The Adolescent

Yet another powerful circumstance influenced my departure from Moscow, yet another temptation, which even then, three months before leaving (that is, when there had not yet been any mention of Petersburg), made my heart heave and pound! I was also drawn into this unknown ocean because I could enter it directly as the lord and master even of other people’s destinies, and what people! But it was magnanimous and not despotic feelings that seethed in me—I warn you beforehand, so there will be no mistaking my words. Versilov might think (if he deigned to think about me) that this was a little boy coming, a recent high-school student, an adolescent, for whom the whole world was a marvel. And yet I already knew all his i

VIII

FINALLY, IN ORDER to go on definitively to the nineteenth, I’ll meanwhile say briefly and, so to speak, in passing, that I found them all, that is, Versilov, my mother, and my sister (whom I was seeing for the first time in my life), in difficult circumstances, almost destitute or verging on destitution. I had already learned of that in Moscow, but I had never supposed what I saw. Ever since childhood I had been used to picturing this man, this “future father of mine,” almost in some sort of halo, and couldn’t imagine him otherwise than in the forefront everywhere. Versilov had never lived in the same apartment with my mother, but had always rented a separate one for her; he did it, of course, out of those mean “proprieties” of theirs. But here they were all living together in the same wooden wing, in a lane of the Semyonovsky quarter.4 All their things had been pawned, so that I even gave my mother, in secret from Versilov, my secret sixty roubles. Precisely secret, because I had saved them from my pocket money, the five roubles a month allotted me, over the course of two years; the saving began from the first day of my idea, and therefore Versilov was not to know even a word of this money. I trembled over it.

This help was a mere drop. My mother worked, my sister also took in sewing; Versilov lived idly, was capricious, and went on living with a great many of his former, rather expensive habits. He grumbled terribly, especially at di

And yet destitution was only the tenth or twentieth part of his misfortunes, and I knew it only too well. Besides destitution, there was something immeasurably more serious—not to mention that there was still hope of wi

But Versilov did not go to anyone, though he sometimes left for the whole day. Over a year ago, he had already been driven out of society. That story, despite all my efforts, remained unclear to me in its main points, despite my whole month of life in Petersburg. Was Versilov guilty or not—that was what mattered to me, that was what I had come for! Everybody turned away from him, including, by the way, all the influential nobility, with whom he had been especially able to maintain relations all his life, owing to rumors of a certain extremely low and—what’s worst of all in the eyes of the “world”—scandalous act he was supposed to have committed over a year before in Germany, and even of a slap in the face he had received then, much too publicly, precisely from one of the Sokolsky princes, and to which he had not responded with a challenge. Even his children (the legitimate ones), his son and daughter, turned away from him and lived separately. True, both the son and the daughter floated in the highest circle, through the Fanariotovs and old Prince Sokolsky (Versilov’s former friend). However, looking at him more closely during that whole month, what I saw was an arrogant man, whom society had not excluded from its circle, but rather who had himself driven society away from him—so independent an air he had. But did he have the right to that air—that’s what troubled me! I absolutely had to find out the whole truth in the very shortest time, for I had come to judge this man. My own power I still concealed from him, but I had either to acknowledge him, or to spurn him altogether. And the latter would be all too painful for me, and I suffered. I’ll finally make a full confession: this man was dear to me!

And meanwhile I lived in the same apartment with them, worked, and barely refrained from being rude. In fact, I did not refrain. Having lived with them for a month, I became more convinced every day that I simply couldn’t turn to him for final explanations. The proud man stood right in front of me as a riddle that insulted me deeply. He was even nice and jocular with me, but I sooner wanted a quarrel than such jokes. All my conversations with him always bore some sort of ambiguity in them, that is, quite simply some strange mockery on his part. At the very begi

Chapter Two

I

ON THAT NINETEENTH day of the month, I was also to receive my first pay for the first month of my Petersburg service at my “private” post. They never even asked me about this post, but simply sent me there, it seems, on the very first day of my arrival. That was very crude, and I was almost obliged to protest. The post turned out to be in the house of old Prince Sokolsky. But to protest right then would have meant breaking with them at once, which, though it didn’t frighten me at all, would have harmed my essential aims, and therefore I accepted the post silently for the time being, my silence protecting my dignity. I’ll explain from the outset that this Prince Sokolsky, a rich man and a privy councillor,5 was in no way related to those Princes Sokolsky from Moscow (impoverished wretches for several generations in a row) with whom Versilov had his lawsuit. They were merely namesakes. Nevertheless, the old prince took great interest in them and especially liked one of these princes, the head of the family, so to speak—a young officer. Still recently, Versilov had had enormous influence on this old man’s affairs and had been his friend, a strange friend, because the poor prince, as I noticed, was terribly afraid of him, not only at the time when I entered, but, it seems, throughout their friendship. However, they hadn’t seen each other for a long time; the dishonorable act Versilov was accused of concerned precisely the prince’s family; but Tatyana Pavlovna turned up, and it was through her mediation that I was placed with the old man, who wanted to have “a young man” in his office. It so happened that he also wanted terribly much to do Versilov a good turn, to make, so to speak, a first step, and Versilov allowed it. The old prince made the arrangements in the absence of his daughter, a general’s widow, who probably would not have allowed him this step. Of that later, but I’ll note that it was this strangeness of his relations with Versilov that struck me in his favor. It stood to reason that if the head of the insulted family still went on respecting Versilov, it meant that the rumor spread about Versilov’s baseness was absurd or at least ambiguous. It was partly this circumstance that forced me not to protest at taking the post: in taking it, I precisely hoped to verify all that.