Short Fiction quotes

… However my taste has nothing to do with it. Groholsky who was spoilt by women, and who had been in love and out of love hundreds of times in his life, saw her as a beauty.

He loved her, and blind love finds ideal beauty everywhere.

“I say,” he said, looking straight into her eyes, “I have come to talk to you, my precious. Love cannot bear anything vague or indefinite.

The first to move and break the silence was the husband. He stepped up to Groholsky and, screwing his face into a senseless grimace like a smile, gave him his hand.

Groholsky shook the soft perspiring hand and shuddered all over as though he had crushed a cold frog in his fist.

“How are you?” the husband brought out in a faint husky, almost inaudible voice, and he sat down opposite Groholsky, straightening his collar at the back of his neck.

Both longed intensely to get away. They sat still, not looking at one another, and pulled at their beards while they ransacked their troubled brains for some means of escape from their horribly awkward position.

Both were perspiring. Both were unbearably miserable and both were devoured by hatred.

They longed to begin the tussle but how were they to begin and which was to begin first? If only she would have gone out!

The gentleman in the top hat was carrying her off from Groholsky, was singing, was beating Groholsky and her, was flogging the boy under the window, was declaring his love, and driving her off in the chaise. …

Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one’s eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.

… That night Liza lived through a great variety of experiences, and very happy ones, even in spite of the beating.

… Groholsky was in bliss. … At last, after a prolonged interval of agony, he felt happy and at peace again. Ivan Petrovitch with his two ladies had no such happiness as he had with one.

But alas, destiny has no heart. She plays with the Groholskys, the Lizas, the Ivans, and the Mishutkas as with pawns.

… Groholsky lost his peace again. …

Liza turned pale, and of course burst into tears.

When women feel that they are in the right, they scold and shed tears; when they are conscious of being in fault, they shed tears only.

“On a level with those depraved creatures! It’s … it’s … it’s … lower than any impropriety! Why, do you know what they are? They are kept women! Cocottes! And you a respectable woman go rushing off where they are … And he … He!

… With Liza he was silent and Groholsky’s mind was at rest; but there is a Russian proverb which he would have done well to remember: “Don’t fear the dog that barks, but fear the dog that’s quiet. …”

A fiendish proverb, but in practical life sometimes indispensable.

As he was walking in the garden one day, Groholsky heard two voices in conversation. One voice was a man’s, the other was a woman’s. One belonged to Bugrov, the other to Liza. Groholsky listened, and turning white as death, turned softly towards the speakers.

There he took to drink. … He hoped in drink and dissipation to find comfort. … He squandered all his fortune, but did not succeed, poor fellow, in driving out of his brain the image of the beloved woman with the kittenish face. …

Men do not die of happiness, nor do they die of misery.

Groholsky’s hair went grey, but he did not die: he is alive to this day. … He came back from abroad to have “just a peep” at Liza. … Bugrov met him with open arms, and made him stay for an indefinite period.

“

Set a fool to say his prayers, and he will crack his skull on the floor!

Why, who paints oars green! Do think, blockhead! Use your sense! Why don’t you speak?”

One fine evening, a no less fine government clerk called Ivan Dmitritch Tchervyakov was sitting in the second row of the stalls, gazing through an opera glass at the Cloches de Corneville. He gazed and felt at the acme of bliss. But suddenly. …

In stories one so often meets with this “But suddenly.” The authors are right: life is so full of surprises!

But suddenly his face puckered up, his eyes disappeared, his breathing was arrested … he took the opera glass from his eyes, bent over and … “Aptchee!” he sneezed as you perceive. It is not reprehensible for anyone to sneeze anywhere.

The authors are right: life is so full of surprises! But suddenly his face puckered up, his eyes disappeared, his breathing was arrested … he took the opera glass from his eyes, bent over and … “Aptchee!” he sneezed as you perceive.

It is not reprehensible for anyone to sneeze anywhere. Peasants sneeze and so do police superintendents, and sometimes even privy councillors.

All men sneeze. Tchervyakov was not in the least confused, he wiped his face with his handkerchief, and like a polite man, looked round to see whether he had disturbed anyone by his sneezing. But then he was overcome with confusion.

The shutters of the little house are always closed; its occupants do not care for sunlight—the light is no use to them. The windows are never opened, for they are not fond of fresh air.

People who spend their lives in the midst of acacias, mulberries, and nettles have no passion for nature.

It is only to the summer visitor that God has vouchsafed an eye for the beauties of nature. The rest of mankind remain steeped in profound ignorance of the existence of such beauties. People never prize what they have always had in abundance.

It is only to the summer visitor that God has vouchsafed an eye for the beauties of nature. The rest of mankind remain steeped in profound ignorance of the existence of such beauties.

People never prize what they have always had in abundance.

“What we have, we do not treasure,” and what’s more we do not even love it.

As I entered the little house I heard the same “Ach!” echo through it. They recognised me at once. … Well they might!

My first visit had been an event in their lives, and when events are few they are long remembered.

I walked into the drawing room: the mother, who had grown stouter and was already getting grey, was creeping about on the floor, cutting out some blue material. The daughter was sitting on the sofa, embroidering.

He scratches his head and asks whatever comes into it, a rouble, or three kopecks, according to the purchaser. There are expensive birds too. A faded old blackbird, with most of its feathers plucked out of its tail, sits on a dirty perch.

He is dignified, grave, and motionless as a retired general.

He has waved his claw in resignation to his captivity long ago, and looks at the blue sky with indifference. Probably, owing to this indifference, he is considered a sagacious bird. He is not to be bought for less than forty kopecks.

I sing in company too. No, my boy, shout, sing to me without company; sing in solitude, if you can. … You give me that one yonder that sits and holds its tongue! Give me the quiet one!

That one says nothing, so he thinks the more.

…”

He thrashed her with a big whip for a fortnight, till he taught her not to. A hare can learn to light matches if you beat it. Does that surprise you? It’s very simple! It takes the match in its mouth and strikes it.

An animal is like a man. A man’s made wiser by beating, and it’s the same with a beast.

”

“No, an actor.

Nowadays it is difficult to distinguish actors from clerks of the Consistory.

No doubt you have noticed that. … That’s typical, but it’s not very flattering for the government clerk.”

“… forgotten friend Mushkin …” we read.

Time had erased the never, and corrected the falsehood of man.

“A subscription for a monument to him was got up among actors and journalists, but they drank up the money, the dear fellows …” sighed the actor, bowing down to the ground and touching the wet earth with his knees and his cap.

“You are right there. Mushkin was a well-known man, you see; there were a dozen wreaths on the coffin, and he is already forgotten.

Those to whom he was dear have forgotten him, but those to whom he did harm remember him.

I, for instance, shall never, never forget him, for I got nothing but harm from him. I have no love for the deceased.”

I had no pain at all, but my legs were giving way under me, the words stuck in my throat, my head slipped weakly on one side … It seemed as though, in a moment, I must fall down and lose consciousness.

If I had been taken into a hospital at that minute, the doctors would have had to write over my bed: Fames, a disease which is not in the manuals of medicine.

Beside me on the pavement stood my father in a shabby summer overcoat and a serge cap, from which a bit of white wadding was sticking out. On his feet he had big heavy goloshes.

Lyubov Petrovna has taken a vow never to have in her house cards or spirituous liquors—the two sources of her husband’s ruin.

And the only bottles contain oil and vinegar, as though in mockery and chastisement of the guests who are to a man desperately fond of the bottle, and given to tippling.

“Please help yourselves, gentlemen!” the marshal’s widow presses them. “Only you must excuse me, I have no vodka. … I have none in the house.”

… He thought of a warm bed, of the Stanislav order, of new boots, of a uniform without holes in the elbows. …

He thought of all those things because he had none of them.

“Shall I steal?” he thought. “Even if stealing is an easy matter, hiding is what’s difficult. Men run away to America, they say, with what they’ve stolen, but the devil knows where that blessed America is. One must have education even to steal, it seems.”

“Shall I steal?” he thought. “Even if stealing is an easy matter, hiding is what’s difficult. Men run away to America, they say, with what they’ve stolen, but the devil knows where that blessed America is.

One must have education even to steal, it seems.

”

The cockroach fell on its back and wriggled its legs in despair. Nevyrazimov took it by one leg and threw it into the lamp. The lamp flared up and spluttered.

And Nevyrazimov felt better.

“There is a great deal in nature that is mysterious and … terrible …” thought Vaxin, as he got into bed. “

It’s not the dead but the unknown that’s so horrible.

”

“And what if the ghost of Uncle Klavdy should appear this minute?” flashed through Vaxin’s mind. “But, of course, that’s impossible.”

Ghosts are, we all know, a superstition, the offspring of undeveloped intelligence, but Vaxin, nevertheless, pulled the bedclothes over his head, and shut his eyes very tight.

The corpse that turned round in its coffin came back to his mind, and the figures of his deceased mother-in-law, of a colleague who had hanged himself, and of a girl who had drowned herself, rose before his imagination.

“

What a thing it is to have nerves!

” he reflected. “An educated, intelligent man! … Hang it all! … It’s a perfect disgrace!”

On the bed lay stretched Rosalia Karlovna fast asleep, and a couple of yards from her was her husband curled up on the trunk sleeping the sleep of the just and snoring loudly.

What she said to her husband, and how he looked when he woke, I leave to others to describe. It is beyond my powers.

Two young people who had not long been married were walking up and down the platform of a little country station. His arm was round her waist, her head was almost on his shoulder, and both were happy.

The moon peeped up from the drifting cloudlets and frowned, as it seemed, envying their happiness and regretting her tedious and utterly superfluous virginity.

The still air was heavy with the fragrance of lilac and wild cherry. Somewhere in the distance beyond the line a corncrake was calling.

And turning to her visitors, she said with a smile of welcome: “Welcome to the cottage!”

The moon came out again. She seemed to smile, as though she were glad she had no relations.

Sasha, turning his head away to hide his angry despairing face, struggled to give a note of cordial welcome to his voice as he said:

I have tried all sorts of mud-baths, and drunk waters, and goodness knows what I haven’t tried! I have wasted all my substance on doctors, my beautiful lady. The doctors did me nothing but harm. They drove the disease inwards.

Drive in, that they did, but to drive out was beyond their science.

All they care about is their fees, the brigands; but as for the benefit of humanity—for that they don’t care a straw. They prescribe some quackery, and you have to drink it. Assassins, that’s the only word for them.

… I could live for a hundred years. There’s only one trouble, our lack of means. I’m well now, but what’s the use of health if there’s nothing to live on?

Poverty weighs on me worse than illness.

… For example, take this … It’s the time to sow oats, and how is one to sow it if one has no seed? I ought to buy it, but the money … everyone knows how we are off for money. …”

High words follow. … The sun is baking hot.

The shadows begin to grow shorter and to draw in on themselves, like the horns of a snail.

… The high grass warmed by the sun begins to give out a strong, heavy smell of honey. It will soon be midday, and Gerassim and Lubim are still floundering under the willow tree.

A sultry, stifling midday. Not a cloudlet in the sky. … The sunbaked grass had a disconsolate, hopeless look: even if there were rain it could never be green again. …

The forest stood silent, motionless, as though it were looking at something with its treetops or expecting something.

At the edge of the clearing a tall, narrow-shouldered man of forty in a red shirt, in patched trousers that had been a gentleman’s, and in high boots, was slouching along with a lazy, shambling step. He was sauntering along the road.

And I went in for horse-dealing too, I used to go to the fairs when I had the money, and you know that if a peasant goes in for being a sportsman, or a horse-dealer, it’s goodbye to the plough.

Once the spirit of freedom has taken a man you will never root it out of him.

In the same way, if a gentleman goes in for being an actor or for any other art, he will never make an official or a landowner. You are a woman, and you do not understand, but one must understand that.”

“Wha-at? Why, you asked me yourself! The gentry catch fish that way too in our parts. The silliest little boy would not try to catch a fish without a weight. Of course anyone who did not understand might go to fish without a weight.

There is no rule for a fool.

”

Kuzma does not pay, so you, Denis, must answer for it. … Judges indeed! Our master the general is dead—the Kingdom of Heaven be his—or he would have shown you judges. … You ought to judge sensibly, not at random. …

Flog if you like, but flog someone who deserves it, flog with conscience.

”

“

I am not afraid of wolves, of thieves, or of darkness, but I am afraid of the dead.

I am afraid of them, and that is all about it. Good orthodox brothers, I entreat you on my knees, see me to the village.”

“What is there to make out?

Where the horse’s tail is, there’s the front, and where your honour’s sitting, there’s the back.

”

It was dusk by the time the cart drove out of the station. On the surveyor’s right hand stretched a dark frozen plain, endless and boundless.

If you drove over it you would certainly get to the other side of beyond.

On the horizon, where it vanished and melted into the sky, there was the languid glow of a cold autumn sunset.

Uzelkov was overcome with melancholy.

He suddenly had a passionate longing to weep, as once he had longed for love, and he felt those tears would have tasted sweet and refreshing.

A moisture came into his eyes and there was a lump in his throat, but … Shapkin was standing beside him and Uzelkov was ashamed to show weakness before a witness. He turned back abruptly and went into the church.

“To weep, to weep!” thought Uzelkov.

But the moment for tears had been missed; though the old man blinked his eyes, though he worked up his feelings, the tears did not flow nor the lump come in his throat.

After standing for ten minutes, with a gesture of despair, Uzelkov went to look for Shapkin.

And the turner went on muttering endlessly. He prattled on mechanically to get a little relief from his depressing feelings. He had plenty of words on his tongue, but the thoughts and questions in his brain were even more numerous.

Sorrow had come upon the turner unawares, unlooked-for, and unexpected, and now he could not get over it, could not recover himself.

He had lived hitherto in unruffled calm, as though in drunken half-consciousness, knowing neither grief nor joy, and now he was suddenly aware of a dreadful pain in his heart.

He thought how quickly everything passes in this world! His trouble had hardly begun when the final catastrophe had happened. He had not had time to live with his old woman, to show her he was sorry for her before she died.

He had lived with her for forty years, but those forty years had passed by as it were in a fog.

What with drunkenness, quarreling, and poverty, there had been no feeling of life.

He had not had time to live with his old woman, to show her he was sorry for her before she died. He had lived with her for forty years, but those forty years had passed by as it were in a fog.

What with drunkenness, quarreling, and poverty, there had been no feeling of life.

And, as though to spite him, his old woman died at the very time when he felt he was sorry for her, that he could not live without her, and that he had behaved dreadfully badly to her.

“Oh, the public! There’s no satisfying them! It’s no use working and doing one’s best! One’s driven to drinking and cursing it all. … If you do nothing—they’re angry; if you begin doing your duty, they’re angry too. There’s nothing for it but drink!”

Podtyagin empties a bottle straight off and thinks no more of work, duty, and honesty!

… We sat and talked and had a drink. Say what you like, Nathalie, I dislike that individual—I dislike him awfully! He is a rare blockhead. He is a wealthy man, a capitalist; he has six hundred thousand, and you would never guess it.

Money is no more use to him than a radish to a dog.

He does not eat it himself nor give it to others. Money ought to circulate, but he keeps tight hold of it, is afraid to part with it. … What’s the good of capital lying idle? Capital lying idle is no better than grass.”

He does not eat it himself nor give it to others. Money ought to circulate, but he keeps tight hold of it, is afraid to part with it. … What’s the good of capital lying idle?

Capital lying idle is no better than grass.

”

“H’m. … To be sure … of course! Fleeced … plundered. …

What we give we remember, but we don’t remember what we take.

”

The singer was overcome with amazement when she looked at her hanger-on: when and where had he managed to pick up new tastes, polish, and airs and graces? Where had he learned the taste of oysters and of different Burgundies?

Who had taught him to dress and do his hair in the fashion and call her “Nathalie” instead of Natasha?

“It’s strange,” thinks the singer. “In old days he used to get his salary and put it away, but now a hundred roubles a day is not enough for him.

At first she saw only the smile and soft, charming expression of someone’s eyes, then against the shifting grey background there gradually appeared the outlines of a head, a face, eyebrows, beard. It was he, the destined one, the object of long dreams and hopes.

The destined one was for Nellie everything, the significance of life, personal happiness, career, fate.

Outside him, as on the grey background of the looking-glass, all was dark, empty, meaningless.

The grey background was not untouched by death. That might well be.

A husband and wife cannot die simultaneously. Whatever happened one must bury the other.

And Nellie saw her husband dying. This terrible event presented itself to her in every detail. She saw the coffin, the candles, the deacon, and even the footmarks in the hall made by the undertaker.

They all smile at him, they sympathise with him, call him Sergey Nikititch; they all feel that his art is not his personal affair but something that concerns them all, the whole people. One creates, the others help him.

Seryozhka in himself is a nonentity, a sluggard, a drunkard, and a wastrel, but when he has his red lead or compasses in his hand he is at once something higher, a servant of God.

Epiphany morning comes. The precincts of the church and both banks of the river for a long distance are swarming with people. Everything that makes up the Jordan is scrupulously concealed under new mats.

can he not find among those thousands someone who will listen to him? But the crowds flit by heedless of him and his misery. …

His misery is immense, beyond all bounds. If Iona’s heart were to burst and his misery to flow out, it would flood the whole world, it seems, but yet it is not seen.

It has found a hiding-place in such an insignificant shell that one would not have found it with a candle by daylight. …

Iona looks to see the effect produced by his words, but he sees nothing. The young man has covered his head over and is already asleep. The old man sighs and scratches himself. …

Just as the young man had been thirsty for water, he thirsts for speech.

His son will soon have been dead a week, and he has not really talked to anybody yet. … He wants to talk of it properly, with deliberation.

No desire, no joy, no grief, nothing was expressed by her handsome face with its turned-up nose and its dimples.

So a beautiful fountain expresses nothing when it is not playing.

But at last she had finished a sack. She flung it aside, and, stretching luxuriously, rested her motionless, lacklustre eyes on the window.

“

Man will never understand the psychological subtleties of suicide! How can one speak of reasons?

Today the reason makes one snatch up a revolver, while tomorrow the same reason seems not worth a rotten egg. It all depends most likely on the particular condition of the individual at the given moment. … Take me for instance.

the devil knows what I have suffered—no one could have suffered more, I think, and where are the traces? It’s astonishing. One would have thought the imprint made on a man by his agonies would have been everlasting, never to be effaced or eradicated.

And yet that imprint wears out as easily as a pair of cheap boots.

There is nothing left, not a scrap. It’s as though I hadn’t been suffering then, but had been dancing a mazurka. Everything in the world is transitory, and that transitoriness is absurd! A wide field for humorists! Tack on a humorous end, my friend!”

One would have thought the imprint made on a man by his agonies would have been everlasting, never to be effaced or eradicated. And yet that imprint wears out as easily as a pair of cheap boots. There is nothing left, not a scrap.

It’s as though I hadn’t been suffering then, but had been dancing a mazurka.

Everything in the world is transitory, and that transitoriness is absurd! A wide field for humorists! Tack on a humorous end, my friend!”

And yet that imprint wears out as easily as a pair of cheap boots. There is nothing left, not a scrap. It’s as though I hadn’t been suffering then, but had been dancing a mazurka.

Everything in the world is transitory, and that transitoriness is absurd!

A wide field for humorists! Tack on a humorous end, my friend!”

And from that time I began going every day tobogganning with Nadenka, and as we flew down in the sledge, every time I pronounced in a low voice the same words: “I love you, Nadya!”

Soon Nadenka grew used to that phrase as to alcohol or morphia.

She could not live without it. It is true that flying down the ice-hill terrified her as before, but now the terror and danger gave a peculiar fascination to words of love—words which as before were a mystery and tantalized the soul.

I got up and, threading my way between the plots, I walked the length of the kitchen garden.

The dark beds looked like flattened-out graves.

They smelt of dug earth and the tender dampness of plants beginning to be covered with dew. … A red light was still gleaming on the left. It winked genially and seemed to smile.

… I know if I were to beg and to bow down, everyone would help, but … I cannot! I am ashamed. How can I beg of the peasants? You are on the Board here, so you know. …

How can one beg of a beggar?

And to beg of richer people, of landowners, I cannot! I have pride! I am ashamed!”

Here, there is a dark patch on the carpet, concerning which fingers are still shaken at Grisha. Beyond that room is still another, to which one is not admitted, and where one sees glimpses of papa—an extremely enigmatical person!

Nurse and mamma are comprehensible: they dress Grisha, feed him, and put him to bed, but what papa exists for is unknown.

There is another enigmatical person, auntie, who presented Grisha with a drum. She appears and disappears. Where does she disappear to? Grisha has more than once looked under the bed, behind the trunk, and under the sofa, but she was not there.

and behind nurse’s trunk, there are a great many things of all sorts: cotton reels, boxes without lids, and a broken Jack-a-dandy. In that world, besides nurse and Grisha, there are often mamma and the cat.

Mamma is like a doll, and puss is like papa’s fur-coat, only the coat hasn’t got eyes and a tail.

From the world which is called the nursery a door leads to a great expanse where they have dinner and tea. There stands Grisha’s chair on high legs, and on the wall hangs a clock which exists to swing its pendulum and chime.

Beside the postbox, slightly moist with dew, you are sure to see the clumsy figure of a house porter, wearing a bell-shaped sheepskin and carrying a stick.

He is in a condition akin to catalepsy: he is not asleep or awake, but something between.

If the boxes knew how often people resort to them for the decision of their fate, they would not have such a humble air.

Beside the postbox, slightly moist with dew, you are sure to see the clumsy figure of a house porter, wearing a bell-shaped sheepskin and carrying a stick. He is in a condition akin to catalepsy: he is not asleep or awake, but something between.

If the boxes knew how often people resort to them for the decision of their fate, they would not have such a humble air.

I, anyway, almost kissed my postbox, and as I gazed at it I reflected that the post is the greatest of blessings.

From what I remember now,

I was not so much the essential point of the rendezvous as a detail of it.

Sasha was not so much absorbed in the interview itself as in its romantic mysteriousness, my kisses, the silence of the gloomy trees, my vows.

From the park I took Sasha home with me.

The presence of the beloved woman in one’s bachelor quarters affects one like wine and music.

Usually one begins to speak of the future, and the confidence and self-reliance with which one does so is beyond bounds.

… projects, talk fervently of the rank of general though you have not yet reached the rank of a lieutenant, and altogether you fire off such high-flown nonsense that your listener must have a great deal of love and ignorance of life to assent to it.

Fortunately for men, women in love are always blinded by their feelings and never know anything of life.

Far from not assenting, they actually turn pale with holy awe, are full of reverence and hang greedily on the maniac’s words. Sasha listened to me with attention, but I soon detected an absentminded expression on her face, she did not understand me.

When they came out of the shop, Sasha and her mamma with scared and worried faces would discuss at length having made a mistake, having bought the wrong thing, the flowers in the chintz being too dark, and so on.

Yes, it is a bore to be engaged! I’m glad it’s over.

Now I am married. It is evening. I am sitting in my study reading. Behind me on the sofa Sasha is sitting munching something noisily. I want a glass of beer.

… The world was lighted by the stars, which were scattered thickly all over the sky. I don’t remember ever seeing so many stars. Literally one could not have put a finger in between them.

There were some as big as a goose’s egg, others tiny as hempseed.

… They had come out for the festival procession, every one of them, little and big, washed, renewed and joyful, and every one of them was softly twinkling its beams. The sky was reflected in the water;

I don’t remember ever seeing so many stars. Literally one could not have put a finger in between them. There were some as big as a goose’s egg, others tiny as hempseed. …

They had come out for the festival procession, every one of them, little and big, washed, renewed and joyful, and every one of them was softly twinkling its beams.

The sky was reflected in the water; the stars were bathing in its dark depths and trembling with the quivering eddies. The air was warm and still.

Outside the precincts I did not find the same animated scene as I had beheld in the night. Horses and men looked exhausted, drowsy, scarcely moved, while nothing was left of the tar barrels but heaps of black ash.

When anyone is exhausted and sleepy he fancies that nature, too, is in the same condition.

It seemed to me that the trees and the young grass were asleep. It seemed as though even the bells were not pealing so loudly and gaily as at night.

“Not on any account!” he repeated. “Heaven preserve us!”

“Understand, my dear, that if a young man does not set to work directly, but through women, he must be good for nothing! Why doesn’t he come to me himself?”

After dinner the director lay on the sofa in his study and began reading the letters and newspapers he had received.

The jurymen decided that before going to sleep, each one of them should ransack among his memories and tell something that had happened to him.

Man’s life is brief, but yet there is no man who cannot boast that there have been terrible moments in his past.

One juryman told the story of how he was nearly drowned; another described how, in a place where there were neither doctors nor chemists, he had one night poisoned his own son through giving him zinc vitriol by mistake for soda.

My happiness overwhelmed me and I did not know how to get away from it, and I bored my father and my friends and the servants, continually talking about the fervour of my passion.

Happy people are the most sickening bores.

I was a fearful bore; I feel ashamed of it even now. …

“

As I listened to him then I learned that the same word has thousands of shades of meaning according to the tone in which it is pronounced, and the form which is given to the sentence.

Of course I cannot reproduce the tone or the form; I can only say that as I listened to my friend and walked up and down the room, I was moved to resentment, indignation, and contempt together with him.

On reading the letter my mother turned pale and began trembling all over; then an expression of mingled tears and laughter came into her face. She began crying and laughing.

This conflict of tears and laughter always reminds me of the flickering and spluttering of a brightly burning candle when one sprinkles it with water.

Reading the letter once more, mother called together all the household, and in a voice broken with emotion began explaining to us that there had been four Gundasov brothers: one Gundasov had died as a baby;

He was a hardworking capable man who did not drink and was not without a certain fancy and feeling for form, but yet he was an atrocious tailor.

His work was ruined by hesitation.

… The idea that his cut was not fashionable enough made him alter everything half a dozen times, walk all the way to the town simply to study the dandies, and in the end dress us in suits that even a caricaturist would have called …

he informed me that he was not my uncle, but my uncle’s footman, Pyotr. The appearance of this Pyotr, far better dressed than Pobyedimsky or me, excited in me the utmost astonishment, which, to tell the truth, has lasted to this day.

Can such dignified, respectable people with stern and intellectual faces really be footmen? And what for?

Pyotr told me that my uncle was in the garden with my mother. I rushed into the garden.

Pyotr told me that my uncle was in the garden with my mother. I rushed into the garden.

Nature, knowing nothing of the history of the Gundasov family and the rank of my uncle, felt far more at ease and unconstrained than I.

There was a clamour going on in the garden such as one only bears at fairs. Masses of starlings flitting through the air and hopping about the walks were noisily chattering as they hunted for cockchafers.

“Make all the haste you can to live, my friends …” he said. “

God forbid you should sacrifice the present for the future! There is youth, health, fire in the present; the future is smoke and deception!

As soon as you are twenty begin to live.”

“Yes …” my uncle went on, “love, marry, do silly things.

Foolishness is a great deal more living and healthy than our straining and striving after rational life.

”

“We shall get soaked, Fyolka,” mutters Terenty. “There won’t be a dry spot left on us. … Ho-ho, my girl! It’s run down my neck! But don’t be frightened, silly. …

The grass will be dry again, the earth will be dry again, and we shall be dry again. There is the same sun for us all.

”

“Holy, holy, holy …” says Terenty, crossing himself. “

Don’t be afraid, little orphan! It is not from spite that it thunders.

”

The children fall asleep thinking of the homeless cobbler, and, in the night, Terenty comes to them, makes the sign of the cross over them, and puts bread under their heads.

And no one sees his love. It is seen only by the moon which floats in the sky and peeps caressingly through the holes in the wall of the deserted barn.

What a silly! I can just imagine what a nervous fidget she’ll be in and how her tournure will quiver when she does not find me in the arbour! I shan’t go, though. … Bother her!”

But, I repeat, powerful is the enemy of mankind.

“Though I might, perhaps, just out of curiosity …” he was musing, half an hour later. “I might go and look from a distance what sort of a creature she is. … It would be interesting to have a look at her!

“It’s stupid!” I said to myself. “

That phenomenon is only terrible because I don’t understand it; everything we don’t understand is mysterious.

”

Corncrakes, quails, nightingales, and woodcocks were calling, crickets and grasshoppers were chirruping. There was a light mist over the grass, and clouds were scurrying straight ahead across the sky near the moon.

Nature was awake, as though afraid of missing the best moments of her life.

I walked along a narrow path at the very edge of a railway embankment. The moonlight glided over the lines which were already covered with dew. Great shadows from the clouds kept flitting over the embankment. Far ahead, a dim green light was glimmering peacefully.

“It’s altogether abominable,” said Zaikin after a brief silence. “

I maintain, sir, that summer holidays are the invention of the devil and of woman.

The devil was actuated in the present instance by malice, woman by excessive frivolity. Mercy on us, it is not life at all; it is hard labour, it is hell!

“I don’t blame you for your insincerity,” sighed Ilyin. “I did not mean that when I spoke of it. … Your insincerity is natural and in the order of things.

If people agreed together and suddenly became sincere, everything would go to the devil.

”

Seeking for some explanation, she could not understand how it was she did not pull away the hand to which Ilyin was clinging like a leech, and why, like Ilyin, she hastily glanced to right and to left to see whether anyone was looking.

The clouds and the pines stood motionless, looking at them severely, like old ushers seeing mischief, but bribed not to tell the school authorities.

The sentry stood like a post on the embankment and seemed to be looking at the seat.

Sofya Petrovna turned towards the embankment with a burning face. The engine slowly crawled by, then came the carriages. It was not the local train, as she had supposed, but a goods train.

The trucks filed by against the background of the white church in a long string like the days of a man’s life, and it seemed as though it would never end.

But at last the train passed, and the last carriage with the guard and a light in it had disappeared behind the trees. Sofya Petrovna turned round sharply, and without looking at Ilyin, walked rapidly back along the track. She had regained her self-possession.

But when Andrey Ilyitch arrived soon afterwards she hardly greeted him. The rush of false feeling had already passed off without proving anything to her, only irritating and exasperating her by its falsity. She was sitting by the window, feeling miserable and cross.

It is only by being in trouble that people can understand how far from easy it is to be the master of one’s feelings and thoughts.

Sofya Petrovna said afterwards that there was a tangle within her which it was as difficult to unravel as to count a flock of sparrows rapidly flying by.

“And why did I go there this afternoon like a fool?” she thought, tormenting herself. “And am I really so weak that I cannot depend upon myself?”

Fear magnifies danger.

By the time Andrey Ilyitch was finishing the last course, she had firmly made up her mind to tell her husband everything and to flee from danger!

… her appeased conscience told her, would probably have been carried off their feet in her position, and would have lost their balance, while she had almost died of shame, had been miserable, and was now running out of the danger which perhaps did not exist!

She was so touched by her own virtue and determination that she even looked at herself two or three times in the looking-glass.

When it got dark, visitors arrived. The men sat down in the dining room to play cards; the ladies remained in the drawing room and the verandah. The last to arrive was Ilyin. He was gloomy, morose, and looked ill.

After thinking a little and asking his wife several unimportant questions, he delivered himself of his opinions on the family, on infidelity … spoke listlessly for about ten minutes and got into bed again. His moralizing produced no effect.

There are a great many opinions in the world, and a good half of them are held by people who have never been in trouble!

In spite of the late hour, summer visitors were still walking outside. Sofya Petrovna put on a light cape, stood a little, thought a little. … She still had resolution enough to say to her sleeping husband:

“My father of blessed memory used to like to have his heels tickled by peasant women after dinner. I am just like him, with this difference, that after dinner I always like my tongue and my brains gently stimulated.

Sinful man as I am, I like empty talk on a full stomach.

Will you allow me to have a chat with you?”

“Well, how do you like that, sir? But to proceed.

There are no minnesingers or bards nowadays, and celebrity is created almost exclusively by the newspapers.

The day after the dedication of the bridge, I greedily snatched up the local Messenger, and looked for myself in it. I spent a long time running my eyes over all the four pages, and at last there it was—hurrah! I began reading:

but the picture was misty, vague, as he had never in his life seen a drawing room. The pretty and adoring women were not a success either, for, except Katya, he knew no adoring woman, not even one respectable girl.

People who know nothing about life usually picture life from books, but Yegor Savvitch knew no books either.

He had tried to read Gogol, but had fallen asleep on the second page.

The pretty and adoring women were not a success either, for, except Katya, he knew no adoring woman, not even one respectable girl. People who know nothing about life usually picture life from books, but Yegor Savvitch knew no books either.

He had tried to read Gogol, but had fallen asleep on the second page.

“It won’t burn, drat the thing!” the widow bawled down below, as she set the samovar. “Katya, give me some charcoal!”

“Katya, give me the cucumbers! Go to Sidorov’s and get some kvass, you jade!”

Like wolves in a cage, the three friends kept pacing to and fro from one end of the room to the other.

They talked without ceasing, talked, hotly and genuinely; all three were excited, carried away. To listen to them it would seem they had the future, fame, money, in their hands.

To whom those names belonged he had forgotten years ago, and he only repeated them from habit. From habit, too, he swept his room and entry, and set his fat little four-legged copper samovar.

If Zotov had not had these habits he would not have known how to occupy his old age.

The little samovar slowly began to get hot, and all at once, unexpectedly, broke into a tremulous bass hum.

“Hoity-toity! We are virtuous! … Won’t put up with cynicism? As though it were cynicism! What’s the use of firing off those foreign words? My dear girl, it’s a thing that has happened ever since the world began, sanctified by tradition.

What’s a fireman for if not to make love to the cook?

”

I had heard that, though she was only twenty-five or twenty-six, she was ugly, uninteresting, and as insignificant as anybody, and was only distinguished from the ordinary ladies of the district by her immense wealth.

It has always seemed to me that wealth is felt, and that the rich must have special feelings unknown to the poor.

Often as I passed by Nadyezhda Lvovna’s big fruit garden, in which stood the large, heavy house with its windows always curtained, I thought: “What is she thinking at this moment? Is there happiness behind those blinds?” and so on.

“Blockhead!” the prince filtered through his teeth, looking after him. “

It’s wonderful how disgusting it sometimes is to see satisfied faces.

A stupid, animal feeling due to hunger, I expect. … What was I saying? Oh, yes, about going into the Service, … I should be ashamed to take the salary, and yet, to tell the truth, it is stupid.

“What shall I say?” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “In reality mother’s never well.

You see, she is a woman, and women, Nikolay Ilyitch, have always something the matter with them.

”

“

Why is it that if you pull one hair it hurts, but if you pull a lot at once it doesn’t hurt a bit?

Ha, ha! And, you know, it’s a pity you don’t have whiskers. Here ought to be shaved … but here at the sides the hair ought to be left. …”

And he thought nature itself had given man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult moments of spiritual strain he might be able to hide the secrets of his nest as the fox and the wild duck do.

Every family has its joys and its horrors, but however great they may be, it’s hard for an outsider’s eye to see them; they are a secret.

The father of the old lady who had just driven by, for instance, had for some offence lain for half his lifetime under the ban of the wrath of Tsar Nicolas I; her husband had been a gambler;

The greenish light of the lamp lies sparsely on the cheap furniture in patched white covers, on the pitiful flowers and the posts on which ivy is trained. … There is a smell of geranium and carbolic.

The little clock on the wall ticks timidly, as though abashed at the presence of a strange man.

“I am ready,” says Marya Petrovna, coming into the room five minutes later, dressed, washed, and ready for action. “Let us go.”

His relations have parted from him, the servants will not stay more than a month; they have no friends; his wife and children are always on tenterhooks from terror over every step they take.

He does not shout at them nor beat them, his virtues are far more numerous than his defects, but when he goes out of the house they all feel better, and more at ease.

Why it is so the woman herself cannot say.

“I can’t make out what possesses people to get married!” she said, looking about her for her pocket-handkerchief. “

Life is so short, one has so little freedom, and they must put chains on themselves!

”

“A woman …” smiled Susanna. “It’s not my fault that God has cast me into this mould, is it? I’m no more to blame for it than you are for having moustaches.

The violin is not responsible for the choice of its case.

I am very fond of myself, but when anyone reminds me that I am a woman, I begin to hate myself. Well, you can go away, and I’ll dress. Wait for me in the drawing room.”

“A woman …” smiled Susanna. “It’s not my fault that God has cast me into this mould, is it? I’m no more to blame for it than you are for having moustaches. The violin is not responsible for the choice of its case.

I am very fond of myself, but when anyone reminds me that I am a woman, I begin to hate myself.

Well, you can go away, and I’ll dress. Wait for me in the drawing room.”

“I am not afraid of Siberia,” the tramp went on muttering. “

Siberia is just as much Russia and has the same God and Tsar as here.

They are just as orthodox Christians as you and I. Only there is more freedom there and people are better off. Everything is better there. Take the rivers there, for instance; they are far better than those here. There’s no end of fish;

There was something strained, cold, apathetic in her movements, smiles, and words; she was not liked, and was thought proud and not very intelligent.

In reality, I fancy, she was resting.

“My dear friend,” her brother would often say to me, sighing and flinging back his hair in his picturesque literary way, “one must never judge by appearances! Look at this book: it has long ago been read.

“It’s depressing to look at you!” said his sister. “

Wagner in Faust dug up worms, but he was looking for a treasure, anyway, and you are looking for worms for the sake of the worms.

”

Come, ask yourself what is the object of your zealous, conscientious work? Tell me, what is it? Why, everything has long ago been extracted that can be extracted from that rubbish in which you are always rummaging.

You may pound water in a mortar and analyse it as long as you like, you’ll make nothing more of it than the chemists have made already.

…”

The children squat on their heels before the box, and, motionless, holding their breath, gaze at the cat. … They are surprised, impressed, and do not hear nurse grumbling as she pursues them. The most genuine delight shines in the eyes of both.

Domestic animals play a scarcely noticed but undoubtedly beneficial part in the education and life of children.

Which of us does not remember powerful but magnanimous dogs, lazy lapdogs, birds dying in captivity, dull-witted but haughty turkeys, mild old tabby cats, who forgave us when we trod on their tails for fun and caused them agonising pain?

… The nose and the cheeks and the eyebrows, all the features, each taken separately, were coarse and heavy, like the furniture and the stove in the Travellers’ Room, but taken all together they gave the effect of something harmonious and even beautiful.

Such is the lucky star, as it is called, of the Russian face: the coarser and harsher its features the softer and more good-natured it looks.

The man was dressed in a gentleman’s reefer jacket, shabby, but bound with wide new braid, a plush waistcoat, and full black trousers thrust into big high boots.

Russian life presents us with an uninterrupted succession of convictions and aspirations, and if you care to know, it has not yet the faintest notion of lack of faith or scepticism.

If a Russian does not believe in God, it means he believes in something else.

”

I found it the sun of my existence, and asked for no other. I studied day and night without rest, ruined myself over books, wept when before my eyes men exploited science for their own personal ends. But my enthusiasm did not last long.

The trouble is that every science has a beginning but not an end, like a recurring decimal.

Zoology has discovered 35,000 kinds of insects, chemistry reckons sixty elements. If in time tens of noughts can be written after these figures.

She looked at him, said nothing, and went on smiling.

After the conversation in the night he seemed to her not tall and broad shouldered, but little, just as the biggest steamer seems to us a little thing when we hear that it has crossed the ocean.

“Well, it is time for me to set off,” she said. “I must put on my things. Tell me where you are going now?”

The coachman’s voice was heard through the door. With a stern, concentrated face she began putting on her things in silence. Liharev wrapped her up, chatting gaily, but every word he said lay on her heart like a weight.

It is not cheering to hear the unhappy or the dying jest.

When the transformation of a live person into a shapeless bundle had been completed, Mlle. Ilovaisky looked for the last time round the Travellers’ Room, stood a moment in silence, and slowly walked out. Liharev went to see her off. …

Grandfather made a noise in his throat, the forest crackled with the frost, and looking at them Vanka chortled too. Before chopping down the Christmas tree, grandfather would smoke a pipe, slowly take a pinch of snuff, and laugh at frozen Vanka. …

The young fir trees, covered with hoar frost, stood motionless, waiting to see which of them was to die.

Wherever one looked, a hare flew like an arrow over the snowdrifts. … Grandfather could not refrain from shouting: “Hold him, hold him … hold him! Ah, the bobtailed devil!”

“Even if one admits that omens sometimes tell the truth, what evil can happen to us? The misfortunes we have endured already, and which are facing us now, are so great that it is difficult to imagine anything worse.

What further harm can you do a fish which has been caught and fried and served up with sauce?

”

“

My youth is thrown away for nothing, like a useless cigarette end,

” I went on musing. “My parents died when I was a little child;

There was no need to tell me she had run away from her husband, that her husband was old and despotic, that she was good-natured and lively; I took it all in at the first glance.

Indeed, it is doubtful whether there is a man in all Europe who cannot spot at the first glance a woman of a certain temperament.

“I did not know I had such a big nephew!” said my aunt, holding out her hand to me and smiling.

I would make a row and carry on so that half a dozen policemen couldn’t have managed me.

The frost makes one spiteful and drives one to drink.

”

In all nature there seemed to be a feeling of hopelessness and pain.

The earth, like a ruined woman sitting alone in a dark room and trying not to think of the past, was brooding over memories of spring and summer and apathetically waiting for the inevitable winter.

Wherever one looked, on all sides, nature seemed like a dark, infinitely deep, cold pit from which neither Kirilov nor Abogin nor the red half-moon could escape. …

I believe that never in their lives, even in delirium, had they uttered so much that was unjust, cruel, and absurd. The egoism of the unhappy was conspicuous in both.

The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools.

Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.

The egoism of the unhappy was conspicuous in both. The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools.

Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.

“Kindly let me go home!” shouted the doctor, breathing hard.

He condemned Abogin and his wife and Paptchinsky and all who lived in rosy, subdued light among sweet perfumes, and all the way home he hated and despised them till his head ached. And a firm conviction concerning those people took shape in his mind.

Time will pass and Kirilov’s sorrow will pass, but that conviction, unjust and unworthy of the human heart, will not pass, but will remain in the doctor’s mind to the grave.

Frolov’s velvety eyes flashed. He twisted a corner of the tablecloth round his finger, made a slight movement, and the dishes, the candlesticks, and the bottles, all jingling and clattering, fell with a crash on the floor.

The waiters, long accustomed to pothouse catastrophes, ran up to the table and began picking up the fragments with grave and unconcerned faces, like surgeons at an operation.

“How well you know how to manage them!” said Almer, and he laughed. “But … move a little away from the table or you will step in the caviar.”

… books, but at the christening party, in his delight that Lyubov Spiridonovna had passed through her confinement successfully, he had permitted himself to drink four glasses of vodka and a glass of wine, the taste of which suggested something midway between vinegar and castor oil.

Spirituous liquors are like seawater and glory: the more you imbibe of them the greater your thirst.

And now as he undressed, Strizhin was aware of an overwhelming craving for drink.

“The departed sleep; the dear ones sleep!” the stranger mutters, sighing loudly. “

They all sleep alike, rich and poor, wise and foolish, good and wicked. They are of the same value now.

And they will sleep till the last trump. The Kingdom of Heaven and peace eternal be theirs.”

… the high school, a very cultured and good-natured old man, who was so appalled when he found a high school boy with a cigarette in his mouth that he turned pale, immediately summoned an emergency committee of the teachers, and sentenced the sinner to expulsion.

This was probably a law of social life: the less an evil was understood, the more fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.

The prosecutor remembered two or three boys who had been expelled and their subsequent life, and could not help thinking that very often the punishment did a great deal more harm than the crime itself.

distress and something like fear came into his big staring eyes. He was most likely thinking now of death, which had so lately carried off his mother and Uncle Ignat.

Death carries mothers and uncles off to the other world, while their children and violins remain upon the earth.

The dead live somewhere in the sky beside the stars, and look down from there upon the earth. Can they endure the parting?

He would understand me perfectly if I really were sorry for the loss of the tobacco, if I felt injured and cried. …

That’s why no one can take the place of a mother in bringing up a child, because she can feel, cry, and laugh together with the child.

One can do nothing by logic and morality. What more shall I say to him? What?”

“A nice task to devise a punishment for him! How can we undertake to bring up the young? In old days people were simpler and thought less, and so settled problems boldly. But we think too much, we are eaten up by logic. …

The more developed a man is, the more he reflects and gives himself up to subtleties, the more undecided and scrupulous he becomes, and the more timidity he shows in taking action.

How much courage and self-confidence it needs, when one comes to look into it closely, to undertake to teach, to judge, to write a thick book. …”

“They would tell me it was the influence of beauty, artistic form,” he meditated. “It may be so, but that’s no comfort. It’s not the right way, all the same. …

Why must morality and truth never be offered in their crude form, but only with embellishments, sweetened and gilded like pills?

It’s not normal. … It’s falsification … deception … tricks. …”

His wife smiled too; it was as pleasant to her as to him that he only mentioned the series, and did not try to find out the number of the winning ticket.

To torment and tantalize oneself with hopes of possible fortune is so sweet, so thrilling!

“It is our series,” said Ivan Dmitritch, after a long silence. “So there is a probability that we have won. It’s only a probability, but there it is!”

“You think it over now, if you have any sense,” Slyunka says to him, twitching his cheek. “You have the thing lying by unused and get no sort of benefit from it. While we need it.

A sportsman without a gun is like a sacristan without a voice.

You ought to understand that, but I see you don’t understand it, so you can have no real sense. … Hand it over!”

The lieutenant looked at the ray, at the familiar furniture, at the door, and the first thing he did was to laugh. His chest and stomach heaved with delicious, happy, tickling laughter.

His whole body from head to foot was overcome by a sensation of infinite happiness and joy in life, such as the first man must have felt when he was created and first saw the world.

Klimov felt a passionate desire for movement, people, talk. His body lay a motionless block; only his hands stirred, but that he hardly noticed, and his whole attention was concentrated on trifles.

“How miserable I am!” he muttered. “My God, how miserable!”

And joy gave way to the boredom of everyday life and the feeling of his irrevocable loss.

I hear them laying the table in the dining room—they are going to have supper, they will eat salad, cabbage pies, fried and baked fish. How hungry I am!

I would consent to endure any martyrdom, to live in the desert without my mother, to feed bears out of my own hands, if only I might first eat just one cabbage pie!

“Lord, purify me a sinner,” I pray, covering my head over. “Guardian angel, save me from the unclean spirit.”

“You are not kind, you know …” said Maxim, looking into his wife’s face.

And for the first time since his marriage he perceived that his wife was not kind.

“I may be unkind,” cried Lizaveta, tapping angrily with her spoon, “but I am not going to give away the holy Easter cake to every drunken man in the road.”

On the morning of Easter Monday, he drank some more to sober himself, and got drunk again.

And with that his downfall began.

His horses, cows, sheep, and hives disappeared one by one from the yard; Maxim was more and more often drunk, debts mounted up, he felt an aversion for his wife.

… of his own, had stayed on and on, was now sitting in the corner at a little round table with his elbow on a thick account book, and apparently had no thought of going, though it was getting on for nine o’clock in the evening.

Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go.

It not infrequently happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly breeding fail to observe that their presence is arousing a feeling akin to hatred in their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling is being concealed with an effort and disguised with a …

“What good news?” answered the deacon, and after a pause he went on with a smile: “

When your children are little, your trouble is small; when your children are big, your trouble is great.

Such goings on, Father Fyodor, that I don’t know what to think of it. It’s a regular farce, that’s what it is.”

I’d say to him, ‘Go to church,’ and he would answer, ‘What for?’ I would begin explaining, and he would say, ‘Why? what for?’ Or he would slap me on the shoulder and say, ‘

Everything in this world is relative, approximate and conditional. I don’t know anything, and you don’t know anything either, dad.

’ ”

“Pyotr means a stone,” said he, as he went into his house. “

My Pyotr is not a stone, but a rag.

A viper has fastened upon him and he pampers her, and hasn’t the pluck to kick her out. Tfoo! To think there should be women like that, God forgive me! Eh? Has she no shame?

“Do you know, deacon, don’t send it!” said Anastasy, pouring himself out a second glass of vodka as though unconsciously. “Forgive him, let him alone! I am telling you … what I really think.

If his own father can’t forgive him, who will forgive him?

And so he’ll live without forgiveness. Think, deacon: there will be plenty to chastise him without you, but you should look out for some who will show mercy to your son! I’ll … I’ll … have just one more. The last, old man.

When I lived like other people, I hadn’t much to trouble about, but now since I lost the image and semblance, there is only one thing I care about, that good people should forgive me.

And remember, too, it’s not the righteous but sinners we must forgive.

Why should you forgive your old woman if she is not sinful? No, you must forgive a man when he is a sad sight to look at … yes!”

And in those days they were making a railway line at Kalantchiko, and there were swarms and swarms of tramps and vagabonds of all sorts like locusts. Father pulled himself up afterwards, but it was too late.

A word is not a sparrow, if it flies out you can’t catch it.

They drove, sir, by the wood, and all at once there was someone galloping on horseback behind them. Father was not of the chickenhearted brigade—that I couldn’t say—but he felt uneasy;

“That she forgave it quickly means that she had something bad in her mind.

Young wives do not forgive quickly.

”

“What I have told you was about my own wife, about myself. Oh, my God!

I was to blame, I wounded her, but can it have been easier to die than to forgive?

That’s typical feminine logic—cruel, merciless logic. Oh, even then when she was living she was cruel! I recall it all now! It’s all clear to me now!”

The rooks awakening, flew one after another in silence over the earth.

No meaning was to be seen in the languid flight of those long-lived birds, nor in the morning which is repeated punctually every twenty-four hours, nor in the boundless expanse of the steppe.

The overseer smiled and said:

Nervously, with the flutter of a captured bird, the lady fumbled in her skirt and drew out a fat manuscript.

Pavel Vassilyevitch liked no articles but his own.

When threatened with the necessity of reading other people’s, or listening to them, he felt as though he were facing the cannon’s mouth. Seeing the manuscript he took fright and hastened to say:

I am insolent, I am intrusive, but be magnanimous. Tomorrow I’m leaving for Kazan and I should like to know your opinion today. Grant me half an hour of your attention … only one half-hour … I implore you!”

Pavel Vassilyevitch was cotton-wool at core, and could not refuse.

When it seemed to him that the lady was about to burst into sobs and fall on her knees, he was overcome with confusion and muttered helplessly.

To begin with, I will tell her that she is mistaken in supposing that I am in love with her. That’s a thing one does not say to a lady as a rule, though.

To tell a lady that one’s not in love with her, is almost as rude as to tell an author he can’t write.

The best thing will be to explain my views of marriage.

And my ungovernable temper is a very suspicious symptom.

But why do these great ideas always come too late? Why?

“And it was a lie about the races, too, and a lie about the pension. And you are deceiving me, Borenka. … I feel your generous tactfulness. I see through you!

Your boots were too small, because your heart is too big.

Ah, Borenka, Borenka! I understand it all and feel it!”

Give it up. I must stick in my filthy hole. This minute, here I am sitting, looking at your angel face, yet something is drawing me home to my hole. Such is my fate.

You can’t draw a dung-beetle to a rose.

But it’s time I was going, my boy. It’s getting dark.”

He began talking again about the races and his winnings, about some Panama hat for which he had paid sixteen roubles the day before.

He told lies with the same relish with which he ate herring and drank.

His son sat on in silence for an hour, and began to say goodbye.

A glass of wine, I beg. … Of course, it would be very agreeable that one’s wife should be rather plump, but for mutual happiness it is not of great consequence; what matters is the mind.

Properly speaking, a woman does not need mind either, for if she has brains she will have too high an opinion of herself, and take all sorts of ideas into her head.

One cannot do without education nowadays, of course, but education is of different kinds. It would be pleasing for one’s wife to know French and German, to speak various languages, very pleasing;

… And even now, in spite of my good-humoured baldness, meek corpulence, and unassuming air, she still looks askance at me, and feels put out when I go to see my brother.

Hatred it seems can no more be forgotten than love.

…

“Cleverer, maybe, that’s true, young man; but what’s the use of that?

What earthly good is cleverness to people on the brink of ruin? One can perish without cleverness.

What’s the good of cleverness to a huntsman if there is no game? What I think is that God has given men brains and taken away their strength. People have grown weak, exceedingly weak.

triple-action, with ejector, kills at six hundred paces, central sight. Let me draw your attention, M’sieu, to the beauty of the finish. The most fashionable system, M’sieu.

We sell a dozen every day for burglars, wolves, and lovers.

Very correct and powerful action, hits at a great distance, and kills wife and lover with one bullet. As for suicide, M’sieu, I don’t know a better pattern.”

… Here, for instance, this revolver of the Lefaucher pattern costs only eighteen roubles, but …” (the shopman pursed up his face contemptuously) “… but, M’sieu, it’s an old-fashioned make. They are only bought by hysterical ladies or the mentally deficient.

To commit suicide or shoot one’s wife with a Lefaucher revolver is considered bad form nowadays.

Smith-Wesson is the only pattern that’s correct style.”

Sigaev suddenly felt mortified and sorry that he would be dead, and would miss seeing the agonies of the traitress.

Revenge is only sweet when one can see and taste its fruits, and what sense would there be in it if he were lying in his coffin, knowing nothing about it?

“Hadn’t I better do this?” he pondered. “I’ll kill him, then I’ll go to his funeral and look on, and after the funeral I’ll kill myself. They’d arrest me, though, before the funeral, and take away my pistol.

Society would be pleased if the government were to send all the husbands to Sahalin. Oh, M’sieu, you don’t know how it excites my indignation to see the corruption of morals nowadays.

To love other men’s wives is as much the regular thing today as to smoke other men’s cigarettes and to read other men’s books.

Every year our trade gets worse and worse—it doesn’t mean that wives are more faithful, but that husbands resign themselves to their position and are afraid of the law and penal servitude.”

… came in the student stood at the buffet drinking tea while the postman, with his hands thrust up his sleeves and the same look of anger still on his face, paced up and down the platform in solitude, staring at the ground under his feet.

With whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the autumn nights?

when fate wants to wipe you and your family off the face of the earth, it remains inexorable in its persecution, and the first misfortune is commonly only the first of a long series. …

Misfortunes are like stones. One stone has only to drop from a high cliff for others to be set rolling after it.

In short, as I came away from the requiem service at Putohin’s, I believed that he and his family were in a bad way.

she washes and scrubs, and is by turns a midwife, a matchmaker, or a beggar. It is true she, too, is not disinclined to drown her sorrows, but even when she has had a drop she does not forget her duties.

In Russia there are many such tough old women, and how much of its welfare rests upon them!

When he has finished his tea, Vassya packs up his books in a satchel and goes behind the stove; his greatcoat ought to be hanging there beside his granny’s clothes. A minute later he comes out from behind the stove and asks:

After standing for a while by the engine, Yasha saunters lazily to the station; here he looks at the eatables in the refreshment bar, reads aloud some quite uninteresting notice, and goes back slowly to the cattle van.

His face expresses neither boredom nor desire; apparently he does not care where he is, at home, in the van, or by the engine.

Towards evening the train stops near a big station. The lamps have only just been lighted along the line; against the blue background in the fresh limpid air the lights are bright and pale like stars;

“Upon my word!” the inspector interrupts him. “No one is indignant, no one criticizes. And why? It is very simple.

An abomination strikes the eye and arouses indignation only when it is exceptional, when the established order is broken by it.

Here, where, saving your presence, it constitutes the long-established program and forms and enters into the basis of the order itself, where every sleeper on the line bears the trace of it and stinks of it, one too easily grows accustomed to it! Yes, sir!”

The hotelkeeper listens out of politeness and reluctantly drinks tea. Malahin sighs and groans, gesticulates, jests about his ill-luck, but everything shows that the loss he has sustained does not trouble him much.

He doesn’t mind whether he has lost or gained as long as he has listeners, has something to make a fuss about, and is not late for his train.

An hour later Malahin and Yasha, laden with bags and boxes, go downstairs from the hotel room to the front door to get into a sledge and drive to the station. They are seen off by the hotelkeeper, the waiter, and various women.

“

It’s awful! Without languages I’m like a bird without wings.

I might just as well give up the work.”

“Her hair isn’t naturally curly; she curls it.

It’s a strange thing! She works from morning to night, and yet she has time to curl her hair.

”

Seeing her out after the lesson, Vorotov dressed and went to the theatre himself. He went, and fancied that he was going simply for change and amusement, and that he was not thinking about Alice at all.

He could not admit that a serious man, preparing for a learned career, lethargic in his habits, could fling up his work and go to the theatre simply to meet there a girl he knew very little, who was unintelligent and utterly unintellectual.

Yet for some reason his heart was beating during the intervals, and without realizing what he was doing, he raced about the corridors and foyer like a boy impatiently looking for someone, and he was disappointed when the interval was over.

… Salrnanov is coarse and very Tatar, but he has had a love affair that has ended in marriage. … I am the same as everyone else, and I, too, shall have the same experience as everyone else, sooner or later. …”

And the thought that he was an ordinary person, and that his life was ordinary, delighted him and gave him courage.

He pictured her and his happiness as he pleased, and put no rein on his imagination.

He began describing very minutely the incident of the kiss, and a moment later relapsed into silence. …

In the course of that moment he had told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it.

He had imagined that he could have been telling the story of the kiss till next morning. Listening to him, Lobytko, who was a great liar and consequently believed no one, looked at him sceptically and laughed.

I made a movement with my hand and felt somebody’s elbow. … I opened my eyes and only imagine—a woman. Black eyes, lips red as a prime salmon, nostrils breathing passionately—a bosom like a buffer. …”

“Excuse me,” Merzlyakov interrupted calmly, “I understand about the bosom, but how could you see the lips if it was dark?”

Lobytko began trying to put himself right and laughing at Merzlyakov’s unimaginativeness. It made Ryabovitch wince. He walked away from the box, got into bed, and vowed never to confide again.

“We were expecting you all yesterday? Did you come all right? Had a good journey?

Mercy on us! you might let him say ‘how do you do’ to his father! I am his father after all!

”

“Well, Christmas will soon be here,” the father said in a pleasant singsong voice, rolling a cigarette of dark reddish tobacco. “It doesn’t seem long since the summer, when mamma was crying at your going … and here you are back again. …

Time flies, my boy. Before you have time to cry out, old age is upon you.

Mr. Lentilov, take some more, please help yourself! We don’t stand on ceremony!”

“

In California they don’t drink tea, but gin.

”

“

And we had lentils for supper yesterday.

”

The cat obediently lay down on his mattress and closed his eyes.

Judging from the expression of his face and whiskers, he was displeased with himself for having lost his temper and got into a fight.

Kashtanka began whining resentfully, while the gander craned his neck and began saying something rapidly, excitedly, distinctly, but quite unintelligibly.

When he woke he did not utter a sound, did not stir, and did not even open his eyes. He would have been glad not to wake, for, as was evident, he was not greatly in love with life.

Nothing interested him, he showed an apathetic and nonchalant attitude to everything, he disdained everything and, even while eating his delicious dinner, sniffed contemptuously.

When she woke Kashtanka began walking about the room and sniffing the corners. She and the cat were the only ones allowed to go all over the flat;

As a rule, their master went off somewhere in the evening and took the cat and the gander with him. Left alone, Auntie lay down on her little mattress and began to feel sad.

Melancholy crept on her imperceptibly and took possession of her by degrees, as darkness does of a room.

It began with the dog’s losing every inclination to bark, to eat, to run about the rooms, and even to look at things; then vague figures, half dogs, half human beings, with countenances attractive, pleasant, but incomprehensible, would appear in her imagination;

“It’s talent! It’s talent!” he said. “Unquestionable talent! You will certainly be successful!”

And Auntie grew so used to the word talent, that every time her master pronounced it, she jumped up as if it had been her name.

Auntie had a doggy dream that a porter ran after her with a broom, and she woke up in a fright.

When the master went out, carrying the candle with him, there was darkness again. Auntie felt frightened. The gander did not scream, but again she fancied that there was some stranger in the room.

What was most dreadful was that this stranger could not be bitten, as he was unseen and had no shape.

And for some reason she thought that something very bad would certainly happen that night. Fyodor Timofeyitch was uneasy too.

The sledge stopped at a big strange-looking house, like a soup-ladle turned upside down. The long entrance to this house, with its three glass doors, was lighted up with a dozen brilliant lamps.

The doors opened with a resounding noise and, like jaws, swallowed up the people who were moving to and fro at the entrance.

There were a great many people, horses, too, often ran up to the entrance, but no dogs were to be seen.

Fyodor Timofeyitch stood looking about him indifferently, waiting to be made to do something silly.

He danced listlessly, carelessly, sullenly, and one could see from his movements, his tail and his ears, that he had a profound contempt for the crowd, the bright light, his master and himself.

When he had performed his allotted task, he gave a yawn and sat down.

Infected by his gaiety, I too began laughing at the thought that in a minute I should be drenched to the skin and might be struck by lightning.

Riding swiftly in a hurricane when one is breathless with the wind, and feels like a bird, thrills one and puts one’s heart in a flutter.

By the time we rode into our courtyard the wind had gone down, and big drops of rain were pattering on the grass and on the roofs. There was not a soul near the stable.

The whole evening till suppertime he was singing, whistling, playing noisily with the dog and racing about the room after it, so that he nearly upset the servant with the samovar.

And at supper he ate a great deal, talked nonsense, and maintained that when one eats fresh cucumbers in winter there is the fragrance of spring in one’s mouth.

When I went to bed I lighted a candle and threw my window wide open, and an undefined feeling took possession of my soul. I remembered that I was free and healthy, that I had rank and wealth, that I was beloved;

And what happened afterwards? Why—nothing. In the winter when we lived in town Pyotr Sergeyitch came to see us from time to time.

Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and in summer; in the town and in winter they lose their charm.

When you pour out tea for them in the town it seems as though they are wearing other people’s coats, and as though they stirred their tea too long.

And what happened afterwards? Why—nothing. In the winter when we lived in town Pyotr Sergeyitch came to see us from time to time. Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and in summer; in the town and in winter they lose their charm.

When you pour out tea for them in the town it seems as though they are wearing other people’s coats, and as though they stirred their tea too long.

In the town, too, Pyotr Sergeyitch spoke sometimes of love, but the effect was not at all the same as in the country. In the town we were more vividly conscious of the wall that stood between us.

And he sat and was silent, and did not say to me: “Don’t weep.”

He understood that I must weep, and that the time for this had come.

I saw from his eyes that he was sorry for me; and I was sorry for him, too, and vexed with this timid, unsuccessful man who could not make a life for me, nor for himself.

In the fifth century, just as now, the sun rose every morning and every evening retired to rest.

In the morning, when the first rays kissed the dew, the earth revived, the air was filled with the sounds of rapture and hope; while in the evening the same earth subsided into silence and plunged into gloomy darkness.

… When the lamp begins to flicker, the green patch and the shadows come to life, and are set in motion, as though by the wind. It is stuffy.

There is a smell of cabbage soup, and of the inside of a boot-shop.

The baby’s crying. For a long while he has been hoarse and exhausted with crying; but he still goes on screaming, and there is no knowing when he will stop. And Varka is sleepy. Her eyes are glued together, her head droops, her neck aches.

The baby’s crying. For a long while he has been hoarse and exhausted with crying; but he still goes on screaming, and there is no knowing when he will stop. And Varka is sleepy. Her eyes are glued together, her head droops, her neck aches.

She cannot move her eyelids or her lips, and she feels as though her face is dried and wooden, as though her head has become as small as the head of a pin.

“Hush-a-bye, my baby wee,” she hums, “while I cook the groats for thee. …”

At last, tired to death, she does her very utmost, strains her eyes, looks up at the flickering green patch, and listening to the screaming, finds the foe who will not let her live.

That foe is the baby.

She laughs. It seems strange to her that she has failed to grasp such a simple thing before. The green patch, the shadows, and the cricket seem to laugh and wonder too.

“Never mind, never mind, Yegor boy, never mind,” Father Christopher muttered rapidly—“never mind, my boy. … Call upon God. … You are not going for your harm, but for your good.

Learning is light, as the saying is, and ignorance is darkness.

… That is so, truly.”

“And if all go in for trading and sowing corn there will be no one to acquire learning.”

And considering that each of them had said something weighty and convincing, Kuzmitchov and Father Christopher both looked serious and cleared their throats simultaneously.

Deniska, who had been listening to their conversation without understanding a word of it, shook his head and, rising in his seat, lashed at both the bays. A silence followed.

… The music in the grass was hushed, the petrels had flown away, the partridges were out of sight, rooks hovered idly over the withered grass; they were all alike and made the steppe even more monotonous.

A hawk flew just above the ground, with an even sweep of its wings, suddenly halted in the air as though pondering on the dreariness of life, then fluttered its wings and flew like an arrow over the steppe, and there was no telling why it flew off and what it wanted.

In the distance a windmill waved its sails. …

Children, on the other hand, saw nothing strange in the invasion of their domain by the big coachman. “Let him play,” they thought, “as long as he doesn’t fight!”

In the same way little dogs see nothing strange in it when a simple-hearted big dog joins their company uninvited and begins playing with them.

Deniska outstripped Yegorushka, and was evidently very much pleased at having done so.

Yegorushka was exhausted by the heat and drowsiness, but he raced off after him all the same.

Deniska was in his twentieth year, was a coachman and going to be married, but he had not left off being a boy.

He was very fond of flying kites, chasing pigeons, playing knuckle-bones, running races, and always took part in children’s games and disputes.

“And I said to him, ‘God bless your compressed air!’ ” he brought out through his laughter, waving both hands.

“God bless your compressed air!”

Moisey Moisevitch got up, too, and with his hands on his stomach, went off into shrill laughter like the yap of a lapdog.

Corncrakes and quails do not call in the July nights, the nightingale does not sing in the woodland marsh, and there is no scent of flowers, but still the steppe is lovely and full of life.

As soon as the sun goes down and the darkness enfolds the earth, the day’s weariness is forgotten, everything is forgiven, and the steppe breathes a light sigh from its broad bosom.

As though because the grass cannot see in the dark that it has grown old, a gay youthful twitter rises up from it, such as is not heard by day;

Everything can be seen through the mist, but it is hard to make out the colours and the outlines of objects.

Everything looks different from what it is.

You drive on and suddenly see standing before you right in the roadway a dark figure like a monk; it stands motionless, waiting, holding something in its hands. … Can it be a robber? The figure comes closer, grows bigger;

One glances at the pale green, star-spangled sky on which there is no cloudlet, no spot, and understands why the warm air is motionless, why nature is on her guard, afraid to stir: she is afraid and reluctant to lose one instant of life.

Of the unfathomable depth and infinity of the sky one can only form a conception at sea and on the steppe by night when the moon is shining.

It is terribly lonely and caressing; it looks down languid and alluring, and its caressing sweetness makes one giddy.

she is afraid and reluctant to lose one instant of life. Of the unfathomable depth and infinity of the sky one can only form a conception at sea and on the steppe by night when the moon is shining.

It is terribly lonely and caressing; it looks down languid and alluring, and its caressing sweetness makes one giddy.

You drive on for one hour, for a second. … You meet upon the way a silent old barrow or a stone figure put up God knows when and by whom;

“To school? Aha! … Well, may the Queen of Heaven help you. Yes. One brain is good, but two are better. To one man God gives one brain, to another two brains, and to another three. … To another three, that is true. …

One brain you are born with, one you get from learning, and a third with a good life.

So you see, my lad, it is a good thing if a man has three brains. Living is easier for him, and, what’s more, dying is, too. Dying is, too. … And we shall all die for sure.”

The latter broke into a deep guffaw of laughter and coughing and said: “I say, lads, Dymov has killed a snake!”

There are people whose intelligence can be gauged at once by their voice and laughter.

The man with the black beard belonged to that class of fortunate individuals; impenetrable stupidity could be felt in his voice and laugh.

they were all people with a splendid past and a very poor present. Of their past they all—every one of them—spoke with enthusiasm; their attitude to the present was almost one of contempt.

The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living.

Yegorushka did not yet know that, and before the stew had been all eaten he firmly believed that the men sitting round the cauldron were the injured victims of fate.

The day had passed peacefully; the quiet peaceful night had come, and they could stay tranquilly at home in heaven. … Yegorushka saw the sky by degrees grow dark and the mist fall over the earth—saw the stars light up, one after the other. …

When you gaze a long while fixedly at the deep sky thoughts and feelings for some reason merge in a sense of loneliness.

One begins to feel hopelessly solitary, and everything one used to look upon as near and akin becomes infinitely remote and valueless;

All were resting, musing on something, and they glanced cursorily at the cross over which patches of red light were dancing.

There is something melancholy, pensive, and extremely poetical about a solitary tomb; one feels its silence, and the silence gives one the sense of the presence of the soul of the unknown man who lies under the cross.

Is that soul at peace on the steppe? Does it grieve in the moonlight? Near the tomb the steppe seems melancholy, dreary and mournful;

Over their porridge they were all silent, thinking of what they had just heard.

Life is terrible and marvellous, and so, however terrible a story you tell in Russia, however you embroider it with nests of robbers, long knives and such marvels, it always finds an echo of reality in the soul of the listener, and only a man who has been a good deal affected by education looks askance distrustfully, and even he will be silent.

The cross by the roadside, the dark bales of wool, the wide expanse of the plain, and the lot of the men gathered together by the camp fire—all this was of itself so marvellous and terrible that the fantastic colours of legend and fairytale were …

… was due to the flickering light or because everyone wanted to make out the man’s face first of all, it happened, strangely enough, that at the first glance at him they all saw, first of all, not his face nor his clothes, but his smile.

It was an extraordinarily good-natured, broad, soft smile, like that of a baby on waking, one of those infectious smiles to which it is difficult not to respond by smiling too.

The stranger, when they did get a good look at him, turned out to be a man of thirty, ugly and in no way remarkable. He was a tall Little Russian, with a long nose, long arms and long legs;

“What did I say? I don’t remember … How could one remember?

My words flowed at the time like water from a tap, without stopping to take breath.

Ta-ta-ta! And now I can’t utter a word. … Well, so she married me. … She’s gone now to her mother’s, the magpie, and while she is away here I wander over the steppe. I can’t stay at home. It’s more than I can do!”

Having poured out his soul before these strangers, he settled down quietly at last, and, looking at the fire, sank into thought.

At the sight of this happy man everyone felt depressed and longed to be happy, too.

Everyone was dreamy. Dymov got up, walked about softly by the fire, and from his walk, from the movement of his shoulder-blades, it could be seen that he was weighed down by depression and yearning.

“Our Mother Russia is the he-ad of all the world!” Kiruha sang out suddenly in a harsh voice, choked and subsided.

The steppe echo caught up his voice, carried it on, and it seemed as though stupidity itself were rolling on heavy wheels over the steppe.

“It’s time to go,” said Panteley. “Get up, lads.”

I talk intellectually, drink a cup of tea with them, laugh, ask them what I don’t know, … and they like it. So that’s how it is, my boy.

Learning is light and ignorance is darkness.

Study! It’s hard, of course; nowadays study is expensive. … Your mother is a widow; she lives on her pension, but there, of course …”

When Yegorushka ran out of the gate Ivan Ivanitch and Father Christopher, the former waving his stick with the crook, the latter his staff, were just turning the corner.

Yegorushka felt that with these people all that he had known till then had vanished from him forever.

He sank helplessly on to the little bench, and with bitter tears greeted the new unknown life that was beginning for him now. …

Yegorushka felt that with these people all that he had known till then had vanished from him forever. He sank helplessly on to the little bench, and with bitter tears greeted the new unknown life that was beginning for him now. …

What would that life be like?

The lights were motionless. There seemed to be something in common between them and the stillness of the night and the disconsolate song of the telegraph wire.

It seemed as though some weighty secret were buried under the embankment and only the lights, the night, and the wires knew of it.

“How glorious, O Lord!” sighed Ananyev; “such space and beauty that one can’t tear oneself away! And what an embankment! It’s not an embankment, my dear fellow, but a regular Mont Blanc. It’s costing millions. …”

“Because. …

Thoughts like that are for the end of life, not for the beginning of it. You are too young for them.

”

The thinker reaches that stage and—comes to a halt! There is nowhere further to go. The activity of the normal brain is completed with this, and that is natural and in the order of things. Our misfortune is that we begin thinking at that end.

What normal people end with we begin with.

From the first start, as soon as the brain begins working independently, we mount to the very topmost, final step and refuse to know anything about the steps below.”

“

I must say that as a rule I was a great hand at combining my lofty ideas with the lowest prose.

“Thoughts of the darkness of the grave did not prevent me from giving busts and legs their full due. Our dear Baron’s exalted ideas do not prevent him from going on Saturdays to Vukolovka on amatory expeditions.

When people cry, they don’t like their tears to be seen. And I lighted match after match and went on striking till the box was empty. What I wanted with this ungenerous illumination, I can’t conceive to this day.

Cold-hearted people are apt to be awkward, and even stupid.

“In the end Kisotchka took my arm and we set off. Going out of the gate, we turned to the right and sauntered slowly along the soft dusty road. It was dark.

“Kisotchka’s face was flooded with bewilderment. She stepped back from the street lamp and, completely overwhelmed, gazed at me with wide-open eyes. I gripped her by the arm, began showering kisses on her face, her neck, her shoulders, and went on making vows and promises.

In love affairs vows and promises are almost a physiological necessity.

There’s no getting on without them. Sometimes you know you are lying and that promises are not necessary, but still you vow and protest. Kisotchka, utterly overwhelmed, kept staggering back and gazing at me with round eyes.

For the first time in my life I was really thinking eagerly and intensely, and that seemed to me so monstrous that I said to myself: ‘I am going off my head.’

A man whose brain does not work at all times, but only at painful moments, is often haunted by the thought of madness.

“I spent a day and a night in this misery, then a second night, and learning from experience how little my philosophy was to me, I came to my senses and realised at last what sort of a creature I was.

“Me convince anybody!” said the engineer. “My dear soul, do you suppose I claim to do that? God bless you! To convince you is impossible.

You can reach conviction only by way of personal experience and suffering!

”

“

There is no making out anything in this world.

”

I saw the bewitching features of the most beautiful face I have ever met in real life or in my dreams.

Before me stood a beauty, and I recognized that at the first glance as I should have recognized lightning.

I am ready to swear that Masha—or, as her father called her, Mashya—was a real beauty, but I don’t know how to prove it.

“How tall they have grown! It is not long since they used to come with their nurse, and they are at school already!

The old grow older while the young grow up.

… Have you had dinner?”

“God, forgive me, a sinner!” He said the same thing now though he had become rich. What difference was there? And after death Fyodor rich would not be buried in gold, not in diamonds, but in the same black earth as the poorest beggar.

Fyodor would burn in the same fire as cobblers.

Fyodor resented all this, and, too, he felt weighed down all over by his dinner, and instead of prayer he had all sorts of thoughts in his head about his box of money, about thieves, about his bartered, ruined soul.

“I don’t agree with you,” said their host the banker. “I have not tried either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one may judge a priori, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?”

“The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life, I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

”

Show them to people who know the languages. Let them read them. If they find not one mistake I implore you to fire a shot in the garden. That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages, but the same flame burns in them all.

Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them!” The prisoner’s desire was fulfilled. The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry, and a manual of medicine, and a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

The old banker remembered all this, and thought:

“Oh, thank you; I was afraid that you, too, had forgotten your princess.

People only remember their enemies, but they forget their friends.

Have you, too, come to pray?”

There was nothing but the desire to amuse yourself with living puppets, nothing else. …

A person who does not feel the difference between a human being and a lapdog ought not to go in for philanthropy.

I assure you, there’s a great difference between human beings and lapdogs!”

The bearer of that name, that is I, see myself as a man of sixty-two, with a bald head, with false teeth, and with an incurable tic douloureux.

I am myself as dingy and unsightly as my name is brilliant and splendid.

My head and my hands tremble with weakness; my neck, as Turgenev says of one of his heroines, is like the handle of a double bass; my chest is hollow; my shoulders narrow; when I talk or lecture, my mouth turns down at one corner;

As regards my present manner of life, I must give a foremost place to the insomnia from which I have suffered of late.

If I were asked what constituted the chief and fundamental feature of my existence now, I should answer, Insomnia.

As in the past, from habit I undress and go to bed exactly at midnight. I fall asleep quickly, but before two o’clock I wake up and feel as though I had not slept at all.

… entered the service, retired, or died, then summon to your assistance the vast memory of that soldier, and he will not only tell you the year, the month and the day, but will furnish you also with the details that accompanied this or that event.

Only one who loves can remember like that.

He is the guardian of the University traditions.

I believe if Patti had sung in his very ear, if a horde of Chinese had invaded Russia, if there had been an earthquake, he would not have stirred a limb, but screwing up his eye, would have gone on calmly looking through his microscope.

What is he to Hecuba or Hecuba to him, in fact? I would give a good deal to see how this dry stick sleeps with his wife at night.

Another characteristic is his fanatical faith in the infallibility of science, and, above all, of everything written by the Germans. He believes in himself, in his preparations;

But that is not the point.

I only ask people to be indulgent to my weakness, and to realize that to tear from the lecture-theatre and his pupils a man who is more interested in the history of the development of the bone medulla than in the final object of creation would be equivalent to taking him and nailing him up in his coffin without waiting for him to be dead.

Sleeplessness and the consequent strain of combating increasing weakness leads to something strange in me.

Then when Yegor opens the door my colleague declares that I shall catch cold, while I make a show of being ready to go even into the street with him.

And when at last I go back into my study my face still goes on smiling, I suppose from inertia.

A little later another ring at the bell. Somebody comes into the hall, and is a long time coughing and taking off his things. Yegor announces a student. I tell him to ask him in.

as we do so, we cautiously pat each other on the back, touch each other’s buttons, and it looks as though we were feeling each other and afraid of scorching our fingers.

Both of us laugh, though we say nothing amusing.

When we are seated we bow our heads towards each other and begin talking in subdued voices.

“Oh, well!

Better to have lost your five years than have to spend the rest of your life in doing work you do not care for.

”

“Why is it you all come to me?” I cry angrily. “

Do I keep a shop? I don’t deal in subjects.

For the thousand and oneth time I ask you all to leave me in peace! Excuse my brutality, but I am quite sick of it!”

I say a great deal, but he still remains silent. By degrees I calm down, and of course give in.

The doctor gets a subject from me for his theme not worth a halfpenny, writes under my supervision a dissertation of no use to anyone, with dignity defends it in a dreary discussion, and receives a degree of no use to him.

The rings at the bell may follow one another endlessly, but I will confine my description here to four of them. The bell rings for the fourth time, and I hear familiar footsteps, the rustle of a dress, a dear voice. …

… is a very clever man, and that Woe from Wit is not a dull play, the stage gives me the same feeling of conventionality which bored me so much forty years ago when I was regaled with the classical howling and beating on the breast.

And every time I come out of the theatre more conservative than I go in.

The sentimental and confiding public may be persuaded that the stage, even in its present form, is a school; but anyone who is familiar with a school in its true sense will not be caught with that bait.

she gives very brief replies; or, to rest for a minute, I turn round and watch her as she looks dreamily at some medical journal or review. And at such moments I notice that her face has lost the old look of confiding trustfulness.

Her expression now is cold, apathetic, and absentminded, like that of passengers who had to wait too long for a train.

She is dressed, as in old days, simply and beautifully, but carelessly; her dress and her hair show visible traces of the sofas and rocking-chairs in which she spends whole days at a stretch. And she has lost the curiosity she had in old days.

He is dressed in a very short reefer jacket, a flowered waistcoat, breeches very full at the top and very narrow at the ankle, with a large check pattern on them, and yellow boots without heels.

He has prominent eyes like a crab’s, his cravat is like a crab’s neck, and I even fancy there is a smell of crab-soup about the young man’s whole person.

He visits us every day, but no one in my family knows anything of his origin nor of the place of his education, nor of his means of livelihood.

he criticizes music with great authority, and I have noticed that people are eager to agree with him.

Rich people always have dependents hanging about them; the arts and sciences have the same.

I believe there is not an art nor a science in the world free from “foreign bodies” after the style of this Mr. Gnekker. I am not a musician, and possibly I am mistaken in regard to Mr.

Instead of the simple dishes to which I was accustomed when I was a student and when I was in practice, now they feed me with a puree with little white things like circles floating about in it, and kidneys stewed in madeira.

My rank as a general and my fame have robbed me forever of cabbage-soup and savoury pies, and goose with applesauce, and bream with boiled grain.

They have robbed me of our maidservant Agasha, a chatty and laughter-loving old woman, instead of whom Yegor, a dull-witted and conceited fellow with a white glove on his right hand, waits at dinner.

Gnekker and the young ladies talk of fugues, of counterpoint, of singers and pianists, of Bach and Brahms, while my wife, afraid of their suspecting her of ignorance of music, smiles to them sympathetically and mutters: “That’s exquisite … really! You don’t say so! …”

Gnekker eats with solid dignity, jests with solid dignity, and condescendingly listens to the remarks of the young ladies.

From time to time he is moved to speak in bad French, and then, for some reason or other, he thinks it necessary to address me as “Votre Excellence.”

Liza laughs spasmodically and screws up her eyes. I watch them both, and it is only now at dinner that it becomes absolutely evident to me that the inner life of these two has slipped away out of my ken.

I have a feeling as though I had once lived at home with a real wife and children and that now I am dining with visitors, in the house of a sham wife who is not the real one, and am looking at a Liza who is not the real Liza.

A startling change has taken place in both of them; I have missed the long process by which that change was effected, and it is no wonder that I can make nothing of it. Why did that change take place? I don’t know.

I feel that I can no longer bear the sight of my lamp, of my books, of the shadows on the floor. I cannot bear the sound of the voices coming from the drawing room.

Some force unseen, uncomprehended, is roughly thrusting me out of my flat.

I leap up hurriedly, dress, and cautiously, that my family may not notice, slip out into the street. Where am I to go?

Then he sits down to the table, takes a glass, and at once begins talking. What is most characteristic in his manner of talking is the continually jesting tone, a sort of mixture of philosophy and drollery as in Shakespeare’s gravediggers.

He is always talking about serious things, but he never speaks seriously.

His judgments are always harsh and railing, but, thanks to his soft, even, jesting tone, the harshness and abuse do not jar upon the ear, and one soon grows used to them.

“Do leave off!

Why are you sitting here like two toads, poisoning the air with your breath?

Give over!”

my thoughts are evil, petty, I am insincere with myself, and at such times my theory of life may be expressed in the words the celebrated Araktcheev said in one of his intimate letters: “

Nothing good can exist in the world without evil, and there is more evil than good.

” That is, everything is disgusting; there is nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years I have already lived must be reckoned as wasted.

“If so, what drives me every evening to those two toads?”

And I vow to myself that I will never go to Katya’s again, though I know I shall go next evening.

Ringing the bell at the door and going upstairs, I feel that I have no family now and no desire to bring it back again. It is clear that the new Araktcheev thoughts are not casual, temporary visitors, but have possession of my whole being.

I must say the same of all the literary novelties I have read during the last ten or fifteen years; not one of them is remarkable, and not one of them can be praised without a “but.”

Cleverness, a good tone, but no talent; talent, a good tone, but no cleverness; or talent, cleverness, but not a good tone.

I don’t say the French books have talent, cleverness, and a good tone. They don’t satisfy me, either.

In my childhood and early youth I had for some reason a terror of doorkeepers and attendants at the theatre, and that terror has remained with me to this day. I am afraid of them even now.

It is said that we are only afraid of what we do not understand.

And, indeed, it is very difficult to understand why doorkeepers and theatre attendants are so dignified, haughty, and majestically rude. I feel exactly the same terror when I read serious articles.

Often I admire a boy and girl, both flaxen-headed and ragged, who clamber on the fence and laugh at my baldness. In their shining little eyes I read, “Go up, go up, thou baldhead!”

They are almost the only people who care nothing for my celebrity or my rank.

Visitors do not come to me every day now. I will only mention the visits of Nikolay and Pyotr Ignatyevitch. Nikolay usually comes to me on holidays, with some pretext of business, though really to see me.

Or he makes fun of me good-naturedly.

It is wonderful how petty a man may become!

I am capable of dreaming all dinnertime of how Gnekker will turn out to be an adventurer, how my wife and Liza will come to see their mistake, and how I will taunt them—and such absurd thoughts at the time when I am standing with …

What answer was I to make her?

It is easy to say “work,” or “give your possessions to the poor,” or “know yourself,” and because it is so easy to say that, I don’t know what to answer.

My colleagues when they teach therapeutics advise “the individual study of each separate case.”

I could see the spikes of the fence, the gaunt, drowsy trees by the window, the road, the dark streak of woodland, there was a serene, very bright moon in the sky and not a single cloud, perfect stillness, not one leaf stirring.

I felt that everything was looking at me and waiting for me to die.

…

but all that does not prevent me from dying in a strange bed, in misery, in utter loneliness. Of course, no one is to blame for that; but

I in my foolishness dislike my popularity. I feel as though it had cheated me.

At ten o’clock I fall asleep, and in spite of the tic I sleep soundly, and should have gone on sleeping if I had not been awakened. Soon after one came a sudden knock at the door.

I read the telegram, and my dismay does not last long. I am dismayed, not by what Liza and Gnekker have done, but by the indifference with which I hear of their marriage.

They say philosophers and the truly wise are indifferent. It is false: indifference is the paralysis of the soul; it is premature death.

I go to bed again, and begin trying to think of something to occupy my mind. What am I to think about? I feel as though everything had been thought over already and there is nothing which could hold my attention now.

When daylight comes I sit up in bed with my arms round my knees, and to pass the time I try to know myself.

“Know thyself” is excellent and useful advice; it is only a pity that the ancients never thought to indicate the means of following this precept.

When I have wanted to understand somebody or myself I have considered, not the actions, in which everything is relative, but the desires.

And now I examine myself: what do I want?

I want our wives, our children, our friends, our pupils, to love in us, not our fame, not the brand and not the label, but to love us as ordinary men.

Anything else? I should like to have had helpers and successors. Anything else? I should like to wake up in a hundred years’ time and to have just a peep out of one eye at what is happening in science.

and in all my criticisms of science, the theatre, literature, my pupils, and in all the pictures my imagination draws, even the most skilful analyst could not find what is called a general idea, or the god of a living man.

And if there is not that, then there is nothing.

In a state so poverty-stricken, a serious ailment, the fear of death, the influences of circumstance and men were enough to turn upside down and scatter in fragments all which I had once looked upon as my theory of life, and in which I had …

So there is nothing surprising in the fact that I have overshadowed the last months of my life with thoughts and feelings only worthy of a slave and barbarian, and that now I am indifferent and take no heed of the dawn.

When a man has not in him what is loftier and mightier than all external impressions a bad cold is really enough to upset his equilibrium and make him begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog howling in every sound.

And all his pessimism or optimism with his thoughts great and small have at such times significance as symptoms and nothing more.

… In the latter I find, among other things, the following paragraph: “Our distinguished savant, Professor Nikolay Stepanovitch So-and-so, arrived yesterday in Harkov, and is staying in the So-and-so Hotel.”

Apparently, illustrious names are created to live on their own account, apart from those that bear them.

Now my name is promenading tranquilly about Harkov; in another three months, printed in gold letters on my monument, it will shine bright as the sun itself, while I shall be already under the moss.

Every conversation, even about the weather, she invariably turned into an argument.

She had a passion for catching at words, pouncing on contradictions, quibbling over phrases.

You would begin talking to her, and she would stare at you and suddenly interrupt: “Excuse me, excuse me, Petrov, the other day you said the very opposite!”

“What a lovely day it has been!” said Nikitin, going in to him. “I wonder at you—how can you sit indoors?”

Ippolit Ippolititch was not a talkative person; he either remained silent or talked of things which everybody knew already.

Now what he answered was:

He would agree, and embrace her enthusiastically.

Everything that was just in what she said seemed to him extraordinary and amazing; and what did not fit in with his convictions seemed to him naive and touching.

Sometimes he was in a philosophical mood, and he would begin to discuss some abstract subject while she listened and looked at his face with curiosity.

In October the school sustained a heavy loss: Ippolit Ippolititch was taken ill with erysipelas on the head and died.

For two days before his death he was unconscious and delirious, but even in his delirium he said nothing that was not perfectly well known to everyone.

“The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. … Horses eat oats and hay. …”

“

God grant us all such a death.

”

And he did, in fact, by the morning laugh at himself and call himself an old woman; but it was clear to him that his peace of mind was lost, perhaps, forever, and that in that little two-story house happiness was henceforth impossible for him.

He realized that the illusion had evaporated, and that a new life of unrest and clear sight was beginning which was incompatible with peace and personal happiness.

Next day, which was Sunday, he was at the school chapel, and there met his colleagues and the director.

“Where am I, my God? I am surrounded by vulgarity and vulgarity. Wearisome, insignificant people, pots of sour cream, jugs of milk, cockroaches, stupid women. …

There is nothing more terrible, mortifying, and distressing than vulgarity.

I must escape from here, I must escape today, or I shall go out of my mind!”

“Come, why look at it? No philosophizing, please.

Vodka is given us to be drunk, sturgeon to be eaten, women to be visited, snow to be walked upon.

For one evening anyway live like a human being!”

“How poor and stupid it all is!” thought Vassilyev. “What is there in all this trumpery I see now that can tempt a normal man and excite him to commit the horrible sin of buying a human being for a rouble?

I understand any sin for the sake of splendor, beauty, grace, passion, taste; but what is there here?

What is there here worth sinning for? But … one mustn’t think!”

“How unskillfully they sell themselves!” he thought. “

How can they fail to understand that vice is only alluring when it is beautiful and hidden, when it wears the mask of virtue?

Modest black dresses, pale faces, mournful smiles, and darkness would be far more effective than this clumsy tawdriness. Stupid things! If they don’t understand it of themselves, their visitors might surely have taught them. …”

“

Any place seems nice when one is not in it.

”

“Yes, when I hadn’t the money to study. Even if I hadn’t anyone could understand that.

A beggar is anyway a free man, and you are a slave.

”

If that sinful woman who had poisoned herself was called fallen, it was difficult to find a fitting name for all these who were dancing now to this tangle of sound and uttering long, loathsome sentences.

They were not on the road to ruin, but ruined.

“There is vice,” he thought, “but neither consciousness of sin nor hope of salvation. They are sold and bought, steeped in wine and abominations, while they, like sheep, are stupid, indifferent, and don’t understand. My God! My God!”

‘Well found,’ said one of them, ‘let us have a bit.’ ‘What do you mean? How can you?’ cried the other in horror. ‘Have you forgotten that today is Wednesday?’ And they would not eat it.

After murdering a man, they came out of the forest in the firm conviction that they were keeping the fast.

In the same way these men, after buying women, go their way imagining that they are artists and men of science. …”

There are all sorts of talents—talent for writing, talent for the stage, talent for art; but he had a peculiar talent—a talent for humanity. He possessed an extraordinarily fine delicate scent for pain in general.

As a good actor reflects in himself the movements and voice of others, so Vassilyev could reflect in his soul the sufferings of others.

When he saw tears, he wept; beside a sick man, he felt sick himself and moaned;

The doctor proceeded to ask Vassilyev whether he had had any secret vices as a boy, or had received injuries to his head; whether he had had any aberrations, any peculiarities, or exceptional propensities.

Half the questions usually asked by doctors of their patients can be left unanswered without the slightest ill effect on the health

, but Mihail Sergeyitch, the medical student, and the artist all looked as though if Vassilyev failed to answer one question all would be lost. As he received answers, the doctor for some reason noted them down on a slip of paper.

he asked himself with vexation. “Those who say that have never lived in freedom like Merik and Kalashnikov, and have never loved Lyubka; they have been beggars all their lives, have lived without any pleasure, and have only loved their wives, who are like frogs.”

And he thought about himself that he had not hitherto been a thief, a swindler, or even a brigand, simply because he could not, or had not yet met with a suitable opportunity.

A year and a half passed. In spring, after Easter, Yergunov, who had long before been dismissed from the hospital and was hanging about without a job, came out of the tavern in Ryepino and sauntered aimlessly along the street.

“Yes, very nice, the lieutenant draws plans all the day and you sit in the kitchen and pine for home. … Plans indeed! …

It is not plans that matter, but a human life. Life is not given twice, it must be treated mercifully.

”

The two of them, he and the soldier, threaded their way to the head of the ship, then stood at the rail and looked up and down.

Overhead deep sky, bright stars, peace and stillness, exactly as at home in the village, below darkness and disorder.

The tall waves were resounding, no one could tell why. Whichever wave you looked at each one was trying to rise higher than all the rest and to chase and crush the next one;

Whichever wave you looked at each one was trying to rise higher than all the rest and to chase and crush the next one; after it a third as fierce and hideous flew noisily, with a glint of light on its white crest.

The sea has no sense and no pity.

If the steamer had been smaller and not made of thick iron, the waves would have crushed it to pieces without the slightest compunction, and would have devoured all the people in it with no distinction of saints or sinners.

I used always to be talking to her across the fence, and in the end I made a little gate in the fence so as not to have to go so far round.

From womankind comes much evil into the world and every kind of abomination.

Not we sinners only; even the saints themselves have been led astray by them. Mashenka did not try to keep me at a distance. Instead of thinking of her husband and being on her guard, she fell in love with me.

“

Live like a dog and you must die a dog’s death,

” said Dyudya.

“Alas, I am forty-six!” I said, laughing.

Ivan Ivanitch smelt of tallow candles and cooking, and that suited him.

His big, puffy, slow-moving body was swathed in a long frock-coat like a coachman’s full coat, with a high waist, and with hooks and eyes instead of buttons, and it would have been strange if he had smelt of eau de cologne, for instance.

“Yes …” Ivan Ivanitch muttered inappropriately. “Burov, the merchant, must have four hundred thousand at least. I said to him: ‘Hand over one or two thousand to the famine. You can’t take it with you when you die, anyway.’ He was offended.

But we all have to die, you know. Death is not a potato.

”

“I am master here; if I like, I can in a moment turn out all that fine crew.” But I knew that all that was nonsense, that I could not turn out anyone, and the word “master” had no meaning.

One may think oneself master, married, rich, a kammer-junker, as much as one likes, and at the same time not know what it means.

After supper someone downstairs began singing in a tenor voice.

“You are very well educated and very well bred, very honest, just, and high-principled, but in you the effect of all that is that wherever you go you bring suffocation, oppression, something insulting and humiliating to the utmost degree.

You have a straightforward way of looking at things, and so you hate the whole world.

You hate those who have faith, because faith is an expression of ignorance and lack of culture, and at the same time you hate those who have no faith for having no faith and no ideals;

“And how splendid, how enviable life might have been!” she said softly, looking reflectively into the fire. “

What a life it might have been! There’s no bringing it back now.

”

I did not understand what was wanted of me by my conscience, and my wife, translating it in her feminine way, made clear to me in the meaning of my agitation.

As often before in the moments of intense uneasiness, I guessed that the whole secret lay, not in the starving peasants, but in my not being the sort of a man I ought to be.

My wife got up with an effort and came up to me.

and while this frantic uproar was going on, I recalled all the details of that strange wild day, unique in my life, and it seemed to me that I really had gone out of my mind or become a different man.

It was as though the man I had been till that day were already a stranger to me.

The doctor drove behind and kept talking loudly with his coachman. From time to time he overtook me, drove side by side, and always, with the same naive confidence that it was very pleasant to me, offered me a cigarette or asked for the matches.

How many such humane, sensitive people there are among us who tear about in all good faith with subscription lists, but don’t pay their tailors or their cooks.

There is no logic in our life; that’s what it is! No logic!

”

… who recalled the existence of doctors only in times of illness, and to whom the name of Dymov sounded in no way different from Sidorov or Tarasov—in the midst of this company Dymov seemed strange, not wanted, and small, though he was tall and broad-shouldered.

He looked as though he had on somebody else’s coat, and his beard was like a shopman’s.

Though if he had been a writer or an artist, they would have said that his beard reminded them of Zola.

I don’t understand landscapes and operas, but the way I look at it is that if one set of sensible people devote their whole lives to them, and other sensible people pay immense sums for them, they must be of use.

I don’t understand them, but not understanding does not imply disbelieving in them.

”

… And your cottage is weighed down and whines pitifully. That corner ought to have been taken more in shadow, but on the whole it is not bad; I like it.”

And the more incomprehensible he talked, the more readily Olga Ivanovna understood him.

After dinner on the second day of Trinity week, Dymov bought some sweets and some savouries and went down to the villa to see his wife. He had not seen her for a fortnight, and missed her terribly.

“

That man crushes me with his magnanimity.

”

“He has been already. It was he noticed that the diphtheria had passed into the nose. What’s the use of Shrek! Shrek’s no use at all, really.

He is Shrek, I am Korostelev, and nothing more.

”

“And his moral force,” he went on, seeming to grow more and more exasperated against someone. “

Not a man, but a pure, good, loving soul, and clean as crystal.

He served science and died for science. And he worked like an ox night and day—no one spared him—and with his youth and his learning he had to take a private practice and work at translations at night to pay for these … vile rags!”

My God! how interesting, how fascinating men were! Nadya recalled the fine expression, ingratiating, guilty, and soft, which came into the officer’s face when one argued about music with him, and the effort he made to prevent his voice from betraying his passion.

In a society where cold haughtiness and indifference are regarded as signs of good breeding and gentlemanly bearing, one must conceal one’s passions.

And he did try to conceal them, but he did not succeed, and everyone knew very well that he had a passionate love of music.

that if his wife came to him for one day, even for one hour, that for such happiness he would be ready to bear any suffering and to thank God.

Better one day of happiness than nothing.

Then he described again what a beautiful and clever wife he had left at home. Then, clutching his head in both hands, he began crying and assuring Semyon that he was not guilty, and was suffering for nothing.

“He is good … good; but you are bad! You are bad! The gentleman is a good soul, excellent, and you are a beast, bad! The gentleman is alive, but you are a dead carcass. …

God created man to be alive, and to have joy and grief and sorrow; but you want nothing, so you are not alive, you are stone, clay!

A stone wants nothing and you want nothing. You are a stone, and God does not love you, but He loves the gentleman!”

“

Our life and the life beyond the grave are equally incomprehensible and horrible.

If anyone is afraid of ghosts he ought to be afraid, too, of me, and of those lights and of the sky, seeing that, if you come to reflect, all that is no less fantastic and beyond our grasp than apparitions from the other world.

I don’t know. Perhaps I am a morbid person, unhinged. It seems to a sound, healthy man that he understands everything he sees and hears, but that ‘seeming’ is lost to me, and from day to day I am poisoning myself with terror.

There is a disease, the fear of open spaces, but my disease is the fear of life.

When I lie on the grass and watch a little beetle which was born yesterday and understands nothing, it seems to me that its life consists of nothing else but fear, and in it I see myself.”

My fancy invented thousands of the gloomiest visions, and I have succeeded in working myself up to an agonizing exaltation, to a state of nightmare, and I assure you that that did not seem to me more terrible than reality.

What I mean is, apparitions are terrible, but life is terrible, too.

I don’t understand life and I am afraid of it, my dear boy; I don’t know. Perhaps I am a morbid person, unhinged.

and I am frightened at the thought that to the day of my death I shall not escape from this falsity.

Today I do something and tomorrow I do not understand why I did it.

I entered the service in Petersburg and took fright; I came here to work on the land, and here, too, I am frightened. … I see that we know very little and so make mistakes every day.

The terror of Dmitri Petrovitch, the thought of whom I could not get out of my head, infected me. I thought of what had happened and could make nothing of it.

I looked at the rooks, and it seemed so strange and terrible that they were flying.

“Why have I done this?” I kept asking myself in bewilderment and despair. “Why has it turned out like this and not differently?

I kept asking myself in bewilderment and despair. “Why has it turned out like this and not differently? To whom and for what was it necessary that she should love me in earnest, and that he should come into my room to fetch his cap?

What had a cap to do with it?

”

“But how? What can I do?” he asked himself, and looked imploringly at the sky and at the trees, as though begging for their help.

But the sky and the trees were mute.

His noble ideas were no help, and his common sense whispered that the agonising question could have no solution but a stupid one, and that today’s scene with the messenger was not the last one of its kind.

But Vlassitch was not one of those men who do fight duels; being called a blackguard and slapped in the face would only make him more unhappy, and would make him shrink into himself more than ever.

These unhappy, defenceless people are the most insufferable, the most tiresome creatures in the world.

They can do anything with impunity. When the luckless man responds to well-deserved reproach by looking at you with eyes full of deep and guilty feeling, and with a sickly smile bends his head submissively, even justice itself could not lift its hand against him.

After two years I gave her all I had to set me free and she went off to town. Yes. … And now I pay her twelve hundred roubles a year. She is an awful woman!

There is a fly, brother, which lays an egg in the back of a spider so that the spider can’t shake it off: the grub fastens upon the spider and drinks its heart’s blood.

That was how this woman fastened upon me and sucks the blood of my heart. She hates and despises me for being so stupid; that is, for marrying a woman like her. My chivalry seems to her despicable.

The front of the lodge faces the hospital; at the back it looks out into the open country, from which it is separated by the grey hospital fence with nails on it.

These nails, with their points upwards, and the fence, and the lodge itself, have that peculiar, desolate, Godforsaken look which is only found in our hospital and prison buildings.

If you are not afraid of being stung by the nettles, come by the narrow footpath that leads to the lodge, and let us see what is going on inside. Opening the first door, we walk into the entry.

that society must see its failings and be horrified. In his criticisms of people he laid on the colours thick, using only black and white, and no fine shades; mankind was divided for him into honest men and scoundrels: there was nothing in between.

He always spoke with passion and enthusiasm of women and of love, but he had never been in love.

In spite of the severity of his judgments and his nervousness, he was liked, and behind his back was spoken of affectionately as Vanya.

but the more sensibly and logically he reasoned, the more acute and agonizing his mental distress became.

It might be compared with the story of a hermit who tried to cut a dwelling-place for himself in a virgin forest; the more zealously he worked with his axe, the thicker the forest grew.

In the end Ivan Dmitritch, seeing it was useless, gave up reasoning altogether, and abandoned himself entirely to despair and terror.

superstition and all the nastiness and abominations of daily life were necessary, since in process of time they worked out to something sensible, just as manure turns into black earth.

There was nothing on earth so good that it had not something nasty about its first origin.

When Andrey Yefimitch undertook his duties he was apparently not greatly concerned about the irregularities at the hospital. He only asked the attendants and nurses not to sleep in the wards, and had two cupboards of instruments put up;

He only asked the attendants and nurses not to sleep in the wards, and had two cupboards of instruments put up; the superintendent, the housekeeper, the medical assistant, and the erysipelas remained unchanged.

Andrey Yefimitch loved intelligence and honesty intensely, but he had no strength of will nor belief in his right to organize an intelligent and honest life about him.

He was absolutely unable to give orders, to forbid things, and to insist. It seemed as though he had taken a vow never to raise his voice and never to make use of the imperative. It was difficult for him to say “Fetch” or “Bring”;

To be any real help to forty patients between morning and dinner was not physically possible, so it could but lead to deception.

If twelve thousand patients were seen in a year it meant, if one looked at it simply, that twelve thousand men were deceived.

To put those who were seriously ill into wards, and to treat them according to the principles of science, was impossible, too, because though there were principles there was no science;

Most likely I should have become a member of some university. Of course, intellect, too, is transient and not eternal, but you know why I cherish a partiality for it.

Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.

Indeed, he is summoned without his choice by fortuitous circumstances from nonexistence into life … what for? He tries to find out the meaning and object of his existence; he is told nothing, or he is told absurdities;

“Morality and logic don’t come in, it all depends on chance. If anyone is shut up he has to stay, and if anyone is not shut up he can walk about, that’s all.

There is neither morality nor logic in my being a doctor and your being a mental patient, there is nothing but idle chance.

”

“I love life; I love it passionately. I have the mania of persecution, a continual agonizing terror; but I have moments when I am overwhelmed by the thirst for life, and then I am afraid of going mad.

I want dreadfully to live, dreadfully!

”

“There is no real difference between a warm, snug study and this ward,” said Andrey Yefimitch. “

A man’s peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but in himself.

”

There’s no answer, of course. We are kept here behind barred windows, tortured, left to rot; but that is very good and reasonable, because there is no difference at all between this ward and a warm, snug study. A convenient philosophy.

You can do nothing, and your conscience is clear, and you feel you are wise.

… No, sir, it is not philosophy, it’s not thinking, it’s not breadth of vision, but laziness, fakirism, drowsy stupefaction.

“

Which of us is the madman?

” he thought with vexation. “I, who try not to disturb my fellow-passengers in any way, or this egoist who thinks that he is cleverer and more interesting than anyone here, and so will leave no one in peace?”

“

Even though one does not believe it makes one somehow easier when one prays a little.

Kiss the icon, my dear fellow.”

As soon as he was alone Andrey Yefimitch abandoned himself to a feeling of relief. How pleasant to lie motionless on the sofa and to know that one is alone in the room!

Real happiness is impossible without solitude.

The fallen angel betrayed God probably because he longed for solitude, of which the angels know nothing. Andrey Yefimitch wanted to think about what he had seen and heard during the last few days, but he could not get Mihail Averyanitch out of his head.

“My honoured friend, don’t believe it!” he whispered, laying his hand on his heart; “don’t believe them. It’s all a sham.

My illness is only that in twenty years I have only found one intelligent man in the whole town, and he is mad.

I am not ill at all, it’s simply that I have got into an enchanted circle which there is no getting out of. I don’t care; I am ready for anything.”

but that evening, at the restaurant, she had suddenly become convinced that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four years, he was so slim, agile, supple, he made puns and hummed to the gipsies’ tunes so charmingly.

Really, the older men were nowadays a thousand times more interesting than the young. It seemed as though age and youth had changed parts.

The Colonel was two years older than her father, but could there be any importance in that if, honestly speaking, there were infinitely more vitality, go, and freshness in him than in herself, though she was only twenty-three?

Everyone was silent. She felt dispirited and weak all over. That she should have made a nun get into a sledge and drive in a company hardly sober seemed to her now stupid, tactless, and almost sacrilegious.

As the intoxication passed off, the desire to deceive herself passed away also.

It was clear to her now that she did not love her husband, and never could love him, and that it all had been foolishness and nonsense.

From the nunnery she went to her father’s and found that he, too, was out. Then she took another sledge and drove aimlessly about the streets till evening.

And for some reason she kept thinking of the aunt whose eyes were red with crying, and who could find no peace anywhere.

And at night they drove out again with three horses to a restaurant out of town and listened to the gipsies.

he began to pick quarrels with him, rail at him in unseemly language and once even tried to strike him, and Rothschild was offended and said, looking at him ferociously:

“If it were not that I respect you for your talent, I would have sent you flying out of the window.”

Then he began to weep. And because of this Yakov was not often asked to play in the orchestra; he was only sent for in case of extreme necessity in the absence of one of the Jews.

And why was it a man could not live so as to avoid these losses and misfortunes? One wondered why they had cut down the birch copse and the pine forest. Why was he walking with no reason on the grazing ground?

Why do people always do what isn’t needful?

Why had Yakov all his life scolded, bellowed, shaken his fists, ill-treated his wife, and, one might ask, what necessity was there for him to frighten and insult the Jew that day? Why did people in general hinder each other from living?

Why did people in general hinder each other from living? What losses were due to it! what terrible losses!

If it were not for hatred and malice people would get immense benefit from one another.

In the evening and the night he had visions of the baby, of the willow, of fish, of slaughtered geese, and Marfa looking in profile like a bird that wants to drink, and the pale, pitiful face of Rothschild, and faces moved down from all …

he would not have to eat or drink, or pay taxes or offend people, and, as a man lies in his grave not for one year but for hundreds and thousands, if one reckoned it up the gain would be enormous.

A man’s life meant loss: death meant gain.

This reflection was, of course, a just one, but yet it was bitter and mortifying; why was the order of the world so strange, that life, which is given to man only once, passes away without benefit?

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.”

And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

When he crossed the river by the ferry boat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there …

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath.

“The past,” he thought, “is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.”

And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

“Don’t be naughty, girls,” Rashevitch said again.

He wanted to be talking himself. If other people talked in his presence, he suffered from a feeling like jealousy.

“So that’s how it is, my dear boy,” he began, looking affectionately at Meier.

If he sat down to write anything, if it were only a letter of congratulation, there would somehow be abuse in the letter. And all this was strange, because in reality he was a man of feeling, given to tears.

Could he be possessed by some devil which hated and slandered in him, apart from his own will?

“It’s bad,” he sighed, as he lay down under the quilt. “It’s bad.”

“The whole town agreed with this opinion. The doctor was buried, and nothing more was said about a violent death. The existence of a man who could have the baseness and wickedness to kill the doctor seemed incredible.

There is a limit even to wickedness, isn’t there?

“All at once, would you believe it, chance led them to discovering the murderer. A vagrant who had been many times convicted, notorious for his vicious life, was seen selling for drink a snuffbox and watch that had belonged to the doctor.

“How do they jeer at you?”

“They call me Mashenka’s Mishenka.”

“Pooh, what nonsense!” cried Anna Akimovna indignantly. “How stupid you all are! What a stupid you are, Misha! How sick I am of you! I can’t bear the sight of you.”

it had all so long been familiar, stale, ordinary. … He believed in nothing but what was original and unusual.

A copybook moral in an original form would move him to tears.

Both his notebooks were filled with extraordinary expressions which he had read in various authors; and when he needed to look up any expression, he would search nervously in both books, and usually failed to find it.

Don’t listen to anyone, my girl; live, have your fling till you are forty, and then you will have time to pray forgiveness—there will be plenty of time to bow down and to sew your shroud.

A candle to God and a poker to the devil! You can do both at once!

Well, how is it to be? Will you make some little man happy?”

Red-haired Masha was kneeling before the bed, gazing at her in mournful perplexity; then she, too, began crying, and laid her face against her mistress’s arm, and without words it was clear why she was so wretched.

“We are fools!” said Anna Akimovna, laughing and crying. “We are fools! Oh, what fools we are!”

“No matter. That’s the wife of the director of the local treasury! Bow, I tell you,” he would grumble insistently. “Your head won’t drop off.”

Anna bowed and her head certainly did not drop off, but it was agonizing.

She did everything her husband wanted her to, and was furious with herself for having let him deceive her like the veriest idiot. She had only married him for his money, and yet she had less money now than before her marriage.

Anna bowed and her head certainly did not drop off, but it was agonizing. She did everything her husband wanted her to, and was furious with herself for having let him deceive her like the veriest idiot.

She had only married him for his money, and yet she had less money now than before her marriage.

In old days her father would sometimes give her twenty kopecks, but now she had not a farthing.

She caught a glimpse over her partner’s shoulder of her father gliding over the floor, putting his arm round a lady and whirling down the ballroom with her.

“How sweet he is when he is sober!” she thought.

She danced the mazurka with the same huge officer; he moved gravely, as heavily as a dead carcase in a uniform, twitched his shoulders and his chest, stamped his feet very languidly—he felt fearfully disinclined to dance.

and with rapture, with indignation, with contempt, convinced that no harm would come to her from it, she said, articulating distinctly each word:

“Be off, you blockhead!”

From this time forward Anna never had one day free, as she was always taking part in picnics, expeditions, performances.

In the morning he called Whitebrow, smacked him hard about the ears, and then showing him a stick, kept repeating to him:

“Go in at the door! Go in at the door! Go in at the door!”

“Yes, when Russians come together they discuss nothing but abstract subjects and women. We are so intellectual, so solemn, that we utter nothing but truths and can discuss only questions of a lofty order.

The Russian actor does not know how to be funny; he acts with profundity even in a farce.

We’re just the same: when we have got to talk of trifles we treat them only from an exalted point of view. It comes from a lack of boldness, sincerity, and simplicity. We talk so often about women, I fancy, because we are dissatisfied.

“Yes, when Russians come together they discuss nothing but abstract subjects and women.

We are so intellectual, so solemn, that we utter nothing but truths and can discuss only questions of a lofty order.

The Russian actor does not know how to be funny; he acts with profundity even in a farce. We’re just the same: when we have got to talk of trifles we treat them only from an exalted point of view.

Lubkov was fond of nature, but he regarded it as something long familiar and at the same time, in reality, infinitely beneath himself and created for his pleasure.

He would sometimes stand still before some magnificent landscape and say: “It would be nice to have tea here.”

One day, seeing Ariadne walking in the distance with a parasol, he nodded towards her and said:

You see for yourself that she has reached the age when she must have a husband or a lover. I respect women as much as you do, but I don’t think certain relations exclude poetry.

Poetry’s one thing and love is another. It’s just the same as it is in farming. The beauty of nature is one thing and the income from your forests or fields is quite another.

”

“You’re really not a man, but a mush, God forgive me! A man ought to be able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad, to make mistakes, to suffer!

A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness!

”

A month later I returned home. It was by now autumn. Every week Ariadne sent my father extremely interesting letters on scented paper, written in an excellent literary style.

It is my opinion that every woman can be a writer.

Ariadne described in great detail how it had not been easy for her to make it up with her aunt and induce the latter to give her a thousand roubles for the journey, and what a long time she had spent in Moscow trying to …

I was bored at the sight of the pictures; I longed to be at home to rest; I was exhausted, looked about for a chair and hypocritically repeated after other people: “How exquisite, what atmosphere!”

Like overfed boa constrictors, we noticed only the most glaring objects.

The shop windows hypnotised us; we went into ecstasies over imitation brooches and bought a mass of useless trumpery.

… reason, I imagined Ariadne with child, and she seemed disgusting to me, and all the women I saw in the trains and at the stations looked to me, for some reason, as if they too were with child, and they too seemed disgusting and pitiable.

I was in the position of a greedy, passionate miser who should suddenly discover that all his gold coins were false.

The pure, gracious images which my imagination, warmed by love, had cherished for so long, my plans, my hopes, my memories, my ideas of love and of woman—all now were jeering and putting out their tongues at me.

The chief, so to say fundamental, characteristic of the woman was an amazing duplicity.

She was continually deceitful every minute, apparently apart from any necessity, as it were by instinct, by an impulse such as makes the sparrow chirrup and the cockroach waggle its antennae.

She was deceitful with me, with the footman, with the porter, with the tradesmen in the shops, with her acquaintances; not one conversation, not one meeting, took place without affectation and pretence.

She argued about free love and freedom in general like a bigoted old woman, declared that Boleslav Markevitch was a better writer than Turgenev. But she was diabolically cunning and sharp, and knew how to seem a highly educated, advanced person in company.

Even at a good-humoured moment, she could always insult a servant or kill an insect without a pang; she liked bullfights, liked to read about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.

For the life Ariadne and I were leading, we had to have a great deal of money. My poor father sent me his pension, all the little sums he received, borrowed for me wherever he could, and when one day he answered me:

I too was introduced to her. She pressed my hand with great warmth, and looking at me ecstatically, thanked me in honeyed cadences for the pleasure I had given her by my writings.

“Don’t you believe her,” Shamohin whispered to me, “she has never read a word of them.”

When I was walking on the seafront in the early evening Shamohin met me with his arms full of big parcels of fruits and dainties.

… mockery, his health gone, his rooms as vulgar in their atmosphere as a cocotte’s, and of the ten thousand he earned every year he could never save ten roubles to send his old mother in the village, and his debts were already about fifteen thousand.

It seemed that if a band of brigands had been living in his rooms his life would not have been so hopelessly, so irremediably ruined as by the presence of this woman.

He began coughing and gasping for breath. He ought to have gone to bed and got warm, but he could not. He kept walking about the rooms, or sat down to the table, nervously fidgeting with a pencil and scribbling mechanically on a paper.

Yakov did not speak. He longed to be rid of Matvey, but he could not give him money, since all the money was in the business; besides, there had never been a case of the family dividing in the whole history of the Terehovs.

Division means ruin.

Yakov said nothing, but still waited for Matvey to go away, and kept looking at his sister, afraid that she would interfere, and that there would be a storm of abuse again, as there had been in the morning.

On one occasion, handing a cup of tea to a young woman who was nursing her baby and wishing to say something agreeable to her, he expressed himself in this way:

“The mother’s breast is the baby’s refreshment bar.”

Reckoning with the beads in Matvey’s room, he asked for money; said he could not go on living at Progonnaya, and several times repeated in a tone of voice that sounded as though he were just going to cry:

Yulia Sergeyevna went out, and after staying a little longer, Laptev said goodbye to the doctor and went home.

When a man is dissatisfied and feels unhappy, how trivial seem to him the shapes of the lime trees, the shadows, the clouds, all the beauties of nature, so complacent, so indifferent!

By now the moon was high up in the sky, and the clouds were scudding quickly below. “But how naive and provincial the moon is, how threadbare and paltry the clouds!” thought Laptev.

Laptev had a glass of vodka, and then began drinking wine. Panaurov drank nothing. He never drank, and never gambled, yet in spite of that he had squandered all his own and his wife’s property, and had accumulated debts.

To squander so much in such a short time, one must have, not passions, but a special talent.

Panaurov liked dainty fare, liked a handsome dinner service, liked music after dinner, speeches, bowing footmen, to whom he would carelessly fling tips of ten, even twenty-five roubles.

To soften the last words, she stroked his head and said:

“You’re not good-looking, but you’re a dear.”

She was so agitated that a faint flush came into her cheeks, and she began discussing eagerly whether it would be the proper thing for her to bless Alyosha with the icon at the wedding.

“We have in it an example of the action of electricity,” he said in French, addressing the lady. “

Every man has in his skin microscopic glands which contain currents of electricity. If you meet with a person whose currents are parallel with your own, then you get love.

”

Not one boy knew when he would be promoted to be a clerk; not one of the men knew whether his employer was satisfied with him or not.

Nothing was directly forbidden, and so the clerks never knew what was allowed, and what was not.

They were not forbidden to marry, but they did not marry for fear of displeasing their employer and losing their place.

… it always appeared that he had made his wife and all her relations happy, that he had been munificent to his children, and a benefactor to his clerks and employees and that everyone in the street and all his acquaintances remembered him in their prayers.

Whatever he did was always right, and if things went wrong with people it was because they did not take his advice; without his advice nothing could succeed.

In church he stood in the foremost place, and even made observations to the priests, if in his opinion they were not conducting the service properly, and believed that this was pleasing God because God loved him.

I am worn out with ideas—my brain’s crowded with them, and I feel as though there were a pulse throbbing in my head. I don’t in the least want to become anything special, to create something great.

I simply want to live, to dream, to hope, to be in the midst of everything.

… Life is short, my dear fellow, and one must make the most of everything.”

I don’t in the least want to become anything special, to create something great. I simply want to live, to dream, to hope, to be in the midst of everything. …

Life is short, my dear fellow, and one must make the most of everything.

”

I tremble over every step I take as though I should be flogged for it. I am timid before nonentities, idiots, brutes, who are immeasurably my inferiors mentally and morally; I am afraid of porters, doorkeepers, policemen, gendarmes.

I am afraid of everyone, because I was born of a mother who was terrified, and because from a child I was beaten and frightened!

… You and I will do well to have no children. Oh, God, grant that this distinguished merchant family may die with us!”

He’s a churchwarden because he can domineer over the choristers and keep them under his thumb; he’s the patron of a school because he likes to feel the teacher is his subordinate and enjoys lording it over him.

The merchant does not love trading, he loves dominating, and your warehouse is not so much a commercial establishment as a torture chamber!

And for a business like yours, you want clerks who have been deprived of individual character and personal life—and you make them such by forcing them in childhood to lick the dust for a crust of bread, and you’ve trained them from childhood to believe …

“What keeps me here?” And he felt angry with himself and with the black dog, which still lay stretched on the stone yard, instead of running off to the open country, to the woods, where it would have been free and happy.

It was clear that that dog and he were prevented from leaving the yard by the same thing; the habit of bondage, of servitude.

…

“

Let us live, and we shall see.

”

“

Good breeding is shown, not by not upsetting the sauce, but by not noticing it when somebody else does

,” said Byelokurov, with a sigh. “Yes, a splendid, intellectual family! I’ve dropped out of all decent society; it’s dreadful how I’ve dropped out of it! It’s all through work, work, work!”

“That’s nothing much,” I said. “You mustn’t look for miracles only among sick people and old women. Isn’t health a miracle? And life itself?

Whatever is beyond understanding is a miracle.

”

Byelokurov, drawling out “Er—er,” began a long-winded disquisition on the malady of the age—pessimism. He talked confidently, in a tone that suggested that I was opposing him.

Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, burnt-up steppe cannot induce such deep depression as one man when he sits and talks, and one does not know when he will go.

“It’s not a question of pessimism or optimism,” I said irritably; “its simply that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no sense.”

And still more rarely, at moments when I am sad and depressed by loneliness, I have dim memories, and little by little I begin to feel that she is thinking of me, too—that she is waiting for me, and that we shall meet. …

Misuce, where are you?

The Superintendent said to me: “I only keep you out of regard for your worthy father; but for that you would have been sent flying long ago.” I replied to him: “

You flatter me too much, your Excellency, in assuming that I am capable of flying.

” And then I heard him say: “Take that gentleman away; he gets upon my nerves.”

but for that you would have been sent flying long ago.” I replied to him: “You flatter me too much, your Excellency, in assuming that I am capable of flying.” And then I heard him say: “

Take that gentleman away; he gets upon my nerves.

”

To continue this conversation was unprofitable.

My father worshipped himself, and nothing was convincing to him but what he said himself.

Besides, I knew perfectly well that the disdain with which he talked of physical toil was founded not so much on reverence for the sacred fire as on a secret dread that I should become a workman, and should set the whole town talking about …

“Look up,” he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the same umbrella with which he had beaten me that afternoon. “Look up at the sky! Even the tiniest stars are all worlds! How insignificant is man in comparison with the universe!”

And he said this in a tone that suggested that it was particularly agreeable and flattering to him that he was so insignificant.

How absolutely devoid of talent and imagination he was! Sad to say, he was the only architect in the town, and in the fifteen to twenty years that I could remember not one single decent house had been built in it.

and the fat, well-fed-looking chimneys were invariably crowned by wire caps with squeaking black cowls. And for some reason all these houses, built by my father exactly like one another, vaguely reminded me of his top-hat and the back of his head, stiff and stubborn-looking.

In the course of years they have grown used in the town to the poverty of my father’s imagination. It has taken root and become our local style.

This same style my father had brought into my sister’s life also, beginning with christening her Kleopatra (just as he had named me Misail).

And how I longed to be filled with the sense of freedom, if only for that one morning, that I might not think of what was being done in the town, not think of my needs, not feel hungry!

Nothing has so marred my existence as an acute feeling of hunger, which made images of buckwheat porridge, rissoles, and baked fish mingle strangely with my best thoughts.

Here I was standing alone in the open country, gazing upward at a lark which hovered in the air at the same spot, trilling as though in hysterics, and meanwhile I was thinking:

When he was drunk he was very pale, and kept rubbing his hands and laughing with a sound like a neigh: “hee-hee-hee!” By way of bravado he used to strip and run about the country naked.

He used to eat flies and say they were rather sour.

One day, after dinner, he ran breathless into the lodge and said: “Go along, your sister has come.”

“

Lice consume the grass, rust consumes the iron, and lying the soul. Lord, have mercy upon us sinners.

”

Or, thinking about something, would answer his thoughts aloud:

“Anything may happen! Anything may happen!”

When I went home from my work, all the people who were sitting on benches by the gates, all the shopmen and boys and their employers, made sneering and spiteful remarks after me, and this upset me at first and seemed to be simply monstrous.

… but gloomy old woman, who always foreboded some harm, was afraid of all dreams, and even in the bees and wasps that flew into her room saw omens of evil, and the fact that I had become a workman, to her thinking, boded nothing good.

“Your life is ruined,” she would say, mournfully shaking her head, “ruined.”

Her adopted son Prokofy, a huge, uncouth, redheaded fellow of thirty, with bristling moustaches, a butcher by trade, lived in the little house with her.

I felt that all my doings, my desires, and everything I had thought and said till then were trivial in comparison with my loneliness, in comparison with my present suffering, and the suffering that lay before me in the future.

Alas, the thoughts and doings of living creatures are not nearly so significant as their sufferings!

And without clearly realizing what I was doing, I pulled at the bell of the Dolzhikovs’ gate, broke it, and ran along the street like some naughty boy, with a feeling of terror in my heart, expecting every moment that they would come out and …

… My wife and I went down to the millpond and drew out the net which Stepan had thrown in over night in our presence. A big pike was struggling in it, and a crayfish was twisting about, clawing upwards with its pincers.

“Let them go,” said Masha. “Let them be happy too.”

Because we got up so early and afterwards did nothing, that day seemed very long, the longest day in my life. Towards evening Stepan came back and I went home.

“

Poverty? There is want to be sure, there’s different sorts of want, Madam.

If a man is in prison, or let us say blind or crippled, that really is trouble I wouldn’t wish anyone, but if a man’s free and has all his senses, if he has his eyes and his hands and his strength and God, what …

“Tell me, Stepan, did you marry for love?” asked Masha.

“Love among us in the village!” answered Stepan, and he gave a laugh.

“Properly speaking, Madam, if you care to know, this is my second marriage. I am not a Kurilovka man, I am from Zalegoshtcho, but afterwards I was taken into Kurilovka when I married.

“They say a wife is a helpmate to her husband. What do I want with a helpmate? I help myself; I’d rather she talked to me, and not clack, clack, clack, but circumstantially, feelingly.

What is life without good conversation?

”

… that was that he believed the chief thing on earth was truth and justice, and that his salvation, and that of the whole people, was only to be found in truth and justice, and so more than anything in the world he loved just dealing.

I told my wife she saw the spots on the glass, but not the glass itself

; she said nothing in reply, or hummed like Stepan “oo-loo-loo-loo.”

I did not grieve for Dubetchnya. I grieved for my love which, too, was threatened with its autumn.

What an immense happiness it is to love and be loved, and how awful to feel that one is slipping down from that high pinnacle!

Masha returned from the town towards the evening of the next day. She was displeased with something, but she concealed it, and only said, why was it all the window frames had been put in for the winter it was enough to suffocate one.

“

And what a long night it is. Oh dear, if only it were over!

”

I am told that I walked about the streets bareheaded, staggering, and singing aloud, while a crowd of boys ran after me, shouting:

If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be: “Nothing passes away.”

I believe that nothing passes away without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has significance for our present and our future existence.

If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be: “Nothing passes away.”

I believe that nothing passes away without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has significance for our present and our future existence.

What I have been through has not been for nothing. My great troubles, my patience, have touched people’s hearts, and now they don’t call me “Better-than-nothing,” they don’t laugh at me, and when I walk by the shops they don’t throw water over me.

In the corner, facing the door, under the holy images, bottle labels and newspaper cuttings were stuck on the walls instead of pictures.

The poverty, the poverty!

Of the grown-up people there were none at home; all were at work at the harvest. On the stove was sitting a white-headed girl of eight, unwashed and apathetic; she did not even glance at them as they came in.

“Puss, puss!” Sasha called to her. “Puss!”

“She can’t hear,” said the little girl; “she has gone deaf.”

Nikolay and Olga realized from the first glance what life was like here, but said nothing to one another; in silence they put down their bundles, and went out into the village street.

“She can’t hear,” said the little girl; “she has gone deaf.”

“Oh, she was beaten.”

Nikolay and Olga realized from the first glance what life was like here, but said nothing to one another; in silence they put down their bundles, and went out into the village street.

“

Look at the sky without winking, you will see angels.

”

Sasha and Motka and all the little girls in the hut huddled on the stove in the corner behind Nikolay’s back, and from that refuge listened in silent terror, and the beating of their little hearts could be distinctly heard.

Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill, there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death; and only the children fear the death of someone near them, and always feel horrified at the thought of it.

And now the children, with bated breath, with a mournful look on their faces, gazed at Nikolay and thought that he was soon to die; and they wanted to cry and to say something friendly and compassionate to him.

She was evidently hardly awake, and seemed dropping asleep as she walked. Probably she had had some dream, or the stories of the night before came into her mind as, stretching luxuriously before the stove, she said:

“No, freedom is better.”

The master arrived—that was what they called the police inspector. When he would come and what he was coming for had been known for the last week.

as though he knew something and was expecting something. They used to talk about an edict in golden letters, about the division of lands, about new land, about treasures; they hinted at something.

Now the people of Zhukovo had no mystery at all; their whole life was bare and open in the sight of all, and they could talk of nothing but poverty, food, there being no snow yet.

…

There was a pause. Then they thought again of the hens, of the sheep, and began discussing whose fault it was.

“The Zemstvo,” said Osip wearily. “Who else?”

The parish church was nearly five miles away at Kosogorovo, and the peasants only attended it when they had to do so for baptisms, weddings, or funerals; they went to the services at the church across the river.

An immense crowd of villagers and strangers flooded the street; there was noise, dust, a great crush. … And the old father and Granny and Kiryak—all stretched out their hands to the icon, looked eagerly at it and said, weeping:

All seemed suddenly to realize that there was not an empty void between earth and heaven, that the rich and the powerful had not taken possession of everything, that there was still a refuge from injury, from slavish bondage, from crushing, unendurable poverty, from the terrible vodka.

“Defender! Mother!” sobbed Marya. “Mother!”

Towards the evening he began to be in great distress; asked to be laid on the ground, asked the tailor not to smoke; then he subsided under the sheepskin and towards morning he died.

Oh, what a grim, what a long winter!

Their own grain did not last beyond Christmas, and they had to buy flour. Kiryak, who lived at home now, was noisy in the evenings, inspiring terror in everyone, and in the mornings he suffered from headache and was ashamed;

I myself married when I was forty-eight; I was told it was late, but it has turned out that it was not late or early, but simply that it would have been better not to marry at all.

Everyone is soon tired of his wife, but not everyone tells the truth, because, you know, people are ashamed of an unhappy home life and conceal it.

It’s ‘Manya this’ and ‘Manya that’ with many a man by his wife’s side, but if he had his way he’d put that Manya in a sack and drop her in the water. It’s dull with one’s wife, it’s mere foolishness.

He controlled himself and said nothing. But in the gateway he suddenly could not restrain himself; he got up and shouted loudly and angrily:

“You have bored me to death.”

And he disappeared through the gate.

“

All sorts of things are done in the provinces through boredom, all sorts of unnecessary and nonsensical things! And that is because what is necessary is not done at all.

What need was there for instance, for us to make a match for this Byelikov, whom one could not even imagine married?

“

Suggestion plays a great part in love affairs, and still more in getting married.

Everybody—both his colleagues and the ladies—began assuring Byelikov that he ought to get married, that there was nothing left for him in life but to get married;

“A month later Byelikov died. We all went to his funeral—that is, both the high schools and the seminary.

Now when he was lying in his coffin his expression was mild, agreeable, even cheerful, as though he were glad that he had at last been put into a case which he would never leave again.

Yes, he had attained his ideal! And, as though in his honour, it was dull, rainy weather on the day of his funeral, and we all wore goloshes and took our umbrellas.

“We returned from the cemetery in a good humour. But not more than a week had passed before life went on as in the past, as gloomy, oppressive, and senseless—a life not forbidden by government prohibition, but not fully permitted, either: it was no better.

And, indeed, though we had buried Byelikov, how many such men in cases were left, how many more of them there will be!

”

It’s the correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth.

But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man.

And they say, too, now, that if our intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm, it’s a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of earth.

To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in one’s farm—it’s not life, it’s egoism, laziness, it’s monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works.

A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit.

“My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office, dreamed of how he would eat his own cabbages, which would fill the whole yard with such a savoury smell, take his meals on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit for whole hours on the …

He grew fearfully avaricious. I did not like to look at him, and I used to give him something and send him presents for Christmas and Easter, but he used to save that too.

Once a man is absorbed by an idea there is no doing anything with him.

“Years passed: he was transferred to another province. He was over forty, and he was still reading the advertisements in the papers and saving up. Then I heard he was married.

she began to pine away with this sort of life, and three years later she gave up her soul to God. And I need hardly say that my brother never for one moment imagined that he was responsible for her death.

Money, like vodka, makes a man queer.

In our town there was a merchant who, before he died, ordered a plateful of honey and ate up all his money and lottery tickets with the honey, so that no one might get the benefit of it.

“Pavel Konstantinovitch,” he said in an imploring voice, “don’t be calm and contented, don’t let yourself be put to sleep! While you are young, strong, confident, be not weary in well-doing!

There is no happiness, and there ought not to be; but if there is a meaning and an object in life, that meaning and object is not our happiness, but something greater and more rational.

Do good!”

one can take what view one likes of it. So far only one incontestable truth has been uttered about love: ‘This is a great mystery.’

Everything else that has been written or said about love is not a conclusion, but only a statement of questions which have remained unanswered.

The explanation which would seem to fit one case does not apply in a dozen others, and the very best thing, to my mind, would be to explain every case individually without attempting to generalize. We ought, as the doctors say, to individualize each case.”

“

There is a proverb that if a peasant woman has no troubles she will buy a pig.

The Luganovitchs had no troubles, so they made friends with me. If I did not come to the town I must be ill or something must have happened to me, and both of them were extremely anxious.

“

Luckily or unluckily, there is nothing in our lives that does not end sooner or later.

The time of parting came, as Luganovitch was appointed president in one of the western provinces. They had to sell their furniture, their horses, their summer villa.

And what was worst of all, she had no opinions of any sort. She saw the objects about her and understood what she saw, but could not form any opinion about them, and did not know what to talk about.

And how awful it is not to have any opinions!

One sees a bottle, for instance, or the rain, or a peasant driving in his cart, but what the bottle is for, or the rain, or the peasant, and what is the meaning of it, one can’t say, and could not even for a thousand …

He’s a fool; he listens to the first that speaks. The others are quiet folks; they are silent. Some would be glad, you know, to say a word from the heart and to stand up for themselves, but cannot.

They have a heart and a conscience, but no tongue.

Don’t be offended … have patience. … What does it matter?”

but the time has come, and I am left with nothing but a wretched bag, and even that is not mine but government property. And now in our Nedoshtchotova, if the truth is to be told, my house is the worst of the lot.

Makey had four footmen, and now Makey is a footman himself. Petrak had four laborers, and now Petrak is a laborer himself.

”

it was not life, they were not human beings, but something only existing “according to the regulation,” as Loshadin said; it would leave not the faintest trace in the memory, and would be forgotten as soon as he, Lyzhin, drove away from Syrnya.

The fatherland, the real Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg; but here he was in the provinces, the colonies.

When one dreamed of playing a leading part, of becoming a popular figure, of being, for instance, examining magistrate in particularly important cases or prosecutor in a circuit court, of being a society lion, one always thought of Moscow.

… the center of culture, where nothing is accidental, but everything is in accordance with reason and law, and where, for instance, every suicide is intelligible, so that one can explain why it has happened and what is its significance in the general scheme of things.

He imagined that if the life surrounding him here in the wilds were not intelligible to him, and if he did not see it, it meant that it did not exist at all.

At supper the conversation turned on Lesnitsky.

And all the girls listened in silence with grave faces, looking at their father. Lyzhin felt that he, too, must say something, but he couldn’t think of anything, and merely said:

“Yes, suicide is an undesirable phenomenon.”

He slept in a warm room, in a soft bed covered with a quilt under which there were fine clean sheets, but for some reason did not feel comfortable:

He lay down and began to drop asleep; and again they were going along together, singing: “We go on, and on, and on. …

We take from life what is hardest and bitterest in it, and we leave you what is easy and joyful; and sitting at supper, you can coldly and sensibly discuss why we suffer and perish, and why we are not as sound and as satisfied as you.

”

and sitting at supper, you can coldly and sensibly discuss why we suffer and perish, and why we are not as sound and as satisfied as you.”

What they were singing had occurred to his mind before, but the thought was somewhere in the background behind his other thoughts, and flickered timidly like a faraway light in foggy weather.

And he felt that this suicide and the peasant’s sufferings lay upon his conscience, too; to resign himself to the fact that these people, submissive to their fate, should take up the burden of what was hardest and gloomiest in life—how awful it was!