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Updated: June 16, 2025
My wife also dislikes Katya for having been an actress, for ingratitude, for pride, for eccentricity, and for the numerous vices which one woman can always find in another. Besides my wife and daughter and me, there are dining with us two or three of my daughter's friends and Alexandr Adolfovitch Gnekker, her admirer and suitor.
Liza, Gnekker, then Yegor, came running in at our shouts.... "Let me alone!" I cried; "let me alone! Go away!" My legs turned numb as though they had ceased to exist; I felt myself falling into someone's arms; for a little while I still heard weeping, then sank into a swoon which lasted two or three hours.
Rich people always have dependents hanging about them; the arts and sciences have the same. I believe there is not an art nor a science in the world free from "foreign bodies" after the style of this Mr. Gnekker. I am not a musician, and possibly I am mistaken in regard to Mr. Gnekker, of whom, indeed, I know very little.
Though I am ashamed of it, I will describe one that occurred the other day after dinner. I was sitting in my room smoking a pipe; my wife came in as usual, sat down, and began saying what a good thing it would be for me to go to Harkov now while it is warm and I have free time, and there find out what sort of person our Gnekker is. "Very good; I will go," I assented.
If Gnekker and Liza begin talking before him of fugues and counterpoint, Brahms and Bach, he drops his eyes modestly, and is overcome with embarrassment; he is ashamed that such trivial subjects should be discussed before such serious people as him and me. In my present state of mind five minutes of him is enough to sicken me as though I had been seeing and hearing him for an eternity.
"I mean about Liza.... Why don't you pay attention to it?" "To what?" "You pretend to notice nothing. But that is not right. We can't shirk responsibility.... Gnekker has intentions in regard to Liza.... What do you say?" "That he is a bad man I can't say, because I don't know him, but that I don't like him I have told you a thousand times already." "But you can't... you can't!"
I am capable of dreaming all dinner-time of how Gnekker will turn out to be an adventurer, how my wife and Liza will come to see their mistake, and how I will taunt them and such absurd thoughts at the time when I am standing with one foot in the grave! There are now, too, misunderstandings of which in the old days I had no idea except from hearsay.
I behave badly with Pyotr Ignatyevitch, and only when he is going away, and from the window I catch a glimpse of his grey hat behind the garden-fence, I want to call out and say, "Forgive me, my dear fellow!" Dinner is even drearier than in the winter. Gnekker, whom now I hate and despise, dines with us almost every day.
I read the telegram, and my dismay does not last long. I am dismayed, not by what Liza and Gnekker have done, but by the indifference with which I hear of their marriage. They say philosophers and the truly wise are indifferent. It is false: indifference is the paralysis of the soul; it is premature death. I go to bed again, and begin trying to think of something to occupy my mind.
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