drinks and gets others to drink, but the blame goes to Onegin, Pechorin, and Turgenev, who invented the luckless fellow and the superfluous man. The cause of extreme licentiousness and outrageousness, as you see, lies not in him but somewhere outside, in space. And besides—clever trick!— it’s not he alone who is dissolute, false, and vile, but we... ‘we, the people of the eighties,’ ‘we, the sluggish and nervous spawn of serfdom,’ ‘civilization has crippled us...’ In short, we should understand that such a great man as Laevsky is also great in his fall; that his dissoluteness, ignorance, and unscrupulousness constitute a natural-historical phenomenon, sanctified by necessity; that the causes here are cosmic, elemental, and Laevsky should have an icon lamp hung before him, because he is a fatal victim of the times, the trends, heredity, and the rest. All the officials and ladies oh’d and ah’d, listening to him, but I couldn’t understand for a long time whom I was dealing with: a cynic or a clever huckster. Subjects like him, who look intelligent, are slightly educated, and talk a lot about their own nobility, can pretend to be extraordinarily complex natures.’’
‘‘Quiet!’’ Samoilenko flared up. ‘‘I won’t allow bad things to be said in my presence about a very noble man!’’
‘‘Don’t interrupt, Alexander Davidych,’’ von Koren said coldly. ‘‘I’ll finish presently. Laevsky is a rather uncomplicated organism. Here is his moral structure: in the morning, slippers, bathing, and coffee; then up till dinner, slippers, constitutional, and talk; at two o’clock, slippers, dinner, and drink; at five o’clock, bathing, tea, and drink, then vint and lying; at ten o’clock, supper and drink; and after midnight, sleep and
‘‘How do you know?’’ Samoilenko growled, looking at the zoologist with spite. ‘‘Better just eat.’’
Poached mullet with Polish sauce was served. Samoilenko placed a whole mullet on each of his boarders’ plates and poured the sauce over it with his own hands. A couple of minutes passed in silence.
‘‘Women play an essential role in every man’s life,’’ said the deacon. ‘‘There’s nothing to be done about it.’’
‘‘Yes, but to what degree? For each of us, woman is a mother, a sister, a wife, a friend, but for Laevsky, she is all that—and at the same time only a mistress. She—that is, cohabiting with her—is the happiness and goal of his life; he is merry, sad, dull, disappointed—on account of a woman; he’s sick of his life—it’s the woman’s fault; the dawn of a new life breaks, ideals are found—look for a woman here as well... He’s only satisfied by those writings or paintings that have a woman in them. Our age, in his opinion, is bad and worse than the forties and the sixties only because we are unable to give ourselves with self-abandon to amorous ecstasy and passion. These sensualists must have a special growth in their brain, like a sarcoma, that presses on the brain and controls their whole psychology. Try observing Laevsky when he’s sitting somewhere in society. You’ll notice that when, in his presence, you raise some general question, for instance about cells or instincts, he sits to one side, doesn’t speak or listen; he has a languid, disappointed air, nothing interests him, it’s all banal and worthless; but as soon as you start talking about males and females, about the fact, for instance, that the female spider eats the male after fertilization, his eyes light up with curiosity, his face brightens, and, in short, the man revives! All his thoughts, however noble, lofty, or disinterested, always have one and the same point of common convergence. You walk down the street with him and meet, say, a donkey... ‘Tell me, please,’ he asks, ‘what would happen if a female donkey was coupled with a camel?’ And his dreams! Has he told you his dreams? It’s magnificent! Now he dreams he’s marrying the moon, then that he’s summoned by the police, and there they order him to live with a guitar...’
The deacon burst into ringing laughter; Samoilenko frowned and wrinkled his face angrily, so as not to laugh, but could not help himself and guffawed.
‘‘That’s all lies!’’ he said, wiping his tears. ‘‘By God, it’s lies!’’
IV
THE DEACON WAS much given to laughter and laughed at every trifle till his sides ached, till he dropped. It looked as though he liked being among people only because they had funny qualities and could be given funny nicknames. Samoilenko he called ‘‘the tarantula,’’ his orderly ‘‘the drake,’’ and he was delighted when von Koren once called Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna ‘‘macaques.’’ He peered greedily into people’s faces, listened without blinking, and you could see his eyes fill with laughter and his face strain in anticipation of the moment when he could let himself go and rock with laughter.
‘‘He’s a corrupted and perverted subject,’’ the zoologist went on, and the deacon, in anticipation of funny words, fastened his eyes on him. ‘‘It’s not everywhere you can meet such a nonentity. His body is limp, feeble, and old, and in his intellect he in no way differs from a fat merchant’s wife, who only feeds, guzzles, sleeps on a featherbed, and keeps her coachman as a lover.’’
The deacon guffawed again.
‘‘Don’t laugh, Deacon,’’ said von Koren, ‘‘it’s stupid, finally. I’d pay no attention to this nonentity,’’ he went on, after waiting for the deacon to stop guffawing, ‘‘I’d pass him by, if he weren’t so harmful and dangerous. His harmfulness consists first of all in the fact that he has success with women and thus threatens to have progeny, that is, to give the world a dozen Laevskys as feeble and perverted as himself. Second, he’s contagious in the highest degree. I’ve already told you about the vint and the beer. Another year or two and he’ll conquer the whole Caucasian coast. You know to what degree the masses, especially their middle stratum, believe in the intelligentsia, in university education, in highborn manners and literary speech. Whatever vileness he may commit, everyone will believe that it’s good, that it should be so, since he is an intellectual, a liberal, and a university man. Besides, he’s a luckless fellow, a superfluous man, a neurasthenic, a victim of the times, and that means he’s allowed to do anything. He’s a sweet lad, a good soul, he’s so genuinely tolerant of human weaknesses; he’s complaisant, yielding, obliging, he’s not proud, you can drink with him, and use foul language, and gossip a bit... The masses, always inclined to anthropomorphism in religion and morality, like most of all these little idols that have the same weaknesses as themselves. Consider, then, what a wide field for contagion! Besides, he’s not a bad actor, he’s a clever hypocrite, and he knows perfectly well what o’clock it is. Take his dodges and tricks—his attitude to civilization, for instance. He has no notion of civilization, and yet: ‘Ah, how crippled we are by civilization! Ah, how I envy the savages, those children of nature, who know no civilization!’ We’re to understand, you see, that once upon a time he devoted himself heart and soul to civilization, served it, comprehended it thoroughly, but it exhausted, disappointed, deceived him; you see, he’s a Faust, a second Tolstoy... He treats Schopenhauer10 and Spencer like little boys and gives them a fatherly slap on the shoulder: ‘Well, how’s things, Spencer, old boy?’ He hasn’t read Spencer, of course, but how sweet he is when he says of his lady, with a slight, careless irony: ‘She’s read Spencer!’ And people listen to him, and nobody wants to understand that this charlatan has no right not only to speak of Spencer in that tone but merely to kiss Spencer’s bootsole! Undermining civilization, authority, other people’s altars, slinging mud, winking at them like a buffoon only in order to justify and conceal one’s feebleness
