Chapter 33 - Page 2

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.

'Three months have passed since I first saw the Cossack girl,
Maryanka. The views and prejudices of the world I had left were
still fresh in me. I did not then believe that I could love that
woman. I delighted in her beauty just as I delighted in the beauty
of the mountains and the sky, nor could I help delighting in her,
for she is as beautiful as they. I found that the sight of her
beauty had become a necessity of my life and I began asking myself
whether I did not love her. But I could find nothing within myself
at all like love as I had imagined it to be. Mine was not the
restlessness of loneliness and desire for marriage, nor was it
platonic, still less a carnal love such as I have experienced. I
needed only to see her, to hear her, to know that she was near--
and if I was not happy, I was at peace.

'After an evening gathering at which I met her and touched her, I
felt that between that woman and myself there existed an
indissoluble though unacknowledged bond against which I could not
struggle, yet I did struggle. I asked myself: "Is it possible to
love a woman who will never understand the profoundest interests
of my life? Is it possible to love a woman simply for her beauty,
to love the statue of a woman?" But I was already in love with
her, though I did not yet trust to my feelings.

'After that evening when I first spoke to her our relations
changed. Before that she had been to me an extraneous but majestic
object of external nature: but since then she has become a human
being. I began to meet her, to talk to her, and sometimes to go to
work for her father and to spend whole evenings with them, and in
this intimate intercourse she remained still in my eyes just as
pure, inaccessible, and majestic. She always responded with equal
calm, pride, and cheerful equanimity. Sometimes she was friendly,
but generally her every look, every word, and every movement
expressed equanimity--not contemptuous, but crushing and
bewitching. Every day with a feigned smile on my lips I tried to
play a part, and with torments of passion and desire in my heart I
spoke banteringly to her. She saw that I was dissembling, but
looked straight at me cheerfully and simply. This position became