“When I become a man,” I thought to myself as I returned to my room, “Petrovskoe shall be mine, and Basil and Masha my servants.  Some day, when I am sitting in my study and smoking a pipe, Masha will chance to pass the door on her way to the kitchen with an iron, and I shall say, ‘Masha, come here,’ and she will enter, and there will be no one else in the room.  Then suddenly Basil too will enter, and, on seeing her, will cry, ‘My sweetheart is lost to me!’ and Masha will begin to weep, Then I shall say, ’Basil, I know that you love her, and that she loves you.  Here are a thousand roubles for you.  Marry her, and may God grant you both happiness!’ Then I shall leave them together.”

Among the countless thoughts and fancies which pass, without logic or sequence, through the mind and the imagination, there are always some which leave behind them a mark so profound that, without remembering their exact subject, we can at least recall that something good has passed through our brain, and try to retain and reproduce its effect.  Such was the mark left upon my consciousness by the idea of sacrificing my feelings to Masha’s happiness, seeing that she believed that she could attain it only through a union with Basil.

XIX.  BOYHOOD

Perhaps people will scarcely believe me when I tell them what were the dearest, most constant, objects of my reflections during my boyhood, so little did those objects consort with my age and position.  Yet, in my opinion, contrast between a man’s actual position and his moral activity constitutes the most reliable sign of his genuineness.

During the period when I was leading a solitary and self-centred moral life, I was much taken up with abstract thoughts on man’s destiny, on a future life, and on the immortality of the soul, and, with all the ardour of inexperience, strove to make my youthful intellect solve those questions—­the questions which constitute the highest level of thought to which the human intellect can tend, but a final decision of which the human intellect can never succeed in attaining.

I believe the intellect to take the same course of development in the individual as in the mass, as also that the thoughts which serve as a basis for philosophical theories are an inseparable part of that intellect, and that every man must be more or less conscious of those thoughts before he can know anything of the existence of philosophical theories.  To my own mind those thoughts presented themselves with such clarity and force that I tried to apply them to life, in the fond belief that I was the first to have discovered such splendid and invaluable truths.

Sometimes I would suppose that happiness depends, not upon external causes themselves, but only upon our relation to them, and that, provided a man can accustom himself to bearing suffering, he need never be unhappy.  To prove the latter hypothesis, I would (despite the horrible pain) hold out a Tatistchev’s dictionary at arm’s length for five minutes at a time, or else go into the store-room and scourge my back with cords until the tears involuntarily came to my eyes!