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