d whom she does not love, and whom she married out of spite
and for money. Love for a comrade of her youth, Volodia by name,
fills her heart. But this young man, who has recently finished his
studies, is just as commonplace and just as debauched as her husband
and the society which surrounds her. Sofia Lvovna is not yet
resigned to her fate. She speaks of her aspirations to her childhood
friend, who, after getting from her what he desires, leaves her at
the end of a week. And Sofia Lvovna becomes frightened at the
thought that for the young girls and women of her station there is
no other alternative than to go on riding in carriages, or to enter
a convent and gain salvation.

"The Attack" gives us an example of the terrible feeling of terror
that suddenly enters the proud soul of a young man at his first
contact with certain realities.

The student Vassiliev, a young man of excessively nervous
temperament, has visited a house of ill-fame, and since then, he
cannot rid himself of his painful impressions. Sombre thoughts
beset his mind: "Women, living women!" he repeats, his head between
his hands. "If I broke this lamp you would say that it was too bad;
but down there it is not lamps that they break, it is the existence
of human creatures! Living women!..."

He dreams of several ways of saving these unfortunates, and he
decides childishly to stand on a street-corner, and say to each
passer-by:

"Where are you going? and why? Fear God."

But this desire soon gives place to a general state of anguish and
hatred of himself. The evil seems too great for him, and its
vastness crushes him. In the meantime, the people about him do not
suffer; they are indifferent or incredulous. The student feels that
he is losing his mind. They confine him. Later on, when, cured, he
leaves the alienist, "he blushes at his anxiety."... The general
indifference has broken down his aspirations, smothered his vague
dream.

In "Peter the Bishop," we see a man, good and simple, the son of
peasants. This man, thanks to his intelligence, has raised himself
to the rank of bishop. During all his life he has suffocated in this
high ecclesiastical position, the pompous tinsel of which troubles
him to such an extent that the cordial and sincere relationship
existing between him and his old mother, who is so full of respect
for her son, is broken off. After his death he is quickly forgotten.
The old mother, now childless, when she walks in the fie