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Updated: June 1, 2025
Who knows, the example might have infected others if Karmazinov himself, wearing a dress-coat and a white tie and carrying a manuscript, in his hand, had not appeared on the platform at that moment. Yulia Mihailovna turned an ecstatic gaze at him as on her deliverer.... But I was by that time behind the scenes. I was in quest of Liputin. "You did that on purpose!"
I was on the point of asking the advice of Stepan Trofimovitch, but he was standing before the looking-glass, trying on different smiles, and continually consulting a piece of paper on which he had notes. He had to go on immediately after Karmazinov, and was not in a fit state for conversation. Should I run to Yulia Mihailovna?
"Read, read!" several enthusiastic ladies' voices chimed in, and at last there was an outburst of applause, sparse and feeble, it is true. "Believe me, Karmazinov, every one looks on it as an honour..." the marshal's wife herself could not resist saying. "Mr. Karmazinov!" cried a fresh young voice in the back of the hall suddenly.
Karmazinov detested Stavrogin because it was the latter s habit not to take any notice of him. "That flirt," he said, chuckling, "if what is advocated in your manifestoes ever comes to pass, will be the first to be hanged." "Perhaps before," Pyotr Stepanovitch said suddenly. "Quite right too," Karmazinov assented, not laughing, and with pronounced gravity.
Karmazinov, with an affected air and intonation, announced that "at first he had declined absolutely to read." But all that would not have mattered; every one knows what authors' prefaces are like, though, I may observe, that considering the lack of culture of our audience and the irritability of the back rows, all this may have had an influence.
"You left, I believe, because they expected an epidemic out there after the war?" "N-no, not entirely for that reason," Mr. Karmazinov went on, uttering his phrases with an affable intonation, and each time he turned round in pacing the corner there was a faint but jaunty quiver of his right leg. "I certainly intend to live as long as I can." He laughed, not without venom.
But on the morning they decided not to open the buffet at all for fear of disturbing the reading, though the buffet would have been five rooms off the White Hall in which Karmazinov had consented to read Merci. It is remarkable that the committee, and even the most practical people in it, attached enormous consequence to this reading.
"Cher M. Karmazinov," said Stepan Trofimovitch, sitting in a picturesque pose on the sofa and suddenly beginning to lisp as daintily as Karmazinov himself, "cher M. Karmazinov, the life of a man of our time and of certain convictions, even after an interval of twenty-five years, is bound to seem monotonous..."
"You'll have time to sell your estate and time to clear out too," Pyotr Stepanovitch muttered still more roughly. They looked at one another even more intently. There was a minute of silence. "It will begin early next May and will be over by October," Pyotr Stepanovitch said suddenly. "I thank you sincerely," Karmazinov pronounced in a voice saturated with feeling, pressing his hands.
"This boor," thought Karmazinov, looking at him askance as he munched the last morsel and drained the last drops "this boor probably understood the biting taunt in my words... and no doubt he has read the manuscript with eagerness; he is simply lying with some object. But possibly he is not lying and is only genuinely stupid. I like a genius to be rather stupid.
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