The Same Old Story by Ivan Goncharov

Author:Ivan Goncharov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Classics
Published: 2017-04-11T15:22:10+00:00

Chapter 2

Alexander returned home from his uncle’s, sat down in an armchair and started thinking. He remembered the whole conversation with his aunt and uncle, and took himself severely to task.

How, at his age, had he allowed himself to hate and despise people – to see and talk about their insignificance, pettiness and weaknesses, and to pick on each and every one of the people he knew – but forgotten to consider his own case? How could he be so blind? And his uncle had lectured him like a schoolboy, and had given him a thorough going-over – and moreover in the presence of a woman, all in order to get him to take a look at himself. What an impression his uncle must have made on his wife that evening! Nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s only normal; the trouble was that this impression was made at his expense. Now his uncle had achieved once and for all an indisputable supremacy over him.

So now what had become, after all this, he thought, of the advantages of youth, freshness, mental and emotional ardour, when someone armed only with the asset of experience, but with a dried-up heart and without energy, could destroy him so casually and nonchalantly at every step? When would this struggle finally become an even one, and when would the pendulum swing in his favour? His assets were both talent and an abundance of spiritual strength… but his uncle was a giant in comparison. How confidently he argued, how lightly he brushed aside any contradiction and achieved his goal with humour, with a yawn, ridiculing feeling and passionate outpourings of love and friendship – ridiculing, in a word, everything for which the older generation tends to envy the young! As he mulled all this over in his mind he flushed with shame. He swore that he would watch himself very carefully and take the first opportunity to crush his uncle, and to show him that no amount of experience could replace what it was that had “come to him from outside himself” – and that, for all his preaching, from this moment on, not a single one of his cold, methodical predictions would prove to be true. Alexander would find his own path by himself, and would tread it not tentatively, but with firm and even strides. He was now no longer the person he had been three years ago. He had peered into the recesses of his heart and had learnt its secrets; he had scrutinized the interplay of the passions and ferreted out the secret of life – not, of course, without suffering – but had armoured himself against it for ever. His future was clear: he had risen in revolt; he had grown wings – he was no longer a child, but a man, striking out boldly into the future! His uncle would see how henceforth it would be his turn to play the role of the pathetic apprentice to his nephew, the

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