Fedor Ivanitch Lavretsky — we must ask the reader’s permission to break off the thread of our story for a time — came of an old noble family. The founder of the house of Lavretskky came over from Prussia in the reign of Vassili the Blind, and received a grant of two hundred chetverts of land in Byezhetsk. Many of his descendants filled various offices, and served under princes and persons of eminence in outlying districts, but not one of them rose above the rank of an inspector of the Imperial table nor acquired any considerable fortune. The richest and most distinguished of all the Lavretskys was Fedor Ivanitch’s great-grandfather, Andrei, a man cruel and daring, cunning and able. Even to this day stories still linger of his tyranny, his savage temper, his reckless munificence, and his insatiable avarice. He was very stout and tall, swarthy of countenance and beardless, he spoke in a thick voice and seemed half asleep; but the more quietly he spoke the more those about him trembled. He had managed to get a wife who was a fit match for him. She was a gipsy by birth, goggle-eyed and hook-nosed, with a round yellow face. She was irascible and vindictive, and never gave way in anything to her husband, who almost killed her, and whose death she did not survive, though she had been for ever quarrelling with him. The son of Andrei, Piotr, Fedor’s grandfather, did not take after his father; he was a typical landowner of the steppes, rather a simpleton, loud-voiced, but slow to move, coarse but not ill-natured, hospitable and very fond of coursing with dogs. He was over thirty when he inherited from his father a property of two thousand serfs in capital condition; but he had soon dissipated it, and had partly mortgaged his estate, and demoralised his servants. All sorts of people of low position, known and unknown, came crawling like cockroaches from all parts into his spacious, warm, ill-kept halls. All this mass of people ate what they could get, but always had their fill, drank till they were drunk, and carried off what they could, praising and blessing their genial host; and their host too when he was out humour blessed his guests — for a pack of sponging toadies, but he was bored when he was without them. Piotr Andreitch’s wife was a meek-spirited creature; he had taken her from a neighbouring family by his father’s choice and command; her name was Anna Pavlovna. She never interfered in anything, welcomed guests cordially, and readily paid visits herself, though being powdered, she used to declare, would be the death of her. “They put,” she used to say in her old age, “a fox’s brush on your head, comb all the hair up over it, smear it with grease, and dust it over with flour, and stick it up with iron pins,— there’s no washing it off afterwards; but to pay visits without powder was quite impossible — people would be offended. Ah, it was a torture!”

She liked being driven with fast-trotting horses, and was ready to play cards from morning till evening, and would always keep the score of the pennies she had lost or won hidden under her hand when her husband came near the card-table; but all her dowry, her whole fortune, she had put absolutely at his disposal. She bore him two children, a son Ivan, the father of Fedor, and a daughter Glafira. Ivan was not brought up at home, but lived with a rich old maiden aunt, the Princess Kubensky; she had fixed on him for her heir (but for that his father would not have let him go). She dressed him up like a doll, engaged all kinds of teachers for him, and put him in charge of a tutor, a Frenchman, who had been an abbe, a pupil of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a certain M. Courtin de Vaucelles, a subtle and wily intriguer — the very, as she expressed it, fine fleur of emigration — and finished at almost seventy years old by marrying this “fine fleur,” and making over all her property to him. Soon afterwards, covered with rouge, and redolent of perfume a la Richelieu, surrounded by negro boys, delicate-shaped greyhounds and shrieking parrots, she died on a crooked silken divan of the time of Louis XV., with an enamelled snuff-box of Petitot’s workmanship in her hand — and died, deserted by her husband; the insinuating M. Courtin had preferred to remove to Paris with her money. Ivan had only reached his twentieth year when this unexpected blow (we mean the princess’s marriage, not her death) fell upon him; he did not care to stay in his aunt’s house, where he found himself suddenly transformed from a wealthy heir to a poor relation; the society in Petersburg in which he had grown up was closed to him; he felt an aversion for entering the government service in the lower grades, with nothing but hard work and obscurity before him,— this was at the very beginning of the reign of the Emperor Alexander. He was obliged reluctantly to return to the country to his father. How squalid, poor, and wretched his parents’ home seemed to him! The stagnation and sordidness of life in the country offended him at every step. He was consumed with ennui. Moreover, every one in the house, except his mother, looked at him with unfriendly eyes. His father did not like his town manners, his swallow-tail coats, his frilled shirt-fronts, his books, his flute, his fastidious ways, in which he detected — not incorrectly — a disgust for his surroundings; he was for ever complaining and grumbling at his son. “Nothing here,” he used to say, “is to his taste; at table he is all in a fret, and doesn’t eat; he can’t bear the heat and close smell of the room; the sight of folks drunk upsets him, one daren’t beat any one before him; he doesn’t want to go into the government service; he’s weakly, as you see, in health; fie upon him, the milksop! And all this because he’s got his head full of Voltaire.” The old man had a special dislike to Voltaire, and the “fanatic” Diderot, though he had not read a word of their words; reading was not in his line. Piotr Andreitch was not mistaken; his son’s head for that matter was indeed full of both Diderot and Voltaire, and not only of them alone, of Rousseau too, and Helvetius, and many other writers of the same kind — but they were in his head only. The retired abbe and encyclopedist who had been Ivan Petrovitch’s tutor had taken pleasure in pouring all the wisdom of the eighteenth century into his pupil, and he was simply brimming over with it; it was there in him, but without mixing in his blood, nor penetrating to his soul, nor shaping itself in any firm convictions. . . . But, indeed, could one expect convictions from a young man of fifty years ago, when even at the present day we have not succeeded in attaining them? The guests, too, who frequented his father’s house, were oppressed by Ivan Petrovitch’s presence; he regarded them with loathing, they were afraid of him; and with his sister Glafira, who was twelve years older than he, he could not get on at all. This Glafira was a strange creature; she was ugly, crooked, and spare, with severe, wide-open eyes, and thin compressed lips. In her face, her voice, and her quick angular movements, she took after her grandmother, the gipsy, Andrei’s wife. Obstinate and fond of power, she would not even hear of marriage. The return of Ivan Petrovitch did not fit in with her plans; while the Princess Kubensky kept him with her, she had hoped to receive at least half of her father’s estate; in her avarice, too, she was like her grandmother. Besides, Glafira envied her brother, he was so well educated, spoke such good French with a Parisian accent, while she was scarcely able to pronounce “bon jour” or “comment vous portez-vous.” To be sure, her parents did not know any French, but that was no comfort to her. Ivan Petrovitch did not know what to do with himself for wretchedness and ennui; he had spent hardly a year in the country, but that year seemed to him as long as ten. The only consolation he could find was in talking to his mother, and he would sit for whole hou............