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 a lamp before Laevsky, since
he is the fated victim of the age, of influences, of heredity, and
so on. All the officials and their ladies were in ecstasies when
they listened to him, and I could not make out for a long time what
sort of man I had to deal with, a cynic or a clever rogue. Such
types as he, on the surface intellectual with a smattering of
education and a great deal of talk about their own nobility, are
very clever in posing as exceptionally complex natures."

"Hold your tongue!" Samoylenko flared up. "I will not allow a