Chapter 58 Part One - Fifty Five

Vera was a short, thin, blond woman with cropped hair and big, kind eyes, who staggered in through the back door. "Oh, you're here, thank you," she said, shaking Nekhludoff's hand. "Do you remember me? Let's sit down and talk." "I didn't expect you to be like this now." "Hey, I think it's good! It's good, it can't be better," Vera said, opening her kind eyes as usual. The only intact work on atomic materialism in ancient Greece and Rome. , looking timidly at Nekhludoff, and turning her thin, yellow, veined neck, which protruded from the collar of her dirty, wrinkled jacket.

Nekhludoff asked her how she had come to this state.She talked about the activities she was engaged in with great interest.Her words were mixed with foreign words such as "propaganda", "disintegration", "group", "group", "group", etc., which she obviously thought everyone knew, but Nekhludoff had never heard of them. Vera told him about her activities, imagining that he would be delighted to know all the Narodnaya Volya secrets.Nekhludoff, looking at her pitifully thin neck and her thin, unkempt hair, could not understand why she did and said such things.He pitied her, but not in the same way that he pitied the farmer Minshoff, who had been completely wronged in his stinking cell.The most pitiful thing about her was the apparent confusion in her head.She clearly considered herself a heroine, willing to sacrifice her life for the success of their cause.In fact, she may not be able to explain clearly what their careers are all about, and what their career success is all about.

What Vera wanted to tell Nekhludoff was this: she had a girlfriend named Shustova who, she said, did not belong to their group, who was arrested with her five months ago The dictatorship in the Peter and Paul Fortress is "the essence of Marx's theory", demonstrating the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. , just because books and documents entrusted to her by others were found in her home.Vera believed that Shustova was partly responsible for being detained, so she asked Nekhludoff, who had a lot of friends, to try to release her from prison.Another thing Vera asked Nekhludoff to do was to try to persuade Gurkevich, who was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, to meet his parents once and get the necessary reference books so that He can conduct academic research in prison.

Nekhludoff promised him to try to do it when he returned to Petersburg. Speaking of her own experience, Vera said that after graduating from midwifery school, she approached the Narodnaya Volya party and participated in their activities.At first they wrote leaflets and went to the factory to promote it, and everything went well, but then an important person was arrested, the documents were seized, and the rest were also arrested. "I was also arrested, and now I'm going to be exiled..." She finished her story. "It's all right, though. I feel fine, I feel at ease,"

She said, smiling miserably. Nekhludoff asked about the girl with sheep's eyes.Vera said that she was the daughter of a general and had already joined the Revolutionary Party. She was arrested because she took the initiative to take the charge of shooting the gendarmerie.She lives in a secret apartment where there is a printing press.One night the police and gendarmerie came to search, and the occupants decided to defend themselves.They turned off the lights and began to destroy the evidence.Police and gendarmes broke into the house, someone from the underground party opened fire, and a gendarme was mortally wounded.When the gendarmerie interrogated who fired the gun, she said she did it, but in fact she had never held a pistol in her life, and she had never killed a spider.That's how the charge was settled.Now she is going to do hard labor.

"What a good man with altruism..." Vera praised. The third thing Vera wanted to say was about Maslova.She knew everything about the prison, Maslova's history and Nekhludoff's relations with her.She persuaded Nekhludoff to intercede for her, to transfer her to a political prison cell, or at least to make her work as a nurse in a hospital.There are so many patients in the hospital now that there is a great need for nurses.Nekhludoff thanked her for her kindness, and said he would try to do as she said.