down by their reproaches, already pensive, taciturn, gazing wildly about at everything. My school fellows met me with spiteful and merciless derision, because I was not like any of them. But I could not endure derision; I could not get along so cheaply as they got along with each other. I immediately began to hate them, and shut myself away from everyone in timorous, wounded, and inordinate pride. Their crudeness outraged me. They laughed cynically at my face, my ungainly figure; and yet how stupid their own faces were! In our school facial expressions degenerated and would become somehow especially stupid. So many beautiful children came to us. A few years later it was disgusting even to look at them. Already at the age of sixteen I gloomily marveled at them; even then I was amazed at the pettiness of their thinking, the stupidity of their pastimes, games, conversations. They had so little understanding of the most essential things, so little interest in the most impressive, startling subjects, that I began, willy-nilly, to regard them as beneath me. It was not injured vanity that prompted me to do so, and for God's sake don't come creeping at me with those banal objections that one is sick of to the point of nausea - 'that I was only dreaming, while they already understood real life.' They understood nothing, no real life, and I swear it was this in them that outraged me most of all. On the contrary, they took the most obvious, glaring reality in a fantastically stupid way, and were already accustomed to worshiping success alone. Everything that was just, but humiliated and downtrodden, they laughed at disgracefully and hardheartedly. They regarded rank as intelligence; at the age of sixteen they were already talking about cushy billets. Of course, much of this came from stupidity, from the bad examples that had ceaselessly surrounded their childhood and adolescence. They were depraved to the point of monstrosity. To be sure, here, too, there was more of the external, more of an assumed cynicism; to be sure, youthfulness and a certain freshness could be glimpsed in them even through the depravity; but even this freshness was unattractive in them and showed itself as a sort of knavery. I hated them terribly, though I was perhaps worse than they were. They paid me back in kind and did not conceal their loathing for me. But I no longer had any wish for their love; on the contrary, I constantly thirsted for their humiliation. To rid myself of their derision, I purposely began to study as hard as I could and worked my way into the number of the best. This made an impression. Besides, they began little by little to realize that I had by then read such books as they were unable to read, and understood such things (not part of our special course) as they had never even heard of. This they regarded wildly and derisively, but morally they submitted, the more so as even the teachers paid attention to me in this respect. The derision stopped, but the animosity remained, and cold, strained relations set in. Towards the end I myself could not stand it: as I grew older, a need for people, for friends, developed. I tried to start getting closer with some; but the attempt always came out unnaturally and would simply end of itself. I also once had a friend. But I was already a despot in my soul; I wanted to have unlimited power over his soul; I wanted to instill in him a contempt for his surrounding milieu; I demanded of him a haughty and final break with that milieu. I frightened him with my passionate friendship; I drove him to tears, to convulsions; he was a naive, self-giving soul; but once he had given himself wholly to me, I immediately started to hate him and pushed him away - as if I had needed him only to gain a victory over him, only to bring him into subjection. But I could not be victorious over everyone; my friend was also not like any of them, and represented the rarest exception. The first thing I did upon leaving school was quit the special service for which I had been intended, in order to break all ties, to curse the past and bury it in the dust… And the devil knows why, after that, I dragged myself to this Simonov!…

In the morning I roused myself early, I jumped out of bed in agitation, as if all this was going to start happening right away. But then I did believe that some radical break in my life was coming and could not fail to come that very day. It may have been lack of habit or something, but all my life, when faced with any external event, be it ever so small, I always thought that right then some radical break in my life was going to come. Nevertheless, I went to work as usual, but slipped away two hours early to go home and get ready. The main thing, I thought, is that I mustn't be the first to arrive, or they'll think I'm all too delighted. But there were thousands of such main things, and they all agitated me to the point of impotence. I polished my boots a second time with my own hands; for the life of him Apollon would not have polished them twice in one day, finding it inordinate. I polished them, therefore, having stolen the brushes from the entryway so that he would not somehow notice and afterwards begin to despise me. Then I carefully inspected my clothes and found that everything was old, shabby, worn out. I had indeed become too slovenly. My uniform was perhaps in good condition, but I really couldn't go to dinner in my uniform. And the main thing was that on my trousers, right on the knee, there was a huge yellow spot. I could sense already that this spot alone would rob me of nine-tenths of my dignity. I also knew that it was very mean to think so. 'But I can't be bothered with thinking now; now comes reality,' I thought, and my heart sank. I also knew perfectly well, even then, that I was monstrously exaggerating all these facts; but there was nothing to be done: I could no longer control myself, I was shaking with fever. In despair I pictured how coldly and condescendingly that 'scoundrel' Zverkov would meet me; with what dull, all-invincible contempt the dullard Trudolyubov would look at me; how nastily and impudently that little snot Ferfichkin would titter at my expense, sucking up to Zverkov; how perfectly Simonov would understand it all in himself, and how he would despise me for the meanness of my vanity and faintheartedness; and, the main thing - how measly, non- literary, commonplace it was all going to be. Of course, it would be best not to go at all. But that was more impossible than anything else: once I began to be drawn, I used to be drawn in all the way, over my head. Afterwards I'd have been taunting myself for the rest of my life: 'So you turned coward, turned coward before reality, that's what you did, you turned coward!' On the contrary, I passionately wanted to prove to all that

'riffraff' that I was by no means the coward I made myself out to be. More than that: in the strongest paroxysm of cowardly fever, I dreamed of getting the best of them, winning them over, carrying them away, making them love me - if only for my 'lofty mind and indubitable wit.' They would drop Zverkov, he would sit on the sidelines, silent and ashamed, and I would crush him. Afterwards I would perhaps make peace with him, and we would pledge eternal friendship, yet the most bitter and offensive thing for me was that I knew even then, knew fully and certainly, that in fact I needed none of that, and in fact I had no wish to crush, subject, or attract them, and would be the first not to give a penny for the whole outcome, even if I achieved it. Oh, how I prayed to God for that day to pass more quickly! In inexpressible anguish I kept going to the window, opening the vent, and peering into the dull darkness of thickly falling wet snow…

At last my wretched little wall clock hissed five. I grabbed my hat and, trying not to glance at Apollon - who since morning had been waiting to receive his wages from me, but in his pride refused to speak first - slipped past him out the door, and in a coach hired for the purpose with my last fifty kopecks, drove up like a grand gentleman to the Hotel de Paris.

IV

I had already known the evening before that I would be the first to arrive. But primacy was no longer the point. Not only were none of them there, but I even had difficulty finding our room. The table was not quite laid yet. What did it mean? After much questioning, I finally got out of the waiters that the dinner had been ordered for six o'clock, not five. This was confirmed in the bar. I was even ashamed to be asking. It was only five twenty-five. If they had changed the time, they ought in any case to have informed me; that's what the city mail is for; and not to have subjected me to 'disgrace' both in my own and… be it only the waiters' eyes. I sat down; a waiter began laying the table; in his presence it felt somehow still more offensive. By six o'clock, in addition to the lighted lamps, candles were brought into the room. It had not occurred to the waiter, however, to bring them when I arrived. In the next room two customers, gloomy, angry-looking, and silent, were having dinner at separate tables. In one of the farther rooms it was very noisy; there was even shouting; the guffaws of a whole bunch of people could be heard; some nasty French squeals could be heard: it was a dinner with ladies. Quite nauseating, in short. Rarely have I spent a nastier moment, so that when, at exactly six o'clock, they all came in together, I was glad of them for the first moment as of some sort of deliverers, and almost forgot that I ought to look offended.

Zverkov came at the head of them, obviously the leader. Both he and they were laughing; but on seeing me Zverkov assumed a dignified air, approached unhurriedly, bending slightly, as if coquettishly, at the waist, and gave me his hand benignly, but not very, with a certain cautious, almost senatorial politeness, as if by offering me his hand he were protecting himself from something. I had been imagining, on the contrary, that as soon as he walked

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