After his father's burial, having confided to the never-changing
Glafira Petrovna the administration of his household, and the
supervision of his agents, the young Lavretsky set out for Moscow,
whither a vague but powerful longing attracted him. He knew in what
his education had been defective, and he was determined to supply its
deficiencies as far as possible. In the course of the last five years
he had read much, and he had see a good deal with his own eyes. Many
ideas had passed through his mind, many a professor might have envied
him some of his knowledge; yet, at the same time, he was entirely
ignorant of much that had long been familiar to every school-boy.
Lavretsky felt that he was not at his ease among his fellow-men;
he had a secret inkling that he was an exceptional character. The
Anglomaniac had played his son a cruel trick; his capricious education
had borne its fruit. For many years he had implicitly obeyed his
father; and when at last he had learned to value him aright, the
effects of his father's teaching were already produced. Certain habits
had become rooted in him. He did not know how to comport himself
towards his fellow-men; at the age of twenty-three, with an eager
longing after love in his bashful heart, he had not yet dared to look
a woman in the face. With his clear and logical, but rather sluggish
intellect, with his stubbornness, and his tendency towards inactivity
and contemplation, he ought to have been flung at an early age into
the whirl of life, instead of which he had been deliberately kept
in seclusion. And now the magic circle was broken, but he remained
standing on the same spot, cramped in mind and self-absorbed.
At his age it seemed a little ridiculous to put on the uniform of a
student[A], but he did not fear ridicule. His Spartan education had at
all events been so far useful, inasmuch as it had developed in him a
contempt for the world's gossiping. So he donned a student's uniform
without being disconcerted, enrolling himself in the faculty of
physical and mathematical science. His robust figure, his ruddy
face, his sprouting beard, his taciturn manner, produced a singular
impression on his comrades. They never suspected that under the rough
exterior of this man, who attended the lectures so regularly, driving
up in a capacious rustic sledge, drawn by a couple of horses,
something almost childlike was concealed. They thought him an
eccentric sort of pedant, and they made no advances towards him, being
able to do very well without him. And he, for his part, avoided them.
During the first two years he passed at the university, he became
intimate with no one except the student from whom she took lessons in
Latin. This student, whose name was Mikhalevich, an enthusiast, and
somewhat of a poet, grew warmly attached to Lavretsky, and quite
accidentally became the cause of a serious change in his fortunes.
[Footnote A: The students at the Russian universities used to wear a
uniform, but they no longer do so.]
One evening, when Lavretsky was at the theatre--he never missed a
single representation, for Mochalof was then at the summit of his
glory--he caught sight of a young girl in a box on the first tier.
Never before had his heart beaten so fast, though at that time no
woman ever passed before his stern eyes without sending its pulses
flying. Leaning on the velvet border of the box, the girl sat very
still. Youthful animation lighted up every feature of her beautiful
face; artistic feeling shone in her lovely eyes, which looked out with
a soft, attentive gaze from underneath delicately pencilled eyebrows,
in the quick smile of her expressive lips, in the bearing of her head,
her arms, her neck. As to her dress, it was exquisite. By her side sat
a sallow, wrinkled woman of five-and-forty, wearing a low dress and a
black cap, with an unmeaning smile on her vacant face, to which she
strove to give an aspect of attention. In the background of the box
appeared an elderly man in a roomy coat, and with a high cravat. His
small eyes had an expression of stupid conceit, modified by a kind of
cringing suspicion; his mustache and whiskers were dyed, he had an
immense meaningless forehead, and flabby cheeks: his whole appearance
was that of a retired general.
Lavretsky kept his eyes fixed on the girl who had made such an
impression on him. Suddenly the door of the box opened, and
Mikhalevich entered. The appearance of the man who was almost his only
acquaintance in all Moscow--his appearance in the company of the very
girl who had absorbed his whole attention, seemed to Lavretsky strange
and significant. As he continued looking at the box, he remarked that
all its occupants treated Mikhalevich like an old friend. Lavretsky
lost all interest in what was going on upon the stage; even Mochalof,
although he was that evening "in the vein," did not produce his wonted
impression upon him. During one very pathetic passage, Lavretsky
looked almost involuntarily at the object of his admiration. She was
leaning forward, a red glow coloring her cheeks. Her eyes were bent
upon the stage, but gradually, under the influence of his fixed look,
they turned and rested on him. All night long those eyes haunted him.
At last, the carefully constructed dam was broken through. He
shivered and he burnt by turns, and the very next day he went to see
Mikhalevich. From him he learned that the name of the girl he admired
so much was Varvara Pavlovna Korobine, that the elderly people who
were with her in the box were her father and her mother, and that
Mikhalevich had become acquainted with them the year before, during
the period of his stay as tutor in Count N.'s family, near Moscow. The
enthusiast spoke of Varvara Pavlovna in the most eulogistic terms.
"This girl, my brother," he exclaimed, in his peculiar, jerking kind
of sing-song, "is an exceptional being, one endowed with genius, an
artist in the true sense of the word, and besides all that, such an
amiable creature." Perceiving from Lavretsky's questions how great an
impression Varvara Pavlovna had made upon him, Mikhalevich, of his own
accord, proposed to make him acquainted with her, adding that he was
on the most familiar terms with them, that the general was not in the
least haughty, and that the mother was as unintellectual as she well
could be.
Lavretsky blushed, muttered something vague, and took himself off.
For five whole days he fought against his timidity; on the sixth, the
young Spartan donned an entirely new uniform, and placed himself at
the disposal of Mikhalevich, who, as an intimate friend of the
family, contented himself with setting his hair straight--and the two
companions set off together to visit the Karobines.