Chapter 3 Duel II

two Laevsky did not love Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, chiefly in the fact that everything she said and did seemed to him to be false, or nearly false.Everything he had read against women and love seemed to him perfectly applicable to him, to Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and to her husband.When he got home, she had dressed and combed her hair, and was sitting by the window, drinking coffee and flipping through a thick magazine with an air of concentration.He thought to himself: coffee isn't such a big deal, there's no point in making a face of concentration, and she doesn't have to waste time getting a fashionable haircut because no one likes it here, it's a waste of effort.In that magazine, too, he saw hypocrisy.She dressed and brushed her hair to look pretty, he thought, and she read magazines to look smart.

"I'm going to take a shower today, okay?" she asked. "What does that matter? It doesn't matter if you go or not, I don't think there will be an earthquake because of it..." "No, I asked this question because I was afraid that the doctor would be angry." "Then ask the doctor. I'm not a doctor." What Laevsky disliked Nadyezhda Fyodorovna this time was her white bare neck and the lock of hair curled up at the back of her head.He remembered that when Anna Karenina did not love her husband's ears, he disliked his ears the most, and he thought to himself: "How true! How true!" So he went to the study, lay down on the couch, and covered his face with a handkerchief to keep the flies from disturbing him.Those thoughts entangled in the same problem, feeble, spread out in his mind continuously, like a long train of cars appearing on a rainy autumn evening.And so he sank into a sleepy depression.He felt that he had done wrong to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and to her husband, and felt that he had caused her husband's death.He feels sorry for his own life because he ruined it.He felt sorry for the world of sublime ideas, knowledge, and labor. In his mind, that wonderful world was possible and existed, but not here, where there were only hungry Turks and lazy Abha The Zeus prowl the coast, but there, in the North, there are operas, theaters, newspapers, intellectual work of all kinds.To be upright, wise, noble, and pure, one has to go there, not stay here.He blamed himself for the lack of ideals and guiding ideas in his life, but he now had a vague understanding of what these things were.Two years ago he had fallen in love with Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and felt that if he could unite with Nadezhda Fyodorovna and go to the Caucasus with her, he would be saved from the vulgarity and emptiness of life; He believed that if he left Nadezhda Fyodorovna and set off for Petersburg, he would have everything he needed.

"Run away!" he muttered, sitting up, biting his fingernails. "Run away!" He imagined how he would get on the steamer, eat breakfast, drink a cool beer, talk to the ladies on deck, and then board the train at Sevastopol and go on.Long live freedom!One by one the train stations flashed by, the air grew bitterly cold, then birches and firs, then Kursk, Moscow. ... The catering department on the train station has cabbage soup, mutton porridge, sturgeon meat, and beer. In a word, there will be no uncivilized Asia, all of which are Russian style, true Russian style.Passengers on the train talked of business and the new showgirl, of the rapprochement between France and Russia.Everywhere can make people feel active, cultural, intellectual, vigorous life. ... Hurry up, hurry up!Finally came Nevsky Prospekt, Veliky Morskaya Street, then Kovinsky Lane where he used to live as a student, then lovely gray skies, drizzle, wet street carriages. ... "Ivan Andreitch!" someone called him from the next room. "Are you home?"

"Here I am!" Laevsky replied. "What do you want?" "Official document!" Laevsky rose lazily, feeling dizzy.Yawning, he slipped on his slippers and went into the next room.There, outside the open window facing the street, stood his young colleague, with some government papers spread out on the windowsill. "I'll be right there, my dear," said Laevsky mildly, and went out to find the inkpot.When he came back to the window, he signed the official document without reading it, saying, "It's so hot!" "Yes. Are you coming today?"

"Probably not. . . . I'm not feeling well. Tell Sheshkovsky, my dear, that I'll see him after dinner." The civil servant left.Laevsky lay down again on the couch in his room and began to think: "Then I must weigh everything up and think it over carefully. Before I leave here I must pay off my debts. I owe nearly two Thousands of rubles. I have no money with me. . . . Of course, it doesn't matter. I'll try to return some of it now, and I'll send the other from Petersburg later. The point is Nadezhda Fyodorovna.  … First of all, we need to clarify our relationship...that's right."

After a while he thought again: Wouldn't it be better to consult Samoylenko? "You might as well go," he thought, "but what's the use of going? I would talk to him about the boudoir, about women, about integrity or injustice, and say many inappropriate things.Now, since my life has to be saved quickly, since I'm suffocating in this damned unfreedom, and I'm going to torture myself to death; then, to hell with him, why bother talking about integrity or injustice? ? . . . It must be understood by now that it is mean and cruel to go on with the life I am, and that all other things are small and insignificant compared with this one.run away! "

he muttered, sitting up. "Run away!" The bleakness of the coast, the irresolvable heat, the monotony of the smoky lavender hills, always the same, silent and deserted, filled him with anguish, and seemed to lull him to sleep and drain his energy.Perhaps he was clever, witty, and very honest; and if the sea and the mountains hadn't surrounded him on every side, perhaps he would have been a splendid Zemstvo man, state man, orator, commentator, man of merit.Who knows?That being so, is it not foolish if a man of talent and usefulness, such as a musician or a painter, breaks through walls and deceives the guards in order to escape from a prison, and outsiders speak of the integrity of doing so?Whatever a person does under these circumstances is righteous.

At two o'clock in the afternoon Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna sat down to lunch.The cook brought them rice and tomato soup, and Laevsky said: "It's the same soup every day. Why not make cabbage soup?" "No cabbage." "It's strange. Samoylenko's makes cabbage soup, Marya Konstantinovna's makes cabbage soup, and I alone have to drink this sweet slop for some reason. It's not going to go on like this, my dear." of." As is often the case with most couples, at first there was not a single meal between Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna without a little quarrel, but since Laevsky concluded that When he no longer loved her, he tried to give in to Nadezhda Fyodorovna in every way, spoke to her softly and politely, and called her "dear" with a contorted smile.

"This soup tastes like licorice," he said with a smile, trying to control himself, pretending to be kind, but he couldn't help saying: "There is no one in our house to do housework. . . . Since you are always sick, or I'm busy reading, so, well, I'll cook by myself." In the past, she would have replied to him: "You can go to the kitchen", or "I can see that you want to call me a cook", but now she just looked at him timidly and went up. blushing. "So, how are you feeling today?" he asked kindly. "Nothing today. It's okay, just a little weak."

"You ought to take care of yourself, my dear. I am very much worried about you." Nadezhda Fyodorovna was suffering from some kind of disease.Samoylenko said she had intermittent fever and gave her quinine.But another doctor, Uscimovich, thought she was suffering from women's disease and ordered her to treat it with hot compresses. This doctor was a tall, thin, withdrawn man who sat at home during the day and walked slowly on the embankment in the evening. Walking quietly, hands behind their backs, cane pressed on the back, often coughing.When Laevsky had loved Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, her illness had always aroused pity and anxiety in him; but now it seemed to him that even her illness was being faked.Nadezhda Fyodorovna's sleepy yellow face after a fit of fever, that listless look, that incessant yawning, which she lay under the checkered rug during her attacks, was not so much like A woman was rather like a boy, and the hot, foul smell in her room seemed to him to destroy illusions and to be an obstacle to love and marriage.

For the second course, he ate hard-boiled eggs with spinach, and Nadezhda Fyodorovna, who was sick, ate milk and fruit soup.She first stirred the fruit soup with a spoon with a concentrated expression, and then lazily ate the fruit and drank the milk. Hearing her swallowing sound, he felt an unbearable sense of disgust in his heart, which made his scalp itchy.He admitted that such feelings were insulting even to dogs, but he was not annoyed at himself, but at Nadezhda Fyodorovna, for having aroused such feelings in him.Only then did he understand why men sometimes kill their mistresses.Of course he wouldn't kill himself, but if he had the chance to be a juror now, he would advocate for the acquittal of the murderer. "Merci, dear," he said after dinner, kissing Nadezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead. He went back to his study, walked from corner to corner, up and down, up and down, for about five minutes, squinting at his boots, and then, sitting down on the divan, muttered: "Run away, Run away! Run away when the relationship is clear!" Lying down on the sofa, he thought again that perhaps Nadezhda Fyodorovna's husband had really been caused by him. "It's stupid to accuse someone of loving or not loving someone," he told himself as he lay there, stretching his foot into his boot. "Love and hate are not at our disposal. As for her husband, I may have been one of the indirect causes of his death, but then again, I'm in love with his wife, and his wife is in love with me. Is it my fault?" Then he got up, found his hat, and set off to the house of his colleague Sheshkovsky, where the civil servants met every day to play venter and drink cold beer. "My indecision is very much like Hamlet," Laevsky thought to himself on the road. "How true Shakespeare observes! Oh, how true!" "Notes" ①The heroine in Tolstoy's novel. ② are in Petersburg. ③ French: Thank you. ④ A card game.