ANDREY. Oh, what has become of my past and where is it? I used to be young, happy, clever, I used to be able to think and frame clever ideas, the present and the future seemed to me full of hope. Why do we, almost before we have begun to live, become dull, grey, uninteresting, lazy, apathetic, useless, unhappy.... This town has already been in existence for two hundred years and it has a hundred thousand inhabitants, not one of whom is in any way different from the others. There has never been, now or at any other time, a single leader of men, a single scholar, an artist, a man of even the slightest eminence who might arouse envy or a passionate desire to be imitated. They only eat, drink, sleep, and then they die... more people are born and also eat, drink, sleep, and so as not to go silly from boredom, they try to make life many-sided with their beastly backbiting, vodka, cards, and litigation. The wives deceive their husbands, and the husbands lie, and pretend they see nothing and hear nothing, and the evil influence irresistibly oppresses the children and the divine spark in them is extinguished, and they become just as pitiful corpses and just as much like one another as their fathers and mothers.... [Angrily to FERAPONT] What do you want? FERAPONT. What? Documents want signing. ANDREY. I’m tired of you. FERAPONT. [Handing him papers] The hall-porter from the law courts was saying just now that in the winter there were two hundred degrees of frost in Petersburg. ANDREY. The present is beastly, but when I think of the future, how good it is! I feel so light, so free; there is a light in the distance, I see freedom. I see myself and my children freeing ourselves from vanities, from kvass, from goose baked with cabbage, from after-dinner naps, from base idleness.... FERAPONT. He was saying that two thousand people were frozen to death. The people were frightened, he said. In Petersburg or Moscow, I don’t remember which. ANDREY. [Overcome by a tender emotion] My dear sisters, my beautiful sisters! [Crying] Masha, my sister.... NATASHA. [At the window] Who’s talking so loudly out here? Is that you, Andrey? You’ll wake little Sophie. _Il ne faut pas faire du bruit, la Sophie est dormée deja. Vous êtes un ours._ [Angrily] If you want to talk, then give the perambulator and the baby to somebody else. Ferapont, take the perambulator! FERAPONT. Yes’m. [Takes the perambulator.] ANDREY. [Confused] I’m speaking quietly. NATASHA. [At the window, nursing her boy] Bobby! Naughty Bobby! Bad little Bobby! ANDREY. [Looking through the papers] All right, I’ll look them over and sign if necessary, and you can take them back to the offices.... [Goes into house reading papers; FERAPONT takes the perambulator to the back of the garden.] NATASHA. [At the window] Bobby, what’s your mother’s name? Dear, dear! And who’s this? That’s Aunt Olga. Say to your aunt, “How do you do, Olga!”