Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/141



I read Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment"

I read the story of the student Raskolnikov in my uninviting room, shivering with cold and writhing with hunger; my spirit was haunted by that feeling of grief and emptiness common to every Czech in the nineties; the conflict of life, such as I had been compelled to live it under the insane yoke of the secondary school and then hunting after niggardly coaching jobs with vain yearnings for freedom and sunshine within, burdened and afflicted me unspeakably; I was sated with the world which I did not know, nauseated by life of which I had no experience, having no strength because there was no hope, and there was no hope, because there was no-where for it to seize hold. My spirit weighed upon me like a fallow field full of weeds, a few of which—my verses—swayed to and fro there sadly and despondently, waiting submissively for