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Updated: August 23, 2024
Aren't you going? Why you're getting married, too, you wrote?" "Pierre!" cried Stepan Trofimovitch.
He drawled, too, and spoke with peculiar suavity, probably having picked up the habit from Russians travelling abroad, or from those wealthy landowners of former days who had suffered most from the emancipation. Stepan Trofimovitch had observed that the more completely a landowner was ruined, the more suavely he lisped and drawled his words.
He was lost to everything in the world. A perfect panic came over the audience, almost all got up from their seats. Yulia Mihailovna, too, jumped up quickly, seizing her husband by the arm and pulling him up too.... The scene was beyond all belief. "Stepan Trofimovitch!" the divinity student roared gleefully.
When at sixteen he was taken to a lyceum he was fragile-looking and pale, strangely quiet and dreamy. Stepan Trofimovitch succeeded in reaching the deepest chords in his pupil's heart, and had aroused in him a vague sensation of that eternal, sacred yearning which some elect souls can never give up for cheap gratification when once they have tasted and known it.
And they were all discussing him, Stepan Trofimovitch. The peasant with the cow insisted on his point that to go round by the lake would be thirty-five miles out of the way, and that he certainly must go by steamer.
Stepan Trofimovitch, who had not sat down since the entrance of Varvara Petrovna, sank helplessly into an arm-chair on hearing Praskovya Ivanovna's squeal, and tried to catch my eye with a look of despair. Shatov turned sharply in his chair, and growled something to himself. I believe he meant to get up and go away.
A wild and nonsensical idea crossed my mind. "Stepan Trofimovitch, tell me as a friend," I cried, "as a real friend, I will not betray you: do you belong to some secret society or not?" And on this, to my amazement, he was not quite certain whether he was or was not a member of some secret society. "That depends, voyez-vous." "How do you mean 'it depends'?"
Last year I proposed to Stepan Trofimovitch to publish it, on the ground of its perfect harmlessness nowadays, but he declined the suggestion with evident dissatisfaction. My view of its complete harmlessness evidently displeased him, and I even ascribe to it a certain coldness on his part, which lasted two whole months. And what do you think?
One morning, on the seventh or eighth day after Stepan Trofimovitch had consented to become "engaged," about eleven o'clock, when I was hurrying as usual to my afflicted friend, I had an adventure on the way. I met Karmazinov, "the great writer," as Liputin called him. I had read Karmazinov from a child. His novels and tales were well known to the past and even to the present generation.
Liputin, who happened to be present, observed malignantly to Stepan Trofimovitch: "It'll be a pity if their former serfs really do some mischief to messieurs les landowners to celebrate the occasion," and he drew his forefinger round his throat. We shall never be capable of organising anything even without our heads, though our heads hinder our understanding more than anything."
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