The Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Novels, Short Stories and Autobiographical Writings. Федор Достоевский
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“It’s all my own fault, brother,” he would say sometimes to one of the people he used to talk to. “It’s all my fault I One ought to be doubly delicate with a man who is under obligations to one. … I mean that I … Under obligations, indeed! I am talking nonsense again! He is not under obligations to me at all: on the contrary, it is I who am under an obligation to him for living with me! And here I have reproached him for eating my bread! … Not that I did reproach him, but it seems I made some slip of the tongue — I often do make such slips… . And, after all, the man has suffered, he has done great things; for ten years in spite of insulting treatment he was tending his sick friend! And then his learning… . He’s a writer! A highly educated man! A very lofty character; in short …”
The conception of the highly educated and unfortunate Foma ignominiously treated by the cruel and capricious general rent my uncle’s heart with compassion and indignation. All Foma’s peculiarities, all his ignoble doings my uncle at once ascribed to his sufferings, the humiliations he had endured in the past, and the bitterness left by them. … He at once decided in his soft and generous heart that one could not be so exacting with a man who had suffered as with an ordinary person; that one must not only forgive him, but more than that, one must, by gentle treatment, heal his wounds, restore him and reconcile him with humanity. Setting this object before him he was completely fired by it, and lost all power of perceiving that his new friend was a lascivious and capricious animal, an egoist, a sluggard, a lazy drone — and nothing more. He put implicit faith in Foma’s genius and learning. I forgot to mention that my uncle had the most naive and disinterested reverence for the words “learning” and “literature”, though he had himself never studied anything. This was one of his chief and most guileless peculiarities.
“He is writing,” he would whisper, walking on tiptoe, though he was two rooms away from Foma’s study. “I don’t know precisely what he is writing,” he added, with a proud and mysterious air, “but no doubt he is brewing something, brother. … I mean in the best sense, of course; it would be clear to some people, but to you and me, brother, it would be just a jumble that … I fancy he is writing of productive forces of some sort — he said so himself. I suppose that has something to do with politics. Yes, his name will be famous! Then we shall be famous through him. He told me that himself, brother. …”
I know for a fact that my uncle was forced by Foma’s orders to shave off his beautiful fair whiskers. Foma considered that these whiskers made my uncle look like a Frenchman, and that wearing them showed a lack of patriotism. Little by little Foma began meddling in the management of the estate, and giving sage counsels on the subject. These sage counsels were terrible. The peasants soon saw the position and understood who was their real master, and scratched their heads uneasily. Later on I overheard Foma talking to the peasants; I must confess I listened. Foma had told us before that he was fond of talking to intelligent Russian peasants. So one day he went to the threshing floor: after talking to the peasants about the farm-work, though he could not tell oats from wheat, after sweetly dwelling on the sacred obligations of the peasant to his master, after touching lightly on electricity and the division of labour, subjects of which I need hardly say he knew nothing, after explaining to his listeners how the earth went round the sun, and being at last quite touched by his own eloquence — he began talking about the ministers. I understood. Pushkin used to tell a story of a father who impressed upon his little boy of four that he, his papa, was so brave “that the Tsar loves Papa… .” So evidently this papa needed this listener of four years old! And the peasants always listened to Foma Fomitch with cringing respect.
“And did you get a large salary from royalty, little father?” a grey-headed old man called Arhip Korotky asked suddenly from the crowd of peasants, with the evident intention of being flattering; but the question struck Foma Fomitch as familiar, and he could not endure familiarity.
“And what business is that of yours, you lout?” he answered, looking contemptuously at the poor peasant. “Why are you thrusting forward your pug-face? Do you want me to spit in it?”
Foma Fomitch always talked in that tone to the “intelligent Russian peasant”.
“You are our father,” another peasant interposed; “you know we are ignorant people. You may be a major or a colonel or even your Excellency, we don’t know how we ought to speak to you.”
“You lout!” repeated Foma Fomitch, mollified however. “There are salaries and salaries, you blockhead! One will get nothing, though he is a general — because he does nothing to deserve it, he is of no service to the Tsar. But I.got twenty thousand when I was serving in the Ministry, and I did not take it, I served for the honour of it. I had plenty of money of my own. I gave my salary to the cause of public enlightenment, and to aid those whose homes have been burnt in Kazan.”
“I say! So it was you who rebuilt Kazan, little father?” the amazed peasant went on.
The peasants wondered at Foma Fomitch as a rule.
“Oh, well, I had my share in it,” Foma answered, with a show of reluctance, as though vexed with himself for deigning to converse on such a subject with such a person.
His conversations with my uncle were of a different stamp.
“What were you in the past?” Foma would say, for instance, lolling after an ample dinner in an easy-chair, while a servant stood behind him brandishing a fresh lime branch to keep off the flies. “What were you like before I came? But now I have dropped into your soul a spark of that heavenly fire which is glowing there now. Did I drop a spark of heavenly fire into your soul or not? Answer. Did I drop a spark or did I not?”
Foma Fomitch, indeed, could not himself have said why he asked such a question. But my uncle’s silence and confusion at once spurred him on. He who had been so patient and downtrodden in the past now exploded like gunpowder at the slightest provocation. My uncle’s silence seemed to him insulting, and he now insisted on an answer.
“Answer: is the spark glowing in you or not?”
My uncle hesitated, shrank into himself, and did not know what line to take.
“Allow me to observe that I am waiting,” said Foma in an aggrieved voice.
“Metis, ripondez done, Yegorushka,” put in Madame la Generale, shrugging her shoulders.