'Tell me, please, frankly, how do you find married life: is it a good thing? or not very?'
I laughed.
'How venturesome of you,' he went on. 'I wonder at you ; in a normal condition a man can never determine on such a terrible step. Two or three very good matches have been proposed to me, but when I imagine a woman taking up her abode in my room, setting everything in order a ccording to her ideas, perhaps forbidding me to smoke my tobacco (he used to smoke rootlets from Nezhin),12 making a fuss and an upset, I am so frightened that I prder to die in solitude.'
'Shall I stay the night with you or go on to Pokrovskoye?' I askPd him after dinner.
'I have no lack of room lwre,' he answered, 'but for you I think 12 11/akhorka, a strong, cheap tobacco produced, among other places, at Nezhin in the Ukraine. ( fl.)
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it would be better to go on; you will reach your father at ten o'clock. You know, of course, that he is still angry with you ; well-in the evening before going to bed old people's nerves are usually relaxed and drowsy-he will probably receive you much better to-day than he would to-morrow; in the morning you would find him quite ready for battle.'
'Ha, ha, ha! I recognise my teacher in physiology and materialism,' said I, laughing heartily. 'How your remark recalls those blissful days when I used to go to you like Goethe's Wagner to weary you with my idealism and listen with some indignation to your chilling opinions.'
'Since then,' he answered, laughing too, 'you have lived enough to know that all human a ffairs depend simply on the nerves and the chemical composition.'
Later on we had a difference: probably we were both wrong .
. . . Nevertheless in 1 846 he wrote me a letter. I was then beginning to be the fashion after the publication of the first part of Who Is At Fault? The Chemist wrote to me that he saw with grief that I was wasting my talent on idle pursuits.
'I became reconciled to you for the sake of your Letters on the Study of Nature. In them I understood German philosophy (so far as it is possible for the mind of man to do so)-why then instead of going on with serious work are you writing fairytales? ' I sent him a few friendly lines in reply, and with that our intercourse ended.
If the Chemist's ovvn eyes ever rest upon these l ines, I would beg him to read them just after going to bed at night when his nerves arc relaxed, and then I am sure he will forgive me this affectionate gossip, the more so since I retain a very genuine, kind memory of him.
And so at last the seclusion of the parental home was over. I was au large. Instead of solitude in our little room, instead of quiet, half-concealed meetings with Ogarev alone, I was surrounded by a noisy family, seven hundred in number. I was more at home in it in a fortnight than I had been in my father's house from the day of my birth.
But the paternal home pursued me even at the university, in the shape of a footman whom my father ordered to accompany me, particularly when I \vent on foot. For a whol� year I tried to get rid of my escort and only \vith difficulty succeeded in doing so officially. I say 'officially,' because my valet Petr Fedorovich, upon whom the duty was laid, very quickly grasped, first, that I disliked being accompanied, and, secondly, that i t was a great
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deal more pleasant for him in various places of entertainment than in the hall of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, where the only pleasures open to him were conversation 'vith the two porters and the three of them treating each other and themselves to snuff.
VVhat was the object of sending an escort to walk after me?
Could Petr, who from his youth had been given to getting drunk for several days at a time, have prevented me from doing anything? I imagine that my father did not even suppose so, but his own peace of mind took steps, which were ineffective but were still steps, like people who do not believe but take the sacrament.
It was part of the old-fashioned education of landowners. Up to seven years old, orders had been given that I should be led by the hand on the staircase, which was rather steep; up to eleven I was washed in my bath by Vera Artamonovna ; therefore, very consistently, a servant was sent to walk behind me when I was a student; and until I was twenty-one, I was not allowed to be out after half-past ten. In practice I found myself at liberty, standing on my own feet, when I was in exile ; had I not been exiled, probably the same regime would have continued up to hventyfive or even thirty-five.
Like the majority of lively boys brought up in solitude, I flung myself on everyone's neck with such sincerity and impulsiveness, built myself up with such senseless imprudence, and was so candidly fond of everyone, that I could not fail to call forth a warm response from my hearers, who consisted of lads of about my own age. (I was then in my seventeenth year.) The sage rules-to be courteous to all, intimate with no one and to trust no one-did as much to promote this readiness to make friends as the ever-present thought with which we entered the university, the thought that here our dreams would be accomplished, that here we should sow the seeds and lay the foundation of a league. We were persuaded that out of this lecture-room would come the company which would follow in the footsteps of Pestel and Ryleyev, and that we should be in it.
They were a splendid set of young men in our year. It was just at that time that theoretical tendencies were becoming more and more marked among us. The scholastic method of learning and aristocratic indolence were alike disappearing, and had not yet been replaced by that German utilitarianism which enriches men's minds "·ith science, as the fields with manure, for the sake of an increased crop. A tolerably large group of students no longer regarded science as a necessary but wearisome short-cut
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by which they would come to be collegiate assessors. The problems that were arising amongst us had no reference whatever to the Table of Ranks.
On the other hand the interest in science had not yet had time to degenerate into doctrinairianism ; science did not draw us away from the life and suffering around us. Our sympathy with it raised the social morality of the students to an unusual extent.
We said openly in the lecture-room everything that came into our heads; manuscript copies of prohibited poems passed ftom hand to hand, prohibited books were read with commentaries, but for all that I do not remember a single case of tale-bearing from the lecture-room or of betrayal. There were timid young men who turned away and held aloof, but they too were silent.13
One silly boy, questioned by his mother on the Malov affair,14
under threat of the birch, did tell her something. The fond mother-an aristocrat and a princess-flew to the rector and passed on her son's information as proof of his penitence. We heard of this and tormented him so that he did not stay till the end of the course.