"I spent a day and a night in this misery, then a second night, and
learning from experience how little my philosophy was to me, I came
to my senses and realised at last what sort of a creature I was. I
saw that my ideas were not worth a brass farthing, and that before
meeting Kisotchka I had not begun to think and had not even a
conception of what thinking in earnest meant; now through suffering
I realised that I had neither convictions nor a definite moral
standard, nor heart, nor reason; my whole intellectual and moral
wealth consisted of specialist knowledge, fragments, useless memories,
other people's ideas--and nothing else; and my mental processes
were as lacking in complexity, as useless and as rudimentary as a
Yakut's. . . . If I had disliked lying, had not stolen, had not
murdered, and, in fact, made obviously gross mistakes, that was not
owing to my convictions--I had none, but because I was in bondage,
hand and foot, to my nurse's fairy tales and to copy-book morals,
which had entered into my flesh and blood and without my noticing
it guided me in life, though I looked on them as absurd. . . .

"I realised that I was not a thinker, not a philosopher, but simply
a dilettante. God had given me a strong healthy Russian brain with
promise of talent. And, only fancy, here was that brain at twenty-six,
undisciplined, completely free from principles, not weighed down
by any stores of knowledge, but only lightly sprinkled with information
of a sort in the engineering line; it was young and had a physiological
craving for exercise, it was on the look-out for it, when all at
once quite casually the fine juicy idea of the aimlessness of life
and the darkness beyond the tomb descends upon it. It greedily sucks
it in, puts its whole outlook at its disposal and begins playing
with it, like a cat with a mouse. There is neither learning nor