It was then that a tall young man who had remained standing perfectly still within a carriage gateway, two houses lower down, stepped out into the street and walking up rapidly flung another bomb over the heads of the crowd.  It actually struck the Minister-President on the shoulder as he stooped over his dying servant, then falling between his feet exploded with a terrific concentrated violence, striking him dead to the ground, finishing the wounded man and practically annihilating the empty sledge in the twinkling of an eye.  With a yell of horror the crowd broke up and fled in all directions, except for those who fell dead or dying where they stood nearest to the Minister-President, and one or two others who did not fall till they had run a little way.

The first explosion had brought together a crowd as if by enchantment, the second made as swiftly a solitude in the street for hundreds of yards in each direction.  Through the falling snow people looked from afar at the small heap of dead bodies lying upon each other near the carcases of the two horses.  Nobody dared to approach till some Cossacks of a street-patrol galloped up and, dismounting, began to turn over the dead.  Amongst the innocent victims of the second explosion laid out on the pavement there was a body dressed in a peasant’s sheepskin coat; but the face was unrecognisable, there was absolutely nothing found in the pockets of its poor clothing, and it was the only one whose identity was never established.

That day Mr. Razumov got up at his usual hour and spent the morning within the University buildings listening to the lectures and working for some time in the library.  He heard the first vague rumour of something in the way of bomb-throwing at the table of the students’ ordinary, where he was accustomed to eat his two o’clock dinner.  But this rumour was made up of mere whispers, and this was Russia, where it was not always safe, for a student especially, to appear too much interested in certain kinds of whispers.  Razumov was one of those men who, living in a period of mental and political unrest, keep an instinctive hold on normal, practical, everyday life.  He was aware of the emotional tension of his time; he even responded to it in an indefinite way.  But his main concern was with his work, his studies, and with his own future.

Officially and in fact without a family (for the daughter of the Archpriest had long been dead), no home influences had shaped his opinions or his feelings.  He was as lonely in the world as a man swimming in the deep sea.  The word Razumov was the mere label of a solitary individuality.  There were no Razumovs belonging to him anywhere.  His closest parentage was defined in the statement that he was a Russian.  Whatever good he expected from life would be given to or withheld from his hopes by that connexion alone.  This immense parentage suffered from the throes of internal dissensions, and he shrank mentally from the fray as a good-natured man may shrink from taking definite sides in a violent family quarrel.