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Ivan Ivanovitch cleared his throat, meaning to say something, but first lighted his pipe, g azed at the moon, and then said, with pauses: "Yes, intellectual, right minded people read Shtchedrin and Turgenev, Buckle, and all the rest of them, yet they knocked under and put up with it... that's just how it is."
Living was cheap there, so the other members of the family spent the summer there; they were joined by Anton when he had taken his degree, and the Chekhovs soon had a large circle of friends in the neighbourhood. Every day the company met, went long walks, played croquet, discussed politics, read aloud, and went into raptures over Shtchedrin.
The first to make his appearance on the platform was a flute-player of consumptive aspect, who spat out ... that is to say, piped out a piece which was consumptive like himself. Two persons shouted "Bravo!" Then a fat gentleman in spectacles, very sedate and even grim of aspect, recited in a bass voice a sketch by Shtchedrín; the audience applauded the sketch, not him.
For instance, he was absolutely unable to understand why people are depressed, why they weep, shoot themselves, and even kill others; why they fret about things that do not affect them personally, and why they laugh when they read Gogol or Shtchedrin . . . . Everything abstract, everything belonging to the domain of thought and feeling, was to him boring and incomprehensible, like music to one who has no ear.
"I know you don't think much of Shtchedrin at the high school, but that's not the point. Tell me, in what sense is Pushkin a psychologist?" "Why, do you mean to say he was not a psychologist? If you like, I'll give you examples." And Nikitin recited several passages from "Onyegin" and then from "Boris Godunov." "I see no psychology in that." Varya sighed.
"And why does he shrink into himself in that shy way as though he fancied he was naked?" thought Laptev, as he walked along Nikolsky Street, trying to understand the change that had come over his brother. "And his language is new, too: 'Brother, dear brother, God has sent us joy; to pray to God' just like Iudushka in Shtchedrin."
To begin with, it's a dreary life. Work from morning till night and not much to show for it. Money is as scarce as cats' tears. I don't know how it is with Zola and Shtchedrin, but in my flat it is cold and smoky.... They give me cigarettes, as before, on holidays only. Impossible cigarettes! Hard, damp, sausage-like.
Then a stout gentleman in spectacles, of an exceedingly solid, even surly aspect, read in a bass voice a sketch of Shtchedrin; the sketch was applauded, not the reader; then the pianist, whom Aratov had seen before, came forward and strummed the same fantasia of Liszt; the pianist gained an encore.
The husband of his wife, with a few paltry acres and the rank of a titular who has had the luck to marry an heiress! An upstart and a junker, like so many others! A type out of Shtchedrin!
The development of woman, and even the political emancipation of woman in the near future—that’s my ideal. I’ve a daughter myself, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, people don’t know that side of me. I wrote a letter to the author, Shtchedrin, on that subject. He has taught me so much, so much about the vocation of woman.
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