With a curiosity the living would not understand, I study the plan of the town. I like to know why it is laid out in roads and streets and squares. I can see the full importance of the tramway. I like the look of the block of flats and the porters; I like the stone quay. I saw the Ochta Bridge open to let a steamer pass one day, and I liked that, too. I like the bustling crowds at the railway stations; I never miss going to them every day. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t mind if the whole thing collapsed. It would be an interesting spectacle to watch. I try to picture the flames and the ruins. The town would look very flat when it was over.
I saw two aeroplanes in the sky today from the Krestovsky Island; one made a circuit round the edge of a large cloud. Mentally I was up there flying with them, not without a sense of pleasure. I take a very lordly view of life, on the whole. I mean this in all seriousness. At times I am in the best of moods. I don’t mind how much money I spend, and buy presents and sweets for the children in the most lordly way. I took another basket of fruit to Sashenka, and gave it to her very gallantly.
A lord, indeed!
16th September.
The town is in a ferment like a disturbed ant hill. Voices are raised loudly in altercation. The Duma has been dismissed. Our only hope was in the Duma. How bold the citizens of Petrograd have become all at once! They shout things out in the streets they would have been afraid to speak of in a whisper in the privacy of their own bedrooms but a short time ago! Trouble is feared. With the murmur of discontented voices in my ears, I think, “It’s all very fine, my brave fellows. … But what has it to do with me?”
From sheer lack of something else to do, I went to the Taurida Palace. It looked just the same as on any ordinary day. A small crowd of us stood watching the members coming out. There seemed nothing unusual about them too; they were men like other men, only a little grave and satisfied, perhaps, that it had fallen to their lot to participate in such a great historic event. To be dismissed in the hour when “the country was in danger”! They came out with dignity, and sat stiff and upright in their carriages, looking grave, with the air of a specialist who had just finished a patient. When I smiled and happened to pass some jocular remark, a young man near me said something about the black hundreds. I resolve to get away before I was mobbed, and really, what business had I there at all? I went to the Ochta Bridge afterwards and expended six kopeks to go down the Neva on a steamer as far as the Vasily Island.
The water has a strange attraction for me. I was very soothed to sit on the fore part of the ship, with the wind and spray beating against my face. It gave a pleasantness to my hopelessness and despair.
17th September.
I know now what emptiness means. How very weird and strange it is! Emptiness is everywhere; it stretches from the moon, at which I gazed last night, to the English embankment. The houses are full of it; it clings to walls and ceilings; there is not a room that does not contain it; knock down every wall, and nothing will remain between me and the stars but emptiness.
I realised this very vividly at dawn yesterday. I had been dreaming that Lidotchka had come to see me, and I awoke. I was too restless to go to sleep again afterwards, so I got up and went into my study, where I sat down on the windowsill. It was getting light, but it was raining, and everything seemed grey and monotonous. There was no beginning or end to anything. It was still and quiet around me. A sense of the emptiness shot through me, of the emptiness within, and the emptiness without, the two stretching together throughout eternity. Emptiness was everywhere; within it was heated, so that people should not perish of the eternal cold. And that thing sitting on the windowsill (I went on thinking) is a man, and the emptiness is all about him. The emptiness that is heated is called a house, and soon I shall have no house. …
Then I realised where I was. Like a lunatic, once more I was sitting on my windowsill in my pants. My legs seemed so long and my beard so grey. Your end has come, Ilya Petrovitch!
I would have gone to bed just now, but the moon peeped in at my window, so I think I’ll go out and look at it, I don’t like having to wake the porter each time I go in and out; I have only the key of our own flat. I shouldn’t like everybody to know if anything happened to me. What a dear boy Jena is!
19th September.
I have seen a horrible nightmare. I strolled casually into the Finland railway station where a crowd had collected to meet a company of wounded expected back from Germany. They had been dealt with and sent back again, for they were no longer terrible. Oh, God! Like a blind and deaf fool, absorbed in my own petty affairs, I did not realise at first why the crowd was there. It seemed a festive occasion; flag, flowers, and band must have leant colour to this thought. A bride and bridegroom might have been expected to arrive. When I heard
