couldn’t bring myself to tell you, because I respect you and feel sorry for you, but since it has turned out like this … ’ It turned out to be an old acquaintance of ours, a family friend and a frequent visitor to the house … Rich, good-looking, and an ‘Excellency’ to boot. Anyway, to keep it short, she moved in with him. I completely lost my head. To hell with the job and the important trials, if the world’s collapsing around me … I would never have thought I was capable of imploring abjectly, sobbing and all the rest. But I was, I was perfectly capable! Only it was all in vain. My wife is a kind creature, she is compassionate; when I sobbed, she shed tears with me. I went down on my knees, and she immediately plumped down on hers too. There we were crawling about in front of each other. ‘Forgive me’—‘No, you forgive me!’ et cetera, et cetera. But for all her compassionate feelings she’s a resolute lady. She won’t be shifted when it comes to anything important—I already knew that about her. And I respected her for it. Of course, she wouldn’t be shifted this time either, I was simply tormenting her and myself pointlessly And one day she took advantage of my miserable sniveling”—at this point a note of undisguised bitterness appeared in Dolinin’s voice for the first time—“and she asked me to let her have our son. And I did. I was hoping to impress her with my nobility and self-sacrifice. I did impress her. But even so she didn’t come back to me … And that was when I wrote the famous project, the project of reform. With a secret, almost insane purpose in mind. I contravened all the rules of subordination, adopted a highly insolent tone. I thought, if they throw me out of my job, let them, it’s all the same to me. But what if I rise high, make a career? After all, these ideas are far from stupid, they are ideas of national importance, the product of long experience … At first I was removed from my post, but I didn’t flinch, I even felt a certain satisfaction. Well, then, that’s the way it’s going to be, I thought. You see, at that time I conceived a certain plan.”
“What plan?” Pelagia asked, guessing from his tone of voice that this plan would be something very wicked.
“A most excellent one,” Dolinin chuckled. “Actually quite unique in its own way. The point is that the happy lovers had set the date for a wedding. Well, of course, not an entirely legitimate one, because there couldn’t be any marriage, but nonetheless something in the nature of a wedding feast. After all, morals in the capital are different from in the provinces, even a wedding with someone else’s wife is no great rarity there. ‘Civil marriage’ is what they call it. They had planned for everything on a grand scale. In the modern style, with no hypocrisy. If there’s to be a feast, let the whole world come. Meaning that true love is higher than human laws and scandal. And I pretended that I had reconciled myself to the inevitable. Several well-wishers had long been trying to persuade me to ‘take a broader view of things,’ and so I did.” Sergei Sergeevich gave a dry laugh, more like a cough. “I made myself out to be such a gentle lamb, such a Tolstoyan, that I was even—believe it or not—honored with an invitation to this festival of love, along with the other members of the select company. That was when the plan came to me … First I thought I would follow the example of the inhabitants of the Land of the Rising Sun, by slitting my belly open with a knife in public and spilling my insides straight onto the wedding table—help yourselves to that, so to speak. But then I thought of something even better.”
Pelagia gaped at him and put her hand over her mouth. Dolinin continued implacably with his agonizing tale: “I’ll arrive, I thought, with a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of her very favorite white wine, the one I could previously only afford to buy twice a
“What plan?” Pelagia asked, guessing from his tone of voice that this plan would be something very wicked.
“A most excellent one,” Dolinin chuckled. “Actually quite unique in its own way. The point is that the happy lovers had set the date for a wedding. Well, of course, not an entirely legitimate one, because there couldn’t be any marriage, but nonetheless something in the nature of a wedding feast. After all, morals in the capital are different from in the provinces, even a wedding with someone else’s wife is no great rarity there. ‘Civil marriage’ is what they call it. They had planned for everything on a grand scale. In the modern style, with no hypocrisy. If there’s to be a feast, let the whole world come. Meaning that true love is higher than human laws and scandal. And I pretended that I had reconciled myself to the inevitable. Several well-wishers had long been trying to persuade me to ‘take a broader view of things,’ and so I did.” Sergei Sergeevich gave a dry laugh, more like a cough. “I made myself out to be such a gentle lamb, such a Tolstoyan, that I was even—believe it or not—honored with an invitation to this festival of love, along with the other members of the select company. That was when the plan came to me … First I thought I would follow the example of the inhabitants of the Land of the Rising Sun, by slitting my belly open with a knife in public and spilling my insides straight onto the wedding table—help yourselves to that, so to speak. But then I thought of something even better.”
Pelagia gaped at him and put her hand over her mouth. Dolinin continued implacably with his agonizing tale: “I’ll arrive, I thought, with a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of her very favorite white wine, the one I could previously only afford to buy twice a
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