remind one of oxen—one can’t help being bored by them. I believe that being of one piece is the result of self-limitation for the sake of self-defense. Darwin is of that opinion too, apparently. A man lands in a situation in which some characteristics of his ego are not only superfluous but dangerous for him—his internal or external enemies might take advantage of them. So the man consciously squashes, destroys in himself the superfluous, and thus acquires the “wholeness.” For instance: why in the world does a revolutionary want compassion, lyrics, sentimentality, romanticism and all that? All a revolutionary needs is enthusiasm and belief in himself. All interest in the variety of life is definitely a danger to him. It is as easy to get entangled in it as for a child to get lost in a thicket of brambles.

The life of a split person resembles the flight of a swallow. No doubt the man of one piece is from a practical point of view a more useful one—but the second type is more sympathetic to me. A complex man is more interesting. Life is ornamented by useless objects. I have never yet met the idiots who would want to decorate their houses with hammers, screws or bicycles. Although I did know one rich corn merchant who had collected more than five hundred locks and hung them about in two large rooms on red cloth shields. But his locks were so ingenious that I as an hereditary locksmith took great pleasure in examining them. And they were all useless, of course. I am fond of technical tricks, whatever shape they take, as much as I am fond of every play of the human mind.

One talks so much about “Christian culture.” Why lie? How the deuce is it Christian? Where is the simplicity in this culture of ours? There is no evangelical simplicity anywhere. People have bred cunning, evil thoughts and scattered them over the world like a pack of mad dogs. The fools.

Towards 1908 the strongest men in the revolution had been destroyed. Some of the workmen had gone to Siberia, others, with fear in their hearts, adorned themselves in the pelt of indifference. With time these pelts grew on to their bodies. Others in the desire to “live pleasurably” turned into bandits; “living pleasurably” is always linked directly or indirectly with banditry. Particular dexterity and speed in avoiding the retribution dealt out by the victors was shown by our comrades of the intelligentsia. A filthy time it was indeed. Even people who had proved to be made of the stuff of heroes turned to meanness.

But it is better not to write or think of these times. I do not wish to seem to be hinting: the times were such that…

No, I do not want to find excuses. I have my own line, my own aim. A Tartar friend of mine used to say:

“Min din min—”—I am I. Whatever I may be—I am I.

The conditions of the time played a large part in my life but only in that it placed me face to face with myself. I used to live, arming, so to say, for battle, and this engaged my strength to such a degree that I had no time to think: who am I? I used to be linked with others by the consciousness of mutual interests, political and economic, by party solidarity, discipline. Now I suddenly felt that these questions did not engross me altogether. I noticed that the solidarity of interests was a matter of doubt and that the laws of party discipline were not always written in the same print.…And at the same time I came up with a shock against the question: why were people so unstable, so shaky, why did they betray their cause and their faith with such ease? All this sounds as an excuse all the same. That is a foul trick. I believe it would be more truthful and honest to say simply: I used to work with love, exhilaration, self-denial, now I began to loiter about with my hands in my pockets, whistling, conscious of a reluctance to do any work at all. Not that I was tired and unable to go on—no, I just did not want to. I was bored. And not bored because it had become necessary once more to grab people by the scruff of their necks and drag them towards freedom on to a path abundantly sprinkled with blood—no, not because of that. I performed all these acts, grabbed and dragged and led, but more out of stubbornness, from a desire to prove something to someone, altogether out of other motives, not the old ones, but new ones, which were not clear even to myself. And unstable ones at that.

I was particularly sharply aware of this instability of purpose in my revolutionary work. The ideas were still there, but the energy that stimulated them seemed to demand other outlets. It is difficult to explain