Netochka Nezvanova

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

There are times when I’m overcome with such terrible despair that I wish I’d never been born.

the other hand his companion, Efimov, was already thirty and tired and weary; his patience was spent

By now his enthusiasm was rather spasmodic, jaundiced and erratic, as if he were trying to deceive only himself, trying to convince himself that his energy, his vigour, his original inspiration and fire were not really burnt out.

He saw clearly that all his impetuosity, impatience and feverish haste amounted to nothing more than an unconscious despair at the memory of his squandered talent and that it was more than likely that this talent had never been anything very special, not even in the beginning, that there had been a great deal of blindness, of vain complacency and premature self-satisfaction, and of dreaming and fantasizing about his genius.

I saw before my own eyes a desperate, feverish contest taking place between a violently over-strained will and inner impotence. For seven miserable years he had contented himself with mere dreams of future fame, to the extent that he failed to notice how he was losing sight of what was essential to our art and was forgetting even the most elementary mechanics of the matter.

Sometimes, in his crude and rather simple language, he would utter such profound truths that I was struck dumb and could not believe that a man who had never read anything or even studied under anyone could have worked these things out for himself.

He saw through him and knew well in advance how it would all end up.

You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.

Just now no one wants you, no one is bothered about knowing you, but that’s the way of the world. Just wait a while and you’ll see how different it is once they’ve discovered you.

The envy, the petty meanness and, worst of all, the stupidity will be a greater burden to you than any hardship.

These future friends of yours will give you neither comfort nor encouragement. They won’t point out your good sides. Oh no! They’ll take a malicious delight in spotting every one of your mistakes. They’ll only be interested in your faults and errors.

Try to be simpler – you’re too subtle and you think too much; you give your brain a lot of work.

It seemed as if all that had weighed on him during his life in mysterious, intangible torments; all that had deluded and tortured him in dreams from which he had fled in horror, protecting himself with a lie; all that he had had presentiments of, but had been too scared to face – all suddenly became crystal clear to him, naked to his sight which had, until then, refused to recognize light for light, darkness for darkness. The truth was more than his eyes could bear and, seeing for the first time what had been, what was and what awaited him, he was blinded as by a lightning stroke.

There had always been an axe hanging over his head. All his life he had been tortured by the fear that at any moment it might fall and strike him… At last it fell! The blow was fatal.