The sudden death of his second wife, who did not live even a year with him, finally settled it all. I will say straight out: it was all resolved through Varvara Petrovna's fervent sympathy and precious, so to speak, classical friendship for him, if one may thus express oneself about friendship. He threw himself into the embrace of this friendship, and the thing got set for more than twenty years. I have used the expression "threw himself into the embrace," but God forbid that anyone should think anything idle and unwarranted; this embrace should be understood only in the highest moral sense. The most subtle and delicate bond united these two so remarkable beings forever.

The position of tutor was accepted also because the bit of an estate left by Stepan

Trofimovich's first wife—a very small one—happened to be just next to Skvoreshniki, the splendid suburban estate of the Stavrogins in our province. Moreover, it was always possible, in the quiet of one's study and no longer distracted by the vastness of university employment, to dedicate oneself to the cause of learning and enrich the literature of one's fatherland with the most profound research. No research resulted; but what did result instead was the possibility of standing for the rest of his life, for more than twenty years, as, so to speak, a "reproach incarnate" to his fatherland, to use the expression of a people's poet:9

Reproach incarnate you did stand

Before the fatherland, a liberal idealist.

Perhaps the person of whom the people's poet so expressed himself did have the right to pose all his life in this vein, if he wanted, boring though it is. But our Stepan Trofimovich in truth was only an imitator compared with such persons; then, too, he used to get tired of standing and would often recline. But, even then, the incarnateness of the reproach was still preserved in that reclining position—the more so, speaking in all fairness, as even that was quite sufficient for our province. You should have seen him when he sat down to play cards in our club. His whole look seemed to say: "Cards! Me sit down to play whist with you! Is it compatible? Who must answer for it? Who broke up my activity and turned it into whist? Ah, perish Russia!" and he would trump majestically with a heart.

And to tell the truth he was terribly fond of a little game of cards, for which, especially of late, he had frequent and unpleasant skirmishes with Varvara Petrovna, the more so as he was forever losing. But of that later. I will merely note that he was even a man of tender conscience (sometimes, that is) and therefore often sorrowful. In the course of his twenty-year-long friendship with Varvara Petrovna he used to fall regularly, three or four times a year, into a state known among us as "civic grief" 10—that is, simply a fit of spleen, but our much respected Varvara Petrovna liked the expression. Later on, besides civic grief, he also began falling into champagne; but the alert Varvara Petrovna guarded him all his life against all trivial inclinations. And he did need a nurse, because he would sometimes become quite strange: in the midst of the loftiest grief he would suddenly start laughing in a most plebeian manner. Moments came over him when he would start talking about himself in a humorous vein. And there was nothing Varvara Petrovna feared more than a humorous vein. This was a woman-classic, a woman-Maecenas, whose acts presupposed only the loftiest considerations. Supreme was the twenty-year-long influence of this lofty lady upon her poor friend. One ought to speak of her separately, and so I will.

III

There are strange friendships: two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part. Parting is even impossible: the friend who waxes capricious and breaks it off will be the first to fall sick and die, perhaps, if it should happen. I know positively that several times, occasionally even after his most intimate outpourings tête-à-tête with Varvara

1: Instead of an Introduction, III

Petrovna, Stepan Trofimovich suddenly jumped up from the sofa when she had gone and started pounding the wall with his fists.

This occurred without a trace of allegory, so that once he even broke some plaster from the wall. Perhaps I shall be asked how I could have learned of such a fine detail. And what if I myself witnessed it? What if Stepan Trofimovich himself sobbed many a time on my shoulder while portraying in vivid colors all his innermost secrets? (And what, oh, what did he not tell me then!) But here is what almost always happened after such weepings: the very next day he would be ready to crucify himself for his ingratitude; he would hurriedly send for me, or come running to me himself, with the sole purpose of announcing to me that Varvara Petrovna was "an angel of honor and delicacy, while he was just the opposite." He not only came running to me, but he described it more than once to her in the most eloquent letters, and confessed, over his full signature, that no more than a day ago, for instance, he had been telling some outsider that she kept him out of vanity, that she envied his learning and talents, that she hated him and was only afraid to show her hatred openly for fear he would leave her and thereby damage her literary reputation; that he despised himself on account of that and had resolved to die a violent death, and was only waiting for a last word from her that would decide it all, and so on, and so on, in the same vein.