"But what is self-enjoyment, I ask you?" "--And it ought to give way. Because you looked for support there, where it is impossible to find it; because you built your house on the quicksands--" "Speak plainer, without metaphor, _because_ I do not understand you." "--Because--laugh away if you like--because there is no faith in you, no hearty warmth--and only a poor farthingsworth of intellect;[A] you are simply a pitiable creature, a behind--your--age disciple of Voltaire. That's what you are." [Footnote A: Literally, "intellect, in all merely a copeck intellect."] "Who? I a disciple of Voltaire?" "Yes, just such a one as your father was; and you have never so much as suspected it." "After that," exclaimed Lavretsky, "I have a right to say that you are a fanatic." "Alas!" sorrowfully replied Mikhalevich, "unfortunately, I have not yet in any way deserved so grand a name--" "I have found out now what to call you!" cried the self-same Mikhalevich at three o'clock in the morning. "You are not a sceptic, nor are you a _blasé_, nor a disciple of Voltaire; you are a marmot,[A] and a culpable marmot; a marmot with a conscience, not a naïve marmot. Naïve marmots lie on the stove[B] and do nothing, because they can do nothing. They do not even think anything. But you are a thinking man, and yet you lie idly there. You could do something, and you do nothing. You lie on the top with full paunch and say, 'To lie idle--so must it be; because all that people ever do--is all vanity, mere nonsense that conduces to nothing.'" [Footnote A: A _baibak_, a sort of marmot or "prairie dog."] [Footnote B: The top of the stove forms the sleeping place in a Russian peasant's hut.] "But what has shown you that I lie idle?" insisted Lavretsky. "Why do you suppose I have such ideas?" "--And, besides this, all you people, all your brotherhood," continued Mikhalevich without stopping, "are deeply read marmots. You all know where the German's shoe pinches him; you all know what faults Englishmen and Frenchmen have; and your miserable knowledge only serves to help you to justify your shameful laziness, your abominable idleness. There are some who even pride themselves on this, that 'I, forsooth, am a learned man. I lie idle, and they are fools to give themselves trouble.' Yes! even such persons as these do exist among us; not that I say this with reference to you; such persons as will spend all their life in a certain languor of ennui, and get accustomed to it, and exist in it like--like a mushroom in sour cream" (Mikhalevich could not help laughing at his own comparison). "Oh, that languor of ennui! it is the ruin of the Russian people. Throughout all time the wretched marmot is making up its mind to work--" "But, after all, what are you scolding about?" cried Lavretsky in his turn. "To work, to do. You had better say what one should do, instead of scolding, O Demosthenes of Poltava."[A]