Book 3 Chapter 13 Love Affairs of the Exiles

The stove had burned up and got warm, the tea was made and poured
out into mugs and cups, and milk was added to it; rusks, fresh
rye and wheat bread, hard-boiled eggs, butter, and calf's head
and feet were placed on the cloth. Everybody moved towards the
part of the shelf beds which took the place of the table and sat
eating and talking. Rintzeva sat on a box pouring out the tea.
The rest crowded round her, only Kryltzoff, who had taken off his
wet cloak and wrapped himself in his dry plaid and lay in his own
place talking to Nekhludoff.

After the cold and damp march and the dirt and disorder they had
found here, and after the pains they had taken to get it tidy,
after having drunk hot tea and eaten, they were all in the best
and brightest of spirits.

The fact that the tramp of feet, the screams and abuse of the
criminals, reached them through the wall, reminding them of their
surroundings, seemed only to increase the sense of coziness. As
on an island in the midst of the sea, these people felt
themselves for a brief interval not swamped by the degradation
and sufferings which surrounded them; this made their spirits
rise, and excited them. They talked about everything except their
present position and that which awaited them. Then, as it
generally happens among young men, and women especially, if they
are forced to remain together, as these people were, all sorts of
agreements and disagreements and attractions, curiously blended,
had sprung up among them. Almost all of them were in love.
Novodvoroff was in love with the pretty, smiling Grabetz. This
Grabetz was a young, thoughtless girl who had gone in for a
course of study, perfectly indifferent to revolutionary
questions, but succumbing to the influence of the day, she
compromised herself in some way and was exiled. The chief
interest of her life during the time of her trial in prison and
in exile was her success with men, just as it had been when she
was free. Now on the way she comforted herself with the fact that
Novodvoroff had taken a fancy to her, and she fell in love with
him. Vera Doukhova, who was very prone to fall in love herself,
but did not awaken love in others, though she was always hoping
for mutual love, was sometimes drawn to Nabatoff, then to
Novodvoroff. Kryltzoff felt something like love for Mary
Pavlovna. He loved her with a man's love, but knowing how she
regarded this sort of love, hid his feelings under the guise of
friendship and gratitude for the tenderness with which she
attended to his wants. Nabatoff and Rintzeva were attached to
each other by very complicated ties. Just as Mary Pavlovna was a
perfectly chaste maiden, in the same way Rintzeva was perfectly
chaste as her own husband's wife. When only a schoolgirl of
sixteen she fell in love with Rintzeff, a student of the
Petersburg University, and married him before he left the
university, when she was only nineteen years old. During his
fourth year at the university her husband had become involved in
the students' rows, was exiled from Petersburg, and turned
revolutionist. She left the medical courses she was attending,
followed him, and also turned revolutionist. If she had not
considered her husband the cleverest and best of men she would
not have fallen in love with him; and if she had not fallen in
love would not have married; but having fallen in love and
married him whom she thought the best and cleverest of men, she
naturally looked upon life and its aims in the way the best and
cleverest of men looked at them. At first he thought the aim of
life was to learn, and she looked upon study as the aim of life.
He became a revolutionist, and so did she. She could demonstrate
very clearly that the existing state of things could not go on,
and that it was everybody's duty to fight this state of things
and to try to bring about conditions in which the individual
could develop freely, etc. And she imagined that she really
thought and felt all this, but in reality she only regarded
everything her husband thought as absolute truth, and only sought
for perfect agreement, perfect identification of her own soul
with his which alone could give her full moral satisfaction. The
parting with her husband and their child, whom her mother had
taken, was very hard to bear; but she bore it firmly and quietly,
since it was for her husband's sake and for that cause which she
had not the slightest doubt was true, since he served it. She was
always with her husband in thoughts, and did not love and could
not love any other any more than she had done before. But
Nabatoff's devoted and pure love touched and excited her. This
moral, firm man, her husband's friend, tried to treat her as a
sister, but something more appeared in his behaviour to her, and
this something frightened them both, and yet gave colour to their
life of hardship.