very day with a feigned smile on my lips I tried to
play a part, and with torments of passion and desire in my heart I
spoke banteringly to her. She saw that I was dissembling, but looked
straight at me cheerfully and simply. This position became unbearable.
I wished not to deceive her but to tell her all I thought and felt. I
was extremely agitated. We were in the vineyard when I began to tell
her of my love, in words I am now ashamed to remember. I am ashamed
because I ought not to have dared to speak so to her because she stood
far above such words and above the feeling they were meant to express.
I said no more, but from that day my position has been intolerable. I
did not wish to demean myself by continuing our former flippant
relations, and at the same time I felt that I had not yet reached the
level of straight and simple relations with her. I asked myself
despairingly, "What am I to do?" In foolish dreams I imagined her now
as my mistress and now as my wife, but rejected both ideas with
disgust. To make her a wanton woman would be dreadful. It would be
murder. To turn her into a fine lady, the wife of Dmitri Andreich
Olenin, like a Cossack woman here who is married to one of our
officers, would be still worse. Now could I turn Cossack like Lukashka,
and steal horses, get drunk on chikhir, sing rollicking songs, kill
people, and when drunk climb in at her window for the night without a
thought of who and what I am, it would be different: then we might
understand one another and I might be happy.

'I tried to throw myself into that kind of life but was still more
conscious of my own weakness and artificiality. I cannot forget myself
and my complex, distorted past, and my future appears to me still more
hopeless. Every day I have before me the distant snowy mountains and
this majestic, happy woman. But not for me is the only happiness
possible in the world; I cannot have this woman! What is most terrible
and yet sweetest in my condition is that I feel that I understand her
but that she will never understand me; not because she is inferior: on
the contrary she ought not to understand me. She is happy, she is like
nature: consistent, calm, and self-contained; and I, a weak distorted
being, want her to understand my deformity and my torments! I have not
slept at night, but have aimlessly passed under her windows not
rendering account to myself of what was happening to me. On the 18th
our company started on a raid, and