cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano.  I smell heliotrope; I mutter to myself:  a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows; I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening.  I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me.  As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no!  Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball.  I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more.  And so it goes for everlasting.  I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life.  To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot.  Am I not a madman?  Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased?  Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum.  The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing.  A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world.  His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone.  I did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with cold indifference.  Oh, how terrible it was!  What agony!

Nina.  But don’t your inspiration and the act of creation give you moments of lofty happiness?

Trigorin.  Yes.  Writing is a pleasure to me, and so is reading the proofs, but no sooner does a book leave the press than it becomes odious to me; it is not what I meant it to be; I made a mistake to write it at all; I am provoked and discouraged.  Then the public reads it and says:  “Yes, it is clever and pretty, but not nearly as good as Tolstoi,” or “It is a lovely thing, but not as good as Turgenieff’s ’Fathers and Sons,’” and so it will always be.  To my dying day I shall hear people say:  “Clever and pretty; clever and pretty,” and nothing more; and when I am gone, those that knew me will say as they pass my grave:  “Here lies Trigorin, a clever writer, but he was not as good as Turgenieff.”