Dostoevsky: Demons discussion

The hooligans of Yulia's circle go to pay court on the holy fool Semyon Yakovlevich and mock him. He responds with "F- you!" (P&V) or "Out with the -!" (Garnett). The original text is rendered "В... тебя, в... тебя!"

Translating "тебя" as "you", the word we might expect in place of the censored "В..." might be "Ебать" (f-ck); this is the same word as Polish jebać. However the first letter В indicates perhaps the word is in perfective aspect "выебать тебя" - future tense? I'm not sure if this is grammatically correct Russian.

The Garnett translation is less obvious - perhaps the word is really блядь
(blyat, "whore")?

One other note here: we are given a hint something askew may have happened between Nikolai and Liza:

I fancied they both stood still for an instant, and looked, as it were, strangely at one another, but I may not have seen rightly in the crowd. It is asserted, on the contrary, and quite seriously, that Liza, glancing at Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, quickly raised her hand to the level of his face, and would certainly have struck him if he had not drawn back in time.

The Magarshack translation for Semyon Yakovlevich’s response to the vocal lady from the party is:
“‘Kick her in the ____, in the ____!’ Semyon Yakovlevich addressed himself to her with an extremely indecent word.”

About the incident between Liza and Nikolay Stavrogin, Dennis Abrams includes this in his ProjectD blog:

From Gary Saul Morson from his essay “Reading Dostoevskii”:

“Dostoevskii’s second narrative method demonstrates the untenability of determinism apparently opposite to the first…let me here just offer one example. In [Demons], the young and wealthy reprobates of the town visit the mad ‘prophet’ Semen Iakovlevich. Just as they are leaving, Liza Nikolaevna and Stavrogin appear to jostle each other in the doorway, and the chronicler goes on:

‘I fancied they both stood still for an instant and looked, as it were, strangely at one another, but I may not have seen rightly in the crowd. It is asserted, on the contrary, and quite seriously, that Liza, glancing at Nikolai Vsevolodovich [Stavrogin], quickly raised her hand to the level of his face, and would certainly have struck him if he had not drawn back in time. Perhaps she was displeased with the expression of his face, or the way he smiled, particularly just after such an episode with [her fiance] Mavrikii Nikolaevich. I must admit I saw nothing myself, but all the others declared they had, though they certainly could not all have seen it in such a crush, though perhaps some may have. I remember, however, that Nikolai Vsevolodovich was rather pale all the way home.’

‘Perhaps,’ ‘on the contrary’, ‘I may not have seen rightly’, ‘I fancied’: language like this is irritatingly common in Dostoevskii’s narrative. Something may or may not have happened; and if it did (which is by no means certain, though perhaps it could have happened, though many doubt it, but then they are unreliable, though not always mistaken…) – if it did happen, it might be part of many sequences, each of which may suggest an endless series of ramifications. In any case, the action that may or may not have happened was itself a non-action, a slap that could have been given, but was not. The narrator tries to decide whether Liza meant to slap Stavrogin but did not or, on the contrary, simply did not slap him.

As in so many of such descriptions in Dostoevskii, the point is not what did happen: it is that any of the suggested events could have happened. Sometimes Dostoevskii suggests a haze ofc rumours, each suggesting a possibility that, whether or not it is true, could be. We gradually learn to see time not as a line of single points but as a field of possibilities. If the tape were played over again, a different possibility might be realised. Contrary to the determinists or Leibnizians, we live in a world where more than one thing is possible at any moment. Possibilities exceed actualities. Whatever happens, something else might have, and to understand a moment is to grasp that ‘something else.’ By the same token, each of us is capable of living more lives than one, and to understand a person is to intuit what else he or she might have been or done. Dmitrii might have been a murderer, and Alesha, we are told, might easily have been a revolutionary.”