In the spring of 1878 there was living in Moscow,
in a small wooden house in Shabolovka, a young man
of five-and-twenty, called Yakov Aratov. With
him lived his father’s sister, an elderly maiden
lady, over fifty, Platonida Ivanovna. She took
charge of his house, and looked after his household
expenditure, a task for which Aratov was utterly unfit.
Other relations he had none. A few years previously,
his father, a provincial gentleman of small property,
had moved to Moscow together with him and Platonida
Ivanovna, whom he always, however, called Platosha;
her nephew, too, used the same name. On leaving
the country-place where they had always lived up till
then, the elder Aratov settled in the old capital,
with the object of putting his son to the university,
for which he had himself prepared him; he bought for
a trifle a little house in one of the outlying streets,
and established himself in it, with all his books and
scientific odds and ends. And of books and odds
and ends he had many—for he was a man of
some considerable learning ... ‘an out-and-out
eccentric,’ as his neighbours said of him.
He positively passed among them for a sorcerer; he
had even been given the title of an ‘insectivist.’
He studied chemistry, mineralogy, entomology, botany,
and medicine; he doctored patients gratis with herbs
and metallic powders of his own invention, after the
method of Paracelsus. These same powders were
the means of his bringing to the grave his pretty,
young, too delicate wife, whom he passionately loved,
and by whom he had an only son. With the same
powders he fairly ruined his son’s health too,
in the hope and intention of strengthening it, as he
detected anaemia and a tendency to consumption in
his constitution inherited from his mother. The
name of ‘sorcerer’ had been given him partly
because he regarded himself as a descendant—not
in the direct line, of course—of the great
Bruce, in honour of whom he had called his son Yakov,
the Russian form of James.
He was what is called a most good-natured man, but
of melancholy temperament, pottering, and timid, with
a bent for everything mysterious and occult....
A half-whispered ah! was his habitual exclamation;
he even died with this exclamation on his lips, two
years after his removal to Moscow.
His son, Yakov, was in appearance unlike his father,
who had been plain, clumsy, and awkward; he took more
after his mother. He had the same delicate pretty
features, the same soft ash-coloured hair, the same
little aquiline nose, the same pouting childish lips,
and great greenish-grey languishing eyes, with soft
eyelashes. But in character he was like his father;
and the face, so unlike the father’s face, wore
the father’s expression; and he had the triangular-shaped
hands and hollow chest of the old Aratov, who ought,
however, hardly to be called old, since he never reached
