n one instant, as if youth had returned to
him, as if the dying sparks of his talent had blazed forth afresh.
The bandage suddenly fell from his eyes. Heavens! to think of having
mercilessly wasted the best years of his youth, of having extinguished,
trodden out perhaps, that spark of fire which, cherished in his breast,
might perhaps have been developed into magnificence and beauty, and
have extorted too, its meed of tears and admiration! It seemed as though
those impulses which he had known in other days re-awoke suddenly in his
soul.

He seized a brush and approached his canvas. One thought possessed him
wholly, one desire consumed him; he strove to depict a fallen angel.
This idea was most in harmony with his frame of mind. The perspiration
started out upon his face with his efforts; but, alas! his
figures, attitudes, groups, thoughts, arranged themselves stiffly,
disconnectedly. His hand and his imagination had been too long confined
to one groove; and the fruitless effort to escape from the bonds
and fetters which he had imposed upon himself, showed itself in
irregularities and errors. He had despised the long, wearisome ladder to
knowledge, and the first fundamental law of the future great man, hard
work. He gave vent to his vexation. He ordered all his later productions
to be taken out of his studio, all the fashionable, lifeless pictures,
all the portraits of hussars, ladies, and councillors of state.

He shut himself up alone in his room, would order no food, and devoted
himself entirely to his work. He sat toiling like a scholar. But how
pitifully wretched was all which proceeded from his hand! He was stopped
at every step by his ignorance of the very first principles: simple
ignorance of the mechanical part of his art chilled all inspiration
and formed an impassable barrier to his imagination. His brush returned
involuntarily to hackneyed forms: hands folded themselves in a set
attitude; heads dared not make any unusual turn; the very garments
turned out commonplace, and would not drape themselves to any
unaccustomed posture of the body. And he felt and saw this all himself.

"But had I really any talent?" he said at length: "did not I deceive
myself?" Uttering these words, he turned to the early works which he had
painted so purely, so unselfishly, in former days, in his wretched cabin
yonder in lonely Vasilievsky Ostroff. He began attentively to examine
them all; and all the misery of his former life cam