Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/142

118 the stroke of the scythe, the foreboding of an early death persisted in me with extraordinary strength, because death seemed to me the natural and only result of my condition.

And into this spirit there now fell sentences and scenes the like of which I had met with neither in life nor in literature. I read each page three or four times in succession; I did not hurry, I was not anxious to know what the end of the story would be; my spirit was in a ferment, everything within it rose upwards, my nerves were strained like wires and quivered with anguish—my own suffering was doubled by the suffering of another, and evinced itself as sheer physical pain.

And meantime I used to go to school and felt the whole inanity of so-called studies, Xenophon, Caesar, dogmatics, mathematics; I used to go to my coaching jobs, and the more they afflicted me, the more I afflicted others, insisting to them how important it is to know the irregular perfects and the ablative absolute—I did everything like a machine, but with a spirit in painful turmoil. Then evening came, and jaded and hungry I would sit down to Raskolnikov.

"A human louse"—yes, that is what Raskolnikov called the murdered usuress but her stupid sister was also a human louse, a superfluous louse, the scamp Svidrigailov was a louse, the drunkard Marmeladov was a louse, the