Calm, resolved, steady in his great purpose, he was stretching his hand towards the pen when he happened to glance towards the bed.  He rushed at it, enraged, with a mental scream:  “it’s you, crazy fanatic, who stands in the way!” He flung the pillow on the floor violently, tore the blankets aside....  Nothing there.  And, turning away, he caught for an instant in the air, like a vivid detail in a dissolving view of two heads, the eyes of General T—–­ and of Privy-Councillor Mikulin side by side fixed upon him, quite different in character, but with the same unflinching and weary and yet purposeful expression...servants of the nation!

Razumov tottered to the washstand very alarmed about himself, drank some water and bathed his forehead.  “This will pass and leave no trace,” he thought confidently.  “I am all right.”  But as to supposing that he had been forgotten it was perfect nonsense.  He was a marked man on that side.  And that was nothing.  It was what that miserable phantom stood for which had to be got out of the way....  “If one only could go and spit it all out at some of them—­and take the consequences.”

He imagined himself accosting the red-nosed student and suddenly shaking his fist in his face.  “From that one, though,” he reflected, “there’s nothing to be got, because he has no mind of his own.  He’s living in a red democratic trance.  Ah! you want to smash your way into universal happiness, my boy.  I will give you universal happiness, you silly, hypnotized ghoul, you!  And what about my own happiness, eh?  Haven’t I got any right to it, just because I can think for myself?...”

And again, but with a different mental accent, Razumov said to himself, “I am young.  Everything can be lived down.”  At that moment he was crossing the room slowly, intending to sit down on the sofa and try to compose his thoughts.  But before he had got so far everything abandoned him—­hope, courage, belief in himself trust in men.  His heart had, as it were, suddenly emptied itself.  It was no use struggling on.  Rest, work, solitude, and the frankness of intercourse with his kind were alike forbidden to him.  Everything was gone.  His existence was a great cold blank, something like the enormous plain of the whole of Russia levelled with snow and fading gradually on all sides into shadows and mists.

He sat down, with swimming head, closed his eyes, and remained like that, sitting bolt upright on the sofa and perfectly awake for the rest of the night; till the girl bustling into the outer room with the samovar thumped with her fist on the door, calling out, “Kirylo Sidorovitch, please!  It is time for you to get up!”

Then, pale like a corpse obeying the dread summons of judgement, Razumov opened his eyes and got up.