ll that is no less fantastic and beyond our grasp
than apparitions from the other world. Prince Hamlet did not kill
himself because he was afraid of the visions that might haunt his
dreams after death. I like that famous soliloquy of his, but, to
be candid, it never touched my soul. I will confess to you as a
friend that in moments of depression I have sometimes pictured to
myself the hour of my death. My fancy invented thousands of the
gloomiest visions, and I have succeeded in working myself up to an
agonizing exaltation, to a state of nightmare, and I assure you
that that did not seem to me more terrible than reality. What I
mean is, apparitions are terrible, but life is terrible, too. I
don't understand life and I am afraid of it, my dear boy; I don't
know. Perhaps I am a morbid person, unhinged. It seems to a sound,
healthy man that he understands everything he sees and hears, but
that 'seeming' is lost to me, and from day to day I am poisoning
myself with terror. There is a disease, the fear of open spaces,
but my disease is the fear of life. When I lie on the grass and
watch a little beetle which was born yesterday and understands
nothing, it seems to me that its life consists of nothing else but
fear, and in it I see myself."

"What is it exactly you are frightened of?" I asked.

"I am afraid of everything. I am not by nature a profound thinker,
and I take little interest in such questions as the life beyond the
grave, the destiny of humanity, and, in fact, I am rarely carried
away to the heights. What chiefly frightens me is the common routine
of life from which none of us can escape. I am incapable of
distinguishing what is true and what is false in my actions, and
they worry me. I recognize that education and the conditions of
life have imprisoned me in a narrow circle of falsity, that my whole
life is nothing else than a daily effort to deceive myself and other
people, and to avoid noticing it; and I am frightened at the thought
that to the day of my death I shall not escape from this falsity.
To-day I do something and to-morrow I do not understand why I did
it. I entered the service in Petersburg and took fright; I came
here to work on the land, and here, too, I am frightened. . . . I
see that we know very little and so make mistakes every day. We are
unjust, we slander one another and spoil each other's lives, we
waste all our powers on trash which we do not need and which hinders
us from living; and th