e distinction between
mine and thine, and there will come a paradise upon earth, and man will
again become naked, glorified and without sin. Perhaps it may be
then..."

"But now? Now?" asks Lichonin with growing agitation. "Shall I look on,
with my little hands folded? 'It's none of my affair?' Tolerate it as
an unavoidable evil? Put up with it, and wash my hands of it? Shall I
pronounce a benediction upon it?"

"This evil is not unavoidable, but insuperable. But isn't it all the
same to you?" asked Platonov with cold wonder. "For you're an
anarchist, aren't you?"

"What the devil kind of an anarchist am I! Well, yes, I am an
anarchist, because my reason, when I think of life, always leads me
logically to the anarchistic beginning. And I myself think in theory:
let men beat, deceive, and fleece men, like flocks of sheep--let
them!--violence will breed rancour sooner or later. Let them violate
the child, let them trample creative thought under foot, let there be
slavery, let there be prostitution, let them thieve, mock, spill
blood...Let them! The worse, the better, the nearer the end. There is a
great law, I think, the same for inanimate objects as well as for all
the tremendous and many-millioned human life: the power of effort is
equal to the power of resistance. The worse, the better. Let evil and
vindictiveness accumulate in mankind, let them grow and ripen like a
monstrous abscess--an abscess the size of the whole terrestrial sphere.
For it will burst some time! And let there be terror and insufferable
pain. Let the pus deluge all the universe. But mankind will either
choke in it and perish, or, having gone through the illness, will be
regenerated to a new, beautiful life."

Lichonin avidly drank off a cup of cold black coffee and continued
vehemently:

"Yes. Just so do I and many others theorize, sitting in our rooms, over
tea with white bread and cooked sausage, when the value of each
separate human life is so-so, an infinitesimally small numeral in a
mathematical formula. But let me see a child abused, and the red blood
will rush to my head from rage. And when I look and look upon the
labour of a moujik or a labourer, I am thrown into hysterics for shame
at my algebraic calculations. There is--the devil take it!--there is
something incongruous, altogether illogical, but which at this time is
stronger than human reason. Take to-day, now ... Why do I feel at this
minute as though I had robbed a sleeping man