bailiffs, young Lavretsky went to Moscow, whither he felt drawn by a
vague but strong attraction. He recognised the defects of his education,
and formed the resolution, as far as possible, to regain lost ground. In
the last five years he had read much and seen something; he had many
stray ideas in his head; any professor might have envied some of his
acquirements, but at the same time he did not know much that every
schoolboy would have learnt long ago. Lavretsky was aware of his
limitations; he was secretly conscious of being eccentric. The
Anglomaniac had done his son an ill turn; his whimsical education had
produced its fruits. For long years he had submitted unquestioningly to
his father; when at last he began to see through him, the evil was
already done, his habits were deeply-rooted. He could not get on with
people; at twenty-three years old, with an unquenchable thirst for love
in his shy heart, he had never yet dared to look one woman in the face.
With his intellect, clear and sound, but somewhat heavy, with his
tendencies to obstinacy, contemplation, and indolence he ought from his
earliest years to have been thrown into the stream of life, and he had
been kept instead in artificial seclusion. And now the magic circle was
broken, but he continued to remain within it, prisoned and pent up
within himself. It was ridiculous at his age to put on a student's
dress, but he was not afraid of ridicule; his Spartan education had at
least the good effect of developing in him a contempt for the opinion of
others, and he put on, without embarrassment, the academical uniform. He
entered the section of physics and mathematics. Robust, rosy-cheeked,
bearded, and taciturn, he produced a strange impression on his
companions; they did not suspect that this austere man, who came so
punctually to the lectures in a wide village sledge with a pair of
horses, was inwardly almost a child. He appeared to them to be a queer
kind of pedant; they did not care for him, and made no overtures to him,
and he avoided them. During the first two years he spent in the