Third, in the past living with another man’s wife was a covert affair here, for the same motives that thieves steal covertly and not overtly. Adultery was considered the sort of thing that was shameful to display in public. Laevsky’s attitude toward all this is a schoolboy’s. He openly lives with another man’s wife. Fourth …

Von Koren quickly ate his okroshka and handed his plate over to the valet.

“I understood Laevsky from the very first month of our acquaintance,” he continued, addressing the deacon. “We arrived here at the same time. People like him love to make friends, establish intimacy, solidarity and the like, because they always need company for Vint, drinks and a bite to eat. What’s more, they’re garrulous and they require listeners. We became friends; that is, he would hang around my place every day, disturbing my work and confiding way too much about his concubine. In the beginning, I was dumbstruck by his extraordinary mendacity, which I found simply nauseating. In my capacity as a friend, I scolded him about his way of life, about how he drinks too much, how he does not live according to his means and incurs debts, how he has done nothing and has read nothing, how he is so uncultured and knows so little—and in reply to all of my questions he would smile bitterly, sigh and say, ‘I’m a good-for-nothing, a superfluous man,’ or ‘What do you, old chap, want from the splinters of serfdom?’ or ‘We are degenerating …’ Or he would begin to wax on about Onegin, Pechorin, Byron’s Cain, Bazarov, of whom he would say: ‘These are our fathers in flesh and in spirit.’ Meaning something along the lines of: it’s not he that is guilty of letting bureaucratic packets lie unopened for weeks or that he himself drinks, and gets others drunk, but that Onegin, Pechorin and Turgenev are to blame for creating the good-for-nothing and the superfluous man. The principle cause for this lack of discipline and grace isn’t with him, you see, but somewhere out there, in the periphery. And what’s more—here’s a good joke for you!—it’s not him alone that’s guilty of being licentious, mendacious and vile but all of us … ‘We are people of the eighties. We are the inert, neurotic offspring of the age of serfdom. We have been crippled by civilization.’ In a word, we are expected to understand that a great man like Laevsky is also great in his collapse; that his debauchery, ignorance and defilement are a naturally occurring phenomena based in history, consecrated by necessity, the cause of which is global, spontaneous; and that we should hang a sconce before Laevsky, since he is the victim of the times, the spirit of the times, our inheritance and so forth. All the civil servants and ladies who listened to him, all oohed and aahed, but for the longest time I couldn’t understand whom I was dealing with: a cynic or a skilled mazurka dancer? Subjects such as he, who have the appearance of intelligence, are a tad well-mannered and drone on about their own honorable pedigrees, are capable of pretending to have unusually complicated natures.”

“Hold your tongue!” flared Samoylenko. “I won’t allow such foolish talk about an honorable man in my presence!”

“Don’t interrupt, Alexander Davidich,” Von Koren coldly said. “I’m almost finished. Laevsky is not a complicated organism, for the most part. Here is his moral framework: in the morning, shoes, a swim and coffee; then until dinner, shoes, calisthenics and conversation; at two o’clock, shoes, dinner and wine; at five o’clock, a swim, tea and wine; after that, Vint and slander; at ten o’clock, supper and wine; and after midnight, dreams and la femme. His existence is locked into this narrow program like an egg in its shell. Whether he goes about, sits around, grows angry, writes or expresses joy—everything comes back to wine, cards, shoes and women. Women have played a disastrous, crushing role in his life. He’ll tell you himself that he fell in love at the age of thirteen. As a student, during his first semester he lived with a lady who had a patron-like attitude toward him and whom he is indebted to for his knowledge of music. In his second semester he bought, outright, a prostitute from a public house and raised her to his own status, that is, he made a concubine of her, but she only lived with him for half a year before she ran back to her madam, and this abandonment caused him more than a little heartache. See, he’s suffered so much, that he couldn’t help but to leave the university and spend two years living at home without a thing to do. But that’s still not the worst part. At home he took up with a certain widow, who suggested that he leave the legal department and enroll in the philological. He did just that.