While his soul was filled with imaginings grand.'

And his handwriting was dreamy, limp like wet silk. An individual
called Kross, probably an insignificant, little man, felt his
unimportance so deeply that he gave full licence to his penknife
and carved his name in deep letters an inch high. I took a pencil
out of my pocket mechanically, and I too scribbled on one of the
columns. All that is irrelevant, however. . . You must forgive me
--I don't know how to tell a story briefly.

"I was sad and a little bored. Boredom, the stillness, and the
purring of the sea gradually brought me to the line of thought we
have been discussing. At that period, towards the end of the
'seventies, it had begun to be fashionable with the public, and
later, at the beginning of the 'eighties, it gradually passed from
the general public into literature, science, and politics. I was
no more than twenty-six at the time, but I knew perfectly well that
life was aimless and had no meaning, that everything was a deception
and an illusion, that in its essential nature and results a life
of penal servitude in Sahalin was not in any way different from a
life spent in Nice, that the difference between the brain of a Kant
and the brain of a fly was of no real significance, that no one in
this world is righteous or guilty, that everything was stuff and
nonsense and damn it all! I lived as though I were doing a favour
to some unseen power which compelled me to live, and to which I
seemed to say: 'Look, I don't care a straw for life, but I am
living!' I thought on one definite line, but in all sorts of keys,
and in that respect I was like the subtle gourmand who could prepare
a hundred appetising dishes from nothing but potatoes. There is no
doubt that I was one-sided and even to some extent narrow, but I