id Platonov with artlessness. "You
see, I am a vagabond, and am passionately in love with life. I have
been a turner, a compositor; I have sown and sold tobacco--the cheap
Silver Makhorka kind--have sailed as a stoker on the Azov Sea, have
been a fisherman on the Black--on the Dubinin fisheries; I have loaded
watermelons and bricks on the Dnieper, have ridden with a circus, have
been an actor--I can't even recall everything. And never did need drive
me. No, only an immeasurable thirst for life and an insupportable
curiosity. By God, I would like for a few days to become a horse, a
plant, or a fish, or to be a woman and experience childbirth; I would
like to live with the inner life, and to look upon the universe with
the eyes of every human being I meet. And so I wander care-free over
towns and hamlets, bound by nothing; know and love tens of trades and
joyously float wherever it suits fate to set my sail... And so it was
that I came upon the brothel, and the more I look at it, the more there
grows within me alarm, incomprehension, and very great anger. But even
this will soon be at an end. When things get well into autumn--away
again! I'll get into a rail-rolling mill. I've a certain friend, he'll
manage it ... Wait, wait, Lichonin ... Listen to the actor ... That's
the third act."

Egmont-Lavretzki, who until this had been very successfully imitating
now a shoat which is being put into a bag, now the altercation of a cat
with a dog, was beginning little by little to wilt and droop. Upon him
was already advancing the stage of self-revelation, next in order, in
the paroxysm of which he several times attempted to kiss Yarchenko's
hand. His lids had become red; around the shaven, prickly lips had
deepened the tearful wrinkles that gave him an appearance of weeping;
and it could be heard by his voice that his nose and throat were
already overflowing with tears.

"I serve in a farce!" he was saying, smiting himself on the breast with
his fist. "I disport myself in striped trunks for the sport of the
sated mob! I have put out my torch, have hid my talent in the earth,
like the slothful servant! But fo-ormerly!" he began to bray
tragically, "Fo-ormerly-y-y! Ask in Novocherkassk, ask in Tvier, in
Ustejne, in Zvenigorodok, in Krijopole.[10] What a Zhadov and Belugin I
was! How I played Max! What a figure I created of Veltishchev--that was
my crowning ro-ole ... Nadin-Perekopski was beginning with me at
Sumbekov's! With Nikiph