be as simple in our day as it was before the Flood, and can it be
that I, a cultivated man endowed with a complex spiritual organisation,
ought to explain the intense attraction I feel towards a woman
simply by the fact that her bodily formation is different from mine?
Oh, how awful that would be! I want to believe that in his struggle
with nature the genius of man has struggled with physical love too,
as with an enemy, and that, if he has not conquered it, he has at
least succeeded in tangling it in a net-work of illusions of
brotherhood and love; and for me, at any rate, it is no longer a
simple instinct of my animal nature as with a dog or a toad, but
is real love, and every embrace is spiritualised by a pure impulse
of the heart and respect for the woman. In reality, a disgust for
the animal instinct has been trained for ages in hundreds of
generations; it is inherited by me in my blood and forms part of
my nature, and if I poetize love, is not that as natural and
inevitable in our day as my ears' not being able to move and my not
being covered with fur? I fancy that's how the majority of civilised
people look at it, so that the absence of the moral, poetical element
in love is treated in these days as a phenomenon, as a sign of
atavism; they say it is a symptom of degeneracy, of many forms of
insanity. It is true that, in poetizing love, we assume in those
we love qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source
of continual mistakes and continual miseries for us. But to my
thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer
than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man
being man.

In Tiflis I received a letter from my father. He wrote that Ariadne
Grigoryevna had on such a day gone abroad, intending to spend the
whole winter away. A month later I returned home. It was by now