My brother was kind, amiable, clever, and serious; but he passed away without ever knowing why he had lived or what his death meant for him.  All theories were futile in the face of this tragedy.  Returning to Russia I settled in my rural home and began to organise schools for the peasants, feeling real enthusiasm for the enterprise.  For I still clung to a great extent to the idea of progress by development.  I thought that though highly cultured men all thought and taught differently and agreed about nothing, yet in the case of the children of the mujiks the difficulty could easily be surmounted by permitting the children to learn what they liked.

I also tried through my own newspaper to indoctrinate the people, but my mind grew more and more embarrassed.  At length I fell sick, rather mentally than physically.  I went off to the Steppes to breathe the pure air and to take mare’s milk and to live the simple life.  I married soon after my return to my estate.  As time passed on I became happily absorbed in the interests of wife and children, largely forgetting during a happy interval of fifteen years the old anxiety for individual perfection.  For this desire was superseded by that of promoting the welfare of my family.

All this time, however, I was writing busily, and was gaining much money as well as winning great applause.  And in everything I wrote I persistently taught what was for me the sole truth—­that our chief object in life should be to secure our own happiness and that of our family.  Then, five years ago, supervened a mood of mental lethargy.  I grew despondent; my perplexity increased, and I was tormented by the constant recurrence of such questions as—­“Why?” and “What afterwards?” And by degrees the questions took a more concrete form.  “I now possess six thousand ‘desyatins’ of land in the government of Samara, and three hundred horses—­what then?” I could find no answer.  Then came the question, “What if I could excel Shakespeare, and Moliere, and Gogol, and become the most celebrated the world has ever seen—­what then?” Answer, there was none; yet I felt that I must find one in order to go on living.

Life had now lost its meaning, and was no longer real to me.  I was a healthy and happy man, and yet so empty did life seem to me that I was afraid of being tempted to commit suicide, even though I had not the slightest intention to perpetrate such a deed.  But, fearing lest the temptation might come upon me I hid a rope away out of my sight, and ceased carrying a gun in my walks.

III.—­The Spirit of Despair

It was in my 50th year that the question “What is life” had reduced me to utter despair.  Various queries clustered round this central interrogation.  “Why should I live?  Why should I do anything?  Is there any signification in life that can overcome inevitable death?” I found that in human knowledge no real answer was forthcoming to such yearnings.  None of the theories of the philosophers gave any satisfaction.  In my search for a solution of life’s problem I felt like a traveller lost in a forest, out of which he can find no issue.