lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some
day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to
the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there,
but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my
brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go
back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. And so it
goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am
consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am
doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from
their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot. Am I not
a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally
diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to
think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am
being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble
lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic
asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me
by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make
a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His
nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is
irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about
them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye,
like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I
did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were
distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and
when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in
the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with
cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!

NINA. But don't your inspiration and the act of creation give you
moments of lofty happiness?