I spent three days away from the
village. I was sad and apathetic, the usual songs, cards,
drinking-bouts, and talk of rewards in the regiment, were more
repulsive to me than usual. Yesterday I returned home and saw her, my
hut. Daddy Eroshka, and the snowy mountains, from my porch, and was
seized by such a strong, new feeling of joy that I understood it all. I
love this woman; I feel real love for the first and only time in my
life. I know what has befallen me. I do not fear to be degraded by this
feeling, I am not ashamed of my love, I am proud of it. It is not my
fault that I love. It has come about against my will. I tried to escape
from my love by self-renunciation, and tried to devise a joy in the
Cossack Lukashka's and Maryanka's love, but thereby only stirred up my
own love and jealousy. This is not the ideal, the so-called exalted
love which I have known before; not that sort of attachment in which
you admire your own love and feel that the source of your emotion is
within yourself and do everything yourself. I have felt that too. It is
still less a desire for enjoyment: it is something different. Perhaps
in her I love nature: the personification of all that is beautiful in
nature; but yet I am not acting by my own will, but some elemental
force loves through me; the whole of God's world, all nature, presses
this love into my soul and says, "Love her." I love her not with my
mind or my imagination, but with my whole being. Loving her I feel
myself to be an integral part of all God's joyous world. I wrote before
about the new convictions to which my solitary life had brought me, but
no one knows with what labour they shaped themselves within me and with
what joy I realized them and saw a new way of life opening out before
me; nothing was dearer to me than those convictions... Well! ... love
has come and neither they nor any regrets for them remain! It is even
difficult for me to believe that I could prize such a one-sided, cold,
and abstract state of mind. Beauty came and scattered to the winds all
that laborious inward toil, and no regret remains for what has
vanished! Self-renunciation is all nonsense and absurdity! That is
pride, a refuge from well-merited unhappiness, and salvation from the
envy of others' happiness: "Live for others, and do good!"--Why? when
in my soul there is only love for myself and the desire to love her and
to live her life with her? Not for others, not for Lukashka, I now
desire happi