everything
is pleasant. Only you, our successors, you are devoid of all live
feelings! Any little charlatan from among the commoners is cleverer than
you! Take that Yozhov, for instance, what is he? And yet he represents
himself as judge over us, and even over life itself--he has courage. But
you, pshaw! You live like beggars! In your joy you are beasts, in your
misfortune vermin! You are rotten! They ought to inject fire into your
veins, they ought to take your skin off and strew salt upon your raw
flesh, then you would have jumped!"

Yakov Tarasovich, small-sized, wrinkled and bony, with black, broken
teeth in his mouth, bald-headed and dark, as though burned by the heat
of life and smoked in it, trembled in vehement agitation, showering
jarring words of contempt upon his daughter, who was young, well-grown
and plump. She looked at him with a guilty expression in her eyes,
smiled confusedly, and in her heart grew a greater and greater respect
for the live old man who was so steadfast in his desires.

.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And Foma went on straying and raving, passing his days and nights
in taverns and dens, and mastering more and more firmly his
contemptuously-hateful bearing toward the people that surrounded him. At
times they awakened in him a sad yearning to find among them some sort
of resistance to his wicked feeling, to meet a worthy and courageous man
who would cause him to blush with shame by his burning reproach. This
yearning became clearer--each time it sprang up in him it was a longing
for assistance on the part of a man who felt that he had lost his way
and was perishing.

"Brethren!" he cried one day, sitting by the table in a tavern,
half-intoxicated, and surrounded by certain obscure and greedy people,
who ate and drank as though they had not had a piece of bread in their
mouths for many a long day before.

"Brethren! I feel disgusted. I am tired of you! Beat me unmercifully,
drive me away! You are rascals, but you are nearer to one another than
to me. Why? Am I not a drunkard and a rascal as well? And yet I am a
stranger to you! I can see I am a stranger. You drink out of me and
secretly you spit upon me. I can feel it! Why do you do it?"

To be sure, they could treat him in a different way. In the depth of his
soul perhaps not one of them considered himself lower than Foma, but he
was rich, and this hindered them from treating him more as a companion,
and then he always