VI

They went and stayed in Petersburg for almost the whole winter season. By Lent, however, everything burst like an iridescent soap bubble. The dreams scattered, and the jumble not only was not clarified, but became even more repellent. First, the high connections all but failed, except perhaps in microscopic form, and with humiliating strain. The insulted Varvara Petrovna threw herself wholly into the "new ideas" and began holding evenings. She invited writers, and they were immediately brought to her in great numbers. Afterwards they took to coming on their own, without invitation, each one bringing another. Never before had she seen such writers. They were impossibly vain, but quite openly so, as if thereby fulfilling a duty. Some (though by no means all) even came drunk, but it was as if they perceived some special, just-yesterday-discovered beauty in it. They were all proud of something to the point of strangeness. It was written on all their faces that they had just discovered some extremely important secret. They were abusive, and considered it to their credit. It was rather difficult to find out precisely what they had written; but there were critics, novelists, playwrights, satirists, exposers among them. Stepan Trofimovich even penetrated their highest circle, the place from which the movement was directed. It was an immensely steep climb to reach the directors, but they met him cordially, though none of them, of course, knew or had heard anything about him except that he "represented an idea." He maneuvered among them so far that he even managed to invite them a couple of times to Varvara Petrovna's salon, despite all their olympianity. These were very serious and very polite people; they bore themselves well; the others were evidently afraid of them; but it was obvious that they had no time. Two or three former literary celebrities who then happened to be in Petersburg, and with whom Varvara Petrovna had long maintained the most refined relations, also came. But, to her surprise, these real and indisputable celebrities were meek as lambs, and some of them simply clung to all this new rabble and fawned on them shamefully. At first Stepan Trofimovich was in luck; they seized on him and began displaying him at public literary gatherings. When he came out on the platform for the first time as a reader at one of these public literary readings, there was a burst of wild applause that continued for about five minutes. He recalled it with tears nine years later—rather more because of his artistic nature than out of gratitude. "I swear to you and will wager," he himself said to me (but only to me, and as a secret), "that no one in that whole audience knew a blessed thing about me!" A remarkable confession: indeed he must have possessed keen intelligence if he could understand his position so clearly, right there on the platform, despite all his rapture; and indeed he must not have possessed very keen intelligence if even nine years later he could not recall it without feeling offended. He was made to sign two or three collective protests (against what, he himself did not know); he signed. Varvara Petrovna was also made to sign some "outrageous act," and she signed.^[15] However, though the majority of these new people had been Varvara Petrovna's guests, they for some reason considered it their duty to look upon her with contempt and unconcealed derision. Stepan Trofimovich hinted to me afterwards, in bitter moments, that it was then that she had begun to envy him. Of course, she understood that she ought not to associate with these people, but still she received them avidly, with all of a woman's hysterical impatience, and, above all, kept expecting something. At her evenings she spoke little, though she could speak, but rather listened. They talked about the abolition of censorship, about spelling reform, about replacing Russian letters with Roman, about someone's exile the day before, about some scandal in the Passage, about the advantages of dividing Russia into a free federation of nationalities, about abolishing the army and navy, about restoring Poland up to the Dnieper, about peasant reform and tracts, about the abolition of inheritance, the family, children, and priests, about women's rights, about Kraevsky's house, for which no one would ever forgive Mr. Kraevsky, and so on and so forth.^[16] It was clear that among this rabble of new people there were many swindlers, but it was also unquestionable that there were many honest and even quite attractive persons, despite certain nonetheless surprising nuances. The honest ones were far more incomprehensible than the rude and dishonest ones; but it was not clear who was making use of whom. When Varvara Petrovna announced her idea of publishing a magazine, still more people came flocking to her, but accusations also immediately flew in her face that she was a capitalist and an exploiter of labor. The unceremoniousness of the accusations was equaled only by their unexpectedness. The elderly general Ivan Ivanovich Drozdov, a former friend and fellow officer of the late general Stavrogin, a most worthy man (though in his own way), known to all of us here, extremely obstinate and irritable, who ate terribly much and was terribly afraid of atheism, began arguing at one of Varvara Petrovna's evenings with a famous young man. The latter said straight off: "Well, you're a general if you talk like that," meaning that he could not even find any worse abuse than a general. Ivan Ivanovich got extremely fired up: "Yes, sir, I am a general, a lieutenant general, and I've served my sovereign, and you, sir, are a brat and an atheist!" An impossible scandal took place. Next day the incident was exposed in the press and signatures were gathered under a collective letter against the "outrageous act" of Varvara Petrovna in not wishing to throw the general out at once. A caricature appeared in an illustrated magazine, caustically portraying Varvara Petrovna, the general, and Stepan Trofimovich together as three retrograde cronies; the picture was accompanied by some verses written by a people's poet solely for the occasion. I will add, for my part, that in fact many persons with the rank of general have the habit of saying ludicrously: "I have served my sovereign..." as if they did not have the same sovereign as the rest of us, the sovereign's ordinary subjects, but their own special one.

To remain any longer in Petersburg was, of course, impossible, the more so in that Stepan Trofimovich also suffered a final fiasco. He could not help himself and started proclaiming the rights of art, and they started laughing at him all the louder. At his last reading he decided to employ civic eloquence, fancying he would touch people's hearts and counting on their respect for his "exile." He unquestioningly agreed that the word "fatherland" was useless and comical; he also agreed with the notion of the harmfulness of religion; but he loudly and firmly proclaimed that boots are lower than Pushkin, even very much so.^[17] He was hissed so mercilessly that he burst into tears right there, publicly, before he even got off the platform. Varvara Petrovna brought him home more dead than alive. "On m'a traité comme un vieux bonnet de coton!"^[i]he babbled senselessly. She spent the whole night looking after him, gave him laurel water, and kept telling him until dawn: "You are still useful; you will still make your appearance; you will be appreciated... elsewhere."

The very next day, early in the morning, five writers called on Varvara Petrovna, three of them complete strangers whom she had never set eyes on before. They announced to her with stern faces that they had looked into the case of her magazine and had brought her their decision about it. Varvara Petrovna had decidedly never asked anyone to look into or decide anything about her magazine. The decision was that, after founding the magazine, she should at once turn it over to them, along with the capital, under the rights of a free co-operative; and she herself should leave for Skvoreshniki, and not forget to take along Stepan Trofimovich, "who was obsolete." From delicacy they agreed to acknowledge her right of ownership and to send her one sixth of the net income annually. Most touching of all was that, of these five people, four certainly had no mercenary motive, but were busying themselves only for the sake of the "common cause."