The Adolescent

“I can see you then as if it were now, flourishing and handsome. It’s surprising how you’ve managed to age and lose your good looks in these nine years—forgive my frankness; however, back then you were already around thirty-seven, but I even gazed at you in wonder: you had such astonishing hair, almost perfectly black, with a lustrous shine, and not a trace of gray; moustache and side-whiskers of a jeweler’s finish—there’s no other way to put it; your face was matte pale, not the sickly pale that it is now, but like the face of your daughter Anna Andreevna, whom I had the honor of meeting today; burning dark eyes and gleaming teeth, especially when you laughed. You precisely burst out laughing as you looked me over when I came in; I had little discernment then, only my heart rejoiced at your smile. That morning you were in a dark blue velvet jacket, on your neck a scarf of bright Solferino crimson over a magnificent shirt with Alençon lace, standing in front of a mirror with a notebook in your hand and rehearsing, declaiming Chatsky’s last monologue, and especially his last cry:

‘My carriage, my carriage!’”

“Ah, my God,” cried Versilov, “but he’s right! Despite the shortness of my stay in Moscow, I had undertaken then to play Chatsky in Alexandra Petrovna Vitovtov’s home theater, because Zhileiko was sick!”³⁹

“Had you really forgotten?” laughed Tatyana Pavlovna.

“He’s reminded me! And I confess, those few days in Moscow were perhaps the best moment of my whole life! We were all still so young then . . . and everyone was so ardently expectant . . . In Moscow then I unexpectedly met so many . . . But go on, my dear, you did very well this time to recall it in such detail . . .”

“I stood, looked at you, and suddenly cried, ‘Ah, how good, the real Chatsky!’ You suddenly turned to me and asked, ‘So you already know Chatsky?’—and sat down on the sofa and turned to your coffee in the most charming mood—I could have kissed you. Then I told you that at Andronikov’s everybody read a lot, and the young ladies knew many poems by heart and played scenes from Woe from Wit among themselves, and that last week we all read A Hunter’s Sketches⁴⁰ aloud together, and that I loved Krylov’s fables most of all and knew them by heart. You told me to recite something by heart, and I recited ‘The Fussy Bride’ for you: ‘A maiden-bride was thinking on a suitor.’”

“Precisely, precisely, now I remember everything,” Versilov cried again, “but, my friend, I remember you clearly, too: you were such a nice boy then, even a nimble boy, and, I swear to you, you’ve also lost a bit in these nine years.”

Here everybody, even Tatyana Pavlovna herself, burst out laughing. Clearly, Andrei Petrovich was joking and had “paid” me in my own coin for my barb about his having aged. Everybody cheered up; and it had indeed been well put.

“As I recited, you were smiling, but before I reached the middle, you stopped me, rang the bell, and, when the servant came in, told him to send for Tatyana Pavlovna, who came running with such a cheerful look that, though I had seen her the day before, I almost didn’t recognize her now. In front of Tatyana Pavlovna, I began ‘The Fussy Bride’ again and finished brilliantly, even Tatyana Pavlovna smiled, and you, Andrei Petrovich, you even shouted ‘Bravo!’ and observed warmly that if I had recited ‘The Grasshopper and the Ant,’ it wouldn’t have been so surprising, that any sensible boy my age could read it sensibly, but that this fable:

A maiden-bride was thinking on a suitor.

In that there’s yet no sin . . .