I

In the spring of 1878 there was living in Moscow, in a small wooden house
in Shabolovka, a young man of five-and-twenty, called Yakov Aratov.
With him lived his father's sister, an elderly maiden lady, over fifty,
Platonida Ivanovna. She took charge of his house, and looked after his
household expenditure, a task for which Aratov was utterly unfit. Other
relations he had none. A few years previously, his father, a provincial
gentleman of small property, had moved to Moscow together with him and
Platonida Ivanovna, whom he always, however, called Platosha; her nephew,
too, used the same name. On leaving the country-place where they had always
lived up till then, the elder Aratov settled in the old capital, with the
object of putting his son to the university, for which he had himself
prepared him; he bought for a trifle a little house in one of the outlying
streets, and established himself in it, with all his books and scientific
odds and ends. And of books and odds and ends he had many--for he was a
man of some considerable learning ... 'an out-and-out eccentric,' as his
neighbours said of him. He positively passed among them for a sorcerer; he
had even been given the title of an 'insectivist.' He studied chemistry,
mineralogy, entomology, botany, and medicine; he doctored patients gratis
with herbs and metallic powders of his own invention, after the method of
Paracelsus. These same powders were the means of his bringing to the grave
his pretty, young, too delicate wife, whom he passionately loved, and by
whom he had an only son. With the same powders he fairly ruined his son's
health too, in the hope and intention of strengthening it, as he detected
anaemia and a tendency to consumption in his constitution inherited from
his mother. The name of 'sorcerer' had been given him partly because he
regarded himself as a descendant--not in the direct line, of course--of the
great Bruce, in honour of whom he had called his son Yakov, the Russian