To this category of "usual" or "ordinary" people belong certain persons of our story, who till now (I admit it) have been little explained to the reader. Such, namely, are Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyn, her husband, Mr. Ptitsyn, and Gavrila Ardalionovich, her brother.
Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of one's own, to be decidedly "like everybody else." There is wealth, but not a Rothschild's; an honorable family, but which has never distinguished itself in any way; a decent appearance, but very little expression; a proper education, but without knowing what to apply it to; there is intelligence, but with no ideas of one's own;there is a heart, but with no magnanimity, etc., etc., in all respects. There
are a great many such people in the world and even far more than it seems; they are divided, as all people are, into two main categories: one limited, the other "much cleverer." The first are happier. For the limited "usual" man, for instance, there is nothing easier than to imagine himself an unusual and original man and to revel in it without any hesitation. As soon as some of our young ladies cut their hair, put on blue spectacles, and called themselves nihilists, they became convinced at once that, having put on the spectacles, they immediately began to have their own "convictions." As soon as a man feels in his heart just a drop of some sort of generally human and kindly feeling for something or other, he immediately becomes convinced that no one else feels as he does, that he is in the forefront of general development. As soon as a man takes some thought or other at its word or reads a little page of something without beginning or end, he believes at once that these are "his own thoughts" and were conceived in his own brain. The impudence of naivety, if one may put it so, goes so far in such cases as to be astonishing; all this is incredible, but one meets with it constantly. This impudence of naivety, this stupid man's unquestioningness of himself and his talent, is excellently portrayed by Gogol in the astonishing type of Lieutenant Pirogov. 3Pirogov never even doubts that he is a genius, even higher than any genius; he is so far from doubting it that he never even asks himself about it; anyhow, questions do not exist for him. The great writer was finally forced to give him a whipping, for the satisfaction of his reader's offended moral sense, but, seeing that the great man merely shook himself and, to fortify himself after his ordeal, ate a puff pastry, he spread his arms in amazement and thus left his readers. I have always regretted that Gogol bestowed such low rank on the great Pirogov, because Pirogov is so given to self-satisfaction that there would be nothing easier for him than to imagine himself, while his epaulettes grow thicker and more braided as the years pass and "according to his rank," as being, for instance, a great commander; not even to imagine it, but simply to have no doubt of it: he has been made a general, why not a commander? And how many of them later cause a terrible fiasco on the battlefield? And how many Pirogovs have there been among our writers, scholars, propagandists? I say "have there been," but, of course, there still are . . .
One character figuring in our story, Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category
of people who are "much cleverer," though he was all infected, from head to foot, with the desire to be original. But this category, as we have already noted above, is much more unhappy than the first. The thing is that a clever"usual" man, even if he imagines himself momentarily (or perhaps throughout his life) to be a man of genius and originality, nevertheless preserves in his heart a little worm of doubt, which drives him so far that the clever man sometimes ends up in complete despair; if he submits, then he is already completely poisoned by vanity turned in upon itself. However, we have in any case chosen an extreme instance: in the great majority of this clevercategory of people, things generally do not go so tragically; the liver gives out more or less towards the end of his days, and that's all. But still, before reconciling and submitting, these people sometimes spend an extremely long time acting up, from their youth till the age of submission, and all out of a desire to be original. One even comes upon strange cases: some honest man, out of a desire to be original, is even ready to commit a base deed; it can even happen that one of these unhappy persons is not only honest but even kind, the providence of his family, who by his labor supports and provides not only for his own but even for others—and what then? All his life he is unable to be at peace! For him, the thought that he has fulfilled his human obligations so well brings neither peace nor comfort; on the contrary, that is even what irritates him: "This," he says, "is what I've blown my whole life for, this is what has bound me hand and foot, this is what has kept me from discovering gunpowder! If it hadn't been for that, I'd certainly have discovered either gunpowder or America—I don't know what for sure, but I'd certainly have discovered it!" What is most characteristic in these gentlemen is that all their lives they are indeed unable to find out for sure what precisely they need so much to discover and what precisely they have been preparing all their lives to discover: gunpowder or America? But of suffering, of longing for discovery, they truly have enough of a share in them for a Columbus or a Galileo.
Gavrila Ardalionovich was starting out precisely in that line; but he was only starting out. He still had a long time ahead for acting up. A profound and continual awareness of his talentlessness and at the same time an insuperable desire to be convinced that he was an independent man, painfully wounded his heart, even almost from the age of adolescence. He was a young man with envious and impulsive desires and, it seemed, had even been born with
frayed nerves. He mistook the impulsiveness of his desires for their strength. With his passionate desire to distinguish himself, he was sometimes ready for a most reckless leap; but when it came to the point of making the reckless leap, our hero always proved too clever to venture upon it. This was killing him. He might even have ventured, on occasion, upon an extremely base deed, so long as he achieved at least something of what he dreamed; but, as if on purpose, when it reached the limit, he always proved too honest for an extremely base deed. (On a small base deed, however, he was always ready to agree.) He looked upon the poverty and decline of his own family with loathing and hatred. He even treated his mother haughtily and contemptuously, though he understood very well that his mother's character and reputation had so far constituted the main support of his own career. Having entered Epanchin's service, he immediately said to himself: "If I am to be mean, then I shall be mean to the end, so long as I win out"—and—he was almost never mean to the end. And why did he imagine that he would absolutely have to be mean? He had simply been frightened of Aglaya then, but he had not dropped the affair, but dragged it on just in case, though he never seriously believed that she would stoop to him. Then, during his story with Nastasya Filippovna, he had suddenly imagined to himself that the achievement of everythinglay in money. "If it's meanness, it's meanness," he had repeated to himself every day then with self-satisfaction, but also with a certain fear; "if it's meanness, it's also getting to the top," he encouraged himself constantly, "a routine man would turn timid in this case, but we won't turn timid!" Having lost Aglaya and been crushed by circumstances, he had lost heart completely and had actually brought the prince the money thrown to him then by a crazy woman, to whom it had also been brought by a crazy man. Afterwards he regretted this returning of the money a thousand times, though he constantly gloried in it. He had actually wept for three days, while the prince remained in Petersburg, but during those three days he had also come to hate the prince for looking upon him much too compassionately, whereas the fact that he had returned so much money was something "not everyone would bring himself to do." But the noble self-recognition that all his anguish was only a constantly pinched vanity made him suffer terribly. Only a long time afterwards did he see clearly and become convinced of how seriously his affair with such an innocent and strange being as Aglaya might have