But no matter how strange, fictitious or paradoxical this may seem, still, even these compositions, and drawings, and obscene photographic cards, did not arouse a delightful curiosity.  They were looked upon as a prank, a lark, and the allurement of contraband risk.  In the cadets’ library were chaste excerpts from Pushkin and Lermontov; all of Ostrovsky, who only made you laugh; and almost all of Turgenev, who was the very one that played a chief and cruel role in Kolya’s life.  As it is known, love with the late great Turgenev is always surrounded with a tantalizing veil; some sort of crepe, unseizable, forbidden, but tempting:  his maidens have forebodings of love and are agitated at its approach, and are ashamed beyond all measure, and tremble, and turn red.  Married women or widows travel this tortuous path somewhat differently:  they struggle for a long time with their duty, or with respectability, or with the opinion of the world; and, in the end—­oh!—­fall with tears; or—­oh!—­begin to brave it; or, which is still more frequent, the implacable fate cuts short her or his life at the most—­oh!—­necessary moment, when it only lacks a light puff of wind for the ripened fruit to fall.  And yet all of his personages still thirst after this shameful love; weep radiantly and laugh joyously from it; and it shuts out all the world for them.  But since boys think entirely differently than we grown-ups, and since everything that is forbidden, everything not said fully, or said in secret, has in their eyes an enormous, not only twofold but threefold interest—­it is therefore natural that out of reading they drew the hazy thought that the grown-ups were concealing something from them.

And it must be mentioned—­had not Kolya (like the majority of those of his age) seen the chambermaid Phrociya—­so rosy-cheeked, always merry, with legs of the hardness of steel (at times he, in the heat of playing, had slapped her on the back), had he not seen her once, when Kolya had by accident walked quickly into papa’s cabinet, scurry out of there with all her might, covering her face with her apron; and had he not seen that during this time papa’s face was red, with a dark blue, seemingly lengthened nose?  And Kolya had reflected:  “Papa looks like a turkey.”  Had not Kolya—­ partly through the fondness for pranks and the mischievousness natural to all boys, partly through tedium—­accidentally discovered in an unlocked drawer of papa’s writing table an enormous collection of cards, whereon was represented just that which shop clerks call the crowning of love, and worldly nincompoops—­the unearthly passion?