re, and all that you now say and
think and all your wishes for me and for yourselves will fly to atoms!
Happiness is being with nature, seeing her, and conversing with her.
"He may even (God forbid) marry a common Cossack girl, and be quite
lost socially" I can imagine them saying of me with sincere pity! Yet
the one thing I desire is to be quite "lost" in your sense of the word.
I wish to marry a Cossack girl, and dare not because it would be a
height of happiness of which I am unworthy.

'Three months have passed since I first saw the Cossack girl, Maryanka.
The views and prejudices of the world I had left were still fresh in
me. I did not then believe that I could love that woman. I delighted in
her beauty just as I delighted in the beauty of the mountains and the
sky, nor could I help delighting in her, for she is as beautiful as
they. I found that the sight of her beauty had become a necessity of my
life and I began asking myself whether I did not love her. But I could
find nothing within myself at all like love as I had imagined it to be.
Mine was not the restlessness of loneliness and desire for marriage,
nor was it platonic, still less a carnal love such as I have
experienced. I needed only to see her, to hear her, to know that she
was near--and if I was not happy, I was at peace.

'After an evening gathering at which I met her and touched her, I felt
that between that woman and myself there existed an indissoluble though
unacknowledged bond against which I could not struggle, yet I did
struggle. I asked myself: "Is it possible to love a woman who will
never understand the profoundest interests of my life? Is it possible
to love a woman simply for her beauty, to love the statue of a woman?"
But I was already in love with her, though I did not yet trust to my
feelings.

'After that evening when I first spoke to her our relations changed.
Before that she had been to me an extraneous but majestic object of
external nature: but since then she has become a human being. I began
to meet her, to talk to her, and sometimes to go to work for her father
and to spend whole evenings with them, and in this intimate intercourse
she remained still in my eyes just as pure, inaccessible, and majestic.
She always responded with equal calm, pride, and cheerful equanimity.
Sometimes she was friendly, but generally her every look, every word,
and every movement expressed equanimity--not contemptuous, but crushing
and bewitching. E