The Brothers Karamazov‘I wrote them as a joke,’ he said, ‘for I think it degrading to
write verses.... But they are good poetry. They want to put a
monument to your Pushkin for writing about women’s feet,
while I wrote with a moral purpose, and you,’ said he, ‘are
an advocate of serfdom. You’ve no humane ideas,’ said he.
‘You have no modern enlightened feelings, you are uninflu-
enced by progress, you are a mere official,’ he said, ‘and you
take bribes.’ Then I began screaming and imploring them.
And, you know, Pyotr Ilyitch is anything but a coward. He
at once took up the most gentlemanly tone, looked at him
sarcastically, listened, and apologised. ‘I’d no idea,’ said
he. ‘I shouldn’t have said it, if I had known. I should have
praised it. Poets are all so irritable,’ he said. In short, he
laughed at him under cover of the most gentlemanly tone.
He explained to me afterwards that it was all sarcastic. I
thought he was in earnest. Only as I lay there, just as before
you now, I thought, ‘Would it, or would it not, be the proper
thing for me to turn Rakitin out for shouting so rudely at a
visitor in my house?’ And, would you believe it, I lay here,
shut my eyes, and wondered, would it be the proper thing
or not. I kept worrying and worrying, and my heart began
to beat, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether to make
an outcry or not. One voice seemed to be telling me, ‘Speak,’
and the other ‘No, don’t speak.’ And no sooner had the sec-
ond voice said that than I cried out, and fainted. Of course,
there was a fuss. I got up suddenly and said to Rakitin, ‘It’s
painful for me to say it, but I don’t wish to see you in my
house again.’ So I turned him out. Ah! Alexey Fyodorovitch,
I know myself I did wrong. I was putting it on. I wasn’t an-