Chapter 41

MY FRIENDSHIP WITH THE NECHLUDOFFS

At this period, indeed, my friendship with Dimitri hung by a
hair. I had been criticising him too long not to have discovered
faults in his character, for it is only in first youth that we
love passionately and therefore love only perfect people. As soon
as the mists engendered by love of this kind begin to dissolve,
and to be penetrated by the clear beams of reason, we see the
object of our adoration in his true shape, and with all his
virtues and failings exposed. Some of those failings strike us
with the exaggerated force of the unexpected, and combine with
the instinct for novelty and the hope that perfection may yet be
found in a fellow-man to induce us not only to feel coldness, but
even aversion, towards the late object of our adoration.
Consequently, desiring it no longer, we usually cast it from us,
and pass onwards to seek fresh perfection. For the circumstance
that that was not what occurred with respect to my own relation
to Dimitri, I was indebted to his stubborn, punctilious, and more
critical than impulsive attachment to myself--a tie which I felt
ashamed to break. Moreover, our strange vow of frankness bound us
together. We were afraid that, if we parted, we should leave in
one another's power all the incriminatory moral secrets of which
we had made mutual confession. At the same time, our rule of
frankness had long ceased to be faithfully observed, but, on the
contrary, proved a frequent cause of constraint, and brought
about strange relations between us.

Almost every time that winter that I went upstairs to Dimitri's
room, I used to find there a University friend of his named
Bezobiedoff, with whom he appeared to be very much taken up.
Bezobiedoff was a small, slight fellow, with a face pitted over
with smallpox, freckled, effeminate hands, and a huge flaxen
moustache much in need of the comb. He was invariably dirty,
shabby, uncouth, and uninteresting. To me, Dimitri's relations
with him were as unintelligible as his relations with Lubov
Sergievna, and the only reason he could have had for choosing
such a man for his associate was that in the whole University
there was no worse-looking student than Bezobiedoff. Yet that
alone would have been sufficient to make Dimitri extend him his
friendship, and, as a matter of fact, in all his intercourse with
this fellow he seemed to be saying proudly: "I care nothing who a
man may be. In my eyes every one is equal. I like him, and
therefore he is a desirable acquaintance." Nevertheless I could
not imagine how he could bring himself to do it, nor how the
wretched Bezobiedoff ever contrived to maintain his awkward
position. To me the friendship seemed a most distasteful one.