The possessed or, The devils
agitation for a whole month, but I am convinced that in the secret
recesses of his heart he was enormously flattered. He almost took the
copy of the collection to bed with him, and kept it hidden under his
mattress in the daytime; he positively would not allow the women to turn
his bed, and although he expected every day a telegram, he held his head
high. No telegram came. Then he made friends with me again, which is a
proof of the extreme kindness of his gentle and unresentful heart.
II
Of course I don't assert that he had never suffered for his convictions
at all, but I am fully convinced that he might have gone on lecturing
on his Arabs as long as he liked, if he had only given the necessary
explanations. But he was too lofty, and he proceeded with peculiar haste
to assure himself that his career was ruined forever "by the vortex of
circumstance." And if the whole truth is to be told the real cause of
the change in his career was the very delicate proposition which had
been made before and was then renewed by Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin, a
lady of great wealth, the wife of a lieutenant-general, that he should
undertake the education and the whole intellectual development of her
only son in the capacity of a superior sort of teacher and friend, to
say nothing of a magnificent salary. This proposal had been made to
him the first time in Berlin, at the moment when he was first left a
widower. His first wife was a frivolous girl from our province, whom he
married in his early and unthinking youth, and apparently he had had a
great deal of trouble with this young person, charming as she was,
owing to the lack of means for her support; and also from other, more
delicate, reasons. She died in Paris after three years' separation
from him, leaving him a son of five years old; "the fruit of our first,
joyous, and unclouded love," were the words the sorrowing father once
let fall in my presence.
The child had, from the first, been sent back to Russia, where he was
brought up in the charge of distant cousins in some remote region.
Stepan Trofimovitch had declined Varvara Petrovna's proposal on that
occasion and had quickly married again, before the year was over, a
taciturn Berlin girl, and, what makes it more strange, there was no
particular necessity for him to do so. But apart from his marriage there
were, it appears, other reasons for his declining the situation. He was
tempted by the resounding fame of a professor, celebrated at that time,
and he, in his turn, hastened to the lecturer's chair for which he had
been preparing himself, to try his eagle wings in flight. But now with
singed wings he naturally remembered the proposition which even then had
made him hesitate. The sudden death of his second wife, who did not live
a year with him, settled the matter decisively. To put it plainly it was
all brought about by the passionate sympathy and priceless, so to
speak, classic friendship of Varvara Petrovna, if one may use such
an expression of friendship. He flung himself into the arms of this
friendship, and his position was settled for more than twenty years. I
use the expression "flung himself into the arms of," but God forbid that
anyone should fly to idle and superfluous conclusions. These embraces
must be understood only in the most loftily moral sense. The most
refined and delicate tie united these two beings, both so remarkable,
forever.
The post of tutor was the more readily accepted too, as the property--a
very small one--left to Stepan Trofimovitch by his first wife was close
to Skvoreshniki, the Stavrogins' magnificent estate on the outskirts of
our provincial town. Besides, in the stillness of his study, far from
the immense burden of university work, it was always possible to devote
himself to the service of science, and to enrich the literature of his
country with erudite studies. These works did not appear. But on the
other hand it did appear possible to spend the rest of his life, more
than twenty years, "a reproach incarnate," so to speak, to his native
country, in the words of a popular poet:
_Reproach incarnate thou didst stand_
_Erect before thy Fatherland,_
_O Liberal idealist!_
But the person to whom the popular poet referred may perhaps have had
the right to adopt that pose for the rest of his life if he had wished
to do so, though it must have been tedious. Our Stepan Trofimovitch was,
to tell the truth, only an imitator compared with such people; moreover,
he had grown weary of standing erect and often lay down for a while.
But, to do him justice, the "incarnation of reproach" was preserved even
in the recumbent attitude, the more so as that was quite sufficient for
the province. You should have seen him at our club when he sat down to
cards. His whole figure seemed to exclaim "Cards! Me sit down to whist
with you! Is it consistent? Who is responsible for it? Who has shattered
my energies and turned them to whist? Ah, perish, Russia!" and he would
majestically trump with a heart.
And to tell the truth he dearly loved a game of cards, which led him,
especially in later years, into frequent and unpleasant skirmishes with
Varvara Petrovna, particularly as he was always losing. But of that
later. I will only observe that he was a man of tender conscience (that
is, sometimes) and so was often depressed. In the course of his twenty
years' friendship with Varvara Petrovna he used regularly, three or
four times a year, to sink into a state of "patriotic grief," as it
was called among us, or rather really into an attack of spleen, but our
estimable Varvara Petrovna preferred the former phrase. Of late years
his grief had begun to be not only patriotic, but at times alcoholic
too; but Varvara Petrovna's alertness succeeded in keeping him all his
life from trivial inclinations. And he needed someone to look after him
indeed, for he sometimes behaved very oddly: in the midst of his exalted
sorrow he would begin laughing like any simple peasant. There were
moments when he began to take a humorous tone even about himself. But
there was nothing Varvara Petrovna dreaded so much as a humorous tone.
She was a woman of the classic type, a female Mæcenas, invariably
guided only by the highest considerations. The influence of this exalted
lady over her poor friend for twenty years is a fact of the first
importance. I shall need to speak of her more particularly, which I now
proceed to do.
III
There are strange friendships. The two friends are always ready to fly
at one another, and go on like that all their lives, and yet they cannot
separate. Parting, in fact, is utterly impossible. The one who has begun
the quarrel and separated will be the first to fall ill and even die,
perhaps, if the separation comes off. I know for a positive fact that
several times Stepan Trofimovitch has jumped up from the sofa and
beaten the wall with his fists after the most intimate and emotional
_tête-à-tête_ with Varvara Petrovna.
This proceeding was by no means an empty symbol; indeed, on one
occasion, he broke some plaster off the wall. It may be asked how I come
to know such delicate details. What if I were myself a witness of it?
What if Stepan Trofimovitch himself has, on more than one occasion,
sobbed on my shoulder while he described to me in lurid colours all his
most secret feelings. (And what was there he did not say at such times!)
But what almost always happened after these tearful outbreaks was that
next day he was ready to crucify himself for his ingratitude. He would
send for me in a hurry or run over to see me simply to assure me that
Varvara Petrovna was "an angel of honour and delicacy, while he was very
much the opposite." He did not only run to confide in me, but, on more
than one occasion, described it all to her in the most eloquent letter,
and wrote a full signed confession that no longer ago than the day
before he had told an outsider that she kept him out of vanity, that
she was envious of his talents and erudition, that she hated him and was
only afraid to express her hatred openly, dreading that he would leave
her and so damage her literary reputation, that this drove him to
self-contempt, and he was resolved to die a violent death, and that he
was waiting for the final word from her which would decide everything,
and so on and so on in the same style. You can fancy after this what
an hysterical pitch the nervous outbreaks of this most innocent of
all fifty-year-old infants sometimes reached! I once read one of these
letters after some quarrel between them, arising from a trivial matter,
but growing venomous as it went on. I was horrified and besought him not
to send it.
"I must... more honourable... duty... I shall die if I don't confess
everything, everything!" he answered almost in delirium, and he did send
the letter.
That was the difference between them, that Varvara Petrovna never would
have sent such a letter. It is true that he was passionately fond of
writing, he wrote to her though he lived in the same house, and during
hysterical interludes he would write two letters a day. I know for a
fact that she always read these letters with the greatest attention,
even when she received two a day, and after reading them she put them
away in a special drawer, sorted and annotated; moreover, she pondered
them in her heart. But she kept her friend all day without an answer,
met him as though there were nothing the matter, exactly as though
nothing special had happened the day before. By degrees she broke him in
so completely that at last he did not himself dare to allude to what had
happened the day before, and only glanced into her eyes at times. But
she never forgot anything, while he sometimes forgot too quickly, and
encouraged by her composure he would not infrequently, if friends came
in, laugh and make jokes over the champagne the very same day. With what
malignancy she must have looked at him at such moments, while he noticed
nothing! Perhaps in a week's time, a month's time, or even six months
later, chancing to recall some phrase in such a letter, and then the
whole letter with all its attendant circumstances, he would suddenly
grow hot with shame, and be so upset that he fell ill with one of his
attacks of "summer cholera." These attacks of a sort of "summer cholera"
were, in some cases, the regular consequence of his nervous agitations
and were an interesting peculiarity of his physical constitution.
No doubt Varvara Petrovna did very often hate him. But there was one
thing he had not discerned up to the end: that was that he had become
for her a son, her creation, even, one may say, her invention; he had
become flesh of her flesh, and she kept and supported him not simply
from "envy of his talents." And how wounded she must have been by such
suppositions! An inexhaustible love for him lay concealed in her heart
in the midst of continual hatred, jealousy, and contempt. She would not
let a speck of dust fall upon him, coddled him up for twenty-two years,
would not have slept for nights together if there were the faintest
breath against his reputation as a poet, a learned man, and a public
character. She had invented him, and had been the first to believe in
her own invention. He was, after a fashion, her day-dream.... But in
return she exacted a great deal from him, sometimes even slavishness. It
was incredible how long she harboured resentment. I have two anecdotes
to tell about that.
IV
On one occasion, just at the time when the first rumours of the
emancipation of the serfs were in the air, when all Russia was exulting
and making ready for a complete regeneration, Varvara Petrovna was
visited by a baron from Petersburg, a man of the highest connections,
and very closely associated with the new reform. Varvara Petrovna prized