of the serf-owning class?’ or:  ‘We are degenerate. . . .’  Or he would begin a long rigmarole about Onyegin, Petchorin, Byron’s Cain, and Bazarov, of whom he would say:  ’They are our fathers in flesh and in spirit.’  So we are to understand that it was not his fault that Government envelopes lay unopened in his office for weeks together, and that he drank and taught others to drink, but Onyegin, Petchorin, and Turgenev, who had invented the failure and the superfluous man, were responsible for it.  The cause of his extreme dissoluteness and unseemliness lies, do you see, not in himself, but somewhere outside in space.  And so—­an ingenious idea!—­it is not only he who is dissolute, false, and disgusting, but we . . . ‘we men of the eighties,’ ’we the spiritless, nervous offspring of the serf-owning class’; ‘civilisation has crippled us’ . . . in fact, we are to understand that such a great man as Laevsky is great even in his fall:  that his dissoluteness, his lack of culture and of moral purity, is a phenomenon of natural history, sanctified by inevitability; that the causes of it are world-wide, elemental; and that we ought to hang up a lamp before Laevsky, since he is the fated victim of the age, of influences, of heredity, and so on.  All the officials and their ladies were in ecstasies when they listened to him, and I could not make out for a long time what sort of man I had to deal with, a cynic or a clever rogue.  Such types as he, on the surface intellectual with a smattering of education and a great deal of talk about their own nobility, are very clever in posing as exceptionally complex natures.”

“Hold your tongue!” Samoylenko flared up.  “I will not allow a splendid fellow to be spoken ill of in my presence!”

“Don’t interrupt, Alexandr Daviditch,” said Von Koren coldly; “I am just finishing.  Laevsky is by no means a complex organism.  Here is his moral skeleton:  in the morning, slippers, a bathe, and coffee; then till dinner-time, slippers, a constitutional, and conversation; at two o’clock slippers, dinner, and wine; at five o’clock a bathe, tea and wine, then vint and lying; at ten o’clock supper and wine; and after midnight sleep and la femme.  His existence is confined within this narrow programme like an egg within its shell.  Whether he walks or sits, is angry, writes, rejoices, it may all be reduced to wine, cards, slippers, and women.  Woman plays a fatal, overwhelming part in his life.  He tells us himself that at thirteen he was in love; that when he was a student in his first year he was living with a lady who had a good influence over him, and to whom he was indebted for his musical education.  In his second year he bought a prostitute from a brothel and raised her to his level—­that is, took her as his kept mistress, and she lived with him for six months and then ran away back to the brothel-keeper, and her flight caused him much spiritual suffering.  Alas! his sufferings were so great that he had to leave the