But if none of Rakhmétof’s Petersburg acquaintances were aware of his family and pecuniary standing, yet all who knew him knew him by two nicknames. One of them we have already used in this story—“the rigorist”; he accepted it with his usual easy smile of gloomy satisfaction. But when he was called Nikitushka or Lomof, or by the full name, Nikitushka Lomof, he smiled broadly and sweetly, and he had just reason for it, because he was not endowed by nature, but gained by the firmness of his will, the right to this name which is so famous among millions of men. But it thunders with its fame only in a district of a hundred versts in width, running through eight provinces; but to the readers living in the rest of Russia it is necessary to explain what this name meant. Nikitushka Lomof was a river-boatman,71 who went up and down the Volga twenty years or fifteen years ago; he was a giant of herculean strength; he was more than twenty-six feet high;72 he was so broad across his chest and shoulders that he weighed fifteen poods (600 pounds avoirdupois). Though he was such a heavy man, he was not stout. To illustrate his strength it is necessary to give only one illustration: he used to receive the wages of four men. Whenever his vessel came to a city and he went to market, or, as it is called in the Volga dialect, the bazaar, the boys were heard in the most distant corners of the streets, shouting: “Here comes Nikitushka Lomof! here comes Nikitushka Lomof!” and everybody ran into the street which led from the wharf to the bazaar, and crowds of people used to pour out after their favorite hero.
Rakhmétof, from the age of sixteen, when he first came to Petersburg, was, as regards strength, an ordinary lad of rather tall stature, rather strong, but by no means remarkable for his strength; certainly two out of ten of his comrades would have got the better of him. But when he was going on to seventeen, it occurred to him that it would be a good thing to acquire physical riches, and he began to work over himself: he energetically practised gymnastics. This was good; but gymnastics only perfect the material, and it is necessary to have a material basis; and so for a time, which was twice as long as he spent on his gymnastics, he used to work every day for several hours as a common laborer, where physical strength was required. He lugged water, he carried wood, chopped wood, sawed trees, cut stone, dug earth, hammered iron; he passed through a good many occupations, and he frequently changed them, because with every new work, with every change, some of his muscles would get a new development. He underwent the diet of a boxer. He began to nurse himself, in the full sense of the word, with the special things which had the reputation of strengthening the body—beefsteaks, almost raw, more often than anything else; and since that time he always lived in such a way. In a year after he began such a regime, he started off on his wanderings, and here he had still better opportunities to develop his physical strength. He became a plowman, a carpenter, a ferryman, and a workingman—a laborer in every kind of healthy occupation whatever. Once he went the whole length of the Volga, from Dubovka to Ruibinsk, in the capacity of a burlak. To tell the master of the boat and the other burlaks that he wanted to join them would have been regarded as absurd, and he might not have been accepted. So he simply engaged passage as a traveller, and after making friends with the crew, he began to help tow the boat; and at the end of a week he put on the regular harness, as though he had been a genuine laborer. They quickly noticed how powerfully he was towing the boat; they began to put his strength to the test. He out-towed three, even four, of the strongest of his mates. At that time he was twenty years old, and his mates on the boat christened him Nikitushka Lomof, after the memory of the hero, who at this time had left the stage. In the following summer he was travelling in a steamer. One of the second-class passengers who crowded the steamer’s deck proved to be one of his last year’s co-workers on the towpath; and in this way his companions, who were students, learned that he must be nicknamed Nikitushka Lomof. In fact, he acquired and, without sparing any time, he kept up his mighty strength. “This is necessary,” he used to say; “it gives you respect and love among the common people. This is useful, and it may come handy sometime.”
This entered his mind when he was halfway through his sixteenth year, because from that time his peculiarities began to develop themselves. At sixteen he came to Petersburg, as a commonplace, good-natured graduate of the gymnasium, a commonplace, kind, and honest youth, and he spent three or four months in an ordinary way, as all new students do. But he began to learn that there were among the students some very clever heads, who had different ideas from the rest, and he learned the names of half a dozen such students. At that time there were only a few; they interested him, and he began to try to make their acquaintance. He happened to get acquainted with Kirsánof, and from this time dated his regeneration into an extraordinary man, the future Nikitushka Lomof and the rigorist. He listened eagerly to Kirsánof the first evening. He wept; he interrupted him with exclamations of curses against all that was to vanish, and blessings on all that must live. “What books shall I begin to read?” Kirsánof directed him. On the
