the university after some disturbance. In his childhood he
had been a student of Stepan Trofimovitch's and was by birth a serf of
Varvara Petrovna's, the son of a former valet of hers, Pavel Fyodoritch,
and was greatly indebted to her bounty. She disliked him for his pride
and ingratitude and could never forgive him for not having come straight
to her on his expulsion from the university. On the contrary he had not
even answered the letter she had expressly sent him at the time, and
preferred to be a drudge in the family of a merchant of the new style,
with whom he went abroad, looking after his children more in the
position of a nurse than of a tutor. He was very eager to travel at the
time. The children had a governess too, a lively young Russian lady, who
also became one of the household on the eve of their departure, and
had been engaged chiefly because she was so cheap. Two months later the
merchant turned her out of the house for "free thinking." Shatov took
himself off after her and soon afterwards married her in Geneva.
They lived together about three weeks, and then parted as free people
recognising no bonds, though, no doubt, also through poverty. He
wandered about Europe alone for a long time afterwards, living God knows
how; he is said to have blacked boots in the street, and to have been a
porter in some dockyard. At last, a year before, he had returned to his
native place among us and settled with an old aunt, whom he buried a
month later. His sister Dasha, who had also been brought up by Varvara
Petrovna, was a favourite of hers, and treated with respect and
consideration in her house. He saw his sister rarely and was not on
intimate terms with her. In our circle he was always sullen, and never
talkative; but from time to time, when his convictions were touched
upon, he became morbidly irritable and very unrestrained in his
language.

"One has to tie Shatov up and then argue with him," Stepan Trofimovitch
would sometimes say in joke, but he liked him.

Shatov had radically changed some of his former socialistic convictions
abroad and had rushed to the opposite extreme. He was one of those
idealistic beings common in Russia, who are suddenly struck by some
overmastering idea which seems, as it were, to crush them at once, and
sometimes for ever. They are never equal to coping with it, but put
passionate faith in it, and their whole life passes afterwards, as it
were, in the last agonies under the weight