Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/235

Rh sorts of subjects, but I did not learn the art and right way of living, and what's more I did, so to say, learn the art of spending more money on all sorts of new refinements and comforts, and became more familiar with the objects for which money is necessary. Was that because I did not study sensibly? No, my comrades were all the same. Two or three of them perhaps did get real benefit from the lectures and that was perhaps because they were intelligent anyway, but the others did nothing but try to learn what spoils health and wastes money. Yes, indeed! They came to the lectures simply to applaud the professors, to bestow laurels upon them, and not to gain anything from them, so that we take from culture only its worst side; we snatch at the surface of it, but don't take the thing itself. No, Pavel Ivanovitch, it's from some other cause that we don't know how to live, but what it is, upon my word I don't know.'

'There must be a cause,' said Tchitchikov.

Poor Hlobuev heaved a deep sigh and said: 'It sometimes seems to me that the Russian is a lost man. He has no strength of will, no courage to persevere. One wants to do everything and one can do nothing, one is always thinking that from to-morrow one will begin a new life, that from to-morrow one will set to work as one ought, that from to-morrow one will put oneself on a diet; but not a bit of it, on the evening of that very day one will over-eat oneself, so that one can only blink one's eyes and