eas--and nothing else; and my mental processes
were as lacking in complexity, as useless and as rudimentary as a
Yakut's. . . . If I had disliked lying, had not stolen, had not
murdered, and, in fact, made obviously gross mistakes, that was not
owing to my convictions--I had none, but because I was in bondage,
hand and foot, to my nurse's fairy tales and to copy-book morals,
which had entered into my flesh and blood and without my noticing
it guided me in life, though I looked on them as absurd. . . .

"I realised that I was not a thinker, not a philosopher, but simply
a dilettante. God had given me a strong healthy Russian brain with
promise of talent. And, only fancy, here was that brain at twenty-six,
undisciplined, completely free from principles, not weighed down
by any stores of knowledge, but only lightly sprinkled with information
of a sort in the engineering line; it was young and had a physiological
craving for exercise, it was on the look-out for it, when all at
once quite casually the fine juicy idea of the aimlessness of life
and the darkness beyond the tomb descends upon it. It greedily sucks
it in, puts its whole outlook at its disposal and begins playing
with it, like a cat with a mouse. There is neither learning nor
system in the brain, but that does not matter. It deals with the
great ideas with its own innate powers, like a self-educated man,
and before a month has passed the owner of the brain can turn a
potato into a hundred dainty dishes, and fancies himself a
philosopher . . . .

"Our generation has carried this dilettantism, this playing with
serious ideas into science, into literature, into politics, and
into everything which it is not too lazy to go into, and with its
dilettantism has introduced, too, its coldness, its boredom, and
its one-sidedness and, as it seems to me, it has already succeeded
in developing in the masses a new hitherto non-existent attitude
to serious ideas.

"I realised and appreciated my abnormality and utter ignorance,
thanks to a misfortune. My normal thinking, so it seems to me now,
dates from the day when I began again from the A, B, C, when my
conscience sent me flying back to N., when with no philosophical
subleties I repented, besought Kisotchka's forgiveness like a naughty
boy and wept with her. . . ."

Ananyev briefly described his last interview with Kisotchka.

"H'm. . . ." the student filtered through his teeth when the engineer
had finished. "That's th