glittering as sparks. Zotov used to say: “He doesn’t live, he just smolders. One can’t help feeling that at any moment he might flare up—and vanish.”

I listened to Leopold greedily, with great intensity, but liked to hurt him. For instance I would say: “You keep talking of European capitalists—and seem to have forgotten the Jewish ones?”

He would shrink, the poor beggar, blink his sharp little eyes, and say that although capitalism was international, people like Lassalle and Marx were more characteristic of the Jews than capitalists.

When we were alone he would reproach me for being anti-Jewish, but I countered by saying that his reticence about Jews had been noticed by the others as well. That was true.

Eight months after starting his talks with us he was arrested, together with some other members of the intelligentsia, kept over a year in prison, then sent off to the north, where he died. He was one of those men who live like the blind, their eyes wide open but seeing nothing but what they believe in. They’ve got an easy life. With such an asset I would have made just as good a job of it as they do.

They’ve brought a soldier to the prison—remarkably like my father the year he died: just as bald and bearded, the eyes just as deeply sunk in their sockets and the same embarrassed little laugh which my father had before he died. “Peter,” he asked me, “what if a crowd of devils come and welcome you after you’re dead?”

It was almost comical how desperately he clung to life, he consulted three doctors at the same time: the famous Dr. Turkin, some woman-quack in the settlement, and the local priest who treated all diseases with a concoction of ephedra vulgaris, a shrub known as “Kuzmich’s herb.” Also he was anxious about me. He would say:

“Do give up that game, Peter. It isn’t your fault that people’s lives are not what they ought to be—why should it be your duty to put them right? It is about the same as looking after other people’s geese and neglecting one’s own.”

There’s a good deal of truth in blunt thoughts. Yes, people are linked together by the chain of economics. Economic materialism is a clear teaching and allows for no imagination. The external link between people is superficial, automatic, forced upon them. I stand it so long as I profit by it. When that goes—I start on my own—so long, boys! I am not greedy—I don’t need much for my share of life.

Among the comrades there were several poets of sorts, lyrical-minded creatures, preachers of love of mankind. They were good, naïve lads, I admired them, but I well knew that their love of mankind was pure imagination and not of a very fine quality. Of course, for those who hang in the air without a definite place in life, for these men the preaching of love of mankind is a matter of necessity—this is very well proved by the naïve teaching of Christ. But fundamentally—solicitude for people does not come from love for them but from the need to surround oneself by them in order to establish one’s ideas, one’s position, one’s ambition, with their help, their support. I know that some intellectuals are actually physically attracted by the people in their youth and take it to be love. But it is not love—it is mere mechanics—gravitation towards the masses. When they reach maturity these same people become the dullest of artisans, just common stokers on the train of life. Solicitude for people destroys the love for them, revealing the simplest of social mechanisms.

There is some shooting going on at night in the town. At dawn today in the cell above me somebody moaned and wailed and stamped. A woman, I believe.

In the morning comrade Basov came with a message from them, asking whether I was writing. Yes, I am.