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Nikolai Ivan'itch is a tall, slender man, about sixty years of age, with emaciated face, bilious complexion and long black hair evidently a person of excitable, nervous temperament. When he speaks he articulates rapidly, and uses more gesticulation than is common among his countrymen.
If there is any essential difference between the lives of Victor Alexandr'itch and of Ivan Ivan'itch, it is in the fact that the former never goes out into the fields to see how the work is done, and never troubles himself with the state of the weather, the condition of the crops, and cognate subjects.
Ivan Ivan'itch is ever ready to talk with the peasants, and give them sound, practical advice or severe admonitions; and in the old times he was apt, in moments of irritation, to supplement his admonitions by a free use of his fists.
Now, a wholesale massacre of the kind may or may not be desirable in the interests of Society, and justifiable according to some new code of higher morality. That is a question into which I do not enter. All I maintain is that the writer of this memorandum, in speaking of 'books, meant to mislead me." Dimitri Ivan'itch looked puzzled and ashamed.
These and similar facts make many people believe that he has very advanced ideas, and one old gentleman habitually calls him half in joke and half in earnest "our friend the communist." In reality Alexander Ivan'itch has nothing of the communist about him.
In the same district as Ivan Ivan'itch and the General lives Victor Alexandr'itch L . As we approach his house we can at once perceive that he differs from the majority of his neighbours.
Though he wishes to do much, he finds small scope for his activity, and spends his days in pretty much the same way as Ivan Ivan'itch, with this difference, that he plays cards whenever he gets an opportunity, and reads regularly the Moscow Gazette and Russki Invalid, the official military paper.
Our friend Victor Alexandr'itch is commonly selected as a representative of this type. "Look at him!" exclaims Alexander Ivan'itch. "What a useless, contemptible member of society! In spite of his generous aspirations he never succeeds in doing anything useful to himself or to others.
The negotiations, being of a delicate nature, were entrusted to an old lady who had a great reputation for diplomatic skill in such matters, and she accomplished her mission with such success that in the course of a few weeks the preliminaries were arranged and the day fixed for the wedding. Thus Ivan Ivan'itch won his bride as easily as he had won his tchin of "collegiate secretary."
Ivan Ivan'itch good-naturedly listens, and again explains that he cannot grant what they ask; but they have still hopes of gaining their point by entreaty, and continue their supplications till at last his patience is exhausted and he says to them in a paternal tone, "Now, enough! enough! you are blockheads blockheads all round! There's no use talking; it can't be done."
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