et, so numerous are
Russian serf owners that, though careful scrutiny reveals to one's sight
a quantity of outre peculiarities, they are, as a class, exceedingly
difficult to portray, and one needs to strain one's faculties to the
utmost before it becomes possible to pick out their variously subtle,
their almost invisible, features. In short, one needs, before doing
this, to carry out a prolonged probing with the aid of an insight
sharpened in the acute school of research.

Only God can say what Manilov's real character was. A class of men
exists whom the proverb has described as "men unto themselves, neither
this nor that--neither Bogdan of the city nor Selifan of the village."
And to that class we had better assign also Manilov. Outwardly he was
presentable enough, for his features were not wanting in amiability, but
that amiability was a quality into which there entered too much of the
sugary element, so that his every gesture, his every attitude, seemed
to connote an excess of eagerness to curry favour and cultivate a closer
acquaintance. On first speaking to the man, his ingratiating smile, his
flaxen hair, and his blue eyes would lead one to say, "What a pleasant,
good-tempered fellow he seems!" yet during the next moment or two one
would feel inclined to say nothing at all, and, during the third moment,
only to say, "The devil alone knows what he is!" And should, thereafter,
one not hasten to depart, one would inevitably become overpowered with
the deadly sense of ennui which comes of the intuition that nothing
in the least interesting is to be looked for, but only a series of
wearisome utterances of the kind which are apt to fall from the lips
of a man whose hobby has once been touched upon. For every man HAS his
hobby. One man's may be sporting dogs; another man's may be that of
believing himself to be a lover of music, and able to sound the art to
its inmost depths; another's may be that of posing as a connoisseur of
recherche cookery; another's may be that of aspiring to play roles of
a kind higher than nature has assigned him; another's (though this is
a more limited ambition) may be that of getting drunk, and of dreaming
that he is edifying both his friends, his acquaintances, and people with
whom he has no connection at all by walking arm-in-arm with an Imperial
aide-de-camp; another's may be that of possessing a hand able to chip
corners off aces and deuces of diamonds; another's may be that of
yearning t