"About everything which happens to exist in life."
[1] Terryat in Russian means "to lose."
"That is to say, about dogs and horses—whichever may happen to come their way."
The shopman laughed. I was enraged. The atmosphere was oppressive, unpleasant to me. But if I attempted to get away, the shopman stopped me.
"Where are you going?"
And the old man would examine me.
"Now, you learned man, gnaw this problem. Suppose you had a thousand naked people standing before you, five hundred women and five hundred men, and among them Adam and Eve. How would you tell which were Adam and Eve?"
He kept asking me this, and at length explained triumphantly:
"Little fool, don't you see that, as they were not born, but were created, they would have no navels!" The old man knew an innumerable quantity of these "problems." He could wear me out with them.
During my early days at the shop, I used to tell the shopman the contents of some of the books I had read. Now these stories came back to me in an evil form. The shopman retold them to Petr Vassilich, considerably cut up, obscenely mutilated. The old man skilfully helped him in his shameful questions. Their slimy tongues threw the refuse of their obscene words at Eugénie Grandet, Ludmilla, and Henry IV.