cide on the bridge, or to use the words of the sapient reader, to go away somewhere from that hotel. But no honorable man would consider it a heroic deed to act in the situation of those here described, exactly as they acted, but all would be ready to do, if there were any necessity for doing it, and many a time they have acted in situations not less, but probably more, difficult, but still have not looked upon themselves as extraordinary people, but each has said to himself, 'I am a commonplace man, a pretty honorable man, that's all there is of it.' And the good friends of such a man (all such good people as he himself is—for with others he has nothing to do in the way of friendship) also think in regard to him that he is a fine man, but they do not think of falling on their knees before him, but they say to themselves, 'We are just such people as he is.' I hope I have succeeded in reaching this point that every honorable man of the rising generation will recognize an ordinary type of his good acquaintances in my three principal characters.
"But these people, who from the very first beginning of my story will think about my Viéra Pavlovna, Kirsánof, and Lopukhóf, 'Well, now [nu da], these are my good acquaintances, simple, ordinary people, like ourselves'; people who think so, I say, about my three leading characters, constitute the minority of the public. The majority is a great deal lower than this type. A man who never saw anything but little huts, would take an ordinary house drawn upon a piece of paper to be a palace. How can you go to work with such a person to show him that it is a house and not a palace? It is necessary on the same paper to draw at least a small corner of a palace; by this corner he will see that the palace must be something of quite different proportions from the structure which was represented on the paper, and that this structure must be only a simple, ordinary house, in which, or even in better ones, every one ought to live. Had I not shown Rakhmétof's figure, the majority of my readers would have lost their senses of proportion in regard to the main characters of my story. I will wager that till the last part of this chapter, Viéra Pavlovna, Kirsánof, and Lopukhóf have seemed to the majority of the public as heroes, as persons of the highest nature, as even persons idealized, maybe, people such as it is not possible to find in real life, on account of their too grand nobility. No, my friends, my mean, bad, pitiful friends, it did not
