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 dinner, and all his manners were completely despotic. But my mother, my sister, Tatyana Pavlovna, and the whole family of the late Andronikov (a certain department head, deceased three months earlier, who at the time had managed Versilov’s affairs), which consisted of countless women, stood in awe of him as of an idol. I could never have pictured such a thing. I’ll note that nine years earlier he had been incomparably more elegant. I’ve already said that he remained with some sort of halo in my dreams, and therefore I could not imagine how it was possible to become so aged and shabby only some nine years later: I at once felt sadness, pity, shame. The sight of him was one of the most painful of my first impressions on arrival. However, he was by no means an old man yet, he was only forty-five; and as I studied him further, I found something even more striking in his good looks than what had survived in my memory. There was less brilliance than then, less of the external, even of the elegant, but it was as if life had imprinted on his face something much more interesting than was there before.
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 winning the litigation over an inheritance that Versilov had started a year before against the Princes Sokolsky, and Versilov might receive in the nearest future an estate worth seventy thousand and maybe a bit more. I’ve already said above that this Versilov had run through three inheritances in his life, and here he was going to be rescued again by an inheritance! The case was to be decided in court in the shortest time. That was why I came. True, no one gave out money on hope, there was nowhere to borrow, and meanwhile they bore with it.
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 beginning, he did not meet me seriously when I came from Moscow. I could in no way understand why he did that. True, he achieved the result that he remained impenetrable to me; but I could not have lowered myself to beg for serious treatment from him. And besides, he had astonishing and irresistible ways about him, which I didn’t know how to deal with. In short, he treated me like the greenest adolescent—something I was almost unable to bear, though I knew it would be like that. Consequently, I myself stopped speaking seriously and waited; I even almost stopped speaking entirely. I was waiting for a certain person, on whose arrival in Petersburg I could definitively learn the truth; in that lay my last hope. In any case, I was prepared to break with him definitively and had already taken all the measures. I pitied my mother, but . . . “either him or me”—that was what I wanted to suggest to her and my sister. Even the day had been fixed; but meanwhile I went to work.
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.
This Tatyana Pavlovna played a strange role at the time when I found her in Petersburg. I had almost forgotten about her entirely and had never
