“Nonsense, nonsense!”

Navagin was free from superstitions, but the phenomenon which interested him was so mysterious that all sorts of uncanny devilry intruded into his mind against his will.  All the evening he was imagining that the incognito Fedyukov was the spirit of some long-dead clerk, who had been discharged from the service by Navagin’s ancestors and was now revenging himself on their descendant; or perhaps it was the kinsman of some petty official dismissed by Navagin himself, or of a girl seduced by him. . . .

All night Navagin dreamed of a gaunt old clerk in a shabby uniform, with a face as yellow as a lemon, hair that stood up like a brush, and pewtery eyes; the clerk said something in a sepulchral voice and shook a bony finger at him.  And Navagin almost had an attack of inflammation of the brain.

For a fortnight he was silent and gloomy and kept walking up and down and thinking.  In the end he overcame his sceptical vanity, and going into his wife’s room he said in a hollow voice: 

“Zina, call up Fedyukov!”

The spiritualistic lady was delighted; she sent for a sheet of cardboard and a saucer, made her husband sit down beside her, and began upon the magic rites.

Fedyukov did not keep them waiting long. . . .

“What do you want?” asked Navagin.

“Repent,” answered the saucer.

“What were you on earth?”

“A sinner. . . .”

“There, you see!” whispered his wife, “and you did not believe!”

Navagin conversed for a long time with Fedyukov, and then called up Napoleon, Hannibal, Askotchensky, his aunt Klavdya Zaharovna, and they all gave him brief but correct answers full of deep significance.  He was busy with the saucer for four hours, and fell asleep soothed and happy that he had become acquainted with a mysterious world that was new to him.  After that he studied spiritualism every day, and at the office, informed the clerks that there was a great deal in nature that was supernatural and marvellous to which our men of science ought to have turned their attention long ago.

Hypnotism, mediumism, bishopism, spiritualism, the fourth dimension, and other misty notions took complete possession of him, so that for whole days at a time, to the great delight of his wife, he read books on spiritualism or devoted himself to the saucer, table-turning, and discussions of supernatural phenomena.  At his instigation all his clerks took up spiritualism, too, and with such ardour that the old managing clerk went out of his mind and one day sent a telegram:  “Hell.  Government House.  I feel that I am turning into an evil spirit.  What’s to be done?  Reply paid.  Vassily Krinolinsky.”

After reading several hundreds of treatises on spiritualism Navagin had a strong desire to write something himself.  For five months he sat composing, and in the end had written a huge monograph, entitled:  My Opinion.  When he had finished this essay he determined to send it to a spiritualist journal.