The Possessed | Page 5

in later years, into frequent and unpleasant skirmishes with
Varvara Petrovna, particularly as he was always losing. But of that later.
I will only observe that he was a man of tender conscience (that is,
sometimes) and so was often depressed. In the course of his twenty
years' friendship with Varvara Petrovna he used regularly, three or four
times a year, to sink into a state of "patriotic grief," as it was called
among us, or rather really into an attack of spleen, but our estimable
Varvara Petrovna preferred the former phrase. Of late years his grief
had begun to be not only patriotic, but at times alcoholic too; but
Varvara Petrovna's alertness succeeded in keeping him all his life from
trivial inclinations. And he needed some one to look after him indeed,
for he sometimes behaved very oddly: in the midst of his exalted
sorrow he would begin laughing like any simple peasant. There were
moments when he began to take a humorous tone even about himself.
But there was nothing Varvara Petrovna dreaded so much as a
humorous tone. She was a woman of the classic type, a female
Maecenas, invariably guided only by the highest considerations. The
influence of this exalted lady over her poor friend for twenty years is a
fact of the first importance. I shall need to speak of her more
particularly, which I now proceed to do.
III
There are strange friendships. The two friends are always ready to fly at
one another, and go on like that all their lives, and yet they cannot
separate. Parting, in fact, is utterly impossible. The one who has begun
the quarrel and separated will be the first to fall ill and even die,
perhaps, if the separation comes off. I know for a positive fact that
several times Stepan Trofimovitch has jumped up from the sofa and
beaten the wall with his fists after the most 'intimate and emotional
tete-a-tete with Varvara Petrovna.
This proceeding was by no means an empty symbol; indeed, on one
occasion, he broke some plaster off the wall. It may be asked how I
come to know such delicate details. What if I were myself a witness of
it? What if Stepan Trofimovitch himself has, on more than one
occasion, sobbed on my shoulder while he described to me in lurid

colours all his most secret feelings. (And what was there he did not say
at such times!) But what almost always happened after these tearful
outbreaks was that next day he was ready to crucify himself for his
ingratitude. He would send for me in a hurry or run over to see me
simply to assure me that Varvara Petrovna was "an angel of honour and
delicacy, while he was very much the opposite." He did not only run to
confide in me, but, on more than one occasion, described it all to her in
the most eloquent letter, and wrote a full signed confession that no
longer ago than the day before he had told an outsider that she kept him
out of vanity, that she was envious of his talents and erudition, that she
hated him and was only afraid to express her hatred openly, dreading
that he would leave her and so damage her literary reputation, that this
drove him to self-contempt, and he was resolved to die a violent death,
and that he was waiting for the final word from her which would decide
everything, and so on and so on in the same style. You can fancy after
this what an hysterical pitch the nervous outbreaks of this most
innocent of all fifty-year-old infants sometimes reached! I once read
one of these letters after some quarrel between them, arising from a
trivial matter, but growing venomous as it went on. I was horrified and
besought him not to send it.
"I must ... more honourable ... duty ... I shall die if I don't confess
everything, everything!" he answered almost in delirium, and he did
send the letter.
That was the difference between them, that Varvara Petrovna never
would have sent such a letter. It is true that he was passionately fond of
writing, he wrote to her though he lived in the same house, and during
hysterical interludes he would write two letters a day. I know for a fact
that she always read these letters with the greatest attention, even when
she received two a day, and after reading them she put them away in a
special drawer, sorted and annotated; moreover, she pondered them in
her heart. But she kept her friend all day without an answer, met him as
though there were nothing the matter, exactly as though nothing special
had happened the day before. By degrees she broke him in