reading was not in his line. Piotr Andreitch
was not mistaken; his son’s head for that matter
was indeed full of both Diderot and Voltaire, and not
only of them alone, of Rousseau too, and Helvetius,
and many other writers of the same kind—but
they were in his head only. The retired abbe
and encyclopedist who had been Ivan Petrovitch’s
tutor had taken pleasure in pouring all the wisdom
of the eighteenth century into his pupil, and he was
simply brimming over with it; it was there in him,
but without mixing in his blood, nor penetrating to
his soul, nor shaping itself in any firm convictions.
. . . But, indeed, could one expect convictions
from a young man of fifty years ago, when even at the
present day we have not succeeded in attaining them?
The guests, too, who frequented his father’s
house, were oppressed by Ivan Petrovitch’s presence;
he regarded them with loathing, they were afraid of
him; and with his sister Glafira, who was twelve years
older than he, he could not get on at all. This
Glafira was a strange creature; she was ugly, crooked,
and spare, with severe, wide-open eyes, and thin compressed
lips. In her face, her voice, and her quick angular
movements, she took after her grandmother, the gipsy,
Andrei’s wife. Obstinate and fond of power,
she would not even hear of marriage. The return
of Ivan Petrovitch did not fit in with her plans;
while the Princess Kubensky kept him with her, she
had hoped to receive at least half of her father’s
estate; in her avarice, too, she was like her grandmother.
Besides, Glafira envied her brother, he was so well
educated, spoke such good French with a Parisian accent,
while she was scarcely able to pronounce “bon
jour” or “comment vous portez-vous.”
To be sure, her parents did not know any French, but
that was no comfort to her. Ivan Petrovitch did
not know what to do with himself for wretchedness and
ennui; he had spent hardly a year in the country, but
that year seemed to him as long as ten. The only
consolation he could find was in talking to his mother,
and he would sit for whole hours in her low-pitched
rooms, listening to the good woman’s simple-hearted
prattle, and eating preserves. It so happened
that among Anna Pavlovna’s maids there was one
very pretty girl with clear soft eyes and refined features,
Malanya by name, an modest intelligent creature.
She took his fancy at first sight, and he fell in
love with her: he fell in love with her timid
movements, her bashful answers, her gentle voice and
gentle smile; every day she seemed sweeter to him.
And she became devoted to Ivan Petrovitch with all
the strength of her soul, as none but Russian girls
can be devoted—and she gave herself to
him. In the large household of a country squire
nothing can long be kept a secret; soon every one knew
of the love between the young master and Malanya;
the gossip even reached the ears of Piotr Andreitch
himself. Under other circumstances, he would
probably have paid no attention to a matter of so little