From "Nevsky Prospect" by Nikolai Gogol

But before we say who Lieutenant Pirogov was, it would be as well to describe the society in which Pirogov moved. There are officers who make up a kind of middle class in the society of St. Petersburg. At soirees, at dinners given by a councilor of state or an actual councilor of state who has attained this rank after forty years of toil, you will always meet one of these. Several pale daughters as completely colorless as St. Petersburg, some of whom are over-ripe, a tea-table, a piano, dancing in the drawing-room--all this is inseparable from the bright epaulet which shines in the lamplight between a well-behaved blonde and the black dress-coat of a brother or a friend of the family. These cold-blooded young women are very hard to move or make laugh; for this one must use great art, or more exactly, no art at all. You must speak neither too cleverly nor too wittily so that the trifles which all women love are included. In this one must give the above-mentioned gentlemen their due. They have a special gift for listening to these colorless beauties and making them laugh. Exclamations drowned in laughter: "Oh, do stop it! Aren't you ashamed to make such jokes!" are often their highest reward. In the upper classes one meets them rarely, or rather, never. They are driven thence by what this class of society calls the aristocrats; however they are considered educated and well brought-up people. They like to discuss literature; they praise Bulgarin, Pushkin and Grech and speak with scorn and barbed witticisms about A.A. Orlov. They never miss a single public lecture, whether it is about book-keeping or even about forestry. You will always meet one of them at the theater whatever the piece, even if some sort of "Filatka" is on, which is an insult to their discerning taste. They are always at the theater. They are the most useful people for the theater directors. They are particularly fond of good verse in the drama and of calling loudly on the actors; many of them when taking the examinations for the civil service, or preparing for it, finally keep a cabriolet and pair. Then their circle of acquaintance widens. At last they attain to marriage with a merchant's daughter who can play the piano and has a hundred thousand or thereabouts in ready cash and a heap of bearded relatives: but they cannot reach this honored state until they have at least become colonels; because Russian beards, despite the fact that they still give off an odor of cabbage will by no means see their daughters marry anyone save generals or at the least colonels.

These are the main characteristics of young men of this kind. But Lieutenant Pirogov possessed a large number of talents which belonged to him personally. He declaimed verses wonderfully from "Dimitri Donskoy" and "The Misfortune of Being Clever," and had a special gift for making smoke-rings with his pipe so well that he could suddenly thread about ten of them on one another. He knew how to tell pleasant anecdotes about how a field-gun is a field-gun and a howitzer a howitzer. Indeed, it is rather difficult to give a list of all the talents with which fate had rewarded Pirogov. He liked to discuss actresses and dancers but no longer expressed himself so crudely on the subject as a young ensign does. He was very pleased with his rank, to which he had only recently been promoted, and although sometimes he would say as he stretched out on the divan: "Oh, oh! Vanity! All is vanity! What if I am a lieutenant?" yet secretly his new dignity was very flattering to him: he often tried to give a covert hint of it in conversation, and once when he came across a copyist clerk in the street who seemed rude to him, he immediately stopped him and made him see in a few curt words that he had a lieutenant to deal with and not any other officer--and he tried to express this and more eloquently because at that moment two rather good-looking ladies were passing. Pirogov, generally, had a passion for everything elegant and encouraged the painter Piskarev; though, indeed, this might have been due to a desire to see his virile features in a portrait. But enough of Pirogov's qualities. Man is such a wonderful being that one can never enumerate all his good qualities and the more deeply you look into him the more new peculiarities you find and their description might be endless.


-- Nikolai Gogol, "The Nevsky Prospect," 1835, collected in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, Dover Thrift Editions.