‘First of all, don’t rock, please,’ said Alexei Alexandrovich. ‘And second, what is precious is not the reward but the work. And I wish you to understand that. If you work and study in order to get a reward, the work will seem hard to you; but when you work,’ Alexei Alexandrovich said, recalling how he had sustained himself by a sense of duty that morning in the dull work of signing a hundred and eighteen papers, ‘if you love the work, you will find your reward in that.’
Seryozha’s eyes, shining with tenderness and gaiety, went dull and lowered under his father’s gaze. This was the same long-familiar tone in which his father always addressed him and which he had learned to fall in with. His father always talked to him - so he felt - as if he were addressing some imaginary boy, one of those that exist in books, but quite unlike him. And he always tried, when with his father, to pretend he was that book boy.
‘You understand that, I hope?’ said his father.
‘Yes, papa,’ Seryozha replied, pretending to be the imaginary boy.
The lesson consisted in learning several verses from the Gospel by heart and going over the beginning of the Old Testament. Seryozha knew the Gospel verses quite well, but as he was reciting them, he got so lost in contemplating the bone of his father’s forehead, which curved sharply at the temple, that he got confused by a repetition of the same word and moved the ending of one verse to the beginning of another. It was obvious to Alexei Alexandrovich that he did not understand what he was saying, and that annoyed him.
He frowned and began to explain what Seryozha had already heard many times and could never remember, because he understood it all too clearly - the same sort of thing as ‘thus’ being an adverbial modifier of manner. Seryozha looked at his father with frightened eyes and thought of one thing only: whether or not his father would make him repeat what he said, as sometimes happened. And this thought frightened him so much that he no longer understood anything. But his father did not make him repeat it and went on to the lesson from the Old Testament. Seryozha recounted the events themselves quite well, but when he had to answer questions about what some of the events foreshadowed, he knew nothing, though he had already been punished for this lesson. The place where he could no longer say anything and mumbled, and cut the table, and rocked on the chair, was the one where he had to speak of the antediluvian patriarchs. He knew none of them except Enoch, who had been taken alive to heaven.41 He had remembered the names before, but now he had quite forgotten them, especially because Enoch was his favourite person in all the Old Testament, and Enoch’s having been taken alive to heaven was connected in his mind with a whole long train of thought to which he now gave himself, staring with fixed eyes at his father’s watch chain and a waistcoat button half-way through the buttonhole.
In death, which he had been told about so often, Seryozha totally refused to believe. He did not believe that the people he loved could die, and especially that he himself would die. For him that was perfectly impossible and incomprehensible. Yet he had been told that everyone would die; he had even asked people he trusted and they had confirmed it; his nanny had also confirmed it, though reluctantly. But Enoch had not died, which meant that not everyone died. ‘And why can’t everyone be deserving in the same way before God and get taken alive to heaven?’ thought Seryozha. The bad ones — that is, those whom Seryozha did not like - they could die, but the good ones should all be like Enoch.
‘Well, so who are the patriarchs?’
‘Enoch, Enos.’
‘You’ve already said that. Bad, Seryozha, very bad. If you don’t try to learn what’s most necessary for a Christian,’ his father said, getting up, ‘what else can interest you? I’m displeased with you, and Pyotr Ignatyich’ (the chief pedagogue) ‘is displeased with you ... I will have to punish you.’
The father and the pedagogue were both displeased with Seryozha, and indeed he studied very badly. But it was quite impossible to say that he was an incapable boy. On the contrary, he was much more capable than the boys whom the pedagogue held up as examples to Seryozha. As his father saw it, he did not want to learn what he was taught. But in fact, he could not learn it. He could not, because there were demands in his soul that were more exacting for him than those imposed by his father and the pedagogue. These demands were conflicting, and he fought openly with his educators.
