sleep there. But when I finish my picture--no, even
when I approach the end of the picture, I am seized with a sensation so
terrible that I feel like tearing the brain from my head and trampling
it with my feet. Do you understand me?"

"I understand you, my friend, I understand you perfectly, and I
sympathise with you."

"Really? Well, then, listen, old man. I make the last strokes with so
much pain, with such a sense of sorrow and hopelessness, as though I
were bidding good-bye to the person I loved best of all. But here I
have finished it. Do you understand what it means? It means that it has
assumed life, that it lives, that there is a certain mysterious spirit
in it. And yet it is already doomed to death, it is dead already, dead
like a herring. Can you understand it at all? I do not understand it.
And, now, imagine, I--fool that I am--I nevertheless rejoice, I cry and
rejoice. No, I think, this picture I shall not destroy; it is so good
that I shall not destroy it. Let it live. And it is a fact that at such
times I do not feel like drawing anything new, I have not the slightest
desire for it. And yet it is dreadful. Do you understand me?"

"Perfectly, my friend. No doubt the drawing ceases to please you on the
following day--"

"Oh, what nonsense you are prating, old man! (That is exactly what he
said. 'Nonsense.') How can a dying child cease to please you? Of course,
if he lived, he might have become a scoundrel, but when he is dying--No,
old man, that isn't it. For I am killing it myself. I do not sleep all
night long, I jump up, I look at it, and I love it so dearly that I
feel like stealing it. Stealing it from whom? What do I know? But when
morning sets in I feel that I cannot do without it, that I must take
up that cursed pencil again and create anew. What a mockery! To create!
What am I, a galley slave?"

"My friend, you are in a prison."

"My dear old man! When I begin to steal over to the slate with the
sponge in my hand I feel like a murderer. It happens that I go around
it for a day or two. Do you know, one day I bit off a finger of my right
hand so as not to draw any more, but that, of course, was only a trifle,
for I started to learn drawing with my left hand. What is this necessity
for creating! To create by all means, create for suffering--create with
the knowledge that it will all perish! Do you understand it?"

"Finish it, my friend, don't be agitated; then I will expound to you my
views."