The Duel and Other Stories | Page 9

your attitude to him is the same as to me and to the
deacon; that is no attitude at all. You are equally indifferent to all."
"To call a man a blackguard!" muttered Samoylenko, frowning with
distaste--"that is so wrong that I can't find words for it!"
"People are judged by their actions," Von Koren continued. "Now you
decide, deacon. . . . I am going to talk to you, deacon. Mr. Laevsky's
career lies open before you, like a long Chinese puzzle, and you can
read it from beginning to end. What has he been doing these two years
that he has been living here? We will reckon his doings on our fingers.
First, he has taught the inhabitants of the town to play _vint_: two years
ago that game was unknown here; now they all play it from morning
till late at night, even the women and the boys. Secondly, he has taught
the residents to drink beer, which was not known here either; the
inhabitants are indebted to him for the knowledge of various sorts of
spirits, so that now they can distinguish Kospelov's vodka from
Smirnov's No. 21, blindfold. Thirdly, in former days, people here made
love to other men's wives in secret, from the same motives as thieves
steal in secret and not openly; adultery was considered something they
were ashamed to make a public display of. Laevsky has come as a
pioneer in that line; he lives with another man's wife openly. . . .

Fourthly . . ."
Von Koren hurriedly ate up his soup and gave his plate to the orderly.
"I understood Laevsky from the first month of our acquaintance," he
went on, addressing the deacon. "We arrived here at the same time.
Men like him are very fond of friendship, intimacy, solidarity, and all
the rest of it, because they always want company for vint, drinking, and
eating; besides, they are talkative and must have listeners. We made
friends--that is, he turned up every day, hindered me working, and
indulged in confidences in regard to his mistress. From the first he
struck me by his exceptional falsity, which simply made me sick. As a
friend I pitched into him, asking him why he drank too much, why he
lived beyond his means and got into debt, why he did nothing and read
nothing, why he had so little culture and so little knowledge; and in
answer to all my questions he used to smile bitterly, sigh, and say: 'I am
a failure, a superfluous man'; or: 'What do you expect, my dear fellow,
from us, the debris of the serf-owning class?' or: 'We are
degenerate. . . .' Or he would begin a long rigmarole about Onyegin,
Petchorin, Byron's Cain, and Bazarov, of whom he would say: 'They
are our fathers in flesh and in spirit.' So we are to understand that it was
not his fault that Government envelopes lay unopened in his office for
weeks together, and that he drank and taught others to drink, but
Onyegin, Petchorin, and Turgenev, who had invented the failure and
the superfluous man, were responsible for it. The cause of his extreme
dissoluteness and unseemliness lies, do you see, not in himself, but
somewhere outside in space. And so--an ingenious idea!--it is not only
he who is dissolute, false, and disgusting, but we . . . 'we men of the
eighties,' 'we the spiritless, nervous offspring of the serf-owning class';
'civilisation has crippled us' . . . in fact, we are to understand that such a
great man as Laevsky is great even in his fall: that his dissoluteness, his
lack of culture and of moral purity, is a phenomenon of natural history,
sanctified by inevitability; that the causes of it are world-wide,
elemental; and that we ought to hang up a lamp before Laevsky, since
he is the fated victim of the age, of influences, of heredity, and so on.
All the officials and their ladies were in ecstasies when they listened to
him, and I could not make out for a long time what sort of man I had to
deal with, a cynic or a clever rogue. Such types as he, on the surface
intellectual with a smattering of education and a great deal of talk about

their own nobility, are very clever in posing as exceptionally complex
natures."
"Hold your tongue!" Samoylenko flared up. "I will not allow a splendid
fellow to be spoken ill of in my presence!"
"Don't interrupt, Alexandr Daviditch," said Von Koren coldly; "I am
just finishing. Laevsky is by no means a complex organism. Here is his
moral skeleton: in the morning, slippers, a bathe, and coffee; then till
dinner-time, slippers, a constitutional, and conversation; at two o'clock
slippers, dinner, and wine; at five o'clock