you doing, Alexandr.'
' Just the same as ever.'
'Ah, well, then your back won't ache. It's really astonishing!'
' What are you astonished at; are not you yourself
partly to blame for his having become ' said Lizaveta
Alexandrovna.
' I ? well, I like that! I taught him to do nothing ! '
' Certainly, uncle, there is nothing for you to be astonished at,' said Alexandr. 'You were partly to blame because you understood my nature from the first, and in spite of that you tried to build it up afresh ; as a man of experience you ought to have seen that it was impossible—you started a conflict in me between two opposing views of life and could not reconcile them ; what has come of it ? Everything in me has been reduced to a state of doubt, a kind of chaos!'
' Ugh ! my back ! ' groaned Piotr Ivanitch. ' Chaos !— why, I tried to create something out of chaos !'
'Yes, and what did you create? You showed me life in all its most hideous nakedness, and at an age when I ought only to have understood its bright side. And by way of guiding my heart in its attachments you taught me not to feel, but to examine, to analyse, to be on my guard with men. I analysed them—and ceased to love hem !' ' How could I know ? You see you're such a headlong
fellow; I thought that that would teach you to make more allowance for them. I know them, but I don't hate them.'
'What, then, do you love your fellow-men?' asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
' I get on with them.'
' Get on with them! w she repeated monotonously.
' And he would get on with them,' said Piotr Ivanitch, ' but he had been already too much spoilt in the country by his aunt and yellow flowers; that's why he found it so difficult to grow out of it.'
' Then I believed in myself,' Alexandr began again ; ' you showed me I was worse than others, and I fell to hating myself./Finally, with one blow, without warning or compassion, you tore away my fairest dream ; I thought I had a spark of poetic genius; you taught me the bitter lesson that I was not fit to devote myself to literature; you tore that fancy out of my heart at the cost of anguish and offered me instead a task which was repulsive to me. Had it not been for you, I should have been writing. ,,
' Yes, and have become known to the public as a writer without talent,* put in Piotr Ivanitch.
'What have I to do with the public? I should have taken trouble on my own account, I should have ascribed any failures to spite, envy, ill-will, and by degrees I should have grown used to the idea that it was useless to write, and should have taken to something else of myself. How can you be surprised that, when I had found out everything, I lost heart?'
' Well, what do you say?' asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
'I don't want to say anything; what answer is one to make to such absurdity ? Am I to blame that when you came here you imagined that everything here was yellow flowers, and love and friendship, that people did nothing but write poetry some of them while the others listened to it, or sometimes just for a change took to prose ? .... I tried to make you see that man in general, everywhere, but especially here, has to work, and to work hard too, even to the point of getting backache. Any other man in your place would be blessing his stars. You have not felt want nor sickness nor any real sorrow. What, haven't you loved, will you say? Haven't you had enough of it?
twice you have been in love. In time you will marry; a career is before you; only apply yourself; and with it a fortune. Do everything like every one else, and destiny J will not pass you over; you will have your share. It's I ridiculous to regard oneself as some one grand and excep-/ tional when one has not been created so! Come, what ' have you to complain of? '
'I don't blame you, uncle, quite the contrary. I can appreciate your intentions, and thank you from my heart for them. What can one do since they failed ? Don't blame me either. We did not understand each other, that's where our trouble arose! What suits and is pleasant to you, and to some others perhaps, is disagreeable to me.'
' Pleasant to me and some others, perhaps.' .... it's not at all as you say, my dear fellow ! do you suppose that I'm the only person who thinks and acts as I taught you to think and act ? Look round you; consider the mass of men, the herd as you call it, not as they live in the country— it takes a long while for anything to reach them—but the mass of civilised, thinking, acting men of to-day; what do they want, what are they striving after, what is their view ? and you will see it's precisely as I taught you. The demands I made of you did not originate with me.'
' With whom then ? ' asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
u With the age.'
' And must one absolutely fall in with every idea of one's age ? ' she demanded. ' Are they all so right, all so true ? '
' All are right!' replied Piotr Ivanitch.
' What! is it true that one must go more by reason than by feeling? That one must not yield to the heart, but must restrain all demonstrations of emotion, and not give way to spontaneous impulses, not believe in them ? '
'Yes,' said Piotr Ivanitch.
' That one must always act on a system, trust very little in people, reckon everything as uncertain, and live only for oneself?'
' Yes.'
' And is it right that love is not the chief thing in life, that one must care more for one's work than for one's dearest ones, that one must not count on any one's devotion, but must believe that love will end in coldness, estrangement,
or habit ? that friendship is all a matter of habit ? Is all that true?'
' It was always true,' said Piotr Ivanitch, ' only in former days men would not believe it, but now it has become commonplace truism.'
' And is it right that one should consider, and calculate and deliberate over everything and not let oneself forget, and dream and be lured on by a sham, even though one might be happy so ? '
' It's right because it's rational,' said Piotr Ivanitch.
' And is it true that one ought to be guided by prudence even with those nearest your heart—with your wife, for example ? '
'I never have had such a pain in my back—ah?' said Piotr Ivanitch, shrinking in his chair.
' Oh, your back! It's a glorious age indeed !'
' Yes, a very glorious age, my dear; nothing is done like that by caprice; in everything there is prudence, reason, experience, gradual progress, and consequently success; everything is struggling towards improvement and progress.'
' There may be truth in your words, uncle,' said Alexandr, 'but it's no comfort to me. I comprehend everything after your theory. I look at things with your eyes; I am a disciple of your school; but meantime life is a weariness to me—grievous, insupportable. Why is that ? '
'Oh, because you are not suited to the new order of things. For all the mistakes you charged me with just now,' said Piotr Ivanitch, after an instant's thought, ' I have one great justification; do you remember when you first arrived here, after five minutes' talk with you, I advised you to go back ? You would not listen to me. Why do you attack me now, then ? I told you beforehand that you were not fitted for the existing order of things, and you trusted to my guidance, asked for my advice, and talked in grand style of contemporary triumphs of science, of the struggles of humanity, of the practical bent of the age—well, there you are ! It wasn't possible for me to be looking after you like a nurse from morning till night; why should 1 ? I couldn't be your sponsor, or even put a handkerchief over your mouth at night to keep the flies off. I told you the fact because you ask for it; and what has come of it is nothing to do with me. You are not a baby, nor a fool, you can
reason for yourself. Then, instead of doing your work, you're first groaning over some girl's fickleness, then weeping over a separation from a friend, first wretched over the emptiness of your heart, then over its fulness; what sort of life is that ? Why, it's misery ! Look at the young men of to-day; they are young men worth having; they all seem boiling over with intelligent activity and energy. How skilfully and easily they steer their way through all the nonsense, which—in your old jargon—is called ' passionate emotion,' ' spiritual agonies,' and devil knows
