bitext-aligner/xml_files/dost_under_enru_en.xml

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<book code="dost_under_enru">
	<bookInfo>
		<title>Notes from Underground</title>
		<lang>en</lang>
		<isTranslation>true</isTranslation>
		<totalChapters>21</totalChapters>
		<source>http://originalbook.ru/</source>
		<author>Fyodor Dostoevsky</author>
		<author translator="true">Constance Garnett</author>
	</bookInfo>
	<content>
		<chapter num="1" name="PART I. Underground - Chapter I">
			<sentence num="1"> I am a sick man… . I am a spiteful man.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">I am an unattractive man.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">I believe my liver is diseased.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious).</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">That you probably will not understand.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">Well, I understand it, though.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot “pay out” the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">My liver is bad, well — let it get worse!</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">I have been going on like that for a long time — twenty years.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">Now I am forty.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">I used to be in the government service, but am no longer.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">I was a spiteful official.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">I was rude and took pleasure in being so.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">(A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!)</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody unhappy.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">I almost did succeed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">For the most part they were all timid people — of course, they were petitioners.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">But of the uppish ones there was one officer in particular I could not endure.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">He simply would not be humble, and clanked his sword in a disgusting way.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">I carried on a feud with him for eighteen months over that sword.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">At last I got the better of him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">He left off clanking it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">That happened in my youth, though.</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite?</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased.</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with shame for months after.</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">That was my way.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official.</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">I was lying from spite.</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">I was simply amusing myself with the petitioners and with the officer, and in reality I never could become spiteful.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">I was conscious every moment in myself of many, very many elements absolutely opposite to that.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">I felt them positively swarming in me, these opposite elements.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them, would not let them, purposely would not let them come out.</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">They tormented me till I was ashamed: they drove me to convulsions and — sickened me, at last, how they sickened me!</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">Now, are not you fancying, gentlemen, that I am expressing remorse for something now, that I am asking your forgiveness for something?</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">I am sure you are fancying that… However, I assure you I do not care if you are… . It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.</sentence>
			<sentence num="45">Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature.</sentence>
			<sentence num="46">That is my conviction of forty years.</sentence>
			<sentence num="47">I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age.</sentence>
			<sentence num="48">To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral.</sentence>
			<sentence num="49">Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows.</sentence>
			<sentence num="50">I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors!</sentence>
			<sentence num="51">I tell the whole world that to its face!</sentence>
			<sentence num="52">I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="53">To seventy!</sentence>
			<sentence num="54">To eighty!… Stay, let me take breath… You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="55">You are mistaken in that, too.</sentence>
			<sentence num="56">I am by no means such a mirthful person as you imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble (and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I am — then my answer is, I am a collegiate assessor.</sentence>
			<sentence num="57">I was in the service that I might have something to eat (and solely for that reason), and when last year a distant relation left me six thousand roubles in his will I immediately retired from the service and settled down in my corner.</sentence>
			<sentence num="58">I used to live in this corner before, but now I have settled down in it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="59">My room is a wretched, horrid one in the outskirts of the town.</sentence>
			<sentence num="60">My servant is an old country- woman, ill-natured from stupidity, and, moreover, there is always a nasty smell about her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="61">I am told that the Petersburg climate is bad for me, and that with my small means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg.</sentence>
			<sentence num="62">I know all that better than all these sage and experienced counsellors and monitors… . But I am remaining in Petersburg; I am not going away from Petersburg!</sentence>
			<sentence num="63">I am not going away because… ech!</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="2" name="PART I. Underground - Chapter II">
			<sentence num="1"> I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not, why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness — a real thorough-going illness.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">For man’s everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">(There are intentional and unintentional towns.)</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">It would have been quite enough, for instance, to have the consciousness by which all so-called direct persons and men of action live.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">I bet you think I am writing all this from affectation, to be witty at the expense of men of action; and what is more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am clanking a sword like my officer.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself on his diseases and even swagger over them?</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">Though, after all, everyone does do that; people do pride themselves on their diseases, and I do, may be, more than anyone.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">We will not dispute it; my contention was absurd.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">I stick to that.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">Let us leave that, too, for a minute.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">Tell me this: why does it happen that at the very, yes, at the very moments when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all that is “sublime and beautiful,” as they used to say at one time, it would, as though of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do such ugly things, such that… Well, in short, actions that all, perhaps, commit; but which, as though purposely, occurred to me at the very time when I was most conscious that they ought not to be committed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was “sublime and beautiful,” the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the chief point was that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it were bound to be so. It was as though it were my most normal condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">It ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what agonies I endured in that struggle!</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">I did not believe it was the same with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a secret.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and at last — into positive real enjoyment!</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">Yes, into enjoyment, into enjoyment! I insist upon that. I have spoken of this because I keep wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment?</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">I will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one’s own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="3" name="PART I. Underground - Chapter III">
			<sentence num="1"> With people who know how to revenge themselves and to stand up for themselves in general, how is it done?</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">Why, when they are possessed, let us suppose, by the feeling of revenge, then for the time there is nothing else but that feeling left in their whole being.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">Such a gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">(By the way: facing the wall, such gentlemen — that is, the “direct” persons and men of action — are genuinely nonplussed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">For them a wall is not an evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not an excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very glad, though we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">No, they are nonplussed in all sincerity.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">The wall has for them something tranquillising, morally soothing, final — maybe even something mysterious… but of the wall later.)</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his tender mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him into being on the earth. I envy such a man till I am green in the face.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal man should be stupid, how do you know?</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">Perhaps it is very beautiful, in fact.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">It may be an acutely conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and therefore, et caetera, et caetera. And the worst of it is, he himself, his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one asks him to do so; and that is an important point.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">Now let us look at this mouse in action.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">Let us suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted, too (and it almost always does feel insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">There may even be a greater accumulation of spite in it than in L’HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">The base and nasty desire to vent that spite on its assailant rankles perhaps even more nastily in it than in L’HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">For through his innate stupidity the latter looks upon his revenge as justice pure and simple; while in consequence of his acute consciousness the mouse does not believe in the justice of it. To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their healthy sides ache.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself. On its deathbed it will recall it all over again, with interest accumulated over all the years and… But it is just in that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld for forty years, in that acutely recognised and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one’s position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a minute later — that the savour of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="4" name="PART I. Underground - Chapter IV">
			<sentence num="1"> “Ha, ha, ha!</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next,” you cry, with a laugh. “Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment,” I answer.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">It is a good example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown, end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is “divorced from the soil and the national elements,” as they express it now-a-days.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha’porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="5" name="PART I. Underground - Chapter V">
			<sentence num="1"> Come, can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself? I am not saying this now from any mawkish kind of remorse.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">And, indeed, I could never endure saying, “Forgive me, Papa, I won’t do it again,” not because I am incapable of saying that — on the contrary, perhaps just because I have been too capable of it, and in what a way, too.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">As though of design I used to get into trouble in cases when I was not to blame in any way.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">That was the nastiest part of it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">At the same time I was genuinely touched and penitent, I used to shed tears and, of course, deceived myself, though I was not acting in the least and there was a sick feeling in my heart at the time… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">For that one could not blame even the laws of nature, though the laws of nature have continually all my life offended me more than anything. It is loathsome to remember it all, but it was loathsome even then.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">Of course, a minute or so later I would realise wrathfully that it was all a lie, a revolting lie, an affected lie, that is, all this penitence, this emotion, these vows of reform.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">You will ask why did I worry myself with such antics: answer, because it was very dull to sit with one’s hands folded, and so one began cutting capers.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">That is really it. Observe yourselves more carefully, gentlemen, then you will understand that it is so. I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">How many times it has happened to me — well, for instance, to take offence simply on purpose, for nothing; and one knows oneself, of course, that one is offended at nothing; that one is putting it on, but yet one brings oneself at last to the point of being really offended.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">All my life I have had an impulse to play such pranks, so that in the end I could not control it in myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">Another time, twice, in fact, I tried hard to be in love.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">I suffered, too, gentlemen, I assure you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">In the depth of my heart there was no faith in my suffering, only a faint stir of mockery, but yet I did suffer, and in the real, orthodox way; I was jealous, beside myself… and it was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI; inertia overcame me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">You know the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">I have referred to this already.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all “direct” persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">How explain that?</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and you know that is the chief thing.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">To begin to act, you know, you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of doubt left in it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">Why, how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest?</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my foundations?</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">Where am I to get them from?</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">I exercise myself in reflection, and consequently with me every primary cause at once draws after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">That is just the essence of every sort of consciousness and reflection.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">It must be a case of the laws of nature again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">What is the result of it in the end?</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">Why, just the same. Remember I spoke just now of vengeance.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">(I am sure you did not take it in.)</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">I said that a man revenges himself because he sees justice in it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">Therefore he has found a primary cause, that is, justice.</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">And so he is at rest on all sides, and consequently he carries out his revenge calmly and successfully, being persuaded that he is doing a just and honest thing.</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">But I see no justice in it, I find no sort of virtue in it either, and consequently if I attempt to revenge myself, it is only out of spite.</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">Spite, of course, might overcome everything, all my doubts, and so might serve quite successfully in place of a primary cause, precisely because it is not a cause.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">But what is to be done if I have not even spite (I began with that just now, you know).</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">In consequence again of those accursed laws of consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical disintegration.</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">You look into it, the object flies off into air, your reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left again — that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">So you give it up with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly, without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at least for a time; hate or love, if only not to sit with your hands folded.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">The day after tomorrow, at the latest, you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">Result: a soap-bubble and inertia.</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything.</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us.</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="6" name="PART I. Underground - Chapter VI">
			<sentence num="1"> Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness!</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard; how very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself!</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">It would mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was something to say about me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">“Sluggard”— why, it is a calling and vocation, it is a career. Do not jest, it is so.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">I should then be a member of the best club by right, and should find my occupation in continually respecting myself. I knew a gentleman who prided himself all his life on being a connoisseur of Lafitte. He considered this as his positive virtue, and never doubted himself. He died, not simply with a tranquil, but with a triumphant conscience, and he was quite right, too.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">Then I should have chosen a career for myself, I should have been a sluggard and a glutton, not a simple one, but, for instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime and beautiful.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">How do you like that? I have long had visions of it. That “sublime and beautiful” weighs heavily on my mind at forty But that is at forty; then — oh, then it would have been different!</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">I should have found for myself a form of activity in keeping with it, to be precise, drinking to the health of everything “sublime and beautiful.” I should have snatched at every opportunity to drop a tear into my glass and then to drain it to all that is “sublime and beautiful.” I should then have turned everything into the sublime and the beautiful; in the nastiest, unquestionable trash, I should have sought out the sublime and the beautiful.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">I should have exuded tears like a wet sponge.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">An artist, for instance, paints a picture worthy of Gay.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">At once I drink to the health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I love all that is “sublime and beautiful.” An author has written AS YOU WILL: at once I drink to the health of “anyone you will” because I love all that is “sublime and beautiful.” I should claim respect for doing so.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">I should persecute anyone who would not show me respect. I should live at ease, I should die with dignity, why, it is charming, perfectly charming! And what a good round belly I should have grown, what a treble chin I should have established, what a ruby nose I should have coloured for myself, so that everyone would have said, looking at me: “Here is an asset!</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">Here is something real and solid!” And, say what you like, it is very agreeable to hear such remarks about oneself in this negative age.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="7" name="PART I. Underground - Chapter VII">
			<sentence num="1"> But these are all golden dreams.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">Oh, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good?</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">Oh, the babe!</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">Oh, the pure, innocent child!</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has acted only from his own interest?</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage… . Advantage!</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">What is advantage?</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of man consists?</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">And what if it so happens that a man’s advantage, SOMETIMES, not only may, but even must, consist in his desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and not advantageous.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">And if so, if there can be such a case, the whole principle falls into dust.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">What do you think — are there such cases?</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">You laugh; laugh away, gentlemen, but only answer me: have man’s advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty?</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">Are there not some which not only have not been included but cannot possibly be included under any classification?</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">You see, you gentlemen have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and politico-economical formulas.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace — and so on, and so on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine, too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he?</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">But, you know, this is what is surprising: why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon up human advantages invariably leave out one?</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">They don’t even take it into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken, and the whole reckoning depends upon that.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">It would be no greater matter, they would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">But the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any classification and is not in place in any list.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">I have a friend for instance… Ech!</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">gentlemen, but of course he is your friend, too; and indeed there is no one, no one to whom he is not a friend!</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interests of man; with irony he will upbraid the short- sighted fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through something inside him which is stronger than all his interests, he will go off on quite a different tack — that is, act in direct opposition to what he has just been saying about himself, in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to everything… I warn you that my friend is a compound personality and therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">The fact is, gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a man if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity — in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. “Yes, but it’s advantage all the same,” you will retort.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">But excuse me, I’ll make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. In fact, it upsets everything.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">But before I mention this advantage to you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly declare that all these fine systems, all these theories for explaining to mankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and noble — are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises!</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">Yes, logical exercises.</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of mankind by means of the pursuit of his own advantage is to my mind almost the same thing… as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle, that through civilisation mankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does seem to follow from his arguments. But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="8" name="PART I. Underground - Chapter VIII">
			<sentence num="1"> “Ha! ha! ha!</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">But you know there is no such thing as choice in reality, say what you like,” you will interpose with a chuckle.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">“Science has succeeded in so far analysing man that we know already that choice and what is called freedom of will is nothing else than —” Stay, gentlemen, I meant to begin with that myself I confess, I was rather frightened.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">I was just going to say that the devil only knows what choice depends on, and that perhaps that was a very good thing, but I remembered the teaching of science… and pulled myself up.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">And here you have begun upon it. Indeed, if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices — that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula — then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">For who would want to choose by rule?</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">What do you think? Let us reckon the chances — can such a thing happen or not?</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">“H’m!” you decide. “Our choice is usually mistaken from a false view of our advantage.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">But when all that is explained and worked out on paper (which is perfectly possible, for it is contemptible and senseless to suppose that some laws of nature man will never understand), then certainly so-called desires will no longer exist. For if a desire should come into conflict with reason we shall then reason and not desire, because it will be impossible retaining our reason to be SENSELESS in our desires, and in that way knowingly act against reason and desire to injure ourselves.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">And as all choice and reasoning can be really calculated — because there will some day be discovered the laws of our so-called free will — so, joking apart, there may one day be something like a table constructed of them, so that we really shall choose in accordance with it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">If, for instance, some day they calculate and prove to me that I made a long nose at someone because I could not help making a long nose at him and that I had to do it in that particular way, what FREEDOM is left me, especially if I am a learned man and have taken my degree somewhere?</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">Then I should be able to calculate my whole life for thirty years beforehand.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">In short, if this could be arranged there would be nothing left for us to do; anyway, we should have to understand that.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">And, in fact, we ought unwearyingly to repeat to ourselves that at such and such a time and in such and such circumstances nature does not ask our leave; that we have got to take her as she is and not fashion her to suit our fancy, and if we really aspire to formulas and tables of rules, and well, even… to the chemical retort, there’s no help for it, we must accept the retort too, or else it will be accepted without our consent… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">” Yes, but here I come to a stop!</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">Gentlemen, you must excuse me for being over-philosophical; it’s the result of forty years underground!</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">Allow me to indulge my fancy. You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?)</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">I suspect, gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to himself, that that can be proved mathematically.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">I thoroughly agree, it can — by mathematics.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">But I repeat for the hundredth time, there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid — simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">And in particular it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us obvious harm, and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage — for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important — that is, our personality, our individuality.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most precious thing for mankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in agreement with reason; and especially if this be not abused but kept within bounds. It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy.</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">But very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason… and… and… do you know that that, too, is profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy?</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="9" name="PART I. Underground - Chapter IX">
			<sentence num="1"> Gentlemen, I am joking, and I know myself that my jokes are not brilliant,but you know one can take everything as a joke.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">I am, perhaps, jesting against the grain.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">You, for instance, want to cure men of their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and good sense.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also that it is DESIRABLE to reform man in that way? And what leads you to the conclusion that man’s inclinations NEED reforming? In short, how do you know that such a reformation will be a benefit to man?</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">And to go to the root of the matter, why are you so positively convinced that not to act against his real normal interests guaranteed by the conclusions of reason and arithmetic is certainly always advantageous for man and must always be a law for mankind?</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">So far, you know, this is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the law of humanity. You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to defend myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering — that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the “direct” practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me that! But on that point I want to say a couple of words myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing?</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">Who knows, perhaps he only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, for the use of LES ANIMAUX DOMESTIQUES— such as the ants, the sheep, and so on.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">Now the ants have quite a different taste. They have a marvellous edifice of that pattern which endures for ever — the ant-heap.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">With the ant-heap the respectable race of ants began and with the ant- heap they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to their perseverance and good sense.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I assure you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">When workmen have finished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station — and there is occupation for a week.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">But where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive — in other words, only what is conducive to welfare — is for the advantage of man?</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being?</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="10" name="PART I. Underground - Chapter X">
			<sentence num="1"> You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed — a palace at which one will not be able to put out one’s tongue or make a long nose on the sly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this edifice, that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed and that one cannot put one’s tongue out at it even on the sly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">You see, if it were not a palace, but a hen-house, I might creep into it to avoid getting wet, and yet I would not call the hen-house a palace out of gratitude to it for keeping me dry.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">You laugh and say that in such circumstances a hen-house is as good as a mansion.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">Yes, I answer, if one had to live simply to keep out of the rain.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">But what is to be done if I have taken it into my head that that is not the only object in life, and that if one must live one had better live in a mansion?</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">That is my choice, my desire.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">You will only eradicate it when you have changed my preference.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">Well, do change it, allure me with something else, give me another ideal.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">But meanwhile I will not take a hen-house for a mansion.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">The palace of crystal may be an idle dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, through the old-fashioned irrational habits of my generation.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">But what does it matter to me that it is inconsistent?</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">That makes no difference since it exists in my desires, or rather exists as long as my desires exist.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">Perhaps you are laughing again?</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">Laugh away; I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry. I know, anyway, that I will not be put off with a compromise, with a recurring zero, simply because it is consistent with the laws of nature and actually exists.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">I will not accept as the crown of my desires a block of buildings with tenements for the poor on a lease of a thousand years, and perhaps with a sign-board of a dentist hanging out.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">You will say, perhaps, that it is not worth your trouble; but in that case I can give you the same answer.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">We are discussing things seriously; but if you won’t deign to give me your attention, I will drop your acquaintance.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">I can retreat into my underground hole. But while I am alive and have desires I would rather my hand were withered off than bring one brick to such a building!</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">Don’t remind me that I have just rejected the palace of crystal for the sole reason that one cannot put out one’s tongue at it.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="11" name="PART I. Underground - Chapter XI">
			<sentence num="1"> The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do nothing!</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">Better conscious inertia!</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">And so hurrah for underground!</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now (though I shall not cease envying him).</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">There, at any rate, one can… Oh, but even now I am lying!</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">I am lying because I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find!</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">Damn underground!</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">I will tell you another thing that would be better, and that is, if I myself believed in anything of what I have just written.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">I swear to you, gentlemen, there is not one thing, not one word of what I have written that I really believe.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">That is, I believe it, perhaps, but at the same time I feel and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">“Then why have you written all this?” you will say to me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">“I ought to put you underground for forty years without anything to do and then come to you in your cellar, to find out what stage you have reached!</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">How can a man be left with nothing to do for forty years?” “Isn’t that shameful, isn’t that humiliating?” you will say, perhaps, wagging your heads contemptuously.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">“You thirst for life and try to settle the problems of life by a logical tangle.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">And how persistent, how insolent are your sallies, and at the same time what a scare you are in!</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">You talk nonsense and are pleased with it; you say impudent things and are in continual alarm and apologising for them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">You declare that you are afraid of nothing and at the same time try to ingratiate yourself in our good opinion.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">You declare that you are gnashing your teeth and at the same time you try to be witty so as to amuse us.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are evidently well satisfied with their literary value.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">You may, perhaps, have really suffered, but you have no respect for your own suffering.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">You may have sincerity, but you have no modesty; out of the pettiest vanity you expose your sincerity to publicity and ignominy. You doubtlessly mean to say something, but hide your last word through fear, because you have not the resolution to utter it, and only have a cowardly impudence.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">You boast of consciousness, but you are not sure of your ground, for though your mind works, yet your heart is darkened and corrupt, and you cannot have a full, genuine consciousness without a pure heart.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">And how intrusive you are, how you insist and grimace!</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">Lies, lies, lies!” Of course I have myself made up all the things you say.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">That, too, is from underground.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">I have been for forty years listening to you through a crack under the floor.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">I have invented them myself, there was nothing else I could invent.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">It is no wonder that I have learned it by heart and it has taken a literary form… . But can you really be so credulous as to think that I will print all this and give it to you to read too?</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">And another problem: why do I call you “gentlemen,” why do I address you as though you really were my readers?</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">Such confessions as I intend to make are never printed nor given to other people to read.</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">Anyway, I am not strong-minded enough for that, and I don’t see why I should be.</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">But you see a fancy has occurred to me and I want to realise it at all costs. Let me explain.</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret.</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">Anyway, I have only lately determined to remember some of my early adventures. Till now I have always avoided them, even with a certain uneasiness.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">Now, when I am not only recalling them, but have actually decided to write an account of them, I want to try the experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">I will observe, in parenthesis, that Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that man is bound to lie about himself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">He considers that Rousseau certainly told lies about himself in his confessions, and even intentionally lied, out of vanity.</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">I am convinced that Heine is right; I quite understand how sometimes one may, out of sheer vanity, attribute regular crimes to oneself, and indeed I can very well conceive that kind of vanity.</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">But Heine judged of people who made their confessions to the public.</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">I write only for myself, and I wish to declare once and for all that if I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that form.</sentence>
			<sentence num="45">It is a form, an empty form — I shall never have readers.</sentence>
			<sentence num="46">I have made this plain already… I don’t wish to be hampered by any restrictions in the compilation of my notes.</sentence>
			<sentence num="47">I shall not attempt any system or method.</sentence>
			<sentence num="48">I will jot things down as I remember them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="49">But here, perhaps, someone will catch at the word and ask me: if you really don’t reckon on readers, why do you make such compacts with yourself — and on paper too — that is, that you won’t attempt any system or method, that you jot things down as you remember them, and so on, and so on?</sentence>
			<sentence num="50">Why are you explaining? Why do you apologise? Well, there it is, I answer.</sentence>
			<sentence num="51">There is a whole psychology in all this, though.</sentence>
			<sentence num="52">Perhaps it is simply that I am a coward.</sentence>
			<sentence num="53">And perhaps that I purposely imagine an audience before me in order that I may be more dignified while I write.</sentence>
			<sentence num="54">There are perhaps thousands of reasons.</sentence>
			<sentence num="55">Again, what is my object precisely in writing?</sentence>
			<sentence num="56">If it is not for the benefit of the public why should I not simply recall these incidents in my own mind without putting them on paper?</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="12" name="PART II. A Propos of the Wet Snow - Chapter I">
			<sentence num="1"> AT THAT TIME I was only twenty-four.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">My life was even then gloomy, ill- regulated, and as solitary as that of a savage. I made friends with no one and positively avoided talking, and buried myself more and more in my hole.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">At work in the office I never looked at anyone, and was perfectly well aware that my companions looked upon me, not only as a queer fellow, but even looked upon me — I always fancied this — with a sort of loathing.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">I sometimes wondered why it was that nobody except me fancied that he was looked upon with aversion? One of the clerks had a most repulsive, pock-marked face, which looked positively villainous. I believe I should not have dared to look at anyone with such an unsightly countenance. Another had such a very dirty old uniform that there was an unpleasant odour in his proximity.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">Yet not one of these gentlemen showed the slightest self-consciousness — either about their clothes or their countenance or their character in any way.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">Neither of them ever imagined that they were looked at with repulsion; if they had imagined it they would not have minded — so long as their superiors did not look at them in that way.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">I hated my face, for instance: I thought it disgusting, and even suspected that there was something base in my expression, and so every day when I turned up at the office I tried to behave as independently as possible, and to assume a lofty expression, so that I might not be suspected of being abject.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">“My face may be ugly,” I thought, “but let it be lofty, expressive, and, above all, EXTREMELY intelligent.” But I was positively and painfully certain that it was impossible for my countenance ever to express those qualities. And what was worst of all, I thought it actually stupid looking, and I would have been quite satisfied if I could have looked intelligent.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">In fact, I would even have put up with looking base if, at the same time, my face could have been thought strikingly intelligent. Of course, I hated my fellow clerks one and all, and I despised them all, yet at the same time I was, as it were, afraid of them. In fact, it happened at times that I thought more highly of them than of myself. It somehow happened quite suddenly that I alternated between despising them and thinking them superior to myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments. But whether I despised them or thought them superior I dropped my eyes almost every time I met anyone. I even made experiments whether I could face so and so’s looking at me, and I was always the first to drop my eyes. This worried me to distraction.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">I had a sickly dread, too, of being ridiculous, and so had a slavish passion for the conventional in everything external. I loved to fall into the common rut, and had a whole-hearted terror of any kind of eccentricity in myself. But how could I live up to it?</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">I was morbidly sensitive as a man of our age should be. They were all stupid, and as like one another as so many sheep. Perhaps I was the only one in the office who fancied that I was a coward and a slave, and I fancied it just because I was more highly developed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">But it was not only that I fancied it, it really was so. I was a coward and a slave. I say this without the slightest embarrassment.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstances, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">It is the law of nature for all decent people all over the earth. If anyone of them happens to be valiant about something, he need not be comforted nor carried away by that; he would show the white feather just the same before something else.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">That is how it invariably and inevitably ends. Only donkeys and mules are valiant, and they only till they are pushed up to the wall.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">It is not worth while to pay attention to them for they really are of no consequence. Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">“I am alone and they are EVERYONE,” I thought — and pondered. From that it is evident that I was still a youngster. The very opposite sometimes happened. It was loathsome sometimes to go to the office; things reached such a point that I often came home ill.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">But all at once, A PROPOS of nothing, there would come a phase of scepticism and indifference (everything happened in phases to me), and I would laugh myself at my intolerance and fastidiousness, I would reproach myself with being ROMANTIC.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">At one time I was unwilling to speak to anyone, while at other times I would not only talk, but go to the length of contemplating making friends with them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">All my fastidiousness would suddenly, for no rhyme or reason, vanish.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">Who knows, perhaps I never had really had it, and it had simply been affected, and got out of books. I have not decided that question even now.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">Once I quite made friends with them, visited their homes, played preference, drank vodka, talked of promotions… . But here let me make a digression.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">We Russians, speaking generally, have never had those foolish transcendental “romantics”— German, and still more French — on whom nothing produces any effect; if there were an earthquake, if all France perished at the barricades, they would still be the same, they would not even have the decency to affect a change, but would still go on singing their transcendental songs to the hour of their death, because they are fools.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">We, in Russia, have no fools; that is well known.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">That is what distinguishes us from foreign lands. Consequently these transcendental natures are not found amongst us in their pure form.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">The idea that they are is due to our “realistic” journalists and critics of that day, always on the look out for Kostanzhoglos and Uncle Pyotr Ivanitchs and foolishly accepting them as our ideal; they have slandered our romantics, taking them for the same transcendental sort as in Germany or France.</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">On the contrary, the characteristics of our “romantics” are absolutely and directly opposed to the transcendental European type, and no European standard can be applied to them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">(Allow me to make use of this word “romantic”— an old-fashioned and much respected word which has done good service and is familiar to all.)</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">The characteristics of our romantic are to understand everything, TO SEE EVERYTHING AND TO SEE IT OFTEN INCOMPARABLY MORE CLEARLY THAN OUR MOST REALISTIC MINDS SEE IT; to refuse to accept anyone or anything, but at the same time not to despise anything; to give way, to yield, from policy; never to lose sight of a useful practical object (such as rent-free quarters at the government expense, pensions, decorations), to keep their eye on that object through all the enthusiasms and volumes of lyrical poems, and at the same time to preserve “the sublime and the beautiful” inviolate within them to the hour of their death, and to preserve themselves also, incidentally, like some precious jewel wrapped in cotton wool if only for the benefit of “the sublime and the beautiful.” Our “romantic” is a man of great breadth and the greatest rogue of all our rogues, I assure you… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">I can assure you from experience, indeed. Of course, that is, if he is intelligent. But what am I saying!</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">The romantic is always intelligent, and I only meant to observe that although we have had foolish romantics they don’t count, and they were only so because in the flower of their youth they degenerated into Germans, and to preserve their precious jewel more comfortably, settled somewhere out there — by preference in Weimar or the Black Forest.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">I, for instance, genuinely despised my official work and did not openly abuse it simply because I was in it myself and got a salary for it. Anyway, take note, I did not openly abuse it. Our romantic would rather go out of his mind — a thing, however, which very rarely happens — than take to open abuse, unless he had some other career in view; and he is never kicked out.</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">At most, they would take him to the lunatic asylum as “the King of Spain” if he should go very mad. But it is only the thin, fair people who go out of their minds in Russia. Innumerable “romantics” attain later in life to considerable rank in the service.</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">Their many-sidedness is remarkable! And what a faculty they have for the most contradictory sensations!</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">I was comforted by this thought even in those days, and I am of the same opinion now.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">That is why there are so many “broad natures” among us who never lose their ideal even in the depths of degradation; and though they never stir a finger for their ideal, though they are arrant thieves and knaves, yet they tearfully cherish their first ideal and are extraordinarily honest at heart.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">Yes, it is only among us that the most incorrigible rogue can be absolutely and loftily honest at heart without in the least ceasing to be a rogue. I repeat, our romantics, frequently, become such accomplished rascals (I use the term “rascals” affectionately), suddenly display such a sense of reality and practical knowledge that their bewildered superiors and the public generally can only ejaculate in amazement. Their many-sidedness is really amazing, and goodness knows what it may develop into later on, and what the future has in store for us. It is not a poor material!</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">I do not say this from any foolish or boastful patriotism. But I feel sure that you are again imagining that I am joking. Or perhaps it’s just the contrary and you are convinced that I really think so.</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">Anyway, gentlemen, I shall welcome both views as an honour and a special favour. And do forgive my digression.</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">I did not, of course, maintain friendly relations with my comrades and soon was at loggerheads with them, and in my youth and inexperience I even gave up bowing to them, as though I had cut off all relations. That, however, only happened to me once. As a rule, I was always alone. In the first place I spent most of my time at home, reading.</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by means of external impressions.</sentence>
			<sentence num="45">And the only external means I had was reading. Reading, of course, was a great help — exciting me, giving me pleasure and pain.</sentence>
			<sentence num="46">But at times it bored me fearfully. One longed for movement in spite of everything, and I plunged all at once into dark, underground, loathsome vice of the pettiest kind.</sentence>
			<sentence num="47">My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="48">I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice.</sentence>
			<sentence num="49">I have not said all this to justify myself… . But, no! I am lying. I did want to justify myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="50">I make that little observation for my own benefit, gentlemen. I don’t want to lie. I vowed to myself I would not.</sentence>
			<sentence num="51">And so, furtively, timidly, in solitude, at night, I indulged in filthy vice, with a feeling of shame which never deserted me, even at the most loathsome moments, and which at such moments nearly made me curse.</sentence>
			<sentence num="52">Already even then I had my underground world in my soul. I was fearfully afraid of being seen, of being met, of being recognised.</sentence>
			<sentence num="53">I visited various obscure haunts. One night as I was passing a tavern I saw through a lighted window some gentlemen fighting with billiard cues, and saw one of them thrown out of the window.</sentence>
			<sentence num="54">At other times I should have felt very much disgusted, but I was in such a mood at the time, that I actually envied the gentleman thrown out of the window — and I envied him so much that I even went into the tavern and into the billiard-room.</sentence>
			<sentence num="55">“Perhaps,” I thought, “I’ll have a fight, too, and they’ll throw me out of the window.” I was not drunk — but what is one to do — depression will drive a man to such a pitch of hysteria?</sentence>
			<sentence num="56">But nothing happened. It seemed that I was not even equal to being thrown out of the window and I went away without having my fight.</sentence>
			<sentence num="57">An officer put me in my place from the first moment. I was standing by the billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word — without a warning or explanation — moved me from where I was standing to another spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="58">I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me. Devil knows what I would have given for a real regular quarrel — a more decent, a more LITERARY one, so to speak. I had been treated like a fly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="59">This officer was over six foot, while I was a spindly little fellow. But the quarrel was in my hands. I had only to protest and I certainly would have been thrown out of the window.</sentence>
			<sentence num="60">But I changed my mind and preferred to beat a resentful retreat.</sentence>
			<sentence num="61">I went out of the tavern straight home, confused and troubled, and the next night I went out again with the same lewd intentions, still more furtively, abjectly and miserably than before, as it were, with tears in my eyes — but still I did go out again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="62">Don’t imagine, though, it was coward- ice made me slink away from the officer; I never have been a coward at heart, though I have always been a coward in action.</sentence>
			<sentence num="63">Don’t be in a hurry to laugh — I assure you I can explain it all.</sentence>
			<sentence num="64">Oh, if only that officer had been one of the sort who would consent to fight a duel! But no, he was one of those gentlemen (alas, long extinct!) who preferred fighting with cues or, like Gogol’s Lieutenant Pirogov, appealing to the police.</sentence>
			<sentence num="65">They did not fight duels and would have thought a duel with a civilian like me an utterly unseemly procedure in any case — and they looked upon the duel altogether as something impossible, something free-thinking and French. But they were quite ready to bully, especially when they were over six foot. I did not slink away through cowardice, but through an unbounded vanity. I was afraid not of his six foot, not of getting a sound thrashing and being thrown out of the window; I should have had physical courage enough, I assure you; but I had not the moral courage.</sentence>
			<sentence num="66">What I was afraid of was that everyone present, from the insolent marker down to the lowest little stinking, pimply clerk in a greasy collar, would jeer at me and fail to understand when I began to protest and to address them in literary language.</sentence>
			<sentence num="67">For of the point of honour — not of honour, but of the point of honour (POINT D’HONNEUR)— one cannot speak among us except in literary language.</sentence>
			<sentence num="68">You can’t allude to the “point of honour” in ordinary language.</sentence>
			<sentence num="69">I was fully convinced (the sense of reality, in spite of all my romanticism!) that they would all simply split their sides with laughter, and that the officer would not simply beat me, that is, without insulting me, but would certainly prod me in the back with his knee, kick me round the billiard- table, and only then perhaps have pity and drop me out of the window. Of course, this trivial incident could not with me end in that. I often met that officer afterwards in the street and noticed him very carefully.</sentence>
			<sentence num="70">I am not quite sure whether he recognised me, I imagine not; I judge from certain signs. But I— I stared at him with spite and hatred and so it went on… for several years! My resentment grew even deeper with years.</sentence>
			<sentence num="71">At first I began making stealthy inquiries about this officer. It was difficult for me to do so, for I knew no one. But one day I heard someone shout his surname in the street as I was following him at a distance, as though I were tied to him — and so I learnt his surname. Another time I followed him to his flat, and for ten kopecks learned from the porter where he lived, on which storey, whether he lived alone or with others, and so on — in fact, everything one could learn from a porter.</sentence>
			<sentence num="72">One morning, though I had never tried my hand with the pen, it suddenly occurred to me to write a satire on this officer in the form of a novel which would unmask his villainy. I wrote the novel with relish. I did unmask his villainy, I even exaggerated it; at first I so altered his surname that it could easily be recognised, but on second thoughts I changed it, and sent the story to the OTETCHESTVENNIYA ZAPISKI.</sentence>
			<sentence num="73">But at that time such attacks were not the fashion and my story was not printed. That was a great vexation to me. Sometimes I was positively choked with resentment.</sentence>
			<sentence num="74">At last I determined to challenge my enemy to a duel.</sentence>
			<sentence num="75">I composed a splendid, charming letter to him, imploring him to apologise to me, and hinting rather plainly at a duel in case of refusal. The letter was so composed that if the officer had had the least understanding of the sublime and the beautiful he would certainly have flung himself on my neck and have offered me his friendship.</sentence>
			<sentence num="76">And how fine that would have been! How we should have got on together!</sentence>
			<sentence num="77">“He could have shielded me with his higher rank, while I could have improved his mind with my culture, and, well… my ideas, and all sorts of things might have happened.” Only fancy, this was two years after his insult to me, and my challenge would have been a ridiculous anachronism, in spite of all the ingenuity of my letter in disguising and explaining away the anachronism.</sentence>
			<sentence num="78">But, thank God (to this day I thank the Almighty with tears in my eyes) I did not send the letter to him. Cold shivers run down my back when I think of what might have happened if I had sent it. And all at once I revenged myself in the simplest way, by a stroke of genius! A brilliant thought suddenly dawned upon me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="79">Sometimes on holidays I used to stroll along the sunny side of the Nevsky about four o’clock in the afternoon. Though it was hardly a stroll so much as a series of innumerable miseries, humiliations and resentments; but no doubt that was just what I wanted.</sentence>
			<sentence num="80">I used to wriggle along in a most unseemly fashion, like an eel, continually moving aside to make way for generals, for officers of the guards and the hussars, or for ladies.</sentence>
			<sentence num="81">At such minutes there used to be a convulsive twinge at my heart, and I used to feel hot all down my back at the mere thought of the wretchedness of my attire, of the wretchedness and abjectness of my little scurrying figure. This was a regular martyrdom, a continual, intolerable humiliation at the thought, which passed into an incessant and direct sensation, that I was a mere fly in the eyes of all this world, a nasty, disgusting fly — more intelligent, more highly developed, more refined in feeling than any of them, of course — but a fly that was continually making way for everyone, insulted and injured by everyone.</sentence>
			<sentence num="82">Why I inflicted this torture upon myself, why I went to the Nevsky, I don’t know. I felt simply drawn there at every possible opportunity.</sentence>
			<sentence num="83">Already then I began to experience a rush of the enjoyment of which I spoke in the first chapter.</sentence>
			<sentence num="84">After my affair with the officer I felt even more drawn there than before: it was on the Nevsky that I met him most frequently, there I could admire him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="85">He, too, went there chiefly on holidays, He, too, turned out of his path for generals and persons of high rank, and he too, wriggled between them like an eel; but people, like me, or even better dressed than me, he simply walked over; he made straight for them as though there was nothing but empty space before him, and never, under any circumstances, turned aside.</sentence>
			<sentence num="86">I gloated over my resentment watching him and… always resentfully made way for him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="87">It exasperated me that even in the street I could not be on an even footing with him. “Why must you invariably be the first to move aside?” I kept asking myself in hysterical rage, waking up sometimes at three o’clock in the morning. “Why is it you and not he?</sentence>
			<sentence num="88">There’s no regulation about it; there’s no written law. Let the making way be equal as it usually is when refined people meet; he moves half-way and you move half-way; you pass with mutual respect.” But that never happened, and I always moved aside, while he did not even notice my making way for him. And lo and behold a bright idea dawned upon me! “What,” I thought, “if I meet him and don’t move on one side?</sentence>
			<sentence num="89">What if I don’t move aside on purpose, even if I knock up against him? How would that be?” This audacious idea took such a hold on me that it gave me no peace. I was dreaming of it continually, horribly, and I purposely went more frequently to the Nevsky in order to picture more vividly how I should do it when I did do it. I was delighted.</sentence>
			<sentence num="90">This intention seemed to me more and more practical and possible. “Of course I shall not really push him,” I thought, already more good- natured in my joy. “I will simply not turn aside, will run up against him, not very violently, but just shouldering each other — just as much as decency permits.</sentence>
			<sentence num="91">I will push against him just as much as he pushes against me.” At last I made up my mind completely. But my preparations took a great deal of time. To begin with, when I carried out my plan I should need to be looking rather more decent, and so I had to think of my get-up. “In case of emergency, if, for instance, there were any sort of public scandal (and the public there is of the most RECHERCHE: the Countess walks there; Prince D. walks there; all the literary world is there), I must be well dressed; that inspires respect and of itself puts us on an equal footing in the eyes of the society.” With this object I asked for some of my salary in advance, and bought at Tchurkin’s a pair of black gloves and a decent hat.</sentence>
			<sentence num="92">Black gloves seemed to me both more dignified and BON TON than the lemon-coloured ones which I had contemplated at first.</sentence>
			<sentence num="93">“The colour is too gaudy, it looks as though one were trying to be conspicuous,” and I did not take the lemon-coloured ones.</sentence>
			<sentence num="94">I had got ready long beforehand a good shirt, with white bone studs; my overcoat was the only thing that held me back.</sentence>
			<sentence num="95">The coat in itself was a very good one, it kept me warm; but it was wadded and it had a raccoon collar which was the height of vulgarity.</sentence>
			<sentence num="96">I had to change the collar at any sacrifice, and to have a beaver one like an officer’s.</sentence>
			<sentence num="97">For this purpose I began visiting the Gostiny Dvor and after several attempts I pitched upon a piece of cheap German beaver.</sentence>
			<sentence num="98">Though these German beavers soon grow shabby and look wretched, yet at first they look exceedingly well, and I only needed it for the occasion. I asked the price; even so, it was too expensive. After thinking it over thoroughly I decided to sell my raccoon collar.</sentence>
			<sentence num="99">The rest of the money — a considerable sum for me, I decided to borrow from Anton Antonitch Syetotchkin, my immediate superior, an unassuming person, though grave and judicious.</sentence>
			<sentence num="100">He never lent money to anyone, but I had, on entering the service, been specially recommended to him by an important personage who had got me my berth.</sentence>
			<sentence num="101">I was horribly worried. To borrow from Anton Antonitch seemed to me monstrous and shameful. I did not sleep for two or three nights. Indeed, I did not sleep well at that time, I was in a fever; I had a vague sinking at my heart or else a sudden throbbing, throbbing, throbbing!</sentence>
			<sentence num="102">Anton Antonitch was surprised at first, then he frowned, then he reflected, and did after all lend me the money, receiving from me a written authorisation to take from my salary a fortnight later the sum that he had lent me. In this way everything was at last ready.</sentence>
			<sentence num="103">The handsome beaver replaced the mean-looking raccoon, and I began by degrees to get to work.</sentence>
			<sentence num="104">It would never have done to act offhand, at random; the plan had to be carried out skilfully, by degrees. But I must confess that after many efforts I began to despair: we simply could not run into each other. I made every preparation, I was quite determined — it seemed as though we should run into one another directly — and before I knew what I was doing I had stepped aside for him again and he had passed without noticing me. I even prayed as I approached him that God would grant me determination.</sentence>
			<sentence num="105">One time I had made up my mind thoroughly, but it ended in my stumbling and falling at his feet because at the very last instant when I was six inches from him my courage failed me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="106">He very calmly stepped over me, while I flew on one side like a ball. That night I was ill again, feverish and delirious. And suddenly it ended most happily.</sentence>
			<sentence num="107">The night before I had made up my mind not to carry out my fatal plan and to abandon it all, and with that object I went to the Nevsky for the last time, just to see how I would abandon it all. Suddenly, three paces from my enemy, I unexpectedly made up my mind — I closed my eyes, and we ran full tilt, shoulder to shoulder, against one another! I did not budge an inch and passed him on a perfectly equal footing! He did not even look round and pretended not to notice it; but he was only pretending, I am convinced of that.</sentence>
			<sentence num="108">I am convinced of that to this day!</sentence>
			<sentence num="109">Of course, I got the worst of it — he was stronger, but that was not the point.</sentence>
			<sentence num="110">The point was that I had attained my object, I had kept up my dignity, I had not yielded a step, and had put myself publicly on an equal social footing with him. I returned home feeling that I was fully avenged for everything. I was delighted. I was triumphant and sang Italian arias.</sentence>
			<sentence num="111">Of course, I will not describe to you what happened to me three days later; if you have read my first chapter you can guess for yourself. The officer was afterwards transferred; I have not seen him now for fourteen years. What is the dear fellow doing now? Whom is he walking over?</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="13" name="PART II. A Propos of the Wet Snow - Chapter II">
			<sentence num="1"> But the period of my dissipation would end and I always felt very sick afterwards.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">It was followed by remorse — I tried to drive it away; I felt too sick.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">By degrees, however, I grew used to that too.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">I grew used to everything, or rather I voluntarily resigned myself to enduring it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">But I had a means of escape that reconciled everything — that was to find refuge in “the sublime and the beautiful,” in dreams, of course.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">I was a terrible dreamer, I would dream for three months on end, tucked away in my corner, and you may believe me that at those moments I had no resemblance to the gentleman who, in the perturbation of his chicken heart, put a collar of German beaver on his great-coat.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">I suddenly became a hero.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">I would not have admitted my six-foot lieutenant even if he had called on me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">I could not even picture him before me then.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">What were my dreams and how I could satisfy myself with them — it is hard to say now, but at the time I was satisfied with them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">Though, indeed, even now, I am to some extent satisfied with them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">Dreams were particularly sweet and vivid after a spell of dissipation; they came with remorse and with tears, with curses and transports.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">There were moments of such positive intoxication, of such happiness, that there was not the faintest trace of irony within me, on my honour.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">I had faith, hope, love.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">I believed blindly at such times that by some miracle, by some external circumstance, all this would suddenly open out, expand; that suddenly a vista of suitable activity — beneficent, good, and, above all, READY MADE (what sort of activity I had no idea, but the great thing was that it should be all ready for me)— would rise up before me — and I should come out into the light of day, almost riding a white horse and crowned with laurel.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">Anything but the foremost place I could not conceive for myself, and for that very reason I quite contentedly occupied the lowest in reality.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">Either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud — there was nothing between.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">That was my ruin, for when I was in the mud I comforted myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and the hero was a cloak for the mud: for an ordinary man it was shameful to defile himself, but a hero was too lofty to be utterly defiled, and so he might defile himself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">It is worth noting that these attacks of the “sublime and the beautiful” visited me even during the period of dissipation and just at the times when I was touching the bottom. They came in separate spurts, as though reminding me of themselves, but did not banish the dissipation by their appearance. On the contrary, they seemed to add a zest to it by contrast, and were only sufficiently present to serve as an appetising sauce.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">That sauce was made up of contradictions and sufferings, of agonising inward analysis, and all these pangs and pin-pricks gave a certain piquancy, even a significance to my dissipation — in fact, completely answered the purpose of an appetising sauce.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">There was a certain depth of meaning in it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">And I could hardly have resigned myself to the simple, vulgar, direct debauchery of a clerk and have endured all the filthiness of it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">What could have allured me about it then and have drawn me at night into the street?</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">No, I had a lofty way of getting out of it all. And what loving-kindness, oh Lord, what loving-kindness I felt at times in those dreams of mine! in those “flights into the sublime and the beautiful”; though it was fantastic love, though it was never applied to anything human in reality, yet there was so much of this love that one did not feel afterwards even the impulse to apply it in reality; that would have been superfluous.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">Everything, however, passed satisfactorily by a lazy and fascinating transition into the sphere of art, that is, into the beautiful forms of life, lying ready, largely stolen from the poets and novelists and adapted to all sorts of needs and uses.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">I, for instance, was triumphant over everyone; everyone, of course, was in dust and ashes, and was forced spontaneously to recognise my superiority, and I forgave them all.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">I was a poet and a grand gentleman, I fell in love; I came in for countless millions and immediately devoted them to humanity, and at the same time I confessed before all the people my shameful deeds, which, of course, were not merely shameful, but had in them much that was “sublime and beautiful” something in the Manfred style.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">Everyone would kiss me and weep (what idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against the obscurantists.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">Then the band would play a march, an amnesty would be declared, the Pope would agree to retire from Rome to Brazil; then there would be a ball for the whole of Italy at the Villa Borghese on the shores of Lake Como, Lake Como being for that purpose transferred to the neighbourhood of Rome; then would come a scene in the bushes, and so on, and so on — as though you did not know all about it?</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">You will say that it is vulgar and contemptible to drag all this into public after all the tears and transports which I have myself confessed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">But why is it contemptible? Can you imagine that I am ashamed of it all, and that it was stupider than anything in your life, gentlemen?</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">And I can assure you that some of these fancies were by no means badly composed… . It did not all happen on the shores of Lake Como. And yet you are right — it really is vulgar and contemptible.</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">And most contemptible of all it is that now I am attempting to justify myself to you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">And even more contemptible than that is my making this remark now.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">But that’s enough, or there will be no end to it; each step will be more contemptible than the last… . I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society.</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">To plunge into society meant to visit my superior at the office, Anton Antonitch Syetotchkin.</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">He was the only permanent acquaintance I have had in my life, and I wonder at the fact myself now.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">But I only went to see him when that phase came over me, and when my dreams had reached such a point of bliss that it became essential at once to embrace my fellows and all mankind; and for that purpose I needed, at least, one human being, actually existing.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">I had to call on Anton Antonitch, however, on Tuesday — his at-home day; so I had always to time my passionate desire to embrace humanity so that it might fall on a Tuesday.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">This Anton Antonitch lived on the fourth storey in a house in Five Corners, in four low-pitched rooms, one smaller than the other, of a particularly frugal and sallow appearance.</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">He had two daughters and their aunt, who used to pour out the tea.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="14" name="PART II. A Propos of the Wet Snow - Chapter III">
			<sentence num="1"> I found two of my old schoolfellows with him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">They seemed to be discussing an important matter.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">All of them took scarcely any notice of my entrance, which was strange, for I had not met them for years.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">Evidently they looked upon me as something on the level of a common fly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">I had not been treated like that even at school, though they all hated me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">I knew, of course, that they must despise me now for my lack of success in the service, and for my having let myself sink so low, going about badly dressed and so on — which seemed to them a sign of my incapacity and insignificance. But I had not expected such contempt.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">Simonov was positively surprised at my turning up.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">Even in old days he had always seemed surprised at my coming.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">All this disconcerted me: I sat down, feeling rather miserable, and began listening to what they were saying.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">They were engaged in warm and earnest conversation about a farewell dinner which they wanted to arrange for the next day to a comrade of theirs called Zverkov, an officer in the army, who was going away to a distant province.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">This Zverkov had been all the time at school with me too.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">I had begun to hate him particularly in the upper forms.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">In the lower forms he had simply been a pretty, playful boy whom everybody liked.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">I had hated him, however, even in the lower forms, just because he was a pretty and playful boy.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">He was always bad at his lessons and got worse and worse as he went on; however, he left with a good certificate, as he had powerful interests.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">During his last year at school he came in for an estate of two hundred serfs, and as almost all of us were poor he took up a swaggering tone among us.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">He was vulgar in the extreme, but at the same time he was a good-natured fellow, even in his swaggering.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">In spite of superficial, fantastic and sham notions of honour and dignity, all but very few of us positively grovelled before Zverkov, and the more so the more he swaggered.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">And it was not from any interested motive that they grovelled, but simply because he had been favoured by the gifts of nature.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">Moreover, it was, as it were, an accepted idea among us that Zverkov was a specialist in regard to tact and the social graces.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">This last fact particularly infuriated me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">I hated the abrupt self-confident tone of his voice, his admiration of his own witticisms, which were often frightfully stupid, though he was bold in his language; I hated his handsome, but stupid face (for which I would, however, have gladly exchanged my intelligent one), and the free-and-easy military manners in fashion in the “‘forties.” I hated the way in which he used to talk of his future conquests of women (he did not venture to begin his attack upon women until he had the epaulettes of an officer, and was looking forward to them with impatience), and boasted of the duels he would constantly be fighting.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">I remember how I, invariably so taciturn, suddenly fastened upon Zverkov, when one day talking at a leisure moment with his schoolfellows of his future relations with the fair sex, and growing as sportive as a puppy in the sun, he all at once declared that he would not leave a single village girl on his estate unnoticed, that that was his DROIT DE SEIGNEUR, and that if the peasants dared to protest he would have them all flogged and double the tax on them, the bearded rascals.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">Our servile rabble applauded, but I attacked him, not from compassion for the girls and their fathers, but simply because they were applauding such an insect.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">I got the better of him on that occasion, but though Zverkov was stupid he was lively and impudent, and so laughed it off, and in such a way that my victory was not really complete; the laugh was on his side.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">He got the better of me on several occasions afterwards, but without malice, jestingly, casually.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">I remained angrily and contemptuously silent and would not answer him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">When we left school he made advances to me; I did not rebuff them, for I was flattered, but we soon parted and quite naturally. Afterwards I heard of his barrack-room success as a lieutenant, and of the fast life he was leading.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">Then there came other rumours — of his successes in the service.</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">By then he had taken to cutting me in the street, and I suspected that he was afraid of compromising himself by greeting a personage as insignificant as me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">I saw him once in the theatre, in the third tier of boxes. By then he was wearing shoulder-straps. He was twisting and twirling about, ingratiating himself with the daughters of an ancient General.</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">In three years he had gone off considerably, though he was still rather handsome and adroit.</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">One could see that by the time he was thirty he would be corpulent.</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">So it was to this Zverkov that my schoolfellows were going to give a dinner on his departure.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">They had kept up with him for those three years, though privately they did not consider themselves on an equal footing with him, I am convinced of that.</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">Of Simonov’s two visitors, one was Ferfitchkin, a Russianised German — a little fellow with the face of a monkey, a blockhead who was always deriding everyone, a very bitter enemy of mine from our days in the lower forms — a vulgar, impudent, swaggering fellow, who affected a most sensitive feeling of personal honour, though, of course, he was a wretched little coward at heart.</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">He was one of those worshippers of Zverkov who made up to the latter from interested motives, and often borrowed money from him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">Simonov’s other visitor, Trudolyubov, was a person in no way remarkable — a tall young fellow, in the army, with a cold face, fairly honest, though he worshipped success of every sort, and was only capable of thinking of promotion.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">He was some sort of distant relation of Zverkov’s, and this, foolish as it seems, gave him a certain importance among us.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">He always thought me of no consequence whatever; his behaviour to me, though not quite courteous, was tolerable.</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">“Well, with seven roubles each,” said Trudolyubov, “twenty-one roubles between the three of us, we ought to be able to get a good dinner.</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">Zverkov, of course, won’t pay.” “Of course not, since we are inviting him,” Simonov decided.</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">“Can you imagine,” Ferfitchkin interrupted hotly and conceitedly, like some insolent flunkey boasting of his master the General’s decorations, “can you imagine that Zverkov will let us pay alone?</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">He will accept from delicacy, but he will order half a dozen bottles of champagne.” “Do we want half a dozen for the four of us?” observed Trudolyubov, taking notice only of the half dozen.</sentence>
			<sentence num="45">“So the three of us, with Zverkov for the fourth, twenty-one roubles, at the Hotel de Paris at five o’clock tomorrow,” Simonov, who had been asked to make the arrangements, concluded finally.</sentence>
			<sentence num="46">“How twenty-one roubles?” I asked in some agitation, with a show of being offended; “if you count me it will not be twenty-one, but twenty-eight roubles.” It seemed to me that to invite myself so suddenly and unexpectedly would be positively graceful, and that they would all be conquered at once and would look at me with respect.</sentence>
			<sentence num="47">“Do you want to join, too?” Simonov observed, with no appearance of pleasure, seeming to avoid looking at me. He knew me through and through.</sentence>
			<sentence num="48">It infuriated me that he knew me so thoroughly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="49">“Why not? I am an old schoolfellow of his, too, I believe, and I must own I feel hurt that you have left me out,” I said, boiling over again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="50">“And where were we to find you?” Ferfitchkin put in roughly. “You never were on good terms with Zverkov,” Trudolyubov added, frowning.</sentence>
			<sentence num="51">But I had already clutched at the idea and would not give it up.</sentence>
			<sentence num="52">“It seems to me that no one has a right to form an opinion upon that,” I retorted in a shaking voice, as though something tremendous had happened.</sentence>
			<sentence num="53">“Perhaps that is just my reason for wishing it now, that I have not always been on good terms with him.” “Oh, there’s no making you out… with these refinements,” Trudolyubov jeered.</sentence>
			<sentence num="54">“We’ll put your name down,” Simonov decided, addressing me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="55">“Tomorrow at five-o’clock at the Hotel de Paris.” “What about the money?” Ferfitchkin began in an undertone, indicating me to Simonov, but he broke off, for even Simonov was embarrassed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="56">“That will do,” said Trudolyubov, getting up.</sentence>
			<sentence num="57">“If he wants to come so much, let him.” “But it’s a private thing, between us friends,” Ferfitchkin said crossly, as he, too, picked up his hat.</sentence>
			<sentence num="58">“It’s not an official gathering.” “We do not want at all, perhaps… ” They went away.</sentence>
			<sentence num="59">Ferfitchkin did not greet me in any way as he went out, Trudolyubov barely nodded. Simonov, with whom I was left TETE-A-TETE, was in a state of vexation and perplexity, and looked at me queerly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="60">He did not sit down and did not ask me to. “H’m… yes… tomorrow, then. Will you pay your subscription now? I just ask so as to know,” he muttered in embarrassment.</sentence>
			<sentence num="61">I flushed crimson, as I did so I remembered that I had owed Simonov fifteen roubles for ages — which I had, indeed, never forgotten, though I had not paid it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="62">“You will understand, Simonov, that I could have no idea when I came here… . I am very much vexed that I have forgotten… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="63">” “All right, all right, that doesn’t matter. You can pay tomorrow after the dinner. I simply wanted to know… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="64">Please don’t… ” He broke off and began pacing the room still more vexed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="65">As he walked he began to stamp with his heels. “Am I keeping you?” I asked, after two minutes of silence.</sentence>
			<sentence num="66">“Oh!” he said, starting, “that is — to be truthful — yes.</sentence>
			<sentence num="67">I have to go and see someone… not far from here,” he added in an apologetic voice, somewhat abashed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="68">“My goodness, why didn’t you say so?” I cried, seizing my cap, with an astonishingly free-and-easy air, which was the last thing I should have expected of myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="69">“It’s close by… not two paces away,” Simonov repeated, accompanying me to the front door with a fussy air which did not suit him at all.</sentence>
			<sentence num="70">“So five o’clock, punctually, tomorrow,” he called down the stairs after me. He was very glad to get rid of me. I was in a fury. “What possessed me, what possessed me to force myself upon them?” I wondered, grinding my teeth as I strode along the street, “for a scoundrel, a pig like that Zverkov!</sentence>
			<sentence num="71">Of course I had better not go; of course, I must just snap my fingers at them. I am not bound in any way. I’ll send Simonov a note by tomorrow’s post… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="72">” But what made me furious was that I knew for certain that I should go, that I should make a point of going; and the more tactless, the more unseemly my going would be, the more certainly I would go.</sentence>
			<sentence num="73">And there was a positive obstacle to my going: I had no money. All I had was nine roubles, I had to give seven of that to my servant, Apollon, for his monthly wages.</sentence>
			<sentence num="74">That was all I paid him — he had to keep himself. Not to pay him was impossible, considering his character.</sentence>
			<sentence num="75">But I will talk about that fellow, about that plague of mine, another time. However, I knew I should go and should not pay him his wages.</sentence>
			<sentence num="76">That night I had the most hideous dreams.</sentence>
			<sentence num="77">No wonder; all the evening I had been oppressed by memories of my miserable days at school, and I could not shake them off. I was sent to the school by distant relations, upon whom I was dependent and of whom I have heard nothing since — they sent me there a forlorn, silent boy, already crushed by their reproaches, already troubled by doubt, and looking with savage distrust at everyone.</sentence>
			<sentence num="78">My schoolfellows met me with spiteful and merciless jibes because I was not like any of them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="79">But I could not endure their taunts; I could not give in to them with the ignoble readiness with which they gave in to one another.</sentence>
			<sentence num="80">I hated them from the first, and shut myself away from everyone in timid, wounded and disproportionate pride.</sentence>
			<sentence num="81">Their coarseness revolted me. They laughed cynically at my face, at my clumsy figure; and yet what stupid faces they had themselves.</sentence>
			<sentence num="82">In our school the boys’ faces seemed in a special way to degenerate and grow stupider. How many fine-looking boys came to us!</sentence>
			<sentence num="83">In a few years they became repulsive. Even at sixteen I wondered at them morosely; even then I was struck by the pettiness of their thoughts, the stupidity of their pursuits, their games, their conversations.</sentence>
			<sentence num="84">They had no understanding of such essential things, they took no interest in such striking, impressive subjects, that I could not help considering them inferior to myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="85">It was not wounded vanity that drove me to it, and for God’s sake do not thrust upon me your hackneyed remarks, repeated to nausea, that “I was only a dreamer,” while they even then had an understanding of life.</sentence>
			<sentence num="86">They understood nothing, they had no idea of real life, and I swear that that was what made me most indignant with them. On the contrary, the most obvious, striking reality they accepted with fantastic stupidity and even at that time were accustomed to respect success. Everything that was just, but oppressed and looked down upon, they laughed at heartlessly and shamefully.</sentence>
			<sentence num="87">They took rank for intelligence; even at sixteen they were already talking about a snug berth.</sentence>
			<sentence num="88">Of course, a great deal of it was due to their stupidity, to the bad examples with which they had always been surrounded in their childhood and boyhood. They were monstrously depraved.</sentence>
			<sentence num="89">Of course a great deal of that, too, was superficial and an assumption of cynicism; of course there were glimpses of youth and freshness even in their depravity; but even that freshness was not attractive, and showed itself in a certain rakishness.</sentence>
			<sentence num="90">I hated them horribly, though perhaps I was worse than any of them. They repaid me in the same way, and did not conceal their aversion for me. But by then I did not desire their affection: on the contrary, I continually longed for their humiliation.</sentence>
			<sentence num="91">To escape from their derision I purposely began to make all the progress I could with my studies and forced my way to the very top.</sentence>
			<sentence num="92">This impressed them. Moreover, they all began by degrees to grasp that I had already read books none of them could read, and understood things (not forming part of our school curriculum) of which they had not even heard.</sentence>
			<sentence num="93">They took a savage and sarcastic view of it, but were morally impressed, especially as the teachers began to notice me on those grounds.</sentence>
			<sentence num="94">The mockery ceased, but the hostility remained, and cold and strained relations became permanent between us. In the end I could not put up with it: with years a craving for society, for friends, developed in me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="95">I attempted to get on friendly terms with some of my schoolfellows; but somehow or other my intimacy with them was always strained and soon ended of itself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="96">Once, indeed, I did have a friend.</sentence>
			<sentence num="97">But I was already a tyrant at heart; I wanted to exercise unbounded sway over him; I tried to instil into him a contempt for his surroundings; I required of him a disdainful and complete break with those surroundings.</sentence>
			<sentence num="98">I frightened him with my passionate affection; I reduced him to tears, to hysterics.</sentence>
			<sentence num="99">He was a simple and devoted soul; but when he devoted himself to me entirely I began to hate him immediately and repulsed him — as though all I needed him for was to win a victory over him, to subjugate him and nothing else.</sentence>
			<sentence num="100">But I could not subjugate all of them; my friend was not at all like them either, he was, in fact, a rare exception. The first thing I did on leaving school was to give up the special job for which I had been destined so as to break all ties, to curse my past and shake the dust from off my feet… . And goodness knows why, after all that, I should go trudging off to Simonov’s! Early next morning I roused myself and jumped out of bed with excitement, as though it were all about to happen at once.</sentence>
			<sentence num="101">But I believed that some radical change in my life was coming, and would inevitably come that day.</sentence>
			<sentence num="102">Owing to its rarity, perhaps, any external event, however trivial, always made me feel as though some radical change in my life were at hand. I went to the office, however, as usual, but sneaked away home two hours earlier to get ready.</sentence>
			<sentence num="103">The great thing, I thought, is not to be the first to arrive, or they will think I am overjoyed at coming. But there were thousands of such great points to consider, and they all agitated and overwhelmed me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="104">I polished my boots a second time with my own hands; nothing in the world would have induced Apollon to clean them twice a day, as he considered that it was more than his duties required of him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="105">I stole the brushes to clean them from the passage, being careful he should not detect it, for fear of his contempt. Then I minutely examined my clothes and thought that everything looked old, worn and threadbare. I had let myself get too slovenly. My uniform, perhaps, was tidy, but I could not go out to dinner in my uniform.</sentence>
			<sentence num="106">The worst of it was that on the knee of my trousers was a big yellow stain.</sentence>
			<sentence num="107">I had a foreboding that that stain would deprive me of nine-tenths of my personal dignity. I knew, too, that it was very poor to think so. “But this is no time for thinking: now I am in for the real thing,” I thought, and my heart sank.</sentence>
			<sentence num="108">I knew, too, perfectly well even then, that I was monstrously exaggerating the facts. But how could I help it? I could not control myself and was already shaking with fever.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="15" name="PART II. A Propos of the Wet Snow - Chapter IV">
			<sentence num="1"> I had been certain the day before that I should be the first to arrive.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">But it was not a question of being the first to arrive.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">Not only were they not there, but I had difficulty in finding our room.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">The table was not laid even. What did it mean?</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">After a good many questions I elicited from the waiters that the dinner had been ordered not for five, but for six o’clock.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">This was confirmed at the buffet too.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">I felt really ashamed to go on questioning them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">It was only twenty-five minutes past five.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">If they changed the dinner hour they ought at least to have let me know — that is what the post is for, and not to have put me in an absurd position in my own eyes and… and even before the waiters.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">I sat down; the servant began laying the table; I felt even more humiliated when he was present.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">Towards six o’clock they brought in candles, though there were lamps burning in the room.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">It had not occurred to the waiter, however, to bring them in at once when I arrived.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">In the next room two gloomy, angry- looking persons were eating their dinners in silence at two different tables.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">There was a great deal of noise, even shouting, in a room further away; one could hear the laughter of a crowd of people, and nasty little shrieks in French: there were ladies at the dinner.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">It was sickening, in fact.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">I rarely passed more unpleasant moments, so much so that when they did arrive all together punctually at six I was overjoyed to see them, as though they were my deliverers, and even forgot that it was incumbent upon me to show resentment.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">Zverkov walked in at the head of them; evidently he was the leading spirit.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">He and all of them were laughing; but, seeing me, Zverkov drew himself up a little, walked up to me deliberately with a slight, rather jaunty bend from the waist. He shook hands with me in a friendly, but not over- friendly, fashion, with a sort of circumspect courtesy like that of a General, as though in giving me his hand he were warding off something.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">I had imagined, on the contrary, that on coming in he would at once break into his habitual thin, shrill laugh and fall to making his insipid jokes and witticisms.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">I had been preparing for them ever since the previous day, but I had not expected such condescension, such high-official courtesy.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">So, then, he felt himself ineffably superior to me in every respect!</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">If he only meant to insult me by that high-official tone, it would not matter, I thought — I could pay him back for it one way or another.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">But what if, in reality, without the least desire to be offensive, that sheepshead had a notion in earnest that he was superior to me and could only look at me in a patronising way? The very supposition made me gasp.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">“I was surprised to hear of your desire to join us,” he began, lisping and drawling, which was something new.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">“You and I seem to have seen nothing of one another.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">You fight shy of us.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">You shouldn’t.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">We are not such terrible people as you think.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">Well, anyway, I am glad to renew our acquaintance.” And he turned carelessly to put down his hat on the window.</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">“Have you been waiting long?” Trudolyubov inquired.</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">“I arrived at five o’clock as you told me yesterday,” I answered aloud, with an irritability that threatened an explosion.</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">“Didn’t you let him know that we had changed the hour?” said Trudolyubov to Simonov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">“No, I didn’t.</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">I forgot,” the latter replied, with no sign of regret, and without even apologising to me he went off to order the HORS D’OEUVRE.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">“So you’ve been here a whole hour?</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">Oh, poor fellow!” Zverkov cried ironically, for to his notions this was bound to be extremely funny.</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">That rascal Ferfitchkin followed with his nasty little snigger like a puppy yapping.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">My position struck him, too, as exquisitely ludicrous and embarrassing.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">“It isn’t funny at all!” I cried to Ferfitchkin, more and more irritated.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">“It wasn’t my fault, but other people’s.</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">They neglected to let me know. It was… it was… it was simply absurd.” “It’s not only absurd, but something else as well,” muttered Trudolyubov, naively taking my part.</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">“You are not hard enough upon it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">It was simply rudeness — unintentional, of course.</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">And how could Simonov… h’m!” “If a trick like that had been played on me,” observed Ferfitchkin, “I should… ” “But you should have ordered something for yourself,” Zverkov interrupted, “or simply asked for dinner without waiting for us.” “You will allow that I might have done that without your permission,” I rapped out.</sentence>
			<sentence num="45">“If I waited, it was… ” “Let us sit down, gentlemen,” cried Simonov, coming in. “Everything is ready; I can answer for the champagne; it is capitally frozen… . You see, I did not know your address, where was I to look for you?” he suddenly turned to me, but again he seemed to avoid looking at me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="46">Evidently he had something against me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="47">It must have been what happened yesterday.</sentence>
			<sentence num="48">All sat down; I did the same. It was a round table.</sentence>
			<sentence num="49">Trudolyubov was on my left, Simonov on my right, Zverkov was sitting opposite, Ferfitchkin next to him, between him and Trudolyubov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="50">“Tell me, are you… in a government office?” Zverkov went on attending to me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="51">Seeing that I was embarrassed he seriously thought that he ought to be friendly to me, and, so to speak, cheer me up.</sentence>
			<sentence num="52">“Does he want me to throw a bottle at his head?” I thought, in a fury.</sentence>
			<sentence num="53">In my novel surroundings I was unnaturally ready to be irritated.</sentence>
			<sentence num="54">“In the N—— office,” I answered jerkily, with my eyes on my plate.</sentence>
			<sentence num="55">“And ha-ave you a go-od berth?</sentence>
			<sentence num="56">I say, what ma-a-de you leave your original job?” “What ma-a-de me was that I wanted to leave my original job,” I drawled more than he, hardly able to control myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="57">Ferfitchkin went off into a guffaw.</sentence>
			<sentence num="58">Simonov looked at me ironically. Trudolyubov left off eating and began looking at me with curiosity.</sentence>
			<sentence num="59">Zverkov winced, but he tried not to notice it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="60">“And the remuneration?” “What remuneration?” “I mean, your sa-a-lary?” “Why are you cross-examining me?” However, I told him at once what my salary was.</sentence>
			<sentence num="61">I turned horribly red. “It is not very handsome,” Zverkov observed majestically.</sentence>
			<sentence num="62">“Yes, you can’t afford to dine at cafes on that,” Ferfitchkin added insolently.</sentence>
			<sentence num="63">“To my thinking it’s very poor,” Trudolyubov observed gravely.</sentence>
			<sentence num="64">“And how thin you have grown!</sentence>
			<sentence num="65">How you have changed!” added Zverkov, with a shade of venom in his voice, scanning me and my attire with a sort of insolent compassion.</sentence>
			<sentence num="66">“Oh, spare his blushes,” cried Ferfitchkin, sniggering. “My dear sir, allow me to tell you I am not blushing,” I broke out at last; “do you hear?</sentence>
			<sentence num="67">I am dining here, at this cafe, at my own expense, not at other people’s — note that, Mr. Ferfitchkin.” “Wha-at?</sentence>
			<sentence num="68">Isn’t every one here dining at his own expense? You would seem to be… ” Ferfitchkin flew out at me, turning as red as a lobster, and looking me in the face with fury.</sentence>
			<sentence num="69">“Tha-at,” I answered, feeling I had gone too far, “and I imagine it would be better to talk of something more intelligent.” “You intend to show off your intelligence, I suppose?” “Don’t disturb yourself, that would be quite out of place here.” “Why are you clacking away like that, my good sir, eh?</sentence>
			<sentence num="70">Have you gone out of your wits in your office?” “Enough, gentlemen, enough!” Zverkov cried, authoritatively.</sentence>
			<sentence num="71">“How stupid it is!” muttered Simonov. “It really is stupid.</sentence>
			<sentence num="72">We have met here, a company of friends, for a farewell dinner to a comrade and you carry on an altercation,” said Trudolyubov, rudely addressing himself to me alone.</sentence>
			<sentence num="73">“You invited yourself to join us, so don’t disturb the general harmony.” “Enough, enough!” cried Zverkov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="74">“Give over, gentlemen, it’s out of place. Better let me tell you how I nearly got married the day before yesterday… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="75">” And then followed a burlesque narrative of how this gentleman had almost been married two days before.</sentence>
			<sentence num="76">There was not a word about the marriage, however, but the story was adorned with generals, colonels and kammer-junkers, while Zverkov almost took the lead among them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="77">It was greeted with approving laughter; Ferfitchkin positively squealed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="78">No one paid any attention to me, and I sat crushed and humiliated.</sentence>
			<sentence num="79">“Good Heavens, these are not the people for me!” I thought.</sentence>
			<sentence num="80">“And what a fool I have made of myself before them!</sentence>
			<sentence num="81">I let Ferfitchkin go too far, though.</sentence>
			<sentence num="82">The brutes imagine they are doing me an honour in letting me sit down with them. They don’t understand that it’s an honour to them and not to me!</sentence>
			<sentence num="83">I’ve grown thinner!</sentence>
			<sentence num="84">My clothes! Oh, damn my trousers!</sentence>
			<sentence num="85">Zverkov noticed the yellow stain on the knee as soon as he came in… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="86">But what’s the use! I must get up at once, this very minute, take my hat and simply go without a word… with contempt!</sentence>
			<sentence num="87">And tomorrow I can send a challenge.</sentence>
			<sentence num="88">The scoundrels! As though I cared about the seven roubles.</sentence>
			<sentence num="89">They may think… . Damn it!</sentence>
			<sentence num="90">I don’t care about the seven roubles.</sentence>
			<sentence num="91">I’ll go this minute!” Of course I remained.</sentence>
			<sentence num="92">I drank sherry and Lafitte by the glassful in my discomfiture.</sentence>
			<sentence num="93">Being unaccustomed to it, I was quickly affected.</sentence>
			<sentence num="94">My annoyance increased as the wine went to my head. I longed all at once to insult them all in a most flagrant manner and then go away.</sentence>
			<sentence num="95">To seize the moment and show what I could do, so that they would say, “He’s clever, though he is absurd,” and… and… in fact, damn them all!</sentence>
			<sentence num="96">I scanned them all insolently with my drowsy eyes.</sentence>
			<sentence num="97">But they seemed to have forgotten me altogether.</sentence>
			<sentence num="98">They were noisy, vociferous, cheerful.</sentence>
			<sentence num="99">Zverkov was talking all the time.</sentence>
			<sentence num="100">I began listening.</sentence>
			<sentence num="101">Zverkov was talking of some exuberant lady whom he had at last led on to declaring her love (of course, he was lying like a horse), and how he had been helped in this affair by an intimate friend of his, a Prince Kolya, an officer in the hussars, who had three thousand serfs.</sentence>
			<sentence num="102">“And yet this Kolya, who has three thousand serfs, has not put in an appearance here tonight to see you off,” I cut in suddenly. For one minute every one was silent.</sentence>
			<sentence num="103">“You are drunk already.” Trudolyubov deigned to notice me at last, glancing contemptuously in my direction.</sentence>
			<sentence num="104">Zverkov, without a word, examined me as though I were an insect.</sentence>
			<sentence num="105">I dropped my eyes. Simonov made haste to fill up the glasses with champagne.</sentence>
			<sentence num="106">Trudolyubov raised his glass, as did everyone else but me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="107">“Your health and good luck on the journey!” he cried to Zverkov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="108">“To old times, to our future, hurrah!” They all tossed off their glasses, and crowded round Zverkov to kiss him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="109">I did not move; my full glass stood untouched before me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="110">“Why, aren’t you going to drink it?” roared Trudolyubov, losing patience and turning menacingly to me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="111">“I want to make a speech separately, on my own account… and then I’ll drink it, Mr. Trudolyubov.” “Spiteful brute!” muttered Simonov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="112">I drew myself up in my chair and feverishly seized my glass, prepared for something extraordinary, though I did not know myself precisely what I was going to say.</sentence>
			<sentence num="113">“SILENCE!” cried Ferfitchkin. “Now for a display of wit!” Zverkov waited very gravely, knowing what was coming.</sentence>
			<sentence num="114">“Mr. Lieutenant Zverkov,” I began, “let me tell you that I hate phrases, phrasemongers and men in corsets… that’s the first point, and there is a second one to follow it.” There was a general stir.</sentence>
			<sentence num="115">“The second point is: I hate ribaldry and ribald talkers.</sentence>
			<sentence num="116">Especially ribald talkers!</sentence>
			<sentence num="117">The third point: I love justice, truth and honesty.” I went on almost mechanically, for I was beginning to shiver with horror myself and had no idea how I came to be talking like this. “I love thought, Monsieur Zverkov; I love true comradeship, on an equal footing and not… H’m… I love… But, however, why not?</sentence>
			<sentence num="118">I will drink your health, too, Mr. Zverkov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="119">Seduce the Circassian girls, shoot the enemies of the fatherland and… and… to your health, Monsieur Zverkov!” Zverkov got up from his seat, bowed to me and said: “I am very much obliged to you.” He was frightfully offended and turned pale.</sentence>
			<sentence num="120">“Damn the fellow!” roared Trudolyubov, bringing his fist down on the table.</sentence>
			<sentence num="121">“Well, he wants a punch in the face for that,” squealed Ferfitchkin.</sentence>
			<sentence num="122">“We ought to turn him out,” muttered Simonov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="123">“Not a word, gentlemen, not a movement!” cried Zverkov solemnly, checking the general indignation.</sentence>
			<sentence num="124">“I thank you all, but I can show him for myself how much value I attach to his words.” “Mr.</sentence>
			<sentence num="125">Ferfitchkin, you will give me satisfaction tomorrow for your words just now!” I said aloud, turning with dignity to Ferfitchkin.</sentence>
			<sentence num="126">“A duel, you mean?</sentence>
			<sentence num="127">Certainly,” he answered. But probably I was so ridiculous as I challenged him and it was so out of keeping with my appearance that everyone including Ferfitchkin was prostrate with laughter.</sentence>
			<sentence num="128">“Yes, let him alone, of course!</sentence>
			<sentence num="129">He is quite drunk,” Trudolyubov said with disgust.</sentence>
			<sentence num="130">“I shall never forgive myself for letting him join us,” Simonov muttered again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="131">“Now is the time to throw a bottle at their heads,” I thought to myself. I picked up the bottle… and filled my glass… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="132">“No, I’d better sit on to the end,” I went on thinking; “you would be pleased, my friends, if I went away.</sentence>
			<sentence num="133">Nothing will induce me to go.</sentence>
			<sentence num="134">I’ll go on sitting here and drinking to the end, on purpose, as a sign that I don’t think you of the slightest consequence.</sentence>
			<sentence num="135">I will go on sitting and drinking, because this is a public-house and I paid my entrance money.</sentence>
			<sentence num="136">I’ll sit here and drink, for I look upon you as so many pawns, as inanimate pawns.</sentence>
			<sentence num="137">I’ll sit here and drink… and sing if I want to, yes, sing, for I have the right to… to sing… H’m!” But I did not sing.</sentence>
			<sentence num="138">I simply tried not to look at any of them. I assumed most unconcerned attitudes and waited with impatience for them to speak FIRST. But alas, they did not address me!</sentence>
			<sentence num="139">And oh, how I wished, how I wished at that moment to be reconciled to them!</sentence>
			<sentence num="140">It struck eight, at last nine.</sentence>
			<sentence num="141">They moved from the table to the sofa.</sentence>
			<sentence num="142">Zverkov stretched himself on a lounge and put one foot on a round table.</sentence>
			<sentence num="143">Wine was brought there.</sentence>
			<sentence num="144">He did, as a fact, order three bottles on his own account.</sentence>
			<sentence num="145">I, of course, was not invited to join them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="146">They all sat round him on the sofa.</sentence>
			<sentence num="147">They listened to him, almost with reverence.</sentence>
			<sentence num="148">It was evident that they were fond of him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="149">“What for?</sentence>
			<sentence num="150">What for?” I wondered.</sentence>
			<sentence num="151">From time to time they were moved to drunken enthusiasm and kissed each other.</sentence>
			<sentence num="152">They talked of the Caucasus, of the nature of true passion, of snug berths in the service, of the income of an hussar called Podharzhevsky, whom none of them knew personally, and rejoiced in the largeness of it, of the extraordinary grace and beauty of a Princess D., whom none of them had ever seen; then it came to Shakespeare’s being immortal.</sentence>
			<sentence num="153">I smiled contemptuously and walked up and down the other side of the room, opposite the sofa, from the table to the stove and back again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="154">I tried my very utmost to show them that I could do without them, and yet I purposely made a noise with my boots, thumping with my heels.</sentence>
			<sentence num="155">But it was all in vain. They paid no attention.</sentence>
			<sentence num="156">I had the patience to walk up and down in front of them from eight o’clock till eleven, in the same place, from the table to the stove and back again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="157">“I walk up and down to please myself and no one can prevent me.” The waiter who came into the room stopped, from time to time, to look at me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="158">I was somewhat giddy from turning round so often; at moments it seemed to me that I was in delirium.</sentence>
			<sentence num="159">During those three hours I was three times soaked with sweat and dry again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="160">At times, with an intense, acute pang I was stabbed to the heart by the thought that ten years, twenty years, forty years would pass, and that even in forty years I would remember with loathing and humiliation those filthiest, most ludicrous, and most awful moments of my life.</sentence>
			<sentence num="161">No one could have gone out of his way to degrade himself more shamelessly, and I fully realised it, fully, and yet I went on pacing up and down from the table to the stove.</sentence>
			<sentence num="162">“Oh, if you only knew what thoughts and feelings I am capable of, how cultured I am!” I thought at moments, mentally addressing the sofa on which my enemies were sitting.</sentence>
			<sentence num="163">But my enemies behaved as though I were not in the room. Once — only once — they turned towards me, just when Zverkov was talking about Shakespeare, and I suddenly gave a contemptuous laugh.</sentence>
			<sentence num="164">I laughed in such an affected and disgusting way that they all at once broke off their conversation, and silently and gravely for two minutes watched me walking up and down from the table to the stove, TAKING NO NOTICE OF THEM.</sentence>
			<sentence num="165">But nothing came of it: they said nothing, and two minutes later they ceased to notice me again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="166">It struck eleven.</sentence>
			<sentence num="167">“Friends,” cried Zverkov getting up from the sofa, “let us all be off now, THERE!” “Of course, of course,” the others assented.</sentence>
			<sentence num="168">I turned sharply to Zverkov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="169">I was so harassed, so exhausted, that I would have cut my throat to put an end to it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="170">I was in a fever; my hair, soaked with perspiration, stuck to my forehead and temples.</sentence>
			<sentence num="171">“Zverkov, I beg your pardon,” I said abruptly and resolutely.</sentence>
			<sentence num="172">“Ferfitchkin, yours too, and everyone’s, everyone’s: I have insulted you all!” “Aha!</sentence>
			<sentence num="173">A duel is not in your line, old man,” Ferfitchkin hissed venomously.</sentence>
			<sentence num="174">It sent a sharp pang to my heart. “No, it’s not the duel I am afraid of, Ferfitchkin!</sentence>
			<sentence num="175">I am ready to fight you tomorrow, after we are reconciled.</sentence>
			<sentence num="176">I insist upon it, in fact, and you cannot refuse.</sentence>
			<sentence num="177">I want to show you that I am not afraid of a duel.</sentence>
			<sentence num="178">You shall fire first and I shall fire into the air.” “He is comforting himself,” said Simonov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="179">“He’s simply raving,” said Trudolyubov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="180">“But let us pass. Why are you barring our way? What do you want?” Zverkov answered disdainfully. They were all flushed, their eyes were bright: they had been drinking heavily.</sentence>
			<sentence num="181">“I ask for your friendship, Zverkov; I insulted you, but… ” “Insulted?</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="16" name="PART II. A Propos of the Wet Snow - Chapter V">
			<sentence num="1"> “So this is it, this is it at last — contact with real life,” I muttered as I ran headlong downstairs.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">“This is very different from the Pope’s leaving Rome and going to Brazil, very different from the ball on Lake Como!” “You are a scoundrel,” a thought flashed through my mind, “if you laugh at this now.” “No matter!” I cried, answering myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">“Now everything is lost!” There was no trace to be seen of them, but that made no difference — I knew where they had gone.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">At the steps was standing a solitary night sledge-driver in a rough peasant coat, powdered over with the still falling, wet, and as it were warm, snow.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">It was hot and steamy.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">The little shaggy piebald horse was also covered with snow and coughing, I remember that very well.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">I made a rush for the roughly made sledge; but as soon as I raised my foot to get into it, the recollection of how Simonov had just given me six roubles seemed to double me up and I tumbled into the sledge like a sack.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">“No, I must do a great deal to make up for all that,” I cried.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">“But I will make up for it or perish on the spot this very night.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">Start!” We set off.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">There was a perfect whirl in my head.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">“They won’t go down on their knees to beg for my friendship.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">That is a mirage, cheap mirage, revolting, romantic and fantastical — that’s another ball on Lake Como.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">And so I am bound to slap Zverkov’s face!</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">It is my duty to.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">And so it is settled; I am flying to give him a slap in the face.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">Hurry up!” The driver tugged at the reins.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">“As soon as I go in I’ll give it him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">Ought I before giving him the slap to say a few words by way of preface?</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">No. I’ll simply go in and give it him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">They will all be sitting in the drawing-room, and he with Olympia on the sofa.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">That damned Olympia! She laughed at my looks on one occasion and refused me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">I’ll pull Olympia’s hair, pull Zverkov’s ears!</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">No, better one ear, and pull him by it round the room. Maybe they will all begin beating me and will kick me out. That’s most likely, indeed. No matter!</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">Anyway, I shall first slap him; the initiative will be mine; and by the laws of honour that is everything: he will be branded and cannot wipe off the slap by any blows, by nothing but a duel.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">He will be forced to fight.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">And let them beat me now. Let them, the ungrateful wretches!</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">Trudolyubov will beat me hardest, he is so strong; Ferfitchkin will be sure to catch hold sideways and tug at my hair.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">But no matter, no matter!</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">That’s what I am going for.</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">The blockheads will be forced at last to see the tragedy of it all!</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">When they drag me to the door I shall call out to them that in reality they are not worth my little finger.</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">Get on, driver, get on!” I cried to the driver.</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">He started and flicked his whip, I shouted so savagely.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">But where can I get pistols?</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">Nonsense! I’ll get my salary in advance and buy them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">And powder, and bullets? That’s the second’s business.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">The first person I meet in the street is bound to be my second, just as he would be bound to pull a drowning man out of water.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">The most eccentric things may happen.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">Even if I were to ask the director himself to be my second tomorrow, he would be bound to consent, if only from a feeling of chivalry, and to keep the secret!</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">Anton Antonitch… . ” The fact is, that at that very minute the disgusting absurdity of my plan and the other side of the question was clearer and more vivid to my imagination than it could be to anyone on earth. But… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">“Get on, driver, get on, you rascal, get on!” “Ugh, sir!” said the son of toil.</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">Cold shivers suddenly ran down me. Wouldn’t it be better… to go straight home?</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">My God, my God!</sentence>
			<sentence num="45">Why did I invite myself to this dinner yesterday?</sentence>
			<sentence num="46">But no, it’s impossible.</sentence>
			<sentence num="47">And my walking up and down for three hours from the table to the stove?</sentence>
			<sentence num="48">No, they, they and no one else must pay for my walking up and down!</sentence>
			<sentence num="49">They must wipe out this dishonour! Drive on!</sentence>
			<sentence num="50">And what if they give me into custody?</sentence>
			<sentence num="51">They won’t dare!</sentence>
			<sentence num="52">They’ll be afraid of the scandal.</sentence>
			<sentence num="53">And what if Zverkov is so contemptuous that he refuses to fight a duel?</sentence>
			<sentence num="54">He is sure to; but in that case I’ll show them… I will turn up at the posting station when he’s setting off tomorrow, I’ll catch him by the leg, I’ll pull off his coat when he gets into the carriage.</sentence>
			<sentence num="55">I’ll get my teeth into his hand, I’ll bite him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="56">“See what lengths you can drive a desperate man to!” He may hit me on the head and they may belabour me from behind.</sentence>
			<sentence num="57">I will shout to the assembled multitude: “Look at this young puppy who is driving off to captivate the Circassian girls after letting me spit in his face!” Of course, after that everything will be over!</sentence>
			<sentence num="58">The office will have vanished off the face of the earth.</sentence>
			<sentence num="59">I shall be arrested, I shall be tried, I shall be dismissed from the service, thrown in prison, sent to Siberia.</sentence>
			<sentence num="60">Never mind!</sentence>
			<sentence num="61">In fifteen years when they let me out of prison I will trudge off to him, a beggar, in rags.</sentence>
			<sentence num="62">I shall find him in some provincial town.</sentence>
			<sentence num="63">He will be married and happy.</sentence>
			<sentence num="64">He will have a grown-up daughter… . I shall say to him: “Look, monster, at my hollow cheeks and my rags!</sentence>
			<sentence num="65">I’ve lost everything — my career, my happiness, art, science, THE WOMAN I LOVED, and all through you. Here are pistols. I have come to discharge my pistol and… and I… forgive you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="66">Then I shall fire into the air and he will hear nothing more of me… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="67">” I was actually on the point of tears, though I knew perfectly well at that moment that all this was out of Pushkin’s SILVIO and Lermontov’s MASQUERADE.</sentence>
			<sentence num="68">And all at once I felt horribly ashamed, so ashamed that I stopped the horse, got out of the sledge, and stood still in the snow in the middle of the street.</sentence>
			<sentence num="69">The driver gazed at me, sighing and astonished. What was I to do?</sentence>
			<sentence num="70">I could not go on there — it was evidently stupid, and I could not leave things as they were, because that would seem as though… Heavens, how could I leave things! And after such insults!</sentence>
			<sentence num="71">“No!” I cried, throwing myself into the sledge again. “It is ordained! It is fate!</sentence>
			<sentence num="72">Drive on, drive on!” And in my impatience I punched the sledge-driver on the back of the neck. “What are you up to?</sentence>
			<sentence num="73">What are you hitting me for?” the peasant shouted, but he whipped up his nag so that it began kicking.</sentence>
			<sentence num="74">The wet snow was falling in big flakes; I unbuttoned myself, regardless of it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="75">I forgot everything else, for I had finally decided on the slap, and felt with horror that it was going to happen NOW, AT ONCE, and that NO FORCE COULD STOP IT.</sentence>
			<sentence num="76">The deserted street lamps gleamed sullenly in the snowy darkness like torches at a funeral.</sentence>
			<sentence num="77">The snow drifted under my great-coat, under my coat, under my cravat, and melted there.</sentence>
			<sentence num="78">I did not wrap myself up — all was lost, anyway. At last we arrived. I jumped out, almost unconscious, ran up the steps and began knocking and kicking at the door.</sentence>
			<sentence num="79">I felt fearfully weak, particularly in my legs and knees.</sentence>
			<sentence num="80">The door was opened quickly as though they knew I was coming. As a fact, Simonov had warned them that perhaps another gentleman would arrive, and this was a place in which one had to give notice and to observe certain precautions.</sentence>
			<sentence num="81">It was one of those “millinery establishments” which were abolished by the police a good time ago.</sentence>
			<sentence num="82">By day it really was a shop; but at night, if one had an introduction, one might visit it for other purposes.</sentence>
			<sentence num="83">I walked rapidly through the dark shop into the familiar drawing- room, where there was only one candle burning, and stood still in amazement: there was no one there.</sentence>
			<sentence num="84">“Where are they?” I asked somebody. But by now, of course, they had separated.</sentence>
			<sentence num="85">Before me was standing a person with a stupid smile, the “madam” herself, who had seen me before.</sentence>
			<sentence num="86">A minute later a door opened and another person came in.</sentence>
			<sentence num="87">Taking no notice of anything I strode about the room, and, I believe, I talked to myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="88">I felt as though I had been saved from death and was conscious of this, joyfully, all over: I should have given that slap, I should certainly, certainly have given it!</sentence>
			<sentence num="89">But now they were not here and… everything had vanished and changed! I looked round. I could not realise my condition yet.</sentence>
			<sentence num="90">I looked mechanically at the girl who had come in: and had a glimpse of a fresh, young, rather pale face, with straight, dark eyebrows, and with grave, as it were wondering, eyes that attracted me at once; I should have hated her if she had been smiling.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="17" name="PART II. A Propos of the Wet Snow - Chapter VI">
			<sentence num="1"> Somewhere behind a screen a clock began wheezing, as though oppressed by something, as though someone were strangling it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">After an unnaturally prolonged wheezing there followed a shrill, nasty, and as it were unexpectedly rapid, chime — as though someone were suddenly jumping forward.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">It struck two.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">I woke up, though I had indeed not been asleep but lying half-conscious.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">It was almost completely dark in the narrow, cramped, low-pitched room, cumbered up with an enormous wardrobe and piles of cardboard boxes and all sorts of frippery and litter.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">The candle end that had been burning on the table was going out and gave a faint flicker from time to time.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">In a few minutes there would be complete darkness.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">I was not long in coming to myself; everything came back to my mind at once, without an effort, as though it had been in ambush to pounce upon me again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">And, indeed, even while I was unconscious a point seemed continually to remain in my memory unforgotten, and round it my dreams moved drearily.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">But strange to say, everything that had happened to me in that day seemed to me now, on waking, to be in the far, far away past, as though I had long, long ago lived all that down.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">My head was full of fumes.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">Something seemed to be hovering over me, rousing me, exciting me, and making me restless.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">Misery and spite seemed surging up in me again and seeking an outlet.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">Suddenly I saw beside me two wide open eyes scrutinising me curiously and persistently.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">The look in those eyes was coldly detached, sullen, as it were utterly remote; it weighed upon me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">A grim idea came into my brain and passed all over my body, as a horrible sensation, such as one feels when one goes into a damp and mouldy cellar.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">There was something unnatural in those two eyes, beginning to look at me only now.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">I recalled, too, that during those two hours I had not said a single word to this creature, and had, in fact, considered it utterly superfluous; in fact, the silence had for some reason gratified me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">Now I suddenly realised vividly the hideous idea — revolting as a spider — of vice, which, without love, grossly and shamelessly begins with that in which true love finds its consummation.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">For a long time we gazed at each other like that, but she did not drop her eyes before mine and her expression did not change, so that at last I felt uncomfortable.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">“What is your name?” I asked abruptly, to put an end to it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">“Liza,” she answered almost in a whisper, but somehow far from graciously, and she turned her eyes away.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">I was silent.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">“What weather!</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">The snow… it’s disgusting!” I said, almost to myself, putting my arm under my head despondently, and gazing at the ceiling.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">She made no answer.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">This was horrible.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">“Have you always lived in Petersburg?” I asked a minute later, almost angrily, turning my head slightly towards her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">“No.” “Where do you come from?” “From Riga,” she answered reluctantly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">“Are you a German?” “No, Russian.” “Have you been here long?” “Where?” “In this house?” “A fortnight.” She spoke more and more jerkily.</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">The candle went out; I could no longer distinguish her face.</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">“Have you a father and mother?” “Yes… no… I have.” “Where are they?” “There… in Riga.” “What are they?” “Oh, nothing.” “Nothing?</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">Why, what class are they?” “Tradespeople.” “Have you always lived with them?” “Yes.” “How old are you?” “Twenty.” “Why did you leave them?” “Oh, for no reason.” That answer meant “Let me alone; I feel sick, sad.” We were silent.</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">God knows why I did not go away.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">I felt myself more and more sick and dreary.</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">The images of the previous day began of themselves, apart from my will, flitting through my memory in confusion.</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">I suddenly recalled something I had seen that morning when, full of anxious thoughts, I was hurrying to the office.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">“I saw them carrying a coffin out yesterday and they nearly dropped it,” I suddenly said aloud, not that I desired to open the conversation, but as it were by accident.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">“A coffin?” “Yes, in the Haymarket; they were bringing it up out of a cellar.” “From a cellar?” “Not from a cellar, but a basement.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">Oh, you know… down below… from a house of ill-fame. It was filthy all round… Egg-shells, litter… a stench. It was loathsome.” Silence. “A nasty day to be buried,” I began, simply to avoid being silent.</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">“Nasty, in what way?” “The snow, the wet.” (I yawned.)</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">“It makes no difference,” she said suddenly, after a brief silence.</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">“No, it’s horrid.” (I yawned again).</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">“The gravediggers must have sworn at getting drenched by the snow.</sentence>
			<sentence num="45">And there must have been water in the grave.” “Why water in the grave?” she asked, with a sort of curiosity, but speaking even more harshly and abruptly than before.</sentence>
			<sentence num="46">I suddenly began to feel provoked. “Why, there must have been water at the bottom a foot deep.</sentence>
			<sentence num="47">You can’t dig a dry grave in Volkovo Cemetery.” “Why?” “Why?</sentence>
			<sentence num="48">Why, the place is waterlogged. It’s a regular marsh. So they bury them in water.</sentence>
			<sentence num="49">I’ve seen it myself… many times.” (I had never seen it once, indeed I had never been in Volkovo, and had only heard stories of it.)</sentence>
			<sentence num="50">“Do you mean to say, you don’t mind how you die?” “But why should I die?” she answered, as though defending herself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="51">“Why, some day you will die, and you will die just the same as that dead woman.</sentence>
			<sentence num="52">She was… a girl like you. She died of consumption.” “A wench would have died in hospital… ” (She knows all about it already: she said “wench,” not “girl.”) “She was in debt to her madam,” I retorted, more and more provoked by the discussion; “and went on earning money for her up to the end, though she was in consumption.</sentence>
			<sentence num="53">Some sledge-drivers standing by were talking about her to some soldiers and telling them so.</sentence>
			<sentence num="54">No doubt they knew her. They were laughing. They were going to meet in a pot-house to drink to her memory.” A great deal of this was my invention.</sentence>
			<sentence num="55">Silence followed, profound silence. She did not stir.</sentence>
			<sentence num="56">“And is it better to die in a hospital?” “Isn’t it just the same? Besides, why should I die?” she added irritably.</sentence>
			<sentence num="57">“If not now, a little later.” “Why a little later?” “Why, indeed? Now you are young, pretty, fresh, you fetch a high price.</sentence>
			<sentence num="58">But after another year of this life you will be very different — you will go off.” “In a year?” “Anyway, in a year you will be worth less,” I continued malignantly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="59">“You will go from here to something lower, another house; a year later — to a third, lower and lower, and in seven years you will come to a basement in the Haymarket.</sentence>
			<sentence num="60">That will be if you were lucky.</sentence>
			<sentence num="61">But it would be much worse if you got some disease, consumption, say… and caught a chill, or something or other.</sentence>
			<sentence num="62">It’s not easy to get over an illness in your way of life.</sentence>
			<sentence num="63">If you catch anything you may not get rid of it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="64">And so you would die.” “Oh, well, then I shall die,” she answered, quite vindictively, and she made a quick movement.</sentence>
			<sentence num="65">“But one is sorry.” “Sorry for whom?” “Sorry for life.” Silence. “Have you been engaged to be married?</sentence>
			<sentence num="66">Eh?” “What’s that to you?” “Oh, I am not cross-examining you. It’s nothing to me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="67">Why are you so cross? Of course you may have had your own troubles. What is it to me?</sentence>
			<sentence num="68">It’s simply that I felt sorry.” “Sorry for whom?” “Sorry for you.” “No need,” she whispered hardly audibly, and again made a faint movement.</sentence>
			<sentence num="69">That incensed me at once. What! I was so gentle with her, and she… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="70">“Why, do you think that you are on the right path?” “I don’t think anything.” “That’s what’s wrong, that you don’t think.</sentence>
			<sentence num="71">Realise it while there is still time.</sentence>
			<sentence num="72">There still is time.</sentence>
			<sentence num="73">You are still young, good-looking; you might love, be married, be happy… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="74">” “Not all married women are happy,” she snapped out in the rude abrupt tone she had used at first.</sentence>
			<sentence num="75">“Not all, of course, but anyway it is much better than the life here.</sentence>
			<sentence num="76">Infinitely better.</sentence>
			<sentence num="77">Besides, with love one can live even without happiness.</sentence>
			<sentence num="78">Even in sorrow life is sweet; life is sweet, however one lives.</sentence>
			<sentence num="79">But here what is there but… foulness?</sentence>
			<sentence num="80">Phew!” I turned away with disgust; I was no longer reasoning coldly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="81">I began to feel myself what I was saying and warmed to the subject. I was already longing to expound the cherished ideas I had brooded over in my corner. Something suddenly flared up in me. An object had appeared before me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="82">“Never mind my being here, I am not an example for you. I am, perhaps, worse than you are.</sentence>
			<sentence num="83">I was drunk when I came here, though,” I hastened, however, to say in self-defence.</sentence>
			<sentence num="84">“Besides, a man is no example for a woman. It’s a different thing.</sentence>
			<sentence num="85">I may degrade and defile myself, but I am not anyone’s slave.</sentence>
			<sentence num="86">I come and go, and that’s an end of it. I shake it off, and I am a different man.</sentence>
			<sentence num="87">But you are a slave from the start. Yes, a slave! You give up everything, your whole freedom.</sentence>
			<sentence num="88">If you want to break your chains afterwards, you won’t be able to; you will be more and more fast in the snares.</sentence>
			<sentence num="89">It is an accursed bondage. I know it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="90">I won’t speak of anything else, maybe you won’t understand, but tell me: no doubt you are in debt to your madam?</sentence>
			<sentence num="91">There, you see,” I added, though she made no answer, but only listened in silence, entirely absorbed, “that’s a bondage for you!</sentence>
			<sentence num="92">You will never buy your freedom.</sentence>
			<sentence num="93">They will see to that. It’s like selling your soul to the devil… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="94">And besides… perhaps, I too, am just as unlucky — how do you know — and wallow in the mud on purpose, out of misery?</sentence>
			<sentence num="95">You know, men take to drink from grief; well, maybe I am here from grief.</sentence>
			<sentence num="96">Come, tell me, what is there good here? Here you and I… came together… just now and did not say one word to one another all the time, and it was only afterwards you began staring at me like a wild creature, and I at you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="97">Is that loving?</sentence>
			<sentence num="98">Is that how one human being should meet another? It’s hideous, that’s what it is!” “Yes!” she assented sharply and hurriedly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="99">I was positively astounded by the promptitude of this “Yes.” So the same thought may have been straying through her mind when she was staring at me just before.</sentence>
			<sentence num="100">So she, too, was capable of certain thoughts?</sentence>
			<sentence num="101">“Damn it all, this was interesting, this was a point of likeness!” I thought, almost rubbing my hands. And indeed it’s easy to turn a young soul like that! It was the exercise of my power that attracted me most.</sentence>
			<sentence num="102">She turned her head nearer to me, and it seemed to me in the darkness that she propped herself on her arm.</sentence>
			<sentence num="103">Perhaps she was scrutinising me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="104">How I regretted that I could not see her eyes. I heard her deep breathing.</sentence>
			<sentence num="105">“Why have you come here?” I asked her, with a note of authority already in my voice.</sentence>
			<sentence num="106">“Oh, I don’t know.” “But how nice it would be to be living in your father’s house!</sentence>
			<sentence num="107">It’s warm and free; you have a home of your own.” “But what if it’s worse than this?” “I must take the right tone,” flashed through my mind.</sentence>
			<sentence num="108">“I may not get far with sentimentality.” But it was only a momentary thought.</sentence>
			<sentence num="109">I swear she really did interest me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="110">Besides, I was exhausted and moody.</sentence>
			<sentence num="111">And cunning so easily goes hand-in-hand with feeling. “Who denies it!” I hastened to answer. “Anything may happen.</sentence>
			<sentence num="112">I am convinced that someone has wronged you, and that you are more sinned against than sinning.</sentence>
			<sentence num="113">Of course, I know nothing of your story, but it’s not likely a girl like you has come here of her own inclination… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="114">” “A girl like me?” she whispered, hardly audibly; but I heard it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="115">Damn it all, I was flattering her. That was horrid. But perhaps it was a good thing… . She was silent.</sentence>
			<sentence num="116">“See, Liza, I will tell you about myself. If I had had a home from childhood, I shouldn’t be what I am now. I often think that. However bad it may be at home, anyway they are your father and mother, and not enemies, strangers.</sentence>
			<sentence num="117">Once a year at least, they’ll show their love of you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="118">Anyway, you know you are at home.</sentence>
			<sentence num="119">I grew up without a home; and perhaps that’s why I’ve turned so… unfeeling.” I waited again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="120">“Perhaps she doesn’t understand,” I thought, “and, indeed, it is absurd — it’s moralising.” “If I were a father and had a daughter, I believe I should love my daughter more than my sons, really,” I began indirectly, as though talking of something else, to distract her attention.</sentence>
			<sentence num="121">I must confess I blushed. “Why so?” she asked.</sentence>
			<sentence num="122">Ah! so she was listening! “I don’t know, Liza.</sentence>
			<sentence num="123">I knew a father who was a stern, austere man, but used to go down on his knees to his daughter, used to kiss her hands, her feet, he couldn’t make enough of her, really.</sentence>
			<sentence num="124">When she danced at parties he used to stand for five hours at a stretch, gazing at her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="125">He was mad over her: I understand that!</sentence>
			<sentence num="126">She would fall asleep tired at night, and he would wake to kiss her in her sleep and make the sign of the cross over her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="127">He would go about in a dirty old coat, he was stingy to everyone else, but would spend his last penny for her, giving her expensive presents, and it was his greatest delight when she was pleased with what he gave her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="128">Fathers always love their daughters more than the mothers do. Some girls live happily at home! And I believe I should never let my daughters marry.” “What next?” she said, with a faint smile.</sentence>
			<sentence num="129">“I should be jealous, I really should. To think that she should kiss anyone else!</sentence>
			<sentence num="130">That she should love a stranger more than her father!</sentence>
			<sentence num="131">It’s painful to imagine it. Of course, that’s all nonsense, of course every father would be reasonable at last.</sentence>
			<sentence num="132">But I believe before I should let her marry, I should worry myself to death; I should find fault with all her suitors.</sentence>
			<sentence num="133">But I should end by letting her marry whom she herself loved.</sentence>
			<sentence num="134">The one whom the daughter loves always seems the worst to the father, you know.</sentence>
			<sentence num="135">That is always so. So many family troubles come from that.” “Some are glad to sell their daughters, rather than marrying them honourably.” Ah, so that was it!</sentence>
			<sentence num="136">“Such a thing, Liza, happens in those accursed families in which there is neither love nor God,” I retorted warmly, “and where there is no love, there is no sense either.</sentence>
			<sentence num="137">There are such families, it’s true, but I am not speaking of them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="138">You must have seen wickedness in your own family, if you talk like that. Truly, you must have been unlucky.</sentence>
			<sentence num="139">H’m!… that sort of thing mostly comes about through poverty.” “And is it any better with the gentry?</sentence>
			<sentence num="140">Even among the poor, honest people who live happily?” “H’m… yes.</sentence>
			<sentence num="141">Perhaps. Another thing, Liza, man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but does not count his joys.</sentence>
			<sentence num="142">If he counted them up as he ought, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="143">And what if all goes well with the family, if the blessing of God is upon it, if the husband is a good one, loves you, cherishes you, never leaves you!</sentence>
			<sentence num="144">There is happiness in such a family! Even sometimes there is happiness in the midst of sorrow; and indeed sorrow is everywhere.</sentence>
			<sentence num="145">If you marry YOU WILL FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF. But think of the first years of married life with one you love: what happiness, what happiness there sometimes is in it!</sentence>
			<sentence num="146">And indeed it’s the ordinary thing. In those early days even quarrels with one’s husband end happily. Some women get up quarrels with their husbands just because they love them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="147">Indeed, I knew a woman like that: she seemed to say that because she loved him, she would torment him and make him feel it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="148">You know that you may torment a man on purpose through love.</sentence>
			<sentence num="149">Women are particularly given to that, thinking to themselves ‘I will love him so, I will make so much of him afterwards, that it’s no sin to torment him a little now.’ And all in the house rejoice in the sight of you, and you are happy and gay and peaceful and honourable… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="150">Then there are some women who are jealous.</sentence>
			<sentence num="151">If he went off anywhere — I knew one such woman, she couldn’t restrain herself, but would jump up at night and run off on the sly to find out where he was, whether he was with some other woman.</sentence>
			<sentence num="152">That’s a pity.</sentence>
			<sentence num="153">And the woman knows herself it’s wrong, and her heart fails her and she suffers, but she loves — it’s all through love.</sentence>
			<sentence num="154">And how sweet it is to make up after quarrels, to own herself in the wrong or to forgive him!</sentence>
			<sentence num="155">And they both are so happy all at once — as though they had met anew, been married over again; as though their love had begun afresh. And no one, no one should know what passes between husband and wife if they love one another. And whatever quarrels there may be between them they ought not to call in their own mother to judge between them and tell tales of one another.</sentence>
			<sentence num="156">They are their own judges. Love is a holy mystery and ought to be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens. That makes it holier and better. They respect one another more, and much is built on respect.</sentence>
			<sentence num="157">And if once there has been love, if they have been married for love, why should love pass away?</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="18" name="PART II. A Propos of the Wet Snow - Chapter VII">
			<sentence num="1"> “Oh, hush, Liza! How can you talk about being like a book, when it makes even me, an outsider, feel sick?</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">Though I don’t look at it as an outsider, for, indeed, it touches me to the heart… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">Is it possible, is it possible that you do not feel sick at being here yourself?</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">Can you seriously think that you will never grow old, that you will always be good- looking, and that they will keep you here for ever and ever?</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">I say nothing of the loathsomeness of the life here… . Though let me tell you this about it — about your present life, I mean; here though you are young now, attractive, nice, with soul and feeling, yet you know as soon as I came to myself just now I felt at once sick at being here with you!</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">One can only come here when one is drunk.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">But if you were anywhere else, living as good people live, I should perhaps be more than attracted by you, should fall in love with you, should be glad of a look from you, let alone a word; I should hang about your door, should go down on my knees to you, should look upon you as my betrothed and think it an honour to be allowed to.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">I should not dare to have an impure thought about you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">But here, you see, I know that I have only to whistle and you have to come with me whether you like it or not. I don’t consult your wishes, but you mine.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">The lowest labourer hires himself as a workman, but he doesn’t make a slave of himself altogether; besides, he knows that he will be free again presently.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">Only think what you are giving up here?</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">What is it you are making a slave of?</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">It is your soul, together with your body; you are selling your soul which you have no right to dispose of!</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">You give your love to be outraged by every drunkard!</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">Love!</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">But that’s everything, you know, it’s a priceless diamond, it’s a maiden’s treasure, love — why, a man would be ready to give his soul, to face death to gain that love.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">But how much is your love worth now?</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">You are sold, all of you, body and soul, and there is no need to strive for love when you can have everything without love.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">And you know there is no greater insult to a girl than that, do you understand?</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">To be sure, I have heard that they comfort you, poor fools, they let you have lovers of your own here.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">But you know that’s simply a farce, that’s simply a sham, it’s just laughing at you, and you are taken in by it!</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">Why, do you suppose he really loves you, that lover of yours?</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">I don’t believe it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">How can he love you when he knows you may be called away from him any minute?</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">He would be a low fellow if he did!</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">Will he have a grain of respect for you?</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">What have you in common with him?</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">He laughs at you and robs you — that is all his love amounts to!</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">You are lucky if he does not beat you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">Ask him, if you have got one, whether he will marry you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">He will laugh in your face, if he doesn’t spit in it or give you a blow — though maybe he is not worth a bad halfpenny himself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">And for what have you ruined your life, if you come to think of it?</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">For the coffee they give you to drink and the plentiful meals?</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">But with what object are they feeding you up? An honest girl couldn’t swallow the food, for she would know what she was being fed for.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">You are in debt here, and, of course, you will always be in debt, and you will go on in debt to the end, till the visitors here begin to scorn you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">And that will soon happen, don’t rely upon your youth — all that flies by express train here, you know.</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">You will be kicked out. And not simply kicked out; long before that she’ll begin nagging at you, scolding you, abusing you, as though you had not sacrificed your health for her, had not thrown away your youth and your soul for her benefit, but as though you had ruined her, beggared her, robbed her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">And don’t expect anyone to take your part: the others, your companions, will attack you, too, win her favour, for all are in slavery here, and have lost all conscience and pity here long ago.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">They have become utterly vile, and nothing on earth is viler, more loathsome, and more insulting than their abuse.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">And you are laying down everything here, unconditionally, youth and health and beauty and hope, and at twenty-two you will look like a woman of five-and-thirty, and you will be lucky if you are not diseased, pray to God for that!</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">No doubt you are thinking now that you have a gay time and no work to do!</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">Yet there is no work harder or more dreadful in the world or ever has been.</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">One would think that the heart alone would be worn out with tears.</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">And you won’t dare to say a word, not half a word when they drive you away from here; you will go away as though you were to blame.</sentence>
			<sentence num="45">You will change to another house, then to a third, then somewhere else, till you come down at last to the Haymarket.</sentence>
			<sentence num="46">There you will be beaten at every turn; that is good manners there, the visitors don’t know how to be friendly without beating you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="47">You don’t believe that it is so hateful there?</sentence>
			<sentence num="48">You don’t believe that you will ever be like that?</sentence>
			<sentence num="49">I should be sorry to believe it, too, but how do you know; maybe ten years, eight years ago that very woman with the salt fish came here fresh as a cherub, innocent, pure, knowing no evil, blushing at every word.</sentence>
			<sentence num="50">Perhaps she was like you, proud, ready to take offence, not like the others; perhaps she looked like a queen, and knew what happiness was in store for the man who should love her and whom she should love.</sentence>
			<sentence num="51">Do you see how it ended?</sentence>
			<sentence num="52">And what if at that very minute when she was beating on the filthy steps with that fish, drunken and dishevelled — what if at that very minute she recalled the pure early days in her father’s house, when she used to go to school and the neighbour’s son watched for her on the way, declaring that he would love her as long as he lived, that he would devote his life to her, and when they vowed to love one another for ever and be married as soon as they were grown up!</sentence>
			<sentence num="53">No, Liza, it would be happy for you if you were to die soon of consumption in some corner, in some cellar like that woman just now.</sentence>
			<sentence num="54">In the hospital, do you say?</sentence>
			<sentence num="55">You will be lucky if they take you, but what if you are still of use to the madam here?</sentence>
			<sentence num="56">Consumption is a queer disease, it is not like fever.</sentence>
			<sentence num="57">The patient goes on hoping till the last minute and says he is all right.</sentence>
			<sentence num="58">He deludes himself And that just suits your madam. Don’t doubt it, that’s how it is; you have sold your soul, and what is more you owe money, so you daren’t say a word.</sentence>
			<sentence num="59">But when you are dying, all will abandon you, all will turn away from you, for then there will be nothing to get from you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="60">What’s more, they will reproach you for cumbering the place, for being so long over dying.</sentence>
			<sentence num="61">However you beg you won’t get a drink of water without abuse: ‘Whenever are you going off, you nasty hussy, you won’t let us sleep with your moaning, you make the gentlemen sick.’ That’s true, I have heard such things said myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="62">They will thrust you dying into the filthiest corner in the cellar — in the damp and darkness; what will your thoughts be, lying there alone?</sentence>
			<sentence num="63">When you die, strange hands will lay you out, with grumbling and impatience; no one will bless you, no one will sigh for you, they only want to get rid of you as soon as may be; they will buy a coffin, take you to the grave as they did that poor woman today, and celebrate your memory at the tavern.</sentence>
			<sentence num="64">In the grave, sleet, filth, wet snow — no need to put themselves out for you —‘Let her down, Vanuha; it’s just like her luck — even here, she is head-foremost, the hussy.</sentence>
			<sentence num="65">Shorten the cord, you rascal.’ ‘It’s all right as it is.’ ‘All right, is it?</sentence>
			<sentence num="66">Why, she’s on her side!</sentence>
			<sentence num="67">She was a fellow-creature, after all!</sentence>
			<sentence num="68">But, never mind, throw the earth on her.’ And they won’t care to waste much time quarrelling over you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="69">They will scatter the wet blue clay as quick as they can and go off to the tavern… and there your memory on earth will end; other women have children to go to their graves, fathers, husbands. While for you neither tear, nor sigh, nor remembrance; no one in the whole world will ever come to you, your name will vanish from the face of the earth — as though you had never existed, never been born at all!</sentence>
			<sentence num="70">Nothing but filth and mud, however you knock at your coffin lid at night, when the dead arise, however you cry: ‘Let me out, kind people, to live in the light of day!</sentence>
			<sentence num="71">My life was no life at all; my life has been thrown away like a dish- clout; it was drunk away in the tavern at the Haymarket; let me out, kind people, to live in the world again.’” And I worked myself up to such a pitch that I began to have a lump in my throat myself, and… and all at once I stopped, sat up in dismay and, bending over apprehensively, began to listen with a beating heart.</sentence>
			<sentence num="72">I had reason to be troubled.</sentence>
			<sentence num="73">I had felt for some time that I was turning her soul upside down and rending her heart, and — and the more I was convinced of it, the more eagerly I desired to gain my object as quickly and as effectually as possible.</sentence>
			<sentence num="74">It was the exercise of my skill that carried me away; yet it was not merely sport… . I knew I was speaking stiffly, artificially, even bookishly, in fact, I could not speak except “like a book.” But that did not trouble me: I knew, I felt that I should be understood and that this very bookishness might be an assistance.</sentence>
			<sentence num="75">But now, having attained my effect, I was suddenly panic-stricken. Never before had I witnessed such despair!</sentence>
			<sentence num="76">She was lying on her face, thrusting her face into the pillow and clutching it in both hands.</sentence>
			<sentence num="77">Her heart was being torn. Her youthful body was shuddering all over as though in convulsions.</sentence>
			<sentence num="78">Suppressed sobs rent her bosom and suddenly burst out in weeping and wailing, then she pressed closer into the pillow: she did not want anyone here, not a living soul, to know of her anguish and her tears.</sentence>
			<sentence num="79">She bit the pillow, bit her hand till it bled (I saw that afterwards), or, thrusting her fingers into her dishevelled hair, seemed rigid with the effort of restraint, holding her breath and clenching her teeth.</sentence>
			<sentence num="80">I began saying something, begging her to calm herself, but felt that I did not dare; and all at once, in a sort of cold shiver, almost in terror, began fumbling in the dark, trying hurriedly to get dressed to go.</sentence>
			<sentence num="81">It was dark; though I tried my best I could not finish dressing quickly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="82">Suddenly I felt a box of matches and a candlestick with a whole candle in it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="83">As soon as the room was lighted up, Liza sprang up, sat up in bed, and with a contorted face, with a half insane smile, looked at me almost senselessly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="84">I sat down beside her and took her hands; she came to herself, made an impulsive movement towards me, would have caught hold of me, but did not dare, and slowly bowed her head before me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="85">“Liza, my dear, I was wrong… forgive me, my dear,” I began, but she squeezed my hand in her fingers so tightly that I felt I was saying the wrong thing and stopped.</sentence>
			<sentence num="86">“This is my address, Liza, come to me.” “I will come,” she answered resolutely, her head still bowed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="87">“But now I am going, good-bye… till we meet again.” I got up; she, too, stood up and suddenly flushed all over, gave a shudder, snatched up a shawl that was lying on a chair and muffled herself in it to her chin.</sentence>
			<sentence num="88">As she did this she gave another sickly smile, blushed and looked at me strangely.</sentence>
			<sentence num="89">I felt wretched; I was in haste to get away — to disappear.</sentence>
			<sentence num="90">“Wait a minute,” she said suddenly, in the passage just at the doorway, stopping me with her hand on my overcoat. She put down the candle in hot haste and ran off; evidently she had thought of something or wanted to show me something.</sentence>
			<sentence num="91">As she ran away she flushed, her eyes shone, and there was a smile on her lips — what was the meaning of it?</sentence>
			<sentence num="92">Against my will I waited: she came back a minute later with an expression that seemed to ask forgiveness for something.</sentence>
			<sentence num="93">In fact, it was not the same face, not the same look as the evening before: sullen, mistrustful and obstinate.</sentence>
			<sentence num="94">Her eyes now were imploring, soft, and at the same time trustful, caressing, timid.</sentence>
			<sentence num="95">The expression with which children look at people they are very fond of, of whom they are asking a favour.</sentence>
			<sentence num="96">Her eyes were a light hazel, they were lovely eyes, full of life, and capable of expressing love as well as sullen hatred.</sentence>
			<sentence num="97">Making no explanation, as though I, as a sort of higher being, must understand everything without explanations, she held out a piece of paper to me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="98">Her whole face was positively beaming at that instant with naive, almost childish, triumph.</sentence>
			<sentence num="99">I unfolded it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="100">It was a letter to her from a medical student or someone of that sort — a very high-flown and flowery, but extremely respectful, love-letter.</sentence>
			<sentence num="101">I don’t recall the words now, but I remember well that through the high-flown phrases there was apparent a genuine feeling, which cannot be feigned.</sentence>
			<sentence num="102">When I had finished reading it I met her glowing, questioning, and childishly impatient eyes fixed upon me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="103">She fastened her eyes upon my face and waited impatiently for what I should say.</sentence>
			<sentence num="104">In a few words, hurriedly, but with a sort of joy and pride, she explained to me that she had been to a dance somewhere in a private house, a family of “very nice people, WHO KNEW NOTHING, absolutely nothing, for she had only come here so lately and it had all happened… and she hadn’t made up her mind to stay and was certainly going away as soon as she had paid her debt… ” and at that party there had been the student who had danced with her all the evening.</sentence>
			<sentence num="105">He had talked to her, and it turned out that he had known her in old days at Riga when he was a child, they had played together, but a very long time ago — and he knew her parents, but ABOUT THIS he knew nothing, nothing whatever, and had no suspicion!</sentence>
			<sentence num="106">And the day after the dance (three days ago) he had sent her that letter through the friend with whom she had gone to the party… and… well, that was all.” She dropped her shining eyes with a sort of bashfulness as she finished.</sentence>
			<sentence num="107">The poor girl was keeping that student’s letter as a precious treasure, and had run to fetch it, her only treasure, because she did not want me to go away without knowing that she, too, was honestly and genuinely loved; that she, too, was addressed respectfully.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="19" name="PART II. A Propos of the Wet Snow - Chapter VIII">
			<sentence num="1"> It was some time, however, before I consented to recognise that truth.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">Waking up in the morning after some hours of heavy, leaden sleep, and immediately realising all that had happened on the previous day, I was positively amazed at my last night’s SENTIMENTALITY with Liza, at all those “outcries of horror and pity.” “To think of having such an attack of womanish hysteria, pah!” I concluded.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">I resolved on a desperate measure: to borrow fifteen roubles straight off from Anton Antonitch.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">As luck would have it he was in the best of humours that morning, and gave it to me at once, on the first asking.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">I was so delighted at this that, as I signed the IOU with a swaggering air, I told him casually that the night before “I had been keeping it up with some friends at the Hotel de Paris; we were giving a farewell party to a comrade, in fact, I might say a friend of my childhood, and you know — a desperate rake, fearfully spoilt — of course, he belongs to a good family, and has considerable means, a brilliant career; he is witty, charming, a regular Lovelace, you understand; we drank an extra ‘half-dozen’ and… ” And it went off all right; all this was uttered very easily, unconstrainedly and complacently.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">On reaching home I promptly wrote to Simonov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">To this hour I am lost in admiration when I recall the truly gentlemanly, good-humoured, candid tone of my letter.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">With tact and good- breeding, and, above all, entirely without superfluous words, I blamed myself for all that had happened.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">I defended myself, “if I really may be allowed to defend myself,” by alleging that being utterly unaccustomed to wine, I had been intoxicated with the first glass, which I said, I had drunk before they arrived, while I was waiting for them at the Hotel de Paris between five and six o’clock.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">I begged Simonov’s pardon especially; I asked him to convey my explanations to all the others, especially to Zverkov, whom “I seemed to remember as though in a dream” I had insulted.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">I added that I would have called upon all of them myself, but my head ached, and besides I had not the face to.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">I was particularly pleased with a certain lightness, almost carelessness (strictly within the bounds of politeness, however), which was apparent in my style, and better than any possible arguments, gave them at once to understand that I took rather an independent view of “all that unpleasantness last night”; that I was by no means so utterly crushed as you, my friends, probably imagine; but on the contrary, looked upon it as a gentleman serenely respecting himself should look upon it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">“On a young hero’s past no censure is cast!” “There is actually an aristocratic playfulness about it!” I thought admiringly, as I read over the letter.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">“And it’s all because I am an intellectual and cultivated man!</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">Another man in my place would not have known how to extricate himself, but here I have got out of it and am as jolly as ever again, and all because I am ‘a cultivated and educated man of our day.’ And, indeed, perhaps, everything was due to the wine yesterday.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">H’m!”… No, it was not the wine.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">I did not drink anything at all between five and six when I was waiting for them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">I had lied to Simonov; I had lied shamelessly; and indeed I wasn’t ashamed now… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">Hang it all though, the great thing was that I was rid of it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">I put six roubles in the letter, sealed it up, and asked Apollon to take it to Simonov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">When he learned that there was money in the letter, Apollon became more respectful and agreed to take it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">Towards evening I went out for a walk.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">My head was still aching and giddy after yesterday.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">But as evening came on and the twilight grew denser, my impressions and, following them, my thoughts, grew more and more different and confused.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">Something was not dead within me, in the depths of my heart and conscience it would not die, and it showed itself in acute depression.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">For the most part I jostled my way through the most crowded business streets, along Myeshtchansky Street, along Sadovy Street and in Yusupov Garden.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">I always liked particularly sauntering along these streets in the dusk, just when there were crowds of working people of all sorts going home from their daily work, with faces looking cross with anxiety. What I liked was just that cheap bustle, that bare prose.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">On this occasion the jostling of the streets irritated me more than ever, I could not make out what was wrong with me, I could not find the clue, something seemed rising up continually in my soul, painfully, and refusing to be appeased.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">I returned home completely upset, it was just as though some crime were lying on my conscience.</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">The thought that Liza was coming worried me continually.</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">It seemed queer to me that of all my recollections of yesterday this tormented me, as it were, especially, as it were, quite separately.</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">Everything else I had quite succeeded in forgetting by the evening; I dismissed it all and was still perfectly satisfied with my letter to Simonov.</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">But on this point I was not satisfied at all.</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">It was as though I were worried only by Liza.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">“What if she comes,” I thought incessantly, “well, it doesn’t matter, let her come!</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">H’m!</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">it’s horrid that she should see, for instance, how I live.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">Yesterday I seemed such a hero to her, while now, h’m!</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">It’s horrid, though, that I have let myself go so, the room looks like a beggar’s.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">And I brought myself to go out to dinner in such a suit!</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">And my American leather sofa with the stuffing sticking out.</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">And my dressing-gown, which will not cover me, such tatters, and she will see all this and she will see Apollon.</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">That beast is certain to insult her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">He will fasten upon her in order to be rude to me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="45">And I, of course, shall be panic-stricken as usual, I shall begin bowing and scraping before her and pulling my dressing-gown round me, I shall begin smiling, telling lies.</sentence>
			<sentence num="46">Oh, the beastliness! And it isn’t the beastliness of it that matters most!</sentence>
			<sentence num="47">There is something more important, more loathsome, viler!</sentence>
			<sentence num="48">Yes, viler!</sentence>
			<sentence num="49">And to put on that dishonest lying mask again!… ” When I reached that thought I fired up all at once. “Why dishonest? How dishonest?</sentence>
			<sentence num="50">I was speaking sincerely last night.</sentence>
			<sentence num="51">I remember there was real feeling in me, too.</sentence>
			<sentence num="52">What I wanted was to excite an honourable feeling in her… . Her crying was a good thing, it will have a good effect.” Yet I could not feel at ease.</sentence>
			<sentence num="53">All that evening, even when I had come back home, even after nine o’clock, when I calculated that Liza could not possibly come, still she haunted me, and what was worse, she came back to my mind always in the same position.</sentence>
			<sentence num="54">One moment out of all that had happened last night stood vividly before my imagination; the moment when I struck a match and saw her pale, distorted face, with its look of torture.</sentence>
			<sentence num="55">And what a pitiful, what an unnatural, what a distorted smile she had at that moment!</sentence>
			<sentence num="56">But I did not know then, that fifteen years later I should still in my imagination see Liza, always with the pitiful, distorted, inappropriate smile which was on her face at that minute.</sentence>
			<sentence num="57">Next day I was ready again to look upon it all as nonsense, due to over- excited nerves, and, above all, as EXAGGERATED.</sentence>
			<sentence num="58">I was always conscious of that weak point of mine, and sometimes very much afraid of it. “I exaggerate everything, that is where I go wrong,” I repeated to myself every hour.</sentence>
			<sentence num="59">But, however, “Liza will very likely come all the same,” was the refrain with which all my reflections ended.</sentence>
			<sentence num="60">I was so uneasy that I sometimes flew into a fury: “She’ll come, she is certain to come!” I cried, running about the room, “if not today, she will come tomorrow; she’ll find me out!</sentence>
			<sentence num="61">The damnable romanticism of these pure hearts! Oh, the vileness — oh, the silliness — oh, the stupidity of these ‘wretched sentimental souls!’ Why, how fail to understand? How could one fail to understand?… ” But at this point I stopped short, and in great confusion, indeed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="62">And how few, how few words, I thought, in passing, were needed; how little of the idyllic (and affectedly, bookishly, artificially idyllic too) had sufficed to turn a whole human life at once according to my will.</sentence>
			<sentence num="63">That’s virginity, to be sure! Freshness of soil! At times a thought occurred to me, to go to her, “to tell her all,” and beg her not to come to me. But this thought stirred such wrath in me that I believed I should have crushed that “damned” Liza if she had chanced to be near me at the time.</sentence>
			<sentence num="64">I should have insulted her, have spat at her, have turned her out, have struck her!</sentence>
			<sentence num="65">One day passed, however, another and another; she did not come and I began to grow calmer. I felt particularly bold and cheerful after nine o’clock, I even sometimes began dreaming, and rather sweetly: I, for instance, became the salvation of Liza, simply through her coming to me and my talking to her… . I develop her, educate her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="66">Finally, I notice that she loves me, loves me passionately.</sentence>
			<sentence num="67">I pretend not to understand (I don’t know, however, why I pretend, just for effect, perhaps).</sentence>
			<sentence num="68">At last all confusion, transfigured, trembling and sobbing, she flings herself at my feet and says that I am her saviour, and that she loves me better than anything in the world.</sentence>
			<sentence num="69">I am amazed, but… . “Liza,” I say, “can you imagine that I have not noticed your love?</sentence>
			<sentence num="70">I saw it all, I divined it, but I did not dare to approach you first, because I had an influence over you and was afraid that you would force yourself, from gratitude, to respond to my love, would try to rouse in your heart a feeling which was perhaps absent, and I did not wish that… because it would be tyranny… it would be indelicate (in short, I launch off at that point into European, inexplicably lofty subtleties a la George Sand), but now, now you are mine, you are my creation, you are pure, you are good, you are my noble wife.</sentence>
			<sentence num="71">‘Into my house come bold and free, Its rightful mistress there to be’.” Then we begin living together, go abroad and so on, and so on.</sentence>
			<sentence num="72">In fact, in the end it seemed vulgar to me myself, and I began putting out my tongue at myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="73">Besides, they won’t let her out, “the hussy!” I thought.</sentence>
			<sentence num="74">They don’t let them go out very readily, especially in the evening (for some reason I fancied she would come in the evening, and at seven o’clock precisely).</sentence>
			<sentence num="75">Though she did say she was not altogether a slave there yet, and had certain rights; so, h’m!</sentence>
			<sentence num="76">Damn it all, she will come, she is sure to come! It was a good thing, in fact, that Apollon distracted my attention at that time by his rudeness.</sentence>
			<sentence num="77">He drove me beyond all patience!</sentence>
			<sentence num="78">He was the bane of my life, the curse laid upon me by Providence.</sentence>
			<sentence num="79">We had been squabbling continually for years, and I hated him. My God, how I hated him!</sentence>
			<sentence num="80">I believe I had never hated anyone in my life as I hated him, especially at some moments.</sentence>
			<sentence num="81">He was an elderly, dignified man, who worked part of his time as a tailor.</sentence>
			<sentence num="82">But for some unknown reason he despised me beyond all measure, and looked down upon me insufferably.</sentence>
			<sentence num="83">Though, indeed, he looked down upon everyone.</sentence>
			<sentence num="84">Simply to glance at that flaxen, smoothly brushed head, at the tuft of hair he combed up on his forehead and oiled with sunflower oil, at that dignified mouth, compressed into the shape of the letter V, made one feel one was confronting a man who never doubted of himself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="85">He was a pedant, to the most extreme point, the greatest pedant I had met on earth, and with that had a vanity only befitting Alexander of Macedon.</sentence>
			<sentence num="86">He was in love with every button on his coat, every nail on his fingers — absolutely in love with them, and he looked it! In his behaviour to me he was a perfect tyrant, he spoke very little to me, and if he chanced to glance at me he gave me a firm, majestically self- confident and invariably ironical look that drove me sometimes to fury.</sentence>
			<sentence num="87">He did his work with the air of doing me the greatest favour, though he did scarcely anything for me, and did not, indeed, consider himself bound to do anything.</sentence>
			<sentence num="88">There could be no doubt that he looked upon me as the greatest fool on earth, and that “he did not get rid of me” was simply that he could get wages from me every month. He consented to do nothing for me for seven roubles a month. Many sins should be forgiven me for what I suffered from him. My hatred reached such a point that sometimes his very step almost threw me into convulsions.</sentence>
			<sentence num="89">What I loathed particularly was his lisp.</sentence>
			<sentence num="90">His tongue must have been a little too long or something of that sort, for he continually lisped, and seemed to be very proud of it, imagining that it greatly added to his dignity. He spoke in a slow, measured tone, with his hands behind his back and his eyes fixed on the ground. He maddened me particularly when he read aloud the psalms to himself behind his partition. Many a battle I waged over that reading!</sentence>
			<sentence num="91">But he was awfully fond of reading aloud in the evenings, in a slow, even, sing-song voice, as though over the dead.</sentence>
			<sentence num="92">It is interesting that that is how he has ended: he hires himself out to read the psalms over the dead, and at the same time he kills rats and makes blacking. But at that time I could not get rid of him, it was as though he were chemically combined with my existence. Besides, nothing would have induced him to consent to leave me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="93">I could not live in furnished lodgings: my lodging was my private solitude, my shell, my cave, in which I concealed myself from all mankind, and Apollon seemed to me, for some reason, an integral part of that flat, and for seven years I could not turn him away.</sentence>
			<sentence num="94">To be two or three days behind with his wages, for instance, was impossible.</sentence>
			<sentence num="95">He would have made such a fuss, I should not have known where to hide my head.</sentence>
			<sentence num="96">But I was so exasperated with everyone during those days, that I made up my mind for some reason and with some object to PUNISH Apollon and not to pay him for a fortnight the wages that were owing him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="97">I had for a long time — for the last two years — been intending to do this, simply in order to teach him not to give himself airs with me, and to show him that if I liked I could withhold his wages. I purposed to say nothing to him about it, and was purposely silent indeed, in order to score off his pride and force him to be the first to speak of his wages.</sentence>
			<sentence num="98">Then I would take the seven roubles out of a drawer, show him I have the money put aside on purpose, but that I won’t, I won’t, I simply won’t pay him his wages, I won’t just because that is “what I wish,” because “I am master, and it is for me to decide,” because he has been disrespectful, because he has been rude; but if he were to ask respectfully I might be softened and give it to him, otherwise he might wait another fortnight, another three weeks, a whole month… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="99">But angry as I was, yet he got the better of me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="100">I could not hold out for four days. He began as he always did begin in such cases, for there had been such cases already, there had been attempts (and it may be observed I knew all this beforehand, I knew his nasty tactics by heart).</sentence>
			<sentence num="101">He would begin by fixing upon me an exceedingly severe stare, keeping it up for several minutes at a time, particularly on meeting me or seeing me out of the house.</sentence>
			<sentence num="102">If I held out and pretended not to notice these stares, he would, still in silence, proceed to further tortures.</sentence>
			<sentence num="103">All at once, A PROPOS of nothing, he would walk softly and smoothly into my room, when I was pacing up and down or reading, stand at the door, one hand behind his back and one foot behind the other, and fix upon me a stare more than severe, utterly contemptuous.</sentence>
			<sentence num="104">If I suddenly asked him what he wanted, he would make me no answer, but continue staring at me persistently for some seconds, then, with a peculiar compression of his lips and a most significant air, deliberately turn round and deliberately go back to his room.</sentence>
			<sentence num="105">Two hours later he would come out again and again present himself before me in the same way.</sentence>
			<sentence num="106">It had happened that in my fury I did not even ask him what he wanted, but simply raised my head sharply and imperiously and began staring back at him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="107">So we stared at one another for two minutes; at last he turned with deliberation and dignity and went back again for two hours.</sentence>
			<sentence num="108">If I were still not brought to reason by all this, but persisted in my revolt, he would suddenly begin sighing while he looked at me, long, deep sighs as though measuring by them the depths of my moral degradation, and, of course, it ended at last by his triumphing completely: I raged and shouted, but still was forced to do what he wanted.</sentence>
			<sentence num="109">This time the usual staring manoeuvres had scarcely begun when I lost my temper and flew at him in a fury.</sentence>
			<sentence num="110">I was irritated beyond endurance apart from him. “Stay,” I cried, in a frenzy, as he was slowly and silently turning, with one hand behind his back, to go to his room.</sentence>
			<sentence num="111">“Stay! Come back, come back, I tell you!” and I must have bawled so unnaturally, that he turned round and even looked at me with some wonder.</sentence>
			<sentence num="112">However, he persisted in saying nothing, and that infuriated me. “How dare you come and look at me like that without being sent for?</sentence>
			<sentence num="113">Answer!” After looking at me calmly for half a minute, he began turning round again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="114">“Stay!” I roared, running up to him, “don’t stir! There.</sentence>
			<sentence num="115">Answer, now: what did you come in to look at?” “If you have any order to give me it’s my duty to carry it out,” he answered, after another silent pause, with a slow, measured lisp, raising his eyebrows and calmly twisting his head from one side to another, all this with exasperating composure.</sentence>
			<sentence num="116">“That’s not what I am asking you about, you torturer!” I shouted, turning crimson with anger.</sentence>
			<sentence num="117">“I’ll tell you why you came here myself: you see, I don’t give you your wages, you are so proud you don’t want to bow down and ask for it, and so you come to punish me with your stupid stares, to worry me and you have no sus-pic-ion how stupid it is — stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!… ” He would have turned round again without a word, but I seized him.</sentence>
			<sentence num="118">“Listen,” I shouted to him. “Here’s the money, do you see, here it is,” (I took it out of the table drawer); “here’s the seven roubles complete, but you are not going to have it, you… are… not… going… to… have it until you come respectfully with bowed head to beg my pardon.</sentence>
			<sentence num="119">Do you hear?” “That cannot be,” he answered, with the most unnatural self-confidence.</sentence>
			<sentence num="120">“It shall be so,” I said, “I give you my word of honour, it shall be!” “And there’s nothing for me to beg your pardon for,” he went on, as though he had not noticed my exclamations at all.</sentence>
			<sentence num="121">“Why, besides, you called me a ‘torturer,’ for which I can summon you at the police-station at any time for insulting behaviour.” “Go, summon me,” I roared, “go at once, this very minute, this very second!</sentence>
			<sentence num="122">You are a torturer all the same!</sentence>
			<sentence num="123">a torturer!” But he merely looked at me, then turned, and regardless of my loud calls to him, he walked to his room with an even step and without looking round.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="20" name="PART II. A Propos of the Wet Snow - Chapter IX">
			<sentence num="1"> “  I stood before her crushed, crestfallen, revoltingly confused, and I believe I smiled as I did my utmost to wrap myself in the skirts of my ragged wadded dressing-gown — exactly as I had imagined the scene not long before in a fit of depression.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">After standing over us for a couple of minutes Apollon went away, but that did not make me more at ease.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">At the sight of me, of course.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">“Sit down,” I said mechanically, moving a chair up to the table, and I sat down on the sofa.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">She obediently sat down at once and gazed at me open-eyed, evidently expecting something from me at once.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">This naivete of expectation drove me to fury, but I restrained myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">She ought to have tried not to notice, as though everything had been as usual, while instead of that, she… and I dimly felt that I should make her pay dearly for ALL THIS.</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">“You have found me in a strange position, Liza,” I began, stammering and knowing that this was the wrong way to begin.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">“No, no, don’t imagine anything,” I cried, seeing that she had suddenly flushed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">“I am not ashamed of my poverty… . On the contrary, I look with pride on my poverty.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">I am poor but honourable… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">One can be poor and honourable,” I muttered.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">“However… would you like tea?… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">” “No,” she was beginning.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">“Apollon,” I whispered in feverish haste, flinging down before him the seven roubles which had remained all the time in my clenched fist, “here are your wages, you see I give them to you; but for that you must come to my rescue: bring me tea and a dozen rusks from the restaurant.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">If you won’t go, you’ll make me a miserable man!</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">You don’t know what this woman is… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">This is — everything! You may be imagining something… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">But you don’t know what that woman is!… ” Apollon, who had already sat down to his work and put on his spectacles again, at first glanced askance at the money without speaking or putting down his needle; then, without paying the slightest attention to me or making any answer, he went on busying himself with his needle, which he had not yet threaded.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">I waited before him for three minutes with my arms crossed A LA NAPOLEON.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">My temples were moist with sweat. I was pale, I felt it. But, thank God, he must have been moved to pity, looking at me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">Having threaded his needle he deliberately got up from his seat, deliberately moved back his chair, deliberately took off his spectacles, deliberately counted the money, and finally asking me over his shoulder: “Shall I get a whole portion?” deliberately walked out of the room.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">As I was going back to Liza, the thought occurred to me on the way: shouldn’t I run away just as I was in my dressing-gown, no matter where, and then let happen what would?</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">I sat down again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">She looked at me uneasily.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">For some minutes we were silent. “I will kill him,” I shouted suddenly, striking the table with my fist so that the ink spurted out of the inkstand.</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">“What are you saying!” she cried, starting.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">“I will kill him! kill him!” I shrieked, suddenly striking the table in absolute frenzy, and at the same time fully understanding how stupid it was to be in such a frenzy.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">“You don’t know, Liza, what that torturer is to me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">He is my torturer… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">He has gone now to fetch some rusks; he… ” And suddenly I burst into tears.</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">It was an hysterical attack. How ashamed I felt in the midst of my sobs; but still I could not restrain them.</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">She was frightened. “What is the matter? What is wrong?” she cried, fussing about me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">“Water, give me water, over there!” I muttered in a faint voice, though I was inwardly conscious that I could have got on very well without water and without muttering in a faint voice.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">But I was, what is called, PUTTING IT ON, to save appearances, though the attack was a genuine one.</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">She gave me water, looking at me in bewilderment.</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">At that moment Apollon brought in the tea.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">It suddenly seemed to me that this commonplace, prosaic tea was horribly undignified and paltry after all that had happened, and I blushed crimson.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">Liza looked at Apollon with positive alarm. He went out without a glance at either of us.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">“Liza, do you despise me?” I asked, looking at her fixedly, trembling with impatience to know what she was thinking. She was confused, and did not know what to answer.</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">“Drink your tea,” I said to her angrily.</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">I was angry with myself, but, of course, it was she who would have to pay for it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">A horrible spite against her suddenly surged up in my heart; I believe I could have killed her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">To revenge myself on her I swore inwardly not to say a word to her all the time. “She is the cause of it all,” I thought.</sentence>
			<sentence num="45">Our silence lasted for five minutes. The tea stood on the table; we did not touch it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="46">I had got to the point of purposely refraining from beginning in order to embarrass her further; it was awkward for her to begin alone.</sentence>
			<sentence num="47">Several times she glanced at me with mournful perplexity.</sentence>
			<sentence num="48">I was obstinately silent. I was, of course, myself the chief sufferer, because I was fully conscious of the disgusting meanness of my spiteful stupidity, and yet at the same time I could not restrain myself.</sentence>
			<sentence num="49">“I want to… get away… from there altogether,” she began, to break the silence in some way, but, poor girl, that was just what she ought not to have spoken about at such a stupid moment to a man so stupid as I was.</sentence>
			<sentence num="50">My heart positively ached with pity for her tactless and unnecessary straightforwardness.</sentence>
			<sentence num="51">But something hideous at once stifled all compassion in me; it even provoked me to greater venom. I did not care what happened. Another five minutes passed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="52">“Perhaps I am in your way,” she began timidly, hardly audibly, and was getting up.</sentence>
			<sentence num="53">But as soon as I saw this first impulse of wounded dignity I positively trembled with spite, and at once burst out.</sentence>
			<sentence num="54">“Why have you come to me, tell me that, please?” I began, gasping for breath and regardless of logical connection in my words.</sentence>
			<sentence num="55">I longed to have it all out at once, at one burst; I did not even trouble how to begin.</sentence>
			<sentence num="56">“Why have you come? Answer, answer,” I cried, hardly knowing what I was doing. “I’ll tell you, my good girl, why you have come.</sentence>
			<sentence num="57">You’ve come because I talked sentimental stuff to you then. So now you are soft as butter and longing for fine sentiments again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="58">So you may as well know that I was laughing at you then. And I am laughing at you now.</sentence>
			<sentence num="59">Why are you shuddering? Yes, I was laughing at you!</sentence>
			<sentence num="60">I had been insulted just before, at dinner, by the fellows who came that evening before me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="61">I came to you, meaning to thrash one of them, an officer; but I didn’t succeed, I didn’t find him; I had to avenge the insult on someone to get back my own again; you turned up, I vented my spleen on you and laughed at you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="62">I had been humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate; I had been treated like a rag, so I wanted to show my power… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="63">That’s what it was, and you imagined I had come there on purpose to save you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="64">Yes? You imagined that? You imagined that?” I knew that she would perhaps be muddled and not take it all in exactly, but I knew, too, that she would grasp the gist of it, very well indeed.</sentence>
			<sentence num="65">And so, indeed, she did. She turned white as a handkerchief, tried to say something, and her lips worked painfully; but she sank on a chair as though she had been felled by an axe.</sentence>
			<sentence num="66">And all the time afterwards she listened to me with her lips parted and her eyes wide open, shuddering with awful terror. The cynicism, the cynicism of my words overwhelmed her… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="67">“Save you!” I went on, jumping up from my chair and running up and down the room before her. “Save you from what?</sentence>
			<sentence num="68">But perhaps I am worse than you myself. Why didn’t you throw it in my teeth when I was giving you that sermon: ‘But what did you come here yourself for?</sentence>
			<sentence num="69">was it to read us a sermon?’ Power, power was what I wanted then, sport was what I wanted, I wanted to wring out your tears, your humiliation, your hysteria — that was what I wanted then!</sentence>
			<sentence num="70">Of course, I couldn’t keep it up then, because I am a wretched creature, I was frightened, and, the devil knows why, gave you my address in my folly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="71">Afterwards, before I got home, I was cursing and swearing at you because of that address, I hated you already because of the lies I had told you.</sentence>
			<sentence num="72">Because I only like playing with words, only dreaming, but, do you know, what I really want is that you should all go to hell.</sentence>
			<sentence num="73">That is what I want. I want peace; yes, I’d sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea?</sentence>
			<sentence num="74">I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not?</sentence>
			<sentence num="75">Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard.</sentence>
			<sentence num="76">Here I have been shuddering for the last three days at the thought of your coming.</sentence>
			<sentence num="77">And do you know what has worried me particularly for these three days? That I posed as such a hero to you, and now you would see me in a wretched torn dressing-gown, beggarly, loathsome.</sentence>
			<sentence num="78">I told you just now that I was not ashamed of my poverty; so you may as well know that I am ashamed of it; I am more ashamed of it than of anything, more afraid of it than of being found out if I were a thief, because I am as vain as though I had been skinned and the very air blowing on me hurt.</sentence>
			<sentence num="79">Surely by now you must realise that I shall never forgive you for having found me in this wretched dressing-gown, just as I was flying at Apollon like a spiteful cur.</sentence>
			<sentence num="80">The saviour, the former hero, was flying like a mangy, unkempt sheep-dog at his lackey, and the lackey was jeering at him!</sentence>
			<sentence num="81">And I shall never forgive you for the tears I could not help shedding before you just now, like some silly woman put to shame!</sentence>
			<sentence num="82">And for what I am confessing to you now, I shall never forgive you either!</sentence>
			<sentence num="83">Yes — you must answer for it all because you turned up like this, because I am a blackguard, because I am the nastiest, stupidest, absurdest and most envious of all the worms on earth, who are not a bit better than I am, but, the devil knows why, are never put to confusion; while I shall always be insulted by every louse, that is my doom!</sentence>
			<sentence num="84">And what is it to me that you don’t understand a word of this! And what do I care, what do I care about you, and whether you go to ruin there or not? Do you understand? How I shall hate you now after saying this, for having been here and listening.</sentence>
			<sentence num="85">Why, it’s not once in a lifetime a man speaks out like this, and then it is in hysterics!… What more do you want?</sentence>
			<sentence num="86">Why do you still stand confronting me, after all this? Why are you worrying me? Why don’t you go?” But at this point a strange thing happened.</sentence>
			<sentence num="87">I was so accustomed to think and imagine everything from books, and to picture everything in the world to myself just as I had made it up in my dreams beforehand, that I could not all at once take in this strange circumstance.</sentence>
			<sentence num="88">What happened was this: Liza, insulted and crushed by me, understood a great deal more than I imagined.</sentence>
			<sentence num="89">She understood from all this what a woman understands first of all, if she feels genuine love, that is, that I was myself unhappy.</sentence>
			<sentence num="90">The frightened and wounded expression on her face was followed first by a look of sorrowful perplexity.</sentence>
		</chapter>
		<chapter num="21" name="PART II. A Propos of the Wet Snow - Chapter X">
			<sentence num="1"> A quarter of an hour later I was rushing up and down the room in frenzied impatience, from minute to minute I went up to the screen and peeped through the crack at Liza.</sentence>
			<sentence num="2">She was sitting on the ground with her head leaning against the bed, and must have been crying.</sentence>
			<sentence num="3">But she did not go away, and that irritated me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="4">This time she understood it all.</sentence>
			<sentence num="5">I had insulted her finally, but… there’s no need to describe it.</sentence>
			<sentence num="6">She realised that my outburst of passion had been simply revenge, a fresh humiliation, and that to my earlier, almost causeless hatred was added now a PERSONAL HATRED, born of envy… . Though I do not maintain positively that she understood all this distinctly; but she certainly did fully understand that I was a despicable man, and what was worse, incapable of loving her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="7">Why is it strange?</sentence>
			<sentence num="8">In the first place, by then I was incapable of love, for I repeat, with me loving meant tyrannising and showing my moral superiority.</sentence>
			<sentence num="9">I have never in my life been able to imagine any other sort of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking that love really consists in the right — freely given by the beloved object — to tyrannise over her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="10">Even in my underground dreams I did not imagine love except as a struggle. I began it always with hatred and ended it with moral subjugation, and afterwards I never knew what to do with the subjugated object.</sentence>
			<sentence num="11">And what is there to wonder at in that, since I had succeeded in so corrupting myself, since I was so out of touch with “real life,” as to have actually thought of reproaching her, and putting her to shame for having come to me to hear “fine sentiments”; and did not even guess that she had come not to hear fine sentiments, but to love me, because to a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of ruin, and all moral renewal is included in love and can only show itself in that form.</sentence>
			<sentence num="12">I did not hate her so much, however, when I was running about the room and peeping through the crack in the screen.</sentence>
			<sentence num="13">I was only insufferably oppressed by her being here.</sentence>
			<sentence num="14">I wanted her to disappear.</sentence>
			<sentence num="15">I wanted “peace,” to be left alone in my underground world.</sentence>
			<sentence num="16">Real life oppressed me with its novelty so much that I could hardly breathe.</sentence>
			<sentence num="17">But several minutes passed and she still remained, without stirring, as though she were unconscious. I had the shamelessness to tap softly at the screen as though to remind her… . She started, sprang up, and flew to seek her kerchief, her hat, her coat, as though making her escape from me… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="18">Two minutes later she came from behind the screen and looked with heavy eyes at me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="19">I ran up to her, seized her hand, opened it, thrust something in it and closed it again.</sentence>
			<sentence num="20">Then I turned at once and dashed away in haste to the other corner of the room to avoid seeing, anyway… . I did mean a moment since to tell a lie — to write that I did this accidentally, not knowing what I was doing through foolishness, through losing my head.</sentence>
			<sentence num="21">But I don’t want to lie, and so I will say straight out that I opened her hand and put the money in it… from spite.</sentence>
			<sentence num="22">It came into my head to do this while I was running up and down the room and she was sitting behind the screen.</sentence>
			<sentence num="23">But this I can say for certain: though I did that cruel thing purposely, it was not an impulse from the heart, but came from my evil brain.</sentence>
			<sentence num="24">This cruelty was so affected, so purposely made up, so completely a product of the brain, of books, that I could not even keep it up a minute — first I dashed away to avoid seeing her, and then in shame and despair rushed after Liza.</sentence>
			<sentence num="25">I opened the door in the passage and began listening.</sentence>
			<sentence num="26">“Liza!</sentence>
			<sentence num="27">Liza!” I cried on the stairs, but in a low voice, not boldly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="28">There was no answer, but I fancied I heard her footsteps, lower down on the stairs.</sentence>
			<sentence num="29">“Liza!” I cried, more loudly.</sentence>
			<sentence num="30">No answer.</sentence>
			<sentence num="31">But at that minute I heard the stiff outer glass door open heavily with a creak and slam violently; the sound echoed up the stairs.</sentence>
			<sentence num="32">She had gone. I went back to my room in hesitation. I felt horribly oppressed. I stood still at the table, beside the chair on which she had sat and looked aimlessly before me.</sentence>
			<sentence num="33">A minute passed, suddenly I started; straight before me on the table I saw… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="34">In short, I saw a crumpled blue five- rouble note, the one I had thrust into her hand a minute before.</sentence>
			<sentence num="35">It was the same note; it could be no other, there was no other in the flat.</sentence>
			<sentence num="36">So she had managed to fling it from her hand on the table at the moment when I had dashed into the further corner. Well!</sentence>
			<sentence num="37">I might have expected that she would do that.</sentence>
			<sentence num="38">Might I have expected it? No, I was such an egoist, I was so lacking in respect for my fellow-creatures that I could not even imagine she would do so.</sentence>
			<sentence num="39">I could not endure it. A minute later I flew like a madman to dress, flinging on what I could at random and ran headlong after her.</sentence>
			<sentence num="40">She could not have got two hundred paces away when I ran out into the street.</sentence>
			<sentence num="41">It was a still night and the snow was coming down in masses and falling almost perpendicularly, covering the pavement and the empty street as though with a pillow.</sentence>
			<sentence num="42">There was no one in the street, no sound was to be heard.</sentence>
			<sentence num="43">The street lamps gave a disconsolate and useless glimmer. I ran two hundred paces to the cross-roads and stopped short.</sentence>
			<sentence num="44">Where had she gone?</sentence>
			<sentence num="45">And why was I running after her? Why? To fall down before her, to sob with remorse, to kiss her feet, to entreat her forgiveness!</sentence>
			<sentence num="46">I longed for that, my whole breast was being rent to pieces, and never, never shall I recall that minute with indifference.</sentence>
			<sentence num="47">But — what for? I thought. Should I not begin to hate her, perhaps, even tomorrow, just because I had kissed her feet today? Should I give her happiness?</sentence>
			<sentence num="48">Had I not recognised that day, for the hundredth time, what I was worth?</sentence>
			<sentence num="49">Should I not torture her? I stood in the snow, gazing into the troubled darkness and pondered this.</sentence>
			<sentence num="50">“And will it not be better?” I mused fantastically, afterwards at home, stifling the living pang of my heart with fantastic dreams. “Will it not be better that she should keep the resentment of the insult for ever? Resentment — why, it is purification; it is a most stinging and painful consciousness!</sentence>
			<sentence num="51">Tomorrow I should have defiled her soul and have exhausted her heart, while now the feeling of insult will never die in her heart, and however loathsome the filth awaiting her — the feeling of insult will elevate and purify her… by hatred… h’m!… perhaps, too, by forgiveness… .</sentence>
			<sentence num="52">Will all that make things easier for her though?… ” And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better — cheap happiness or exalted sufferings?</sentence>
			<sentence num="53">Well, which is better?</sentence>
			<sentence num="54">So I dreamed as I sat at home that evening, almost dead with the pain in my soul.</sentence>
		</chapter>
	</content>
</book>