everything, and also got mixed up in the story with the nasty boys, be glad that they were there as well and listening! I won't forgive him, I won't forgive that wretched princeling, I'll never forgive him! And why has Aglaya been in hysterics for three days, why has she nearly quarreled with her sisters, even Alexandra, whose hands she always used to kiss like her mother's—she respected her so much? Why has she been setting everyone riddles for three days? What has Gavrila Ivolgin got to do with it? Why did she take to praising Gavrila Ivolgin yesterday and today and then burst into tears? Why does that anonymous letter mention that cursed 'poor knight,' when she never even showed the prince's letter to her sisters? And why . . . what, what made me go running to him like a singed cat and drag him here myself? Lord, I've lost my mind, what have I done now! To talk with a young man about my daughter's secrets, and what's more . . . what's more, about secrets that all but concern him! Lord, it's a good thing at least that he's an idiot and . . . and ... a friend of the house! Only, can it be that Aglaya got tempted by such a little freak? Lord, what drivel I'm spouting! Pah! We're originals . . . they should put us all under glass and show us to people, me first, ten kopecks for admission. I won't forgive you that, Ivan Fyodorych, I'll never forgive you! And why doesn't she give him a dressing-down now? She promised to give him a dressing-down and yet she doesn't do it! There, there, she's looking at him all eyes, says nothing, doesn't go away, stays, and it was she who told him not to come . . . He sits there all pale. And that cursed, cursed babbler Evgeny Pavlych keeps up the whole conversation by himself! Look at him talking away, not letting anybody put a word in. I'd have learned everything, if only I could have turned it the right way . . ."

The prince indeed sat, all but pale, at the round table and, it seemed, was at one and the same time extremely frightened and, for moments, in an incomprehensible, exhilarating ecstasy. Oh, how afraid he was to look in that direction, into that corner from which two familiar dark eyes gazed intently at him, and at the same time how seized with happiness he was to be sitting among them again, to hear the familiar voice—after what she had written to him. "Lord, what will she say now!" He himself had not yet uttered a single word and listened tensely to the "talking-away" Evgeny Pavlovich, who was rarely in such a pleased and excited state of mind as now, that evening. The prince listened to him and for a long time hardly understood a single word. Except for Ivan

Fyodorovich, who had not yet come from Petersburg, everyone was gathered. Prince Shch. was also there. It seemed they were going to go and listen to music a little later, before tea. The present conversation had evidently started before the prince's arrival. Soon Kolya, appearing from somewhere, slipped on to the terrace. "So he's received here as before," the prince thought to himself.

The Epanchins' dacha was a luxurious place, in the style of a Swiss chalet, gracefully adorned on all sides with flowers and leaves. It was surrounded on all sides by a small but beautiful flower garden. Everyone was sitting on the terrace as at the prince's; only the terrace was somewhat more spacious and decorated more smartly.

The theme of the conversation they were having seemed not to everyone's liking; the conversation, as could be guessed, had begun as the result of an impatient argument, and, of course, everyone would have liked to change the subject, but Evgeny Pavlovich seemed to persist all the more and regardless of the impression; the prince's arrival aroused him still more, as it were. Lizaveta Prokofyevna scowled, though she did not understand it all. Aglaya, who was sitting apart from everyone, almost in the corner, would not leave, listened, and remained stubbornly silent.

"Excuse me," Evgeny Pavlovich protested hotly, "but I am not saying anything against liberalism. Liberalism is not a sin; it is a necessary part of the whole, which without it would fall apart or atrophy; liberalism has the same right to exist as the most well-mannered conservatism; what I am attacking is Russian liberalism, and I repeat again that I attack it essentially because a Russian liberal is not a Russian liberal, but is a non-Russian liberal. Give me a Russian liberal and I'll kiss him at once right in front of you."

"Provided he wants to kiss you," said Alexandra Ivanovna, who was extraordinarily excited. Her cheeks even reddened more than usual.

"Just look," Lizaveta Prokofyevna thought to herself, "she sleeps and eats and there's no shaking her up, and then suddenly once a year she goes and starts talking so that you can only spread your arms in wonder."

The prince fleetingly noted that Alexandra Ivanovna seemed very displeased because Evgeny Pavlovich was talking too cheerfully, talking about a serious subject and as if excitedly, and at the same time as if he were joking.

"I was maintaining a moment ago, just before your arrival,

Prince," Evgeny Pavlovich went on, "that up to now our liberals have come from only two strata, the former landowners (abolished) and the seminarians.¹ And as the two estates have finally turned into absolute castes, into something absolutely cut off from the nation, and the more so the further it goes, from generation to generation, it means that all they have done and are doing is absolutely not national . . ."

"How's that? You mean all that's been done—it's all not Russian?" Prince Shch. objected.

"Not national; though it's in Russian, it's not national; our liberals aren't national, our conservatives aren't national, none of them . . . And you may be sure that our nation will recognize nothing of what's been done by landowners and seminarians, either now or later . . ."

"That's a good one! How can you maintain such a paradox, if it's serious? I cannot allow such outbursts concerning Russian landowners, you're a Russian landowner yourself," Prince Shch. objected heatedly.

"But I'm not speaking of the Russian landowner in the sense in which you're taking it. It's a respectable estate, if only for the fact that I myself belong to it; especially now, when it has ceased to exist ..."

"Can it be that there was nothing national in literature either?" Alexandra Ivanovna interrupted.

"I'm not an expert in literature, but Russian literature, in my opinion, is all non-Russian, except perhaps for Lomonosov, Pushkin, and Gogol."²

"First, that's not so little, and second, one of them is from the people and the other two are landowners," laughed Adelaida.

"Quite right, but don't be triumphant. Since up to now only those three of all Russian writers have each managed to say something that is actually his, his own, not borrowed from anyone, those same three thereby immediately became national. Whoever of the Russian people says, writes, or does something of his own, his own, inalienable and unborrowed, inevitably becomes national, even if he speaks Russian poorly. For me that is an axiom. But it wasn't literature that we started talking about, we were talking about socialists, and the conversation started from them. Well, so I maintain that we don't have a single Russian socialist; we don't have and never had any, because all our socialists also come from the landowners or the seminarians. All our inveterate, much-advertised

socialists, here as well as abroad, are nothing more than liberals who come from landowners from the time of serfdom. Why do you laugh? Give me their books, give me their tracts, their memoirs, and I undertake, without being a literary critic, to write a most persuasive literary critique, in which I shall make it clear as day that every page of their books, pamphlets, and memoirs has been written first of all by a former Russian landowner. Their spite, indignation, and wit are a landowner's (even pre-Famusovian!³); their rapture, their tears—real, perhaps even genuine tears, but— they're a landowner's! A landowner's or a seminarian's . . . Again you laugh, and you're laughing, too, Prince? You also disagree?"