The Brothers Karamazovrascal! Three weeks ago he began to tease me. ‘You’ve got
yourself into a mess, like a fool, for the sake of three thou-
sand, but I’m going to collar a hundred and fifty thousand.
I am going to marry a widow and buy a house in Peters-
burg.’ And he told me he was courting Madame Hohlakov.
She hadn’t much brains in her youth, and now at forty she
has lost what she had. ‘But she’s awfully sentimental,’ he
says; ‘that’s how I shall get hold of her. When I marry her, I
shall take her to Petersburg and there I shall start a news-
paper.’ And his mouth was simply watering, the beast, not
for the widow, but for the hundred and fifty thousand. And
he made me believe it. He came to see me every day. ‘She
is coming round,’ he declared. He was beaming with de-
light. And then, all of a sudden, he was turned out of the
house. Perhotin’s carrying everything before him, bravo! I
could kiss the silly old noodle for turning him out of the
house. And he had written this doggerel. ‘It’s the first time
I’ve soiled my hands with writing poetry,’ he said. ‘It’s to
win her heart, so it’s in a good cause. When I get hold of the
silly woman’s fortune, I can be of great social utility.’ They
have this social justification for every nasty thing they do!
‘Anyway it’s better than your Pushkin’s poetry,’ he said, ‘for
I’ve managed to advocate enlightenment even in that.’ I un-
derstand what he means about Pushkin, I quite see that, if
he really was a man of talent and only wrote about women’s
feet. But wasn’t Rakitin stuck up about his doggerel! The
vanity of these fellows! ‘On the convalescence of the swollen
foot of the object of my affections’ — he thought of that for
a title. He’s a waggish fellow.