The Brothers Karamazov полностью

“Listen, listen!” Kalganov was really bubbling over, “even if he’s lying— and he lies all the time—he’s lying so as to give pleasure to us all: that’s not mean, is it? You know, sometimes I love him. He’s awfully mean, but naturally so, eh? Don’t you think? Other people are mean for some reason, to get some profit from it, but he just does it naturally ... Imagine, for instance, he claims (he was arguing about it yesterday all the while we were driving) that Gogol wrote about him in Dead Souls.^[251] Remember, there’s a landowner Maximov, and Nozdryov thrashes him and is taken to court ‘for inflicting personal injury on the landowner Maximov with a birch while in a drunken condition’—do you remember? Imagine, now, he claims that was him, that it was he who was thrashed! But how can it be? Chichikov was traveling around in the twenties at the latest, the beginning of the twenties, so the dates don’t fit at all. He couldn’t have been thrashed then. He really couldn’t, could he?”

It was hard to conceive why Kalganov was so excited, but his excitement was genuine. Mitya entered wholeheartedly into his interests.

“Well, what if he was thrashed!” he cried with a loud laugh.

“Not really thrashed, but just so,” Maximov suddenly put in.

“How ‘so’? Thrashed, or not thrashed?”

“Która godzina, partie (What time is it) ?” the pan with the pipe addressed the tall pan on the chair with a bored look. The latter shrugged his shoulders in reply: neither of them had a watch.

“Why not talk? Let other people talk, too. You mean if you’re bored, no one should talk?” Grushenka roused herself again, apparently provoking him on purpose. For the first time, as it were, something flashed through Mitya’s mind. This time the pan replied with obvious irritation.

“Pani, I do not contradict, I do not say anything.”

“All right, then. And you, go on with your story,” Grushenka cried to Maximov. “Why are you all silent?” “But there’s really nothing to tell, because it’s all foolishness,” Maximov picked up at once with obvious pleasure, mincing a bit, “and in Gogol it’s all just allegorical, because he made all the names allegorical: Nozdryov really wasn’t Nozdryov but Nosov, and Kuvshinnikov doesn’t bear any resemblance, because he was Shkvornyev. And Fenardi was indeed Fenardi, only he wasn’t an Italian but a Russian, Petrov, sirs, and Mamzelle Fenardi was a pretty one, with pretty legs in tights, sirs, a short little skirt all-over sequins, and she made pirouettes, only not for four hours but just for four minutes, sirs ... and seduced everyone ...”

“What were you thrashed for, what did they thrash you for?” Kalganov kept on shouting.

“For Piron, sir,” Maximov replied.^[252]

“What Piron?” cried Mitya.

“The famous French writer Piron, sirs. We were all drinking wine then, a big company, in a tavern, at that fair. They invited me, and first of all I started reciting epigrams: ‘Is it you, Boileau, in that furbelow?’^[253] And Boileau answers that he’s going to a masquerade, meaning to the bathhouse, sirs, hee, hee—so they took it personally. Then I hastened to tell them another one, very well known to all educated people, a sarcastic one, sirs:

You’re Sappho, I’m Phaon, agreed. But there’s one thing still troubling me: You don’t know your way to the sea.^[254]

At that they got even more offended and began scolding me indecently, and I, unfortunately, tried to make things better by telling them a very educated anecdote about Piron, how he wasn’t accepted into the French Academy, and in revenge wrote his own epitaph for his gravestone: Çi-gît Piron qui ne fut rien, Pas même académicien.^[255] Then they up and thrashed me.”

“But what for, what for?”

“For my education. A man can be thrashed for all sorts of reasons,” Maximov summed up meekly and sententiously.

“Eh, enough, it’s all bad, I don’t want to listen, I thought there would be some fun in it,” Grushenka suddenly cut them off. Mitya, thrown into a flutter, stopped laughing at once. The tall pan rose to his feet and, with the haughty look of a man bored by company unsuited to him, began pacing from one corner to the other, holding his hands behind his back. “Look at him pacing!” Grushenka glanced at him contemptuously. Mitya began to worry; besides, he noticed that the pan on the sofa kept glancing at him irritably.

“Pan” Mitya cried, “let us drink, panie! And the other pan, too: let us drink, panowie!” In a second he moved three glasses together and poured champagne.

“To Poland, panowie, I drink to your Poland, to the Polish land!” Mitya exclaimed.^[256]

“Bardzo mi to milo, panie, wypijem (That is very nice, panie, let us drink),” the pan on the sofa said gravely and benevolently, taking his glass.

“And the other pan, what’s his name? Hey, Excellency, take a glass!” Mitya fussed.

“Pan Vrublevsky,” the pan on the sofa prompted.