Читаем The Adolescent полностью

Maxim Ivanovich dressed him like a young gentleman and hired a tutor, and from that hour on had him sitting over books; and it reached the point that he wouldn’t let him out of his sight, but always kept him with him. As soon as the boy starts gaping, he shouts, “To your books! Study! I want to make a man of you.” And the boy was sickly, he had been coughing ever since that time, after the beating. “As if it’s not a fine life with me!” Maxim Ivanovich marveled. “With his mother he just ran around barefoot, chewed on crusts, why is he more sickly than ever?” And the tutor says to him, “Every boy needs to romp and play,” he says, “he shouldn’t study all the time, movement is necessary for him,” and he deduced it all for him reasonably. Maxim Ivanovich thought, “It’s true what you say.” And this tutor, Pyotr Stepanovich, God rest his soul, was like a holy fool;¹⁰ he drank ver-ry much, so that it was even too much, and for that reason had long been removed from any position, and he lived about town like a beggar, but he had great intelligence and a solid education. “I shouldn’t have been here,” he used to say of himself, “I should have been a professor at the university, and here I sink into the mud and ‘even my garments hate my flesh.’”¹¹ Maxim Ivanovich sits and shouts at the boy, “Romp!”—and the boy can barely breathe before him. It reached the point that the child couldn’t bear his voice—he just started trembling all over. And Maxim Ivanovich was still more surprised: “He’s neither this nor that; I took him up from the dirt, dressed him in drap de dames; he’s got nice cloth bootikins, an embroidered shirt, I keep him like a general’s son, why isn’t he well disposed towards me? Why is he silent as a wolf cub?” And though people had long ceased marveling at Maxim Ivanovich, here again they began to wonder: the man’s out of his mind; latched onto the little child and won’t let him be. “Upon my life, I’ll eradicate his character. His father cursed me on his deathbed, after taking holy communion; he has his father’s character.” He didn’t use the birch rod even once (was afraid ever since that time). He intimidated him, that’s what. Intimidated him without the birch rod.