I fell in love with a married woman and she with me. . . . To begin
with, we had kisses, and calm evenings, and vows, and Spencer, and
ideals, and interests in common. . . . What a deception! We really
ran away from her husband, but we lied to ourselves and made out
that we ran away from the emptiness of the life of the educated
class. We pictured our future like this: to begin with, in the
Caucasus, while we were getting to know the people and the place,
I would put on the Government uniform and enter the service; then
at our leisure we would pick out a plot of ground, would toil in
the sweat of our brow, would have a vineyard and a field, and so
on. If you were in my place, or that zoologist of yours, Von Koren,
you might live with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for thirty years, perhaps,
and might leave your heirs a rich vineyard and three thousand acres
of maize; but I felt like a bankrupt from the first day. In the
town you have insufferable heat, boredom, and no society; if you
go out into the country, you fancy poisonous spiders, scorpions,
or snakes lurking under every stone and behind every bush, and
beyond the fields--mountains and the desert. Alien people, an
alien country, a wretched form of civilisation--all that is not
so easy, brother, as walking on the Nevsky Prospect in one's fur
coat, arm-in-arm with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, dreaming of the sunny
South. What is needed here is a life and death struggle, and I'm
not a fighting man. A wretched neurasthenic, an idle gentleman
. . . . From the first day I knew that my dreams of a life of labour
and of a vineyard were worthless. As for love, I ought to tell you
that living with a woman who has read Spencer and has followed you
to the ends of the earth is no more interesting than living with
any Anfissa or Akulina. There's the same smell of ironing, of powder,
and of medicines, the same curl-papers every morning, the same
self-deception."