Chapter 33

It was late when he awoke the next day. His hosts were no longer
in. He did not go shooting, but now took up a book, and now went
out into the porch, and now again re-entered the hut and lay down
on the bed. Vanyusha thought he was ill.

Towards evening Olenin got up, resolutely began writing, and wrote
on till late at night. He wrote a letter, but did not post it
because he felt that no one would have understood what he wanted
to say, and besides it was not necessary that anyone but himself
should understand it. This is what he wrote:

'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 Ermolov 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 Marechal 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,