They were engaged in warm and earnest conversation about a farewell
dinner which they wanted to arrange for the next day to a comrade of
theirs called Zverkov, an officer in the army, who was going away to a
distant province. This Zverkov had been all the time at school with me
too. I had begun to hate him particularly in the upper forms. In the lower
forms he had simply been a pretty, playful boy whom everybody liked. I
had hated him, however, even in the lower forms, just because he was a
pretty and playful boy. He was always bad at his lessons and got worse and
worse as he went on; however, he left with a good certificate, as he had
powerful interests. During his last year at school he came in for an estate
of two hundred serfs, and as almost all of us were poor he took up a
swaggering tone among us. He was vulgar in the extreme, but at the same
time he was a good-natured fellow, even in his swaggering. In spite of
superficial, fantastic and sham notions of honour and dignity, all but very
few of us positively grovelled before Zverkov, and the more so the more he
swaggered. And it was not from any interested motive that they grovelled,
but simply because he had been favoured by the gifts of nature. Moreover,
it was, as it were, an accepted idea among us that Zverkov was a
specialist in regard to tact and the social graces. This last fact particularly
infuriated me. I hated the abrupt self-confident tone of his voice, his
admiration of his own witticisms, which were often frightfully stupid,
though he was bold in his language; I hated his handsome, but stupid
face (for which I would, however, have gladly exchanged my intelligent
one), and the free-and-easy military manners in fashion in the "'forties."
I hated the way in which he used to talk of his future conquests of women
(he did not venture to begin his attack upon women until he had the
epaulettes of an officer, and was looking forward to them with impatience),
and boasted of the duels he would constantly be fighting. I remember
how I, invariably so taciturn, suddenly fastened upon Zverkov,
when one day talking at a leisure moment with his schoolfellows of his