“I receive letters of condolence from Russia. They are afraid that I shall perish, buried in these wilds. They say about me: ‘He will become coarse; he will be behind the times in everything; he will take to drink, and who knows but that he may marry a Cossack girl.’ It was not for nothing, they say, that Ermólov declared: ‘Anyone serving in the Caucasus for ten years either becomes a confirmed drunkard or marries a loose woman.’ How terrible! Indeed it won’t do for me to ruin myself when I might have the great happiness of even becoming the Countess B——’s husband, or a Court chamberlain, or a _Maréchal de noblesse_ of my district. Oh, how repulsive and pitiable you all seem to me! You do not know what happiness is and what life is! One must taste life once in all its natural beauty, must see and understand what I see every day before me—those eternally unapproachable snowy peaks, and a majestic woman in that primitive beauty in which the first woman must have come from her creator’s hands—and then it becomes clear who is ruining himself and who is living truly or falsely—you or I. If you only knew how despicable and pitiable you, in your delusions, seem to me! When I picture to myself—in place of my hut, my forests, and my love—those drawing-rooms, those women with their pomatum-greased hair eked out with false curls, those unnaturally grimacing lips, those hidden, feeble, distorted limbs, and that chatter of obligatory drawing-room conversation which has no right to the name—I feel unendurably revolted. I then see before me those obtuse faces, those rich eligible girls whose looks seem to say: ‘It’s all right, you may come near though I am rich and eligible’—and that arranging and rearranging of seats, that shameless match-making and that eternal tittle-tattle and pretence; those rules—with whom to shake hands, to whom only to nod, with whom to converse (and all this done deliberately with a conviction of its inevitability), that continual ennui in the blood passing on from generation to generation. Try to understand or believe just this one thing: you need only see and comprehend what truth and beauty are, and all that you now say and think and all your wishes for me and for yourselves will fly to atoms! “Happiness is being with nature, seeing her, and conversing with her. ‘He may even (God forbid) marry a common Cossack girl, and be quite lost socially’ I can imagine them saying of me with sincere pity! Yet the one thing I desire is to be quite ‘lost’ in your sense of the word. I wish to marry a Cossack girl, and dare not because it would be a height of happiness of which I am unworthy.