* * * * * "Society for finding and raising anchors of steamers and barges," and the Society's agent at all functions without fail makes a speech, à la N., and without fail promises. * * * * * Super-mysticism. * * * * * When I become rich, I shall have a harem in which I shall keep fat naked women, with their buttocks painted green. * * * * * A shy young man came on a visit for the night: suddenly a deaf old woman came into his room, carrying a cupping-glass, and bled him; he thought that this must be the usual thing and so did not protest; in the morning it turned out that the old woman had made a mistake. * * * * * Surname: Verstax. * * * * * The more stupid the peasant, the better does the horse understand him. THEMES, THOUGHTS, NOTES, AND FRAGMENTS. ... How stupid and for the most part how false, since if one man seeks to devour another or tell him something unpleasant it has nothing to do with Granovsky.[1] [Footnote 1: A well-known Radical professor, a Westerner.] * * * * * I left Gregory Ivanovitch's feeling crushed and mortally offended. I was irritated by smooth words and by those who speak them, and on reaching home I meditated thus: some rail at the world, others at the crowd, that is to say praise the past and blame the present; they cry out that there are no ideals and so on, but all this has already been said twenty or thirty years ago; these are worn-out forms which have already served their time, and whoever repeats them now, he too is no longer young and is himself worn out. With last year's foliage there decay too those who live in it. I thought, we uncultured, worn-out people, banal in speech, stereotyped in intentions, have grown quite mouldy, and, while we intellectuals are rummaging among old rags and, according to the old Russian custom, biting one another, there is boiling up around us a life which we neither know nor notice. Great events will take us unawares, like sleeping fairies, and you will see that Sidorov, the merchant, and the teacher of the school at Yeletz, who see and know more than we do, will push us far into the background, because they will accomplish more than all of us put together. And I thought that were we now to obtain political liberty, of which we talk so much, while engaged in biting one another, we should not know what to do with it, we should waste it in accusing one another in the newspapers of being spies and money-grubbers, we should frighten society with the assurance that we have neither men, nor science, nor literature, nothing! Nothing! And to scare society as we are doing now, and as we shall continue to do, means to deprive it of courage; it means simply to declare that we have no social or political sense in us.