Read Master of Petersburg for Free Online Page A

unpleasant way? These are some of the questions that run through my mind. And that is why I took this lucky opportunity to speak to you, Fyodor Mikhailovich. Because if you do not know him, having been his stepfather and for so long his protector, in the absence of his natural parents, who does?
    â€˜Then, as well, there is the question of his drinking. Was he used to heavy drinking, or did he take to it recently, because of the strains of the conspiratorial life?’
    â€˜I don’t understand. Why are we talking about drinking?’
    â€˜Because on the night of his death he had drunk a great deal. Did you not know that?’
    He shakes his head dumbly.
    â€˜Clearly, Fyodor Mikhailovich, there is a great deal you do not know. Come, let me be candid with you. As soon as I heard you had arrived to claim your stepson’s papers, stepping, so to speak, into the lion’s den, I was sure, or almost sure, that you had no suspicion of anything untoward. For if you had known of a connection between your stepson and Nechaev’s criminal gang, you would surely not have come here. Or at least you would have made it plain from the outset that it was only the letters between yourself and your stepson that you were claiming, nothing else. Do you follow?’
    â€˜Yes –’
    â€˜And since you are already in possession of your stepson’s letters to you, that would have meant you wanted only the letters written by you to him. But why –’
    â€˜Letters, yes, and everything else of a private nature. What can be the point of your hounding him now?’
    â€˜What indeed! . . . So tragic . . . But to return to the matter of the papers: you use the expression “of a private nature.” It occurs to me that in today’s circumstances it is hard to know what “of a private nature” means any longer. Of course we must respect the deceased, we must defend rights your stepson is no longer in a position to defend, in this case a right to a certain decent privacy. The prospect that after our decease a stranger will come sniffing through our possessions, opening drawers, breaking seals, reading intimate letters – such would be a painful prospect to any of us, I am sure. On the other hand, in certain cases we might actually prefer a disinterested stranger to perform this ugly but necessary office. Would we be easy at the thought of our more intimate affairs being opened up, when emotions are still raw, to the unsuspecting gaze of a wife or a daughter or a sister? Better, in certain respects, that it be done by a stranger, someone who cannot be offended because we are nothing to him, and also because he is hardened, by the nature of his profession, to offence.
    â€˜Of course this is, in a sense, idle talk, for in the end it is the law that disposes, the law of succession: the heirs to the estate come into possession of the private papers and everything else. And in a case where one dies without naming an heir, rules of consanguinity take over and determine what needs to be determined.
    â€˜So letters between family members, we agree, are private papers, to be treated with the appropriate discretion. While communications from abroad, communications of a seditious nature – lists of people marked down to be murdered, for instance – are clearly not private papers. But here, now, here is a curious case.’
    He is leafing through something in the file, drumming on the desk with his fingernails in an irritating way. ‘Here’s a curious case, here’s a curious case,’ he repeats in a murmur. ‘A story,’ he announces abruptly. ‘What shall we say of a story, a work of fiction? Is a story a private matter, would you say?’
    â€˜A private matter, an utterly private matter, private to the writer, till it is given to the world.’
    Maximov casts him a quizzical look, then pushes what he has been reading across the desk. It is a