Demons

II

I am by no means claiming that he never suffered at all; only I am now fully convinced that he could have gone on with his Arabians as much as he liked, if he had simply given the necessary explanations. But at the time he made a grand gesture, and with particular hastiness took care to convince himself once and for all that his career had been ruined for the whole of his life by a "whirlwind of circumstances." Though, if one were to tell the whole truth, the real reason for this change of career was a most delicate offer, made once before and now renewed by Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin, the wife of a lieutenant general and a woman of considerable wealth, to take upon himself the upbringing and the whole intellectual development of her only son, in the capacity of a superior pedagogue and friend, to say nothing of a splendid remuneration. This offer had first been made to him in Berlin, and precisely at the time when he had first been left a widower. His first wife was a flighty girl from our province whom he had married in his very first and still reckless youth, and it seems he suffered much grief from this—incidentally attractive—person, for lack of means to support her, and for other, somewhat delicate reasons as well. She died in Paris, having been separated from him for the previous three years, leaving him a five-year-old son, "the fruit of a first, joyful, and still unclouded love," as once escaped the sorrowing Stepan Trofimovich in my presence. The nestling was from the very start sent back to Russia, where he was brought up all the while in the hands of some distant aunts, somewhere in a remote corner. Stepan Trofimovich had declined Varvara Petrovna's offer at that time and quickly got married again, even before the year was out, to a taciturn little German woman from Berlin, and that, moreover, without any special need. But there turned out to be other reasons, besides, for declining the position of tutor: he was tempted by the then resounding glory of one unforgettable professor, and in his turn flew to the chair for which he had been preparing himself, to try out his own eagle's wings. And so now, with his wings singed, he naturally recalled the offer that had already once made him hesitate. The sudden death of his second wife, who did not live even a year with him, finally settled it all. I will say straight out: it was all resolved through Varvara Petrovna's fervent sympathy and precious, so to speak, classical friendship for him, if one may thus express oneself about friendship. He threw himself into the embrace of this friendship, and the thing got set for more than twenty years. I have used the expression "threw himself into the embrace," but God forbid that anyone should think anything idle and unwarranted; this embrace should be understood only in the highest moral sense. The most subtle and delicate bond united these two so remarkable beings forever.

The position of tutor was accepted also because the bit of an estate left by Stepan Trofimovich's first wife—a very small one—happened to be just next to Skvoreshniki, the splendid suburban estate of the Stavrogins in our province. Moreover, it was always possible, in the quiet of one's study and no longer distracted by the vastness of university employment, to dedicate oneself to the cause of learning and enrich the literature of one's fatherland with the most profound research. No research resulted; but what did result instead was the possibility of standing for the rest of his life, for more than twenty years, as, so to speak, a "reproach incarnate" to his fatherland, to use the expression of a people's poet:[9]

Reproach incarnate you did stand

Before the fatherland, a liberal idealist.

Perhaps the person of whom the people's poet so expressed himself did have the right to pose all his life in this vein, if he wanted, boring though it is. But our Stepan Trofimovich in truth was only an imitator compared with such persons; then, too, he used to get tired of standing and would often recline. But, even then, the incarnateness of the reproach was still preserved in that reclining position—the more so, speaking in all fairness, as even that was quite sufficient for our province. You should have seen him when he sat down to play cards in our club. His whole look seemed to say: "Cards! Me sit down to play whist with you! Is it compatible? Who must answer for it? Who broke up my activity and turned it into whist? Ah, perish Russia!" and he would trump majestically with a heart.

And to tell the truth he was terribly fond of a little game of cards, for which, especially of late, he had frequent and unpleasant skirmishes with Varvara Petrovna, the more so as he was forever losing. But of that later. I will merely note that he was even a man of tender conscience (sometimes, that is) and therefore often sorrowful. In the course of his twenty-year-long friendship with Varvara Petrovna he used to fall regularly, three or four times a year, into a state known among us as "civic grief"[10]—that is, simply a fit of spleen, but our much respected Varvara Petrovna liked the expression. Later on, besides civic grief, he also began falling into champagne; but the alert Varvara Petrovna guarded him all his life against all trivial inclinations. And he did need a nurse, because he would sometimes become quite strange: in the midst of the loftiest grief he would suddenly start laughing in a most plebeian ma

III

There are strange friendships: two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they ca

This occurred without a trace of allegory, so that once he even broke some plaster from the wall. Perhaps I shall be asked how I could have learned of such a fine detail. And what if I myself witnessed it? What if Stepan Trofimovich himself sobbed many a time on my shoulder while portraying in vivid colors all his i