on a swing. ANDREY comes in with the perambulator and FERAPONT
also appears.]

FERAPONT. Andrey Sergeyevitch, it isn't as if the documents were mine,
they are the government's. I didn't make them.

ANDREY. Oh, what has become of my past and where is it? I used to be
young, happy, clever, I used to be able to think and frame clever ideas,
the present and the future seemed to me full of hope. Why do we, almost
before we have begun to live, become dull, grey, uninteresting, lazy,
apathetic, useless, unhappy.... This town has already been in existence
for two hundred years and it has a hundred thousand inhabitants, not one
of whom is in any way different from the others. There has never been,
now or at any other time, a single leader of men, a single scholar, an
artist, a man of even the slightest eminence who might arouse envy or a
passionate desire to be imitated. They only eat, drink, sleep, and then
they die... more people are born and also eat, drink, sleep, and so
as not to go silly from boredom, they try to make life many-sided
with their beastly backbiting, vodka, cards, and litigation. The wives
deceive their husbands, and the husbands lie, and pretend they see
nothing and hear nothing, and the evil influence irresistibly oppresses
the children and the divine spark in them is extinguished, and they
become just as pitiful corpses and just as much like one another as
their fathers and mothers.... [Angrily to FERAPONT] What do you want?

FERAPONT. What? Documents want signing.

ANDREY. I'm tired of you.

FERAPONT. [Handing him papers] The hall-porter from the law courts was
saying just now that in the winter there were two hundred degrees of
frost in Petersburg.

ANDREY. The present is beastly, but when I think of the future, how good
it is! I feel so light, so free; there is a light in the distance, I see
freedom. I see myself and my children freeing ourselves from vanities,
from kvass, from goose baked with cabbage, from after-dinner naps, from
base idleness....

FERAPONT. He was saying that two thousand people were frozen to death.
The people were frightened, he said. In Petersburg or Moscow, I don't
remember which.

ANDREY. [Overcome by a tender emotion] My dear sisters, my beautiful
sisters! [Crying] Masha, my sister....

NATASHA. [At the window] Who's talking so loudly out here? Is that you,
Andrey? You'll wake little Sophie. _Il ne faut pas faire du bruit, la
Sophie est dormee deja. Vous etes un our