[Footnote 1:  A well-known Radical professor, a Westerner.]

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I left Gregory Ivanovitch’s feeling crushed and mortally offended.  I was irritated by smooth words and by those who speak them, and on reaching home I meditated thus:  some rail at the world, others at the crowd, that is to say praise the past and blame the present; they cry out that there are no ideals and so on, but all this has already been said twenty or thirty years ago; these are worn-out forms which have already served their time, and whoever repeats them now, he too is no longer young and is himself worn out.  With last year’s foliage there decay too those who live in it.  I thought, we uncultured, worn-out people, banal in speech, stereotyped in intentions, have grown quite mouldy, and, while we intellectuals are rummaging among old rags and, according to the old Russian custom, biting one another, there is boiling up around us a life which we neither know nor notice.  Great events will take us unawares, like sleeping fairies, and you will see that Sidorov, the merchant, and the teacher of the school at Yeletz, who see and know more than we do, will push us far into the background, because they will accomplish more than all of us put together.  And I thought that were we now to obtain political liberty, of which we talk so much, while engaged in biting one another, we should not know what to do with it, we should waste it in accusing one another in the newspapers of being spies and money-grubbers, we should frighten society with the assurance that we have neither men, nor science, nor literature, nothing!  Nothing!  And to scare society as we are doing now, and as we shall continue to do, means to deprive it of courage; it means simply to declare that we have no social or political sense in us.  And I also thought that, before the dawn of a new life has broken, we shall turn into sinister old men and women and we shall be the first who, in our hatred of that dawn, will calumniate it.

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Mother never stops talking about poverty.  It is very strange.  In the first place, it is strange that we are poor, beg like beggars, and at the same time eat superbly, live in a large house; in the summer we go to our own country house, and generally speaking we do not look like beggars.  Evidently this is not poverty, but something else, and rather worse.  Secondly, it is strange that for the last ten years mother has been spending all her energy solely on getting money to pay interest.  It seems to me that were mother to spend that terrible energy on something else, we could have twenty such houses.  Thirdly, it seems to me strange that the hardest work in the family is done by mother, not by me.  To me that is the strangest thing of all, most terrible.  She has, as she has just said, a thought on her brain, she begs, she humiliates herself; our debts grow daily and up till now I have not done a single thing to help her.  What can I do?  I think and think and cannot make it out.  I only see clearly that we are rushing down an inclined plane, but to what, the devil knows.  They say that poverty threatens us and that in poverty there is disgrace, but that too I cannot understand, since I was never poor.