A Desperate Character and Other Stories

... We were a party of eight in the room, and we were talking of contemporary affairs and men.'I don't understand these men!' observed A.: 'they're such desperate fellows.... Really desperate.... There has never been anything like it before.''Yes, there has, ' put in P., a man getting on in years, with grey hair, born some time in the twenties of this century: 'there were desperate characters in former days too, only they were not like the desperate fellows of to-day. Of the poet Yazikov some one has said that he had enthusiasm, but not applied to anything-an enthusiasm without an object. So it was with those people-their desperateness was without an object. But there, if you'll allow me, I'll tell you the story of my nephew, or rather cousin, Misha Poltyev. It may serve as an example of the desperate characters of those days. He came into God's world, I remember, in 1828, at his father's native place and property, in one of the sleepiest corners of a sleepy province of the steppes. Misha's father, Andrei Nikolaevitch Poltyev, I remember well to this day. He was a genuine old-world landowner, a God-fearing, sedate man, fairly-for those days-well educated, just a little cracked, to tell the truth-and, moreover, he suffered from epilepsy.... That too is an old-world, gentlemanly complaint.... Andrei Nikolaevitch's fits were, however, slight, and generally ended in sleep and depression