Chapter 7

"And it was very easy to capture me, since I was brought up under
artificial conditions, like cucumbers in a hothouse. Our too abundant
nourishment, together with complete physical idleness, is nothing but
systematic excitement of the imagination. The men of our society are
fed and kept like reproductive stallions. It is sufficient to close the
valve,--that is, for a young man to live a quiet life for some
time,--to produce as an immediate result a restlessness, which, becoming
exaggerated by reflection through the prism of our unnatural life,
provokes the illusion of love.

"All our idyls and marriage, all, are the result for the most part of
our eating. Does that astonish you? For my part, I am astonished that
we do not see it. Not far from my estate this spring some moujiks
were working on a railway embankment. You know what a peasant's food
is,--bread, kvass,* onions. With this frugal nourishment he lives, he is
alert, he makes light work in the fields. But on the railway this bill
of fare becomes cacha and a pound of meat. Only he restores this meat by
sixteen hours of labor pushing loads weighing twelve hundred pounds.

*Kvass, a sort of cider.

"And we, who eat two pounds of meat and game, we who absorb all sorts
of heating drinks and food, how do we expend it? In sensual excesses.
If the valve is open, all goes well; but close it, as I had closed it
temporarily before my marriage, and immediately there will result an
excitement which, deformed by novels, verses, music, by our idle and
luxurious life, will give a love of the finest water. I, too, fell in
love, as everybody does, and there were transports, emotions, poesy; but
really all this passion was prepared by mamma and the dressmakers. If
there had been no trips in boats, no well-fitted garments, etc., if
my wife had worn some shapeless blouse, and I had seen her thus at her
home, I should not have been seduced."