'Well, enough of love and personal happiness, and everything of that sort. For the last fortnight now I have been "going to the people," and alack and alack! anything more absurd you cannot imagine. Of course, there the fault lies in me, and not in the work itself. Granted, I'm not a Slavophil; I'm not one of those who find their panacea in the people, in contact with them; I don't lay the people on my aching stomach like a flannel bandage . . . I want to have an influence on them myself; but how? How accomplish that? It appears when I am with the people that I am always only stooping to them, and listening; and when it does happen that I say anything, it's below contempt! I feel myself I'm no good. It's like a bad actor in the wrong part. Conscientiousness is quite out of place in this, and so is scepticism, and even a sort of pitiful humour directed against myself. . . . It's all not worth a brass farthing! It's positively sickening to remember; sickening to look at the rags I drag about on me, at this masquerade, as Vassily expresses it! They maintain one ought first to study the people's talk, learn their character and habits.. . . Rubbish! rubbish! rubbish! One must believe in what one says, and then one may say what one likes. I once chanced to hear something like a sermon from a sectarian prophet. There's
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