The Adolescent

Any early morning, a Petersburg one included, has a sobering effect on man’s nature. Some flaming night’s dream even evaporates completely with the coming of morning’s light and cold, and I myself have happened of a morning to recall some of my night’s only just-passed reveries, and sometimes also acts, with reproach and shame. However, I’ll observe in passing that I consider the Petersburg morning, seemingly the most prosaic on the whole earth, to be all but the most fantastic in the world. That is my personal view, or, better to say, impression, but I’ll stand up for it. On such a Petersburg morning, foul, damp, and foggy, the wild dream of some Pushkinian Hermann from the “Queen of Spades” (a colossal character, an extraordinary, perfectly Petersburgian type—a type from the Petersburg period!)⁴⁷—it seems to me, should grow still stronger. A hundred times, in the midst of this fog, a strange but importunate reverie has come to me: “And if this fog breaks up and lifts, won’t this whole foul, slimy city go with it, rise up with the fog and vanish like smoke, and leave only the former Finnish swamp, and in the middle, perhaps, for the beauty of it, a bronze horseman on a hot-breathed, overridden steed?”

⁴⁸ In short, I can’t convey my impressions, because it’s all finally fantasy, poetry, and therefore rubbish. Nevetheless, one totally meaningless question has often come to me and comes to me now: “Here they all are rushing and throwing themselves about, and who knows, maybe it’s all somebody’s dream, and there’s not a single true, genuine person here, not a single real act? The somebody whose dream it is will suddenly wake up—and everything will suddenly vanish.” But I’m getting carried away.

I’ll say beforehand: there are projects and dreams in every life so seemingly eccentric that at first sight they might unmistakably be taken for madness. It was with one of these fantasies that I went that morning to Zverev—to Zverev, because I had no one else in Petersburg to whom I could turn this time. And yet Efim was precisely the last person to whom, if I had had a choice, I would have turned with such a suggestion. When I sat down facing him, it even seemed to me myself that I, the incarnation of fever and delirium, was sitting down facing the incarnation of the golden mean and prose. But on my side was an idea and a right feeling, while on his there was only the practical conclusion that it’s never done that way. In short, I explained to him, briefly and clearly, that apart from him I had absolutely no one in Petersburg whom I could send, in view of an urgent matter of honor, to act as a second; that he was an old comrade and therefore did not even have the right to refuse, and that I wanted to challenge the lieutenant of the guards, Prince Sokolsky, on the grounds that, a little more than a year ago, in Ems, he had given my father, Versilov, a slap in the face. I’ll note, at the same time, that Efim knew even in great detail all my family circumstances, my relations with Versilov, and almost all that I myself knew of Versilov’s history; I had told it to him myself at various times, except, of course, for certain secrets. He sat and listened, as he usually did, ruffled up like a sparrow in a cage, silent and serious, puffy-faced, with his disheveled flaxen hair. A motionless, mocking smile never left his lips. This smile was the nastier in that it was involuntary and not at all deliberate; it was evident that he really and truly considered himself at that moment vastly superior to me in intelligence and character. I also suspected that, besides that, he also despised me for yesterday’s scene at Dergachev’s; that was as it should have been: Efim was the crowd, Efim was the street, and that always bows down only to success.

“And Versilov doesn’t know of it?” he asked.

“Of course not.”

“Then what right do you have to interfere in his affairs? That’s the first thing. And, second, what do you want to prove by it?”

I knew the objections and at once explained to him that it was not at all as stupid as he supposed. First, it would be proved to the insolent prince that there were still people of our estate who understood honor, and, second, Versilov would be shamed and learn a lesson. And, third, and most important, even if Versilov, owing to certain convictions of his own, was right not to have challenged the prince and to have decided to bear with the slap, he would at least see that there was a being who was able to feel his offense so strongly that he took it as his own, and was ready even to lay down his life for his interests . . . in spite of the fact that he had parted with him forever . . .

“Wait, don’t shout, my aunt doesn’t like it. Tell me, is it the same Prince Sokolsky that Versilov is in litigation with over an inheritance? In that case, it will be a totally new and original way of winning in court—by killing your opponents in a duel.”