.

Towards evening Olenin got up, resolutely began writing, and wrote on
till late at night. He wrote a letter, but did not post it because he
felt that no one would have understood what he wanted to say, and
besides it was not necessary that anyone but himself should understand
it. This is what he wrote:

'I receive letters of condolence from Russia. They are afraid that I
shall perish, buried in these wilds. They say about me: "He will become
coarse; he will be behind the times in everything; he will take to
drink, and who knows but that he may marry a Cossack girl." It was not
for nothing, they say, that Ermolov declared: "Anyone serving in the
Caucasus for ten years either becomes a confirmed drunkard or marries a
loose woman." How terrible! Indeed it won't do for me to ruin myself
when I might have the great happiness of even becoming the Countess
B----'s husband, or a Court chamberlain, or a Marechal de noblesse of
my district. Oh, how repulsive and pitiable you all seem to me! You do
not know what happiness is and what life is! One must taste life once
in all its natural beauty, must see and understand what I see every day
before me--those eternally unapproachable snowy peaks, and a majestic
woman in that primitive beauty in which the first woman must have come
from her creator's hands--and then it becomes clear who is ruining
himself and who is living truly or falsely--you or I. If you only knew
how despicable and pitiable you, in your delusions, seem to me! When I
picture to myself--in place of my hut, my forests, and my love--those
drawing-rooms, those women with their pomatum-greased hair eked out
with false curls, those unnaturally grimacing lips, those hidden,
feeble, distorted limbs, and that chatter of obligatory drawing-room
conversation which has no right to the name--I feel unendurably
revolted. I then see before me those obtuse faces, those rich eligible
girls whose looks seem to say:

"It's all right, you may come near though I am rich and eligible"--and
that arranging and rearranging of seats, that shameless match-making
and that eternal tittle-tattle and pretence; those rules--with whom to
shake hands, to whom only to nod, with whom to converse (and all this
done deliberately with a conviction of its inevitability), that
continual ennui in the blood passing on from generation to generation.
Try to understand or believe just this one thing: you need only see and
comprehend what truth and beauty a