"Last year, like Herzen, I was naturalised as a citizen of the canton
of Uri, and that nobody knows. There I've already bought a little house.
I've still twelve thousand roubles left; we'll go and live there for
ever. I don't want to go anywhere else ever.

"It's a very dull place, a narrow valley, the mountains restrict both
vision and thought. It's very gloomy. I chose the place because there
was a little house to be sold. If you don't like it I'll sell it and buy
another in some other place.

"I am not well, but I hope to get rid of hallucinations in that air.
It's physical, and as for the moral you know everything; but do you know
all?

"I've told you a great deal of my life, but not all. Even to you!
Not all. By the way, I repeat that in my conscience I feel myself
responsible for my wife's death. I haven't seen you since then, that's
why I repeat it. I feel guilty about Lizaveta Nikolaevna too; but you
know about that; you foretold almost all that.

"Better not come to me. My asking you to is a horrible meanness. And why
should you bury your life with me? You are dear to me, and when I was
miserable it was good to be beside you; only with you I could speak
of myself aloud. But that proves nothing. You defined it yourself, 'a
nurse'--it's your own expression; why sacrifice so much? Grasp this,
too, that I have no pity for you since I ask you, and no respect for
you since I reckon on you. And yet I ask you and I reckon on you. In
any case I need your answer for I must set off very soon. In that case I
shall go alone.

"I expect nothing of Uri; I am simply going. I have not chosen a gloomy
place on purpose. I have no ties in Russia--everything is as alien to
me there as everywhere. It's true that I dislike living there more than
anywhere; but I can't hate anything even there!

"I've tried my strength everywhere. You advised me to do this 'that I
might learn to know myself.' As long as I was experimenting for myself
and for others it seemed infinite, as it has all my life. Before your
eyes I endured a blow from your brother; I acknowledged my marriage in
public. But to what to apply my strength, that is what I've never seen,
and do not see now in spite of all your praises in Switzerland, which
I believed in. I am still capable, as I always was, of desiring to do
something good, and of feeling pleasure from it; at the same time I
desire evil and feel pleasure from that too. But both feelings are
always too pett