Pyotr Mihalitch listened to Vlassitch and won- dered in perplexity what it was in this man that had so charmed his sister. He was not young — he was forty-one — lean and lanky, narrow-chested, with a long nose, and grey hairs in his beard. He talked in a droning voice, had a sickly smile, and waved his hands awkwardly as he talked. He had neither health, nor pleasant, manly manners, nor savoir-faire, nor gaiety, and in all his exterior there was something colourless and indefinite. He dressed without taste, his surroundings were depress- ing, he did not care for poetry or painting because " they have no answer to give to the questions of the day "—that is, he did not understand them; music did not touch him. He was a poor farmer.
His estate was in a wretched condition and was mortgaged; he was paying twelve per cent. on the second mortgage and owed ten thousand on personal securities as well. When the time came to pay the interest on the mortgage or to send money to his wife, he asked every one to lend him money with as much agitation as though his house were on fire, and, at the same time losing his head, he, would sell the whole of his winter store of fuel for five roubles and a stack of straw for three roubles, and then have his garden fence or old cucumber-frames chopped up to heat his stoves. His meadows were ruined by pigs, the peasants' cattle strayed in the under- growth in his woods, and every year the old trees were fewer and fewer: beehives and rusty pails lay about in his garden and kitchen-garden. He had neither talents nor abilities, nor even ordinary ca- pacity for living like other people. In practical life he was a weak, naive man, easy to deceive and to cheat, and the peasants with good reason called him " simple."
He was a Liberal, and in the district was re- garded as a " Red," but even his progressiveness was a bore. There was no originality nor moving power about his independent views: he was revolted, indignant, and delighted always on the same note; it was always spiritless and ineffective. Even in mo- ments of strong enthusiasm he never raised his head or stood upright. But the most tiresome thing of all was that he managed to express even his best and finest ideas so that they seemed in him commonplace and out of date. It reminded one of something old one had read long ago, when slowly and with an air of profundity he would begin discoursing of his noble, lofty moments, of his best years; or when he went into raptures over the younger generation, which has always been, and still is, in advance of society; or abused Russians for donning their dress- ing-gowns at thirty and forgetting the principles of their alma mater. If you stayed the night with him, he would put Pissarev or Darwin on your bedroom table ; if you said you had read it, he would go and bring Dobrolubov.
In the district this was called free-thinking, and many people looked upon this free-thinking as an innocent and harmless eccentricity; it made him pro- foundly unhappy, however. It was for him the maggot of which he had just been speaking; it had fastened upon him and was sucking his life-blood. In his past there had been the strange marriage in the style of Dostoevsky; long letters and copies writ- ten in a bad, unintelligible hand-writing, but with great feeling, endless misunderstandings, explana- tions, disappointments, then debts, a second mort- gage, the allowance to his wife, the monthly borrow- ing of money — and all this for no benefit to any one, either himself or others. And in the present, as in the past, he was still in a nervous flurry, on the lookout for heroic actions, and poking his nose into other people's affairs; as before, at every favourable opportunity there were long letters and copies, wearisome, stereotyped conversations about the village community, or the revival of handicrafts or the establishment of cheese factories — conversa- tions as like one another as though he had prepared them, not in his living brain, but by some mechanical process. And finally this scandal with Zina of which one could not see the end I
And meanwhile Zina was young — she was only twenty-two — good-looking, elegant, gay; she was fond of laughing, chatter, argument, a passionate musician ; she had good taste in dress, in furniture, in books, and in her own home she would not have put up with a room like this, smelling of boots and cheap vodka. She, too, had advanced ideas, but in her free-thinking one felt the overflow of energy, the vanity of a young, strong, spirited girl, passion- ately eager to be better and more original than others. . . . How had it happened that she had fallen in love with Vlassitch?
" He is a Quixote, an obstinate fanatic, a maniac," thought Pyotr Mihalitch, " and she is as soft, yield- ing, and weak in character as I am. . . . She and I give in easily, without resistance. She loves him; but, then, I, too, love him in spite of every- thing."
Pyotr Mihalitch considered Vlassitch a good, straightforward man, but narrow and one-sided. In his perturbations and his sufferings, and in fact in his whole life, he saw no lofty aims, remote or immediate; he saw nothing but boredom and inca- pacity for life. His self-sacrifi.ce and all that Vlas- sitch himself called heroic actions or noble impulses seemed to him a useless waste of force, unnecessary blank shots which consumed a great deal of powder.