Kovrin could read no more, he tore up the letter and threw it away.
He was overcome by an uneasiness that was akin to terror. Varvara
Nikolaevna was asleep behind the screen, and he could hear her
breathing. From the lower storey came the sounds of laughter and
women's voices, but he felt as though in the whole hotel there were
no living soul but him. Because Tanya, unhappy, broken by sorrow,
had cursed him in her letter and hoped for his perdition, he felt
eerie and kept glancing hurriedly at the door, as though he were
afraid that the uncomprehended force which two years before had
wrought such havoc in his life and in the life of those near him
might come into the room and master him once more.

He knew by experience that when his nerves were out of hand the
best thing for him to do was to work. He must sit down to the table
and force himself, at all costs, to concentrate his mind on some
one thought. He took from his red portfolio a manuscript containing
a sketch of a small work of the nature of a compilation, which he
had planned in case he should find it dull in the Crimea without
work. He sat down to the table and began working at this plan, and
it seemed to him that his calm, peaceful, indifferent mood was
coming back. The manuscript with the sketch even led him to meditation
on the vanity of the world. He thought how much life exacts for the
worthless or very commonplace blessings it can give a man. For
instance, to gain, before forty, a university chair, to be an
ordinary professor, to expound ordinary and second-hand thoughts
in dull, heavy, insipid language--in fact, to gain the position
of a mediocre learned man, he, Kovrin, had had to study for fifteen
years, to work day and night, to endure a terrible mental illness,
to experience an unhappy marriage, and to do a great number of
stupid and unjust things which it would have been pleasant not to