Page:Five Russian plays and one Ukrainian.pdf/87

 surpassed the Vandals without doubt: beautiful religion, omnipotent knowledge, pleasurable ethics, we laugh at all these, make nothings of them and—and our soul, frightened and sad, is ready to throw us into acid, into the bed of corruption, under the wheels of a locomotive, if only it could stifle in itself the consciousness of this inexpressible horror. You understand how greatly a man must suffer for whom God has ceased to exist, but in whom the religious feeling remains, who has lost a reason for fighting, but in whom both the strength and the desire to fight have remained, who wants to possess the truth and knows he is desiring to grasp the moon, who wants to believe in the magical and the marvellous and under whose nose science has swept all magic.


 * But


 * I affirm that in man is placed the necessity for horrors in a greater measure than the necessity for deliverance from them. Oh, how I want, how I need ghosts and slippery nymphs and vampires with terrible red eyes. This has been found to be vanity and driven away, but at the same time life without it has become still vainer.