Samoylenko, who had a misgiving of what he was going to speak about,
dropped his eyes and drummed with his fingers on the table.

"I've lived with her for two years and have ceased to love her,"
Laevsky went on; "or, rather, I realised that I never had felt any
love for her. . . . These two years have been a mistake."

It was Laevsky's habit as he talked to gaze attentively at the pink
palms of his hands, to bite his nails, or to pinch his cuffs. And
he did so now.

"I know very well you can't help me," he said. "But I tell you,
because unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their
salvation in talking. I have to generalise about everything I do.
I'm bound to look for an explanation and justification of my absurd
existence in somebody else's theories, in literary types--in the
idea that we, upper-class Russians, are degenerating, for instance,
and so on. Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking
all the time: 'Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!' And
that did me good. Yes, really, brother, he is a great writer, say
what you like!"

Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so
every day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said:

"Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes
straight from nature."

"My God!" sighed Laevsky; "how distorted we all are by civilisation!