fill Gavrilov's place with him.... Gavrilov was a thousand times more
good-natured and foolish than I.

Now allow me a slight digression.... When I spoke of my university
comrades, I did not mention a certain Mr. Shtchitov. He was
five-and-thirty; he had been a student for ten years already. I can see
even now his rather long pale face, his little brown eyes, his long
hawk nose crooked at the end, his thin sarcastic lips, his solemn
upstanding shock of hair, and his chin that lost itself complacently in
the wide striped cravat of the colour of a raven's wing, the shirt
front with bronze buttons, the open blue frock-coat and striped
waistcoat.... I can hear his unpleasantly jarring laugh.... He went
everywhere, was conspicuous at all possible kinds of 'dancing classes.'
... I remember I could not listen to his cynical stories without a
peculiar shudder.... Kolosov once compared him to an unswept Russian
refreshment bar ... a horrible comparison! And with all that, there was
a lot of intelligence, common sense, observation, and wit in the
man.... He sometimes impressed us by some saying so apt, so true and
cutting, that we were all involuntarily reduced to silence and looked
at him with amazement. But, to be sure, it is just the same to a
Russian whether he has uttered an absurdity or a clever thing.
Shtchitov was especially dreaded by those self-conscious, dreamy, and
not particularly gifted youths who spend whole days in painfully
hatching a dozen trashy lines of verse and reading them in sing-song to
their 'friends,' and who despise every sort of positive science. One
such he simply drove out of Moscow, by continually repeating to him two
of his own lines. Yet all the while Shtchitov himself did nothing and
learnt nothing.... But that's all in the natural order of things. Well,
Shtchitov, God only knows why, began jeering at my romantic attachment
to Kolosov. The first time, with noble indignation, I told him to go to