The New Ideas, Dostoevsky

Below from Dostoevsky’s novel Demons where the refined, liberal character Stefan Trofimovich Verkhovensky encounters the next generation in the development of the ideas first which he imagined he embodied. He is pleasant but self-indulgent and aimless, and the father of the revolutionary figure Pyotor Verkhovensky, loosely based on the demonically ruthless real-life revolutionary Sergei Nechaev, who in turn was a major influence on the likes of Lenin. 

Varvara Petrovna threw herself wholly into the “new ideas” and began holding evenings. She invited writers and they were immediately brought to her in great numbers. Never before had she seen such writers. They were impossibly vain, but quite openly so, as if fulfilling a duty. It was as if they perceived some special, just-yesterday discovered beauty in it. They were all proud of something to the point of strangeness. It was written on all their faces that they had just discovered some extremely important secret. They were abusive and considered it to their credit.

. . .  It was clear that among this rabble of new people there were many swindlers, but it was also unquestionable that there were many honest and even quite attractive persons, despite certain nonetheless surprising nuances. The honest ones were far more incomprehensible than the rude and dishonest ones; but it was not clear who was making use of whom.

… “We left as if in a daze,” Stefan Trofimovich later used to say. “Oh my friends, you cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one’s whole sick when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognisable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion , without harmony, a toy for stupid children! No! It was not so in our day, this is not what we strove for. No, no, not that at all. I recognise nothing . . .”