VÁNYA. Do come! [He runs off].
NICHOLAS IVÁNOVICH. You don't wish to see eye to eye—nor to understand me.
MARY IVÁNOVNA. It is not that I don't wish to, but that I can't.
NICHOLAS IVÁNOVICH. No, you don't wish to, and we drift further and further apart. Only enter into my feelings; put yourself for a moment in my place, and you will understand. First, the whole life here is thoroughly depraved. You are vexed with the expression, but I can give no other name to a life built wholly on robbery; for the money you live on is taken from the land you have stolen from the peasants. Moreover, I see that this life is demoralising the children: “Whoso shall cause one of these little ones to stumble,” and I see how they are perishing and becoming depraved before my very eyes. I cannot bear it when grown-up men dressed up in swallow-tail coats serve us as if they were slaves. Every dinner we have is a torture to me.
MARY IVÁNOVNA. But all this was so before. Is it not done by everyone—both here and abroad?
NICHOLAS IVÁNOVICH. But I can't do it. Since I realised that we are all brothers, I cannot see it without suffering.
MARY IVÁNOVNA. That is as you please. One can invent anything.
NICHOLAS IVÁNOVICH [hotly] It's just this want of understanding that is so terrible. Take for instance to-day! I spent this morning at Rzhánov's lodging-house, among the outcasts there; and I saw an infant literally die of hunger; a boy suffering from alcoholism; and a consumptive charwoman rinsing clothes outside in the cold. Then I returned home, and a footman with a white tie opens the door for me. I see my son—a mere lad—ordering that footman to fetch him some water; and I see the army of servants who work for us. Then I go to visit Borís—a man who is sacrificing his life for truth's sake. I see how he, a pure, strong, resolute man, is deliberately being goaded to lunacy and to destruction, that the Government may be rid of him! I know, and they know, that his heart is weak, and so they provoke him, and drag him to a ward for raving lunatics. It is too dreadful, too dreadful. And when I come home, I hear that the one member of our family who understood—not me but the truth—has thrown over both her betrothed to whom she had promised her love, and the truth, and is going to marry a lackey, a liar …
MARY IVÁNOVNA. How very Christian!
NICHOLAS IVÁNOVICH. Yes, it is wrong of me, and I am to blame, but I only want you to put yourself in my place. I mean to say that she has turned from the truth …