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 time--though only for the briefest
moment--his 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