it; then, getting angry with the uninspired tedious work, he again
threw it on the floor and put out the candle. A little later he once
more took up the play and read it, then he produced it and it was a
failure.

* * * * *

N., heavy, morose, gloomy, says: "I love a joke, I am always joking."

* * * * *

The wife writes; the husband does not like her writing, but out of
delicacy says nothing and suffers all his life.

* * * * *

The fate of an actress: the beginning--a well-to-do family in Kertch,
life dull and empty; the stage, virtue, passionate love, then lovers;
the end: unsuccessful attempt to poison herself, then Kertch, life
at her fat uncle's house, the delight of being left alone. Experience
shows that an artist must dispense with wine, marriage, pregnancy. The
stage will become art only in the future, now it is only struggling
for the future.

* * * * *

(Angrily and sententiously) "Why don't you give me your wife's letters
to read? Aren't we relations?"

* * * * *

Lord, don't allow me to condemn or to speak of what I do not know or
do not understand.

* * * * *

Why do people describe only the weak, surly and frail as sinners? And
every one when he advises others to describe only the strong, healthy,
and interesting, means himself.

* * * * *

For a play: a character always lying without rhyme or reason.

* * * * *

Sexton Catacombov.

* * * * *

N.N., a litterateur, critic, plausible, self-confident, very liberal
minded, talks about poetry; condescendingly agrees with one--and I see
that he is a man absolutely without talent (I haven't read him). Some
one suggests going to Ai-Petri. I say that it is going to rain, but
we set out. The road is muddy, it rains; the critic sits next to me, I
feel his lack of talent. He is wooed and made a fuss of as if he were
a bishop. And when it cleared up, I went back on foot. How easily
people deceive themselves, how they love prophets and soothsayers;
what a herd it is! Another person went with us, a Councillor of State,
middle-aged, silent, because he thinks he is right and despises the
critic, because he too is without talent. A girl afraid to smile
because she is among