The Possessed | Page 2

his position
as a "persecuted" man and, so to speak, an "exile." There is a sort of
traditional glamour about those two little words that fascinated him
once for all and, exalting him gradually in his own opinion, raised him
in the course of years to a lofty pedestal very gratifying to vanity. In an
English satire of the last century, Gulliver, returning from the land of
the Lilliputians where the people were only three or four inches high,
had grown so accustomed to consider himself a giant among them, that
as he walked along the streets of London he could not help crying out
to carriages and passers-by to be careful and get out of his way for fear
he should crush them, imagining that they were little and he was still a
giant. He was laughed at and abused for it, and rough coachmen even
lashed at the giant with their whips. But was that just? What may not be

done by habit? Habit had brought Stepan Trofimovitch almost to the
same position, but in a more innocent and inoffensive form, if one may
use such expressions, for he was a most excellent man.
I am even inclined to suppose that towards the end he had been entirely
forgotten everywhere; but still it cannot be said that his name had never
been known. It is beyond question that he had at one time belonged to a
certain distinguished constellation of celebrated leaders of the last
generation, and at one timethough only for the briefest momenthis
name was pronounced by many hasty persons of that day almost as
though it were on a level with the names of Tchaadaev, of Byelinsky.
of Granovsky, and of Herzen, who had only just begun to write abroad.
But Stepan Trofimovitch's activity ceased almost at the moment it
began, owing, so to say, to a "vortex of combined circumstances." And
would you believe it? It turned out afterwards that there had been no
"vortex" and even no "circumstances," at least in that connection. I only
learned the other day to my intense amazement, though on the most
unimpeachable authority, that Stepan Trofimovitch had lived among us
in our province not as an "exile" as we were accustomed to believe, and
had never even been under police supervision at all. Such is the force of
imagination! All his life he sincerely believed that in certain spheres he
was a constant cause of apprehension, that every step he took was
watched and noted, and that each one of the three governors who
succeeded one another during twenty years in our province came with
special and uneasy ideas concerning him, which had, by higher powers,
been impressed upon each before everything else, on receiving the
appointment. Had anyone assured the honest man on the most
irrefutable grounds that he had nothing to be afraid of, he would
certainly have been offended. Yet Stepan Trofimovitch was a most
intelligent and gifted man, even, so to say, a man of science, though
indeed, in science ... well, in fact he had not done such great things in
science. I believe indeed he had done nothing at all. But that's very
often the case, of course, with men of science among us in Russia.
He came back from abroad and was brilliant in the capacity of lecturer
at the university, towards the end of the forties. He only had time to
deliver a few lectures, I believe they were about the Arabs; he
maintained, too, a brilliant thesis on the political and Hanseatic
importance of the German town Hanau, of which there was promise in

the epoch between 1413 and 1428, and on the special and obscure
reasons why that promise was never fulfilled. This dissertation was a
cruel and skilful thrust at the Slavophils of the day, and at once made
him numerous and irreconcilable enemies among them. Later onafter
he had lost his post as lecturer, howeverhe published (by way of
revenge, so to say, and to show them what a man they had lost) in a
progressive monthly review, which translated Dickens and advocated
the views of George Sand, the beginning of a very profound
investigation into the causes, I believe, of the extraordinary moral
nobility of certain knights at a certain epoch or something of that
nature.
Some lofty and exceptionally noble idea was maintained in it, anyway.
It was said afterwards that the continuation was hurriedly forbidden and
even that the progressive review had to suffer for having printed the
first part. That may very well have been so, for what was not possible
in those days? Though, in this case, it is more likely that there was
nothing of the kind, and that the author himself was too lazy to
conclude his essay. He cut