... We were a party of eight in the room, and we were talking of
contemporary affairs and men.

'I don't understand these men!' observed A.: 'they're such desperate
fellows.... Really desperate.... There has never been anything like
it before.'

'Yes, there has,' put in P., a man getting on in years, with grey hair,
born some time in the twenties of this century: 'there were desperate
characters in former days too, only they were not like the desperate
fellows of to-day. Of the poet Yazikov some one has said that he had
enthusiasm, but not applied to anything--an enthusiasm without an
object. So it was with those people--their desperateness was without an
object. But there, if you'll allow me, I'll tell you the story of my
nephew, or rather cousin, Misha Poltyev. It may serve as an example of
the desperate characters of those days.

He came into God's world, I remember, in 1828, at his father's native
place and property, in one of the sleepiest corners of a sleepy province
of the steppes. Misha's father, Andrei Nikolaevitch Poltyev, I remember
well to this day. He was a genuine old-world landowner, a God-fearing,
sedate man, fairly--for those days--well educated, just a little
cracked, to tell the truth--and, moreover, he suffered from epilepsy....
That too is an old-world, gentlemanly complaint.... Andrei
Nikolaevitch's fits were, however, slight, and generally ended in sleep
and depression. He was good-hearted, and of an affable demeanour, not
without a certain stateliness: I always pictured to myself the tsar
Mihail Fedorovitch as like him. The whole life of Andrei Nikolaevitch
was passed in the punctual fulfilment of every observance established