call
it without mortification, he was made to sign two or three collective
protests (against what he did not know); he signed them. Varvara
Petrovna too was made to protest against some "disgraceful action" and
she signed too. The majority of these new people, however, though they
visited Varvara Petrovna, felt themselves for some reason called upon
to regard her with contempt, and with undisguised irony. Stepan
Trofimovitch hinted to me at bitter moments afterwards that it was from
that time she had been envious of him. She saw, of course, that she
could not get on with these people, yet she received them eagerly,
with all the hysterical impatience of her sex, and, what is more, she
expected something. At her parties she talked little, although she could
talk, but she listened the more. They talked of the abolition of the
censorship, and of phonetic spelling, of the substitution of the Latin
characters for the Russian alphabet, of some one's having been sent into
exile the day before, of some scandal, of the advantage of splitting
Russia into nationalities united in a free federation, of the abolition
of the army and the navy, of the restoration of Poland as far as
the Dnieper, of the peasant reforms, and of the manifestoes, of the
abolition of the hereditary principle, of the family, of children, and
of priests, of women's rights, of Kraevsky's house, for which no one
ever seemed able to forgive Mr. Kraevsky, and so on, and so on. It was
evident that in this mob of new people there were many impostors, but
undoubtedly there were also many honest and very attractive people, in
spite of some surprising characteristics in them. The honest ones were
far more difficult to understand than the coarse and dishonest, but it
was impossible to tell which was being made a tool of by the other.
When Varvara Petrovna announced her idea of founding a magazine, people
flocked to her in even larger numbers, but charges of being a capitalist
and an exploiter of labour were showered upon her to her face. The
rudeness of these accusations was only equalled by their unexpectedness.
The aged General Ivan Ivanovitch Drozdov, an old friend and comrade
of the late General Stavrogin's, known to us all here as an extremely
stubborn and irritable, though very estimable, man (in his own way, of
course), who ate a great deal, and was dreadfully afraid of atheism,
quarrelled at one of Varvara Petrovna's parties with a distinguished
young man. The la