Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VI).djvu/215

Rh business─an Old Believer of the Fedosian sect. He had not increased his father's fortune by his own efforts, as he was, as it is called by the Russians, a joueur, an Epicurean of the Russian stamp, and had no sort of aptitude for business. He was a man of forty, rather stout, and ugly, pockmarked, with small pig's eyes; he talked in a great hurry, stumbling, as it were, over his words, gesticulating with his hands, swinging his legs, and going off into giggles and in general making the impression of a blockhead and a coxcomb of extraordinary vanity. He considered himself a man of culture, because he wore German clothes, and was hospitable, though he lived in filth and disorder, had rich acquaintances, and used to go to the theatre and 'protect' low music-hall actresses, with whom he communicated in an extraordinary would-be French jargon. The thirst for popularity was his ruling passion; for the name of Golushkin to be thundering through the world! As once Suvarov or Potemkin, why not now Kapiton Golushkin? It was just this passion, overcoming even his innate meanness, which had flung him, as he with some self-complacency expressed it, into the opposition (he had at first pronounced this foreign word simply position, but afterwards he had learned better), and brought him into connection with the nihilists; he