on well: 'You're a fine fellow, Kolya! You are
an able boy. We proletariats, plain and poor people, coming from the
backyard of life, we must study and study, in order to come to the
front, ahead of everybody. Russia is in need of wise and honest people.
Try to be such, and you will be master of your fate and a useful member
of society. On us commoners rest the best hopes of the country. We are
destined to bring into it light, truth,' and so on. I believed him, the
brute. And since then about twenty years have elapsed. We proletariats
have grown up, but have neither appropriated any wisdom, nor brought
light into life. As before, Russia is still suffering from its chronic
disease--a superabundance of rascals; while we, the proletariats, take
pleasure in filling their dense throngs. My teacher, I repeat, is a
lackey, a characterless and dumb creature, who must obey the orders of
the mayor. While I am a clown in the employ of society. Fame pursues me
here in town, dear. I walk along the street and I hear one driver say to
another: 'There goes Yozhov! How cleverly he barks, the deuce take him!'
Yes! Even this cannot be so easily attained."

Yozhov's face wrinkled into a bitter grimace, and he began to laugh,
noiselessly, with his lips only. Foma did not understand his words, and,
just to say something, he remarked at random:

"You didn't hit, then, what you aimed at?"

"Yes, I thought I would grow up higher. And so I should! So I should, I
say!"

He jumped up from his chair and began to run about in the room,
exclaiming briskly in a shrill voice:

"But to preserve one's self pure for life and to be a free man in it,
one must have vast powers! I had them. I had elasticity, cleverness.
I have spent all these in order to learn something which is absolutely
unnecessary to me now. I have wasted the whole of myself in order to
preserve something within myself. Oh devil! I myself and many others
with me, we have all robbed ourselves for the sake of saving up
something for life. Just think of it: desiring to make of myself a
valuable man, I have underrated my individuality in every way possible.
In order to study, and not die of starvation, I have for six years in
succession taught blockheads how to read and write, and had to bear
a mass of abominations at the hands of various papas and mammas, who
humiliated me without any constraint. Earning my bread and tea, I
could not, I had not the time to earn my shoes, and I had to tu