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Updated: June 13, 2025
And she began crying. "Vanya," she called. "Ivan Andreitch!" There was no answer. Thinking that Laevsky had come in and was standing behind her chair, she sobbed like a child, and said: "Why did you not tell me before that he was dead? I wouldn't have gone to the picnic; I shouldn't have laughed so horribly. . . . The men said horrid things to me. What a sin, what a sin!
The man's clear, cold theory of life justified the destruction of the rotten and the useless; if it changed at the crucial moment, it would be the hatred and the repugnance that Laevsky inspired in him that would save him. If he missed his aim or, in mockery of his hated opponent, only wounded him, or fired in the air, what could he do then? Where could he go? "Go to Petersburg?"
Marya Konstantinovna showed the visitors Katya's school report and said, drawling: "It's very, very difficult to do well at school nowadays! So much is expected . . ." "Mamma!" groaned Katya, not knowing where to hide her confusion at the praises of the company. Laevsky, too, looked at the report and praised it.
Samoylenko flared up. "I will not allow a splendid fellow to be spoken ill of in my presence!" "Don't interrupt, Alexandr Daviditch," said Von Koren coldly; "I am just finishing. Laevsky is by no means a complex organism.
Looking at the pale, ironically smiling face of Von Koren, who evidently had been convinced from the beginning that his opponent would fire in the air, Laevsky thought that, thank God, everything would be over directly, and all that he had to do was to press the trigger rather hard. . . .
Our age is, to his thinking, poor and inferior to the forties and the sixties only because we do not know how to abandon ourselves obviously to the passion and ecstasy of love. These voluptuaries must have in their brains a special growth of the nature of sarcoma, which stifles the brain and directs their whole psychology. Watch Laevsky when he is sitting anywhere in company.
"I am speaking of Laevsky. He has a great many acquaintances. But unfortunately his mother is a proud aristocrat, not very intelligent. . . ." Nadyezhda Fyodorovna threw herself into the water without finishing; Marya Konstantinovna and Katya made their way in after her. "There are so many conventional ideas in the world," Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went on, "and life is not so easy as it seems."
Laevsky made jests at his own expense, saying he hardly knew how to fire off a pistol, calling himself a royal archer and William Tell. "We must give this gentleman a lesson . . ." he said. After dinner they sat down to cards.
He must look for salvation in himself alone, and if there were no finding it, why waste time? He must kill himself, that was all. . . . He heard the sound of a carriage. It was getting light. The carriage passed by, turned, and crunching on the wet sand, stopped near the house. There were two men in the carriage. "Wait a minute; I'm coming directly," Laevsky said to them out of the window.
Ivan Andreitch Laevsky, a thin, fair young man of twenty-eight, wearing the cap of a clerk in the Ministry of Finance and with slippers on his feet, coming down to bathe, found a number of acquaintances on the beach, and among them his friend Samoylenko, the army doctor.
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