“Oh, yes, it did,” he sighed deeply. “It is terrifying at first. One feels everyone is suspecting the truth. Then, gradually, one gets used to it. Maybe you think the police’s job is an easy one? Not so,” said Popov; “there, too, one needs to be heroic. They’ve got their heroes as well, oh, yes! In a struggle there should be heroes on both sides!”

And lowering his voice, with a mean, cunning smile he added:

“It is quite thrilling, working there, perhaps even more so than with us. There are more of us, fewer of them.…”

I could see that his fear was fading away, vanishing. He got quite excited as he went on, telling his story very vividly with a number of anecdotes, sometimes quite amusing ones. I believe that quite often I had to conquer the desire to smile, and thought that this calf turned into a police-dog could have written interesting stories.

There was something naïve in his cynicism and I remember that it was this naïveté which rendered me most fierce—rendered me fierce and frightened me at the same time. I experienced a curious feeling of being a stranger to myself. Finally the moment came when I, egging myself on to an unexpected decision, became uneasy.

“Well, Popov, write a note saying that no one is to blame for your death.”

He was more astonished than frightened, and frowning, asked:

“What do you mean? Why? What death?”

I explained to him: if he did not write the note—I’d shoot him, if he did—he must hang himself at once in front of me. The first thing he said in reply was unexpected and absurd:

“Suicide? No one will believe that I committed suicide, no one! They’ll know at once over there that I’ve been killed. And of course it will be you. You. Who else but you? They know over there that you are almost alone here…And—what right have you to judge, to punish, alone as you are?”

He dragged himself on the floor, catching at my feet, cried and moaned, and I had to press my hand to his horrid slavering mouth.

“No,” he cried, imploringly, in a whisper, “you must judge me. Try me, I must have a trial.”

This fuss went on for a long time, I was expecting the people downstairs to hear the noise and come to find out what it was. But the accordion became more and more lively, and more and more fierce the shouting and stamping. Popov hanged himself on the stove—I held his hands while he kicked about with his legs and loudly let out wind.

I’ll stop writing. What on earth is it for? What on earth?

No, writing is an entrancing occupation. As one writes, one feels that one is not alone in the world, that there is someone who is fond of one, towards whom one has never been guilty of anything, who understands one well and sympathizes without humiliating. One feels as one writes how much cleverer and better one becomes. It is an intoxicating job. It makes one understand Dostoevsky. He was a writer particularly inclined to intoxicate himself with the mad, stormy, irrational game of his imagination, a game played within himself. I used to read him with mistrust: it seemed to me that he exaggerated, terrifying people by the darkness of a human soul, then, in order that they should admit the necessity of God, that they should submit humbly to His unaccountable devices, His unfathomable will: “Surrender, be meek, proud man!”—he said. If this meekness was necessary to Dostoevsky—it was so only among other things and not primarily. He was first and foremost preoccupied with himself—min din min. He knew how to let himself be consumed, how to press out the burning, scorching juice from his soul to the last drop.