Unit 4: Vocabulary from Readings

STEPAN STEPANOVICH CHUBUKOV, a landowner, elderly, pompous but affable.

STEPAN STEPANOVITCH CHUBUKOV, a landowner, elderly, pompous but affable.

IVAN VASSILEVITCH LOMOV, healthy, but a hypochondriac; nervous, suspicious. Also a landowner.

I mean, I’m always getting palpitations, and I’m nervous, and I get upset so easy. Look, my lips are quivering, and my eyebrow’s twitching.

Why that’s not being a good neighbor. It’s sheer impudence, that’s what it is…

The reason the peasants didn’t pay your aunt’s grandmother, and so forth, was that the land was disputed, even then.

The Lomovs have always been honorable, upstanding people, and not a one of them was ever tried for embezzlement, like your grandfather was.

And you’re a two-faced, malicious schemer!

...one humane, another haughty; one lascivious, another chaste; one frank, another astute; one hard, another easy; one serious, another frivolous; one religious, another an unbeliever, and so on.

I know that everyone will admit that it would be highly praiseworthy in a prince to possess all the above-named qualities that are reputed good, but as they cannot all be possessed or observed, human conditions not permitting of it, it is necessary that he should be prudent enough to avoid the scandal of those vices which would lose him the state, and guard himself if possible against those which will not lose it him, but if not able to, he can indulge them with less scruple.

But one who wishes to obtain the reputation of liberality among men, must not omit every kind of sumptuous display, and to such an extent that a prince of this character will consume by such means all his resources, and will be at last compelled, if he wishes to maintain his name for liberality, to impose heavy taxes on his people, become extortionate, and do everything possible to obtain money.

For these reasons a prince must care little for the reputation of being a miser, if he wishes to avoid robbing his subjects, if he wishes to be able to defend himself, to avoid becoming poor and contemptible, and not to be forced to become rapacious; this niggardliness is one of those vices which enable him to reign.

And, therefore, he must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind, and as the variations of fortune dictate, and, as I said before, not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained.