For a year I busied myself with arbitration work,the schools,and the magazine;and I became so worn out--as a result especially of my mental confusion--and so hard was my struggle as Arbiter,so obscure the results of my activity in the schools,so repulsive my shuffling in the magazine (which always amounted to one and the same thing:a desire to teach everybody and to hide the fact that I did not know what to teach),that I fell ill,mentally rather than physically,threw up everything,and went away to the Bashkirs in the steppes,to breathe fresh air,drink kumys [Footnote:A fermented drink prepared from mare's milk.--A.M.],and live a merely animal life.
Returning from there I married.The new conditions of happy family life completely diverted me from all search for the general meaning of life.My whole life was centred at that time in my family,wife and children,and therefore in care to increase our means of livelihood.My striving after self-perfection,for which I had already substituted a striving for perfection in general,i.e.progress,was now again replaced by the effort simply to secure the best possible conditions for myself and my family.
So another fifteen years passed.
In spite of the fact that I now regarded authorship as of no importance--the temptation of immense monetary rewards and applause for my insignificant work--and I devoted myself to it as a means of improving my material position and of stifling in my soul all questions as to the meaning of my own life or life in general.
I wrote:teaching what was for me the only truth,namely,that one should live so as to have the best for oneself and one's family.
So I lived;but five years ago something very strange began to happen to me.At first I experienced moments of perplexity and arrest of life,and though I did not know what to do or how to live;and I felt lost and became dejected.But this passed and I went on living as before.Then these moments of perplexity began to recur oftener and oftener,and always in the same form.They were always expressed by the questions:What is it for?What does it lead to?
At first it seemed to me that these were aimless and irrelevant questions.I thought that it was all well known,and that if I should ever wish to deal with the solution it would not cost me much effort;just at present I had no time for it,but when I wanted to I should be able to find the answer.The questions however began to repeat themselves frequently,and to demand replies more and more insistently;and like drops of ink always falling on one place they ran together into one black blot.
Then occurred what happens to everyone sickening with a mortal internal disease.At first trivial signs of indisposition appear to which the sick man pays no attention;then these signs reappear more and more often and merge into one uninterrupted period of suffering.The suffering increases,and before the sick man can look round,what he took for a mere indisposition has already become more important to him than anything else in the world--it is death!
That is what happened to me.I understood that it was no casual indisposition but something very important,and that if these questions constantly repeated themselves they would have to be answered.And I tried to answer them.The questions seemed such stupid,******,childish ones;but as soon as I touched them and tried to solve them I at once became convinced,first,that they are not childish and stupid but the most important and profound of life's questions;and secondly that,occupying myself with my Samara estate,the education of my son,or the writing of a book,I had to know *why*I was doing it.As long as I did not know why,I could do nothing and could not live.Amid the thoughts of estate management which greatly occupied me at that time,the question would suddenly occur:"Well,you will have 6,000desyatinas [Footnote:The desyatina is about 2.75acres.--A.M.]of land in Samara Government and 300horses,and what then?"...And I was quite disconcerted and did not know what to think.Or when considering plans for the education of my children,I would say to myself:"What for?"Or when considering how the peasants might become prosperous,I would suddenly say to myself:"But what does it matter to me?"Or when thinking of the fame my works would bring me,I would say to myself,"Very well;you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Moliere,or than all the writers in the world--and what of it?"And I could find no reply at all.The questions would not wait,they had to be answered at once,and if I did not answer them it was impossible to live.But there was no answer.
I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet.What I had lived on no longer existed,and there was nothing left.
