Stepan Trofimovitch was delighted to go.
"There I shall revive!" he exclaimed.

"There, at last, I shall set to work!" But in the first of his letters from Berlin he struck his usual note: "My heart is broken!" he wrote to Varvara Petrovna.

"I can forget nothing! Here, in Berlin, everything brings back to me my old past, my first raptures and my first agonies.

Where is she?
Where are they both?
Where are you two angels of whom I was never worthy?
Where is my son, my beloved son?
And last of all, where am I, where is my old self, strong as steel, firm as a rock, when now some Andreev, our orthodox clown with a beard, _peut briser mon existence en deux_"-- and so on.
As for Stepan Trofimovitch's son, he had only seen him twice in his life, the first time when he was born and the second time lately in Petersburg, where the young man was preparing to enter the university.
The boy had been all his life, as we have said already, brought up by his aunts (at Varvara Petrovna's expense) in a remote province, nearly six hundred miles from Skvoreshniki.

As for Andreev, he was nothing more or less than our local shopkeeper, a very eccentric fellow, a self-taught archaeologist who had a passion for collecting Russian antiquities and sometimes tried to outshine Stepan Trofimovitch in erudition and in the progressiveness of his opinions.