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Updated: June 9, 2025
"Before what?" shouted Razumov, advancing at the woman, who looked astonished but stood her ground. "Before.... Oh! Of course, it was before! How could it have been after? Only a few hours before." "And he spoke of him favourably?" "With enthusiasm! The horses of Ziemianitch! The free soul of Ziemianitch!"
An overbearing, swarthy young man in a student's cloak, who came rushing in, demanded Ziemianitch, beat him furiously, and rushed away without a word, leaving the eating-house keeper paralysed with astonishment." "Does he, too, believe it was the devil?" "That I can't say. I am told he's very reserved on the matter. Those sellers of spirits are great scoundrels generally.
He would show Ziemianitch to the gentleman to prove there were no lies told. And he would show him drunk. His woman, it seems, ran away from him last night. "Such a hag she was! Thin! Pfui!" He spat. They were always running away from that driver of the devil and he sixty years old too; could never get used to it.
Sophia Antonovna's informant, by listening to the talk of the house, by putting this and that together, had managed to come very near to the truth of Haldin's relation to Ziemianitch. "It is I who can tell you what you were not certain of that your friend had some plan for saving himself afterwards, for getting out of St. Petersburg, at any rate.
Sophia Antonovna clapped her hands. "That, to my mind, settles it. The suspicions of my correspondent were aroused...." "Aha! Your correspondent," Razumov said in an almost openly mocking tone. "What suspicions? How aroused? By this Ziemianitch? Probably some drunken, gabbling, plausible..." "You talk as if you had known him." Razumov looked up. "No. But I knew Haldin."
But perhaps when he heard that this "bright soul" of Ziemianitch suffered from a drunken eclipse the fellow would take his infernal resignation somewhere else. And that was not likely on the face of it. Razumov thought: "I am being crushed and I can't even run away." Other men had somewhere a corner of the earth some little house in the provinces where they had a right to take their troubles.
Razumov exclaimed, with mental excitement, as if he had made an interesting discovery. "Ziemianitch ended by falling into mysticism. So many of our true Russian souls end in that way! Very characteristic." He felt pity for Ziemianitch, a large neutral pity, such as one may feel for an unconscious multitude, a great people seen from above like a community of crawling ants working out its destiny.
The point he wanted to hear about could never come into this conversation. There was no way of bringing it forward. He regretted not having composed a perfect story for use abroad, in which his fatal connexion with the house might have been owned up to. But when he left Russia he did not know that Ziemianitch had hanged himself.
Petersburg.... The only thing needed to make me safe a trusted revolutionist for ever. "It was as if Ziemianitch had hanged himself to help me on to further crime. The strength of falsehood seemed irresistible. These people stood doomed by the folly and the illusion that was in them they being themselves the slaves of lies.
The truth is, I have almost lived in that house of late. I slept sometimes in the stable. There is a stable...." "That's where I had my interview with Ziemianitch," interrupted Razumov gently. A mocking spirit entered into him and he added, "It was satisfactory in a sense. I came away from it much relieved." "Ah! he's a fellow," went on Haldin, talking slowly at the ceiling.
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