このエントリは 29の61の部分 シリーズに 白痴

『白痴』英文/和訳 PART II CHAPTER IX ブルドフスキーの真実とリザヴェータ夫人の激怒

『The Idiot』PART II CHAPTER IX を、英語学習用に「英文→和訳」の順で読みやすく整理し、重要語句を多めに色分けしています。上部の操作パネルで、和訳・色分け・ミニ訳・カテゴリ別ハイライトを切り替えられます。

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動作・変化 感情・心理 場面・描写 人物・性格 疑問・不穏 重要表現

“I am sure you will not deny,” said Gavrila Ardalionovitch, turning to Burdovsky, “that you were born two years after your mother’s lawful marriage to Mr. Burdovsky, your father.”

Burdovsky stared at him with wide, astonished eyes. Gania continued, saying that Keller’s version was a work of imagination, and one deeply insulting to both Burdovsky and his mother.

Keller had distorted the facts, perhaps in order to strengthen the claim and serve Burdovsky’s interests.

“He told us he consulted you about the article,” Gania said, “but I cannot believe that he read the whole thing to you, especially the offensive passage about your mother.”

“As a matter of fact, I did not read it all,” interrupted Keller. “But I had the contents on unimpeachable authority, and I—”

“Excuse me, Mr. Keller,” said Gania. “Allow me to finish. Your article will be mentioned in its proper place.”

He explained that, by chance and with the help of his sister Varvara Ardalionovna, he had obtained a letter written twenty-five years earlier by Nicolai Andreevitch Pavlicheff while he was abroad.

After that, he contacted another old friend of Pavlicheff’s, a retired colonel, and received two more letters from him.

The dates and contents of these three letters proved, in the clearest possible way, that Pavlicheff had gone abroad eighteen months before Burdovsky’s birth and had remained there for three years.

“Your mother, as you know, never left Russia,” said Gania. “If you wish, come to me tomorrow with witnesses and handwriting experts, and I will prove everything.”

His words caused a sensation. A general movement of relief passed through the room.

Burdovsky rose abruptly.

“If that is true,” he said, “then I have been deceived—grossly deceived. But not by Tchebaroff. I have been deceived for a long time.”

“I do not want experts, and I will not go to see you. I believe you. I give it up. But I refuse the ten thousand roubles. Good-bye.”

“Please wait five minutes more,” said Gania pleasantly. “Several curious and important facts remain, and it is necessary that you hear them.”

Burdovsky sat down again in silence, his head bent as though sunk in deep thought.

Doktorenko, who had risen to go with him, sat down too. He seemed disappointed, though still as self-confident as before.

Hippolyte looked sulky and depressed; a violent fit of coughing had stained his handkerchief with blood.

Keller looked thoroughly frightened.

“Oh, Antip!” he cried miserably. “I told you the other day—yes, the day before yesterday—that perhaps you were not really Pavlicheff’s son!”

A muffled laugh passed through the company.

“That is valuable information, Mr. Keller,” said Gania. “In any case, I am convinced that Mr. Burdovsky knew nothing about Pavlicheff’s journey abroad.”

He explained that Pavlicheff had spent much of his life outside Russia, returning only for short visits.

That particular journey was so old and so unimportant that even close acquaintances might easily have forgotten it after more than twenty years.

Hippolyte interrupted irritably, asking why Gania was continuing with such tedious details when the main fact had already been admitted.

“Do you want to boast of your detective skill?” he said. “Or do you wish to excuse Burdovsky by proving that he acted in ignorance?”

“He needs no excuse from you or from anyone. The affair is painful enough for him already.”

“Enough, Mr. Terentieff,” said Gania. “Do not excite yourself. You are very ill, and I am sorry for that. I have only a few facts left to state.”

He then explained why Pavlicheff had cared for Burdovsky’s mother.

She was the sister of a serf-girl whom Pavlicheff had loved deeply in his youth and would probably have married, had she not died suddenly.

When Burdovsky’s mother was about ten years old, Pavlicheff took her under his care, educated her, and later gave her a considerable dowry.

His relatives became uneasy, fearing that he might marry her; but when she was twenty, she married a young land-surveyor named Burdovsky.

According to Gania, it had been a marriage of affection.

After the wedding, Burdovsky’s father abandoned his profession and tried commercial speculations with his wife’s dowry of fifteen thousand roubles.

He had no experience, was cheated on all sides, and finally took to drink.

His excesses shortened his life, and eight years after his marriage he died.

Burdovsky’s mother was left in extreme poverty, and would have starved without the yearly pension Pavlicheff gave her.

Many people remembered how fond Pavlicheff had been of Burdovsky as a child.

Gania added that Pavlicheff seemed especially drawn to unfortunate children, and Burdovsky had been sickly, stammering, and almost deformed.

Pavlicheff’s affection, together with school fees and special teachers, caused servants and relatives to whisper that Burdovsky must be his son.

That rumour grew during the last years of Pavlicheff’s life, when his heirs were anxious about the inheritance.

Burdovsky had probably heard the rumour and accepted it as true.

Gania said that he had visited Burdovsky’s mother in Pskoff and found her ill and poor, but deeply grateful to Pavlicheff.

She spoke with tears of how her son had supported her and of how firmly she believed in his future.

At this point the prince tried to stop Gania, crying in alarm, “Enough, Gavrila Ardalionovitch!”

But it was too late.

Burdovsky sprang up in fury.

“I said again and again that I did not want the money!” he shouted. “I will not take it. I am going away!”

He rushed toward the terrace exit, but Doktorenko caught his arm and whispered something to him.

Burdovsky turned back quickly, pulled an unsealed envelope from his pocket, and threw it onto a small table beside the prince.

“There is the money!” he cried. “How dare you? The money!”

Doktorenko explained that this was the two hundred and fifty roubles the prince had dared to send as charity through Tchebaroff.

“The article said fifty!” cried Colia.

The prince went up to Burdovsky in great distress.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I have wronged you. I did not send that money as charity. I spoke of deceit, but I did not mean you.”

“I said you were afflicted like me, but you are not like me. You give lessons. You support your mother. I did not know that.”

“I even said you had dishonoured your mother, but you love her. She herself says so. Forgive me.”

“I dared to offer you ten thousand roubles, but I was wrong. I should have done it differently. Now you despise me, and there is no way to repair it.”

“This is a lunatic asylum!” cried Lizabetha Prokofievna.

“Of course it is a lunatic asylum!” said Aglaya sharply, though her words were drowned by the voices around her.

Everyone began speaking at once. Some discussed the affair gravely; others laughed.

Ivan Fedorovitch stood aside, deeply offended, waiting for his wife.

Doktorenko took up the word again.

He said the prince certainly knew how to make the most of his “infirmity,” and that he had offered money and friendship in such a way that no self-respecting man could accept them.

“It is either excessive innocence or malice,” he said. “You know better than anyone which it is.”

Gania examined the envelope and quietly observed that it contained only one hundred roubles, not two hundred and fifty.

The prince motioned to him to be silent.

“But we do mind,” cried Doktorenko. “Your ‘never mind’ is another insult. We have nothing to hide.”

He admitted that there were only one hundred roubles, but insisted that the principle was the important thing.

The missing hundred and fifty roubles, he explained, had been paid to Tchebaroff for travelling expenses.

They had counted on winning the case. Who, he asked, would not have done the same?

“Who indeed?” said Prince S. ironically.

Lizabetha Prokofievna could contain herself no longer.

“I shall go mad if I stay here!” she cried.

Evgenie Pavlovitch laughed and compared Doktorenko’s argument with a lawyer who defended murder by saying poverty naturally led a man to kill six people.

At that, Lizabetha Prokofievna exploded.

Her eyes blazed, and she looked around with such contempt and defiance that she seemed no longer able to distinguish friend from foe.

She turned first on her husband, accusing him of not dragging her away earlier.

Then she thanked the prince bitterly for the “entertainment” he had provided.

“It is vile, vile!” she cried. “A chaos, a scandal, worse than a nightmare!”

She mocked Doktorenko’s proud phrase: “We do not beseech, we demand!”

“As if he did not know,” she cried, “that this idiot will go to them tomorrow and offer his money and friendship again!”

She turned to the prince and demanded, “You will go, won’t you? Tell me, will you go or not?”

“I shall,” said the prince, with gentle humility.

“You hear him!” she cried. “You count on it too, don’t you?”

She accused them of playing the bold heroes only because they were sure of the prince’s softness.

The prince tried to interrupt her, but she would not stop.

She poured out a furious attack on their morality, their pride, and their false appeal to justice.

They had appealed to the prince’s gratitude to Pavlicheff, she said, while declaring that gratitude from themselves was unnecessary.

They had spoken of defending dishonoured women, and yet they had made Burdovsky’s mother suffer greater shame by exposing her in the newspaper.

“Madmen! Vain fools!” she cried. “You will end by devouring one another!”

Then she turned on Hippolyte, calling him almost dead and yet still corrupting others.

She pointed to Colia and accused Hippolyte of turning the boy’s head and teaching him atheism.

Again she asked the prince whether he would call on them the next day.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then I will never speak to you again,” she declared.

She was about to go, but suddenly turned back toward Hippolyte, whose mocking smile drove her into fresh fury.

Cries rose from every side as she approached him and seized him by the arm.

“Mother, this is disgraceful!” cried Aglaya.

Hippolyte answered calmly that Lizabetha Prokofievna knew one could not strike a dying man.

He wanted to explain why he had laughed, but a violent fit of coughing stopped him.

When he wiped blood from his lips, even Lizabetha Prokofievna was almost frightened.

“He is dying, and still he will not stop talking!” she cried. “Why do you speak? You ought to go home to bed.”

“So I will,” Hippolyte whispered hoarsely. “As soon as I get home, I shall go to bed, and in two weeks I shall be dead.”

He said Botkin himself had told him so the previous week.

That was why he wished to say a few farewell words before leaving the world.

Lizabetha Prokofievna was horrified and insisted that he was feverish and must take care of himself.

“When I go to bed,” said Hippolyte, smiling, “I shall never get up again.”

He had meant to do so the day before, but since his legs could still carry him, he had postponed it for two days in order to come there.

“Sit down, sit down!” cried Lizabetha Prokofievna, placing a chair for him with her own hands.

Hippolyte thanked her gently and asked her to sit opposite him.

“We must talk now,” he said. “Today, for the last time, I am outdoors and among people.”

“In two weeks I shall certainly no longer be in this world. So this is, in a way, my farewell to nature and to men.”

He added that he was glad all this had happened at Pavlofsk, where at least he could see a green tree.

Lizabetha Prokofievna grew more alarmed, saying that he could hardly breathe.

But Hippolyte begged her to grant his last wish.

He said he had long dreamed of meeting her, because Colia had often spoken of her.

He called her original and eccentric, and confessed that he had even become fond of her.

“Good heavens!” cried Lizabetha Prokofievna. “And I nearly struck him!”

Hippolyte said Aglaya had prevented it. Then, looking at Aglaya, he said he had recognized her at once because she was so beautiful.

“Let me look on beauty for the last time in my life,” he said with a crooked smile.

Lizabetha Prokofievna seized a chair for herself and sat down opposite him.

She told Colia that he must take Hippolyte home, and promised to come herself the next day.

Hippolyte asked the prince for tea, saying he was exhausted.

Then he suggested that everyone remain there and spend the evening together.

“We are all good-natured people,” he said. “It is really quite comical.”

The prince immediately gave orders. Lebedeff hurried out, followed by Vera.

Lizabetha Prokofievna decided that Hippolyte might talk, but not too loudly and not in a way that would excite him.

She told the prince that he did not deserve her staying for tea, but that she would stay all the same.

She insisted that she apologized to nobody, then immediately told the prince to forgive her if she had scolded him too harshly.

Her family gathered around her, relieved that the storm had passed.

The prince invited everyone to remain for tea and apologized for not having thought of it earlier.

The general murmured polite phrases; Evgenie Pavlovitch and Prince S. suddenly became extremely cheerful and amiable.

Adelaida and Alexandra were still surprised, but now their surprise was mixed with satisfaction.

Aglaya alone remained silent and frowned, sitting apart from the rest.

The other guests stayed too; nobody wished to leave.

Even General Ivolgin stayed, though Lebedeff whispered something to him that made him go and sulk in a corner.

The prince made sure that Burdovsky and his friends were offered tea as well.

The invitation made them uncomfortable. They muttered that they would wait for Hippolyte, and sat together in a distant corner of the verandah.

Tea was served at once; it was already striking eleven.

『The Idiot』by Fyodor Dostoyevsky / Translated by Eva Martin をもとに、英語学習用の英文・和訳・語句色分け形式に編集しています。原文の PART II CHAPTER IX に対応しています。:contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
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