The Adolescent

“Probably not. And, besides, you must agree that all your outbursts downstairs, instead of falling on me, as you meant, only tyrannized and tormented her. Yet it seems it’s not for you to judge her. And how is she guilty before you? Explain to me also, by the way, my friend: why was it and with what purpose that you spread it around in school, and in high school, and all your life, and in front of every first comer, as I’ve heard, that you are illegitimate? I’ve heard that you did it with a sort of special eagerness. And yet it’s all nonsense and vile slander: you are legitimate, a Dolgoruky, the son of Makar Ivanych Dolgoruky, a respectable man, remarkable for his intelligence and character. And if you have received higher education, that is in fact owing to your former master, Versilov, but what of it? Above all, by proclaiming your illegitimacy, which in itself is a slander, you thereby revealed your mother’s secret and, out of some sort of false pride, dragged your mother to judgment before the first scum to come along. My friend, that is very ignoble, the more so as your mother is not personally guilty of anything: hers is the purest character, and if she is not Mrs. Versilov, it is solely because she is still married.”

“Enough, I agree with you completely, and I believe so much in your intelligence that I fully hope you will stop this already too-lengthy scolding of me. You have such a love of measure; and yet everything has its measure, even your sudden love of my mother. This will be better: since you’ve ventured to come to me and sit here for a quarter or half an hour (I still don’t know what for; well, let’s suppose it’s for my mother’s peace of mind)—and, moreover, you talk to me with such eagerness, in spite of what happened downstairs, it would be better if you told me about my father—this Makar Ivanovich, the wanderer.⁴² I’d like to hear about him precisely from you; I’ve long meant to ask you. Since we’re parting, and maybe for a long time, I’d also like very much to get an answer from you to this question: how is it possible that in this whole twenty years you could have no effect on my mother’s prejudices, and now also my sister’s, enough to dispel with your civilizing influence the surrounding darkness of her original milieu? Oh, I’m not talking about her purity! Even without that she has always been infinitely superior to you morally, forgive me, but . . . this is merely an infinitely superior corpse. Only Versilov lives, and all the rest around him, and everything connected with him, vegetates under the unfailing condition that it has the honor of nourishing him with its forces, its living juices. But wasn’t she alive once? Wasn’t there something you loved in her? Wasn’t she a woman once?”

“My friend, if you like, she never was,” he answered me, twisting at once into that former manner he had had with me, which I remembered so well, and which infuriated me so much; that is, he was apparently the most sincere simpleheartedness, but look—and everything in him was just the deepest mockery, so that sometimes I couldn’t figure out his face at all, “she never was! A Russian woman can never be a woman.”

“And a Polish woman, a French woman, can be? Or an Italian, a passionate Italian woman, there’s what’s capable of captivating a civilized Russian man of a higher milieu like Versilov?”

“Well, who would have expected to run into a Slavophile?”⁴³ Versilov laughed.

I remember his story word for word; he even began talking with great eagerness and obvious pleasure. It was all too clear to me that he had by no means come to me for a chat, and not at all so as to calm my mother, but probably with other goals in mind.

II