ervous breakdown that marked its
conclusion, he never fully recovered.

In the weeks dividing New Year's Day from the April of 1890, Gregoriev
seldom left his bed. He was attended night and day by Piotr and Piotr's
son; who saw, with growing alarm, how slowly the strength seemed to come
back to him, and how little increase of vitality arrived with that
quickening of the year to which Ivan had always heretofore responded so
eagerly.

Through the long days during which he alternated between fever and
debility, Ivan sank into a hell of the senses; and daily gazed with
longing upon the still closed gates of life. He had heard the
low-calling voices of departed Shades. He had been given misty glimpses
of the Elysian land that lay beyond those high black bars. Long and long
was it before he could turn his face from that vision back to the grays
and glooms of his worn routine. And when at last it became patent to him
that this must be, he still clung to the erratic and feverish fancies
for the abnormal, that had come to him in his illness. By May the
Maidonovo household stood aghast at the incomprehensible manner of their
silent master's renewed life. Those who knew him well surmised his
mental condition; but even Kashkine could not fathom the depth to which
his thoughts had sunk. Certainly none but a Russian could, or can,
comprehend the terrible reality of what must, to the inhabitants of the
sunshine lands, seem the mere wilful depression of a hypochondriac. But
those men and women who have dwelt all their lives beneath a sky of
leaden gray, in an horizonless space of desolate, unbroken steppe; whose
children and children's children must come into a heritage even heavier
than their own, handed down from those first, hunted creatures who began
the age-long battle with ice and snow and frozen hurricanes--these,
alas! know well that the disease of Ivan was no pretence, but a
reality, as grim, as terrible, as sullen, as the temperament of their
peasant-brethren. And not one of them but had felt, to some degree, the
same, deep, passionless, revulsive anger that was working in him, and
turning him from the old, secret habits of spiritual meditation and high
thought, into passions of blasphemy and atheism which burned ever deeper
into his brain.

It was in this final phase of inward revolt against the submissive
religions that are permitted to govern the world, that Ivan, nearly
recovered from bodily weakness, took up the histo