"What are the luridly smoky lucubrations of that fellow to the clear
grasp of my intellect?" he thought. "Is not this my country? Have I not
got forty million brothers?" he asked himself, unanswerably victorious
in the silence of his breast. And the fearful thrashing he had given
the inanimate Ziemianitch seemed to him a sign of intimate union, a
pathetically severe necessity of brotherly love. "No! If I must suffer
let me at least suffer for my convictions, not for a crime my reason--my
cool superior reason--rejects."

He ceased to think for a moment. The silence in his breast was complete.
But he felt a suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience when we
enter an unlighted strange place--the irrational feeling that something
may jump upon us in the dark--the absurd dread of the unseen.

Of course he was far from being a moss-grown reactionary. Everything was
not for the best. Despotic bureaucracy... abuses... corruption...
and so on. Capable men were wanted. Enlightened intelligences. Devoted
hearts. But absolute power should be preserved--the tool ready for the
man--for the great autocrat of the future. Razumov believed in him. The
logic of history made him unavoidable. The state of the people demanded
him, "What else?" he asked himself ardently, "could move all that mass
in one direction? Nothing could. Nothing but a single will."

He was persuaded that he was sacrificing his personal longings of
liberalism--rejecting the attractive error for the stern Russian truth.
"That's patriotism," he observed mentally, and added, "There's no
stopping midway on that road," and then remarked to himself, "I am not a
coward."

And again there was a dead silence in Razumov's breast. He walked with