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Updated: May 18, 2025
Within a year Ivan Dmitritch was completely forgotten in the town, and his books, heaped up by his landlady in a sledge in the shed, were pulled to pieces by boys.
There was no sound of a child's crying, no one was congratulating her or rejoicing, it was evident that the little creature had not been born alive. "Pyotr!" Olga Mihalovna called to her husband. Pyotr Dmitritch looked round.
Then that it might not be so dreadful he went to Ivan Dmitritch's bed and sat down. "I have lost heart, my dear fellow," he muttered, trembling and wiping away the cold sweat, "I have lost heart." "You should be philosophical," said Ivan Dmitritch ironically.
You are a deceitful man! I see through you and understand every step you take!" "Olya, I wish you would please warn me when you are out of humour. Then I will sleep in the study." Saying this, Pyotr Dmitritch picked up his pillow and walked out of the bedroom. Olga Mihalovna had not foreseen this.
Hatred and hope both disappeared at once, and it began immediately to seem to Ivan Dmitritch and his wife that their rooms were dark and small and low-pitched, that the supper they had been eating was not doing them good, but lying heavy on their stomachs, that the evenings were long and wearisome.... "What the devil's the meaning of it?" said Ivan Dmitritch, beginning to be ill-humoured.
"I must look horribly unseemly," she thought. Pyotr Dmitritch put her back in bed without a word, and covered her with the quilt, then he took the candle and went out. "For God's sake!" Olga Mihalovna cried again. "Pyotr, understand, understand!"
Very early in the morning, before sunrise, some workmen came into the house. Ivan Dmitritch knew perfectly well that they had come to mend the stove in the kitchen, but terror told him that they were police officers disguised as workmen. He slipped stealthily out of the flat, and, overcome by terror, ran along the street without his cap and coat.
If they were given anything, they would ask for more; while if they were refused, they would swear at them, slander them, and wish them every kind of misfortune. Ivan Dmitritch remembered his own relations, and their faces, at which he had looked impartially in the past, struck him now as repulsive and hateful. "They are such reptiles!" he thought.
At midday the chief of the police usually drove down the street with a pair of horses; he was going from his estate near the town to the police department; but Ivan Dmitritch fancied every time that he was driving especially quickly, and that he had a peculiar expression: it was evident that he was in haste to announce that there was a very important criminal in the town.
She felt dreadfully uneasy that she, the hostess, had deserted her guests, and she remembered how her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch, and her uncle, Nikolay Nikolaitch, had argued at dinner about trial by jury, about the press, and about the higher education of women.
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