I affirm that in man is placed the necessity for horrors in a greater measure than the necessity for deliverance from them. Oh, how I want, how I need ghosts and slippery nymphs and vampires with terrible red eyes. This has been found to be vanity and driven away, but at the same time life without it has become still vainer.
Friend: I don’t understand; are you joking or——
Master: Woe to him whose aesthetic taste is too refined! Woe to him who, as I, looks into the future with bated breath, who desires with all his soul, but does not see there the superman.
Friend: I don’t really understand what you’re looking for! You want the restoration of the long obsolete forms of life.
Master: My dear friend, although perhaps even very highly respected people spread the report of my madness, it’s not really true. I’m not striving for the alteration of social laws. You can’t alter the inevitable. But if I could only fight for the beauty of olden life, if I could only count upon the very smallest success, how happy I should be, with what unweariedness, with what ardour I should set to work! But you remember your evangelist said that the social movement flows naturally from the historical development of society, and, most unfortunately, this is irrefutable. I could shout myself hoarse, crying, “Stop! Whither bound? Go back!” I could shout myself hoarse and not be heard.
Friend: It's amusing to listen to you.
Master: One must be a great philosopher to be reconciled with actual reality. But I cannot be reconciled; I’m too proud, and to fight with it is out of the question. And I went away from that reality, I went away, to lose my despair in beautiful folly.
Friend: Permit me to remark upon this that to say that something is beautiful does not mean to say it is right, and I, in that case——
Master: Better beautiful and wrong, than right and ugly; in both cases we’re a thousand miles away from final truth.
Friend: Yes, but if you judge in that way——
Master: You understand, I was physically unable to bear any longer the society of those advanced fools. Lord, what a gang! They poisoned the whole air. If I weren’t sorry for the trees, I’d hang ’em all with my own hands; I’d drown ’em all in the sea, if I didn’t love the sea, I — I’d shove them all over a precipice, if only there were a precipice they wouldn’t overfill! Write for them? Write for that mercantile riffraff?!
Friend: But what are you occupied with here? What do you do, cut off from all the world?
Master: We’re busy with salting, boiling, pickling, drying and soaking. We simply don’t see time pass: hunting, looking after the estate; just look how many books we've got, let alone papers!
Companion: And did you see the tall tower on our house? We've got a telescope and we look at the skies for hours. And then riding and walking?
Master: If only you saw our wonderful marsh, behind the village cemetery. Not only we walk there in the dark midnights — little green fires, sweetly-sad as we, without direction and without purpose, move about us and wave——
Companion: We’re almost the whole day in the fresh air.
Master: How strong I’ve got! What muscles, why—— (To Companion.) Bring a horseshoe or a poker and a pack of cards. (Exit Companion.) What do I do? There! read his diary.
Friend (reads): “Diary of daily events.”
Master: Find to-day’s date!
Friend: Yes, and then!
Master: Read more or less what I was occupied with to-day. (Pours him out mead.)
Friend (reads): “In the morning I went hunting with tolerable success, the reason of which was doubly sad thoughts about Anna——”
Master: That was his aunt.
Friend: “Still God is good. I wrote to my friend in town to send me another doctor. In the day I personally superintended the arrangement of the bath-house for the winter. Tarass was to dinner.”
Master: A neighbour.
Friend: “We were much diverted with an anecdote made upon an oracle. My aunt felt herself so much improved at evening, that she was even desirous to be present at a comic performance of the house-servants, and they, rejoiced at her graciousness, did not spare their efforts to amuse and divert her at discretion.”
Master: And this morning I, too, went hunting, in the daytime I superintended the dismantling of the bath-house, and this evening we, too, shall have a comic performance. (Calls.) Grusha! Grusha!
Friend: H’m. (Bitterly.) It’s all right for you to live like this — you’ve got so much money.
Master (seriously): Yes, it is. I’m not complaining.
Friend: Pah! Well, I’m damned! Your frankness is very near cynicism. But are you really satisfied with such a life? (Drinks.) Master: Agree that it’s more beautiful than yours.
Friend: But the reason for it——
Master: You madden me. What reason? Can you still keep on hugging that “reason”? What! hasn’t the senselessness of existence stared you in the face yet? You haven’t yet shrunk with horror at its look? Wait, wait! I had too high an opinion of you. The hour will come when it’ll happen. The hour will come when the demon of vengeance will awake in you, the terrible demon of vengeance, and when you will want to seize the globe like a stone from the street of the world and throw it with all your force at the great Policeman. (Enter Maid.)
Friend: Lord, what a passion!
Master: A pipe. (Exit Maid.)
Friend: And you’ve become a phrase-maker, dear old chap. I hope you’re not offended at my frankness, because——
Master: Come, can we be anything else? It’s time at last to recognise that even the cleverest of us, the most talented, the most learned, is no more than a posing phrase-maker. Aren't we all bewitched in a circle of error; aren’t all our reasonings the chatter of children?
Friend: But you’re not going to deny that the love of truth which lies in us——
Master: But the love of beauty and the love of pleasure lie in us too. My dear chap, you busy yourself with science and I with hunting, but which is the more important is not for us to decide. I have lost the measure of importance and, thank God! I can do whatever comes into my mind without pangs of conscience. You understand, we’ve wasted what is most valuable of our heritage from our ancestors: credible knowledge and sound ethics. Ah! these lovely sisters, these attentive slaves we’ve gambled away for that old rake, Scepticism! — But they have left us, with other old stuff, their garments, their grand motley garments, so-called “phrases” and “poses.” Yes, my friend, it’s sad, but it’s so: there are only phrases and poses left to us. But still, it’s good that there’s something left: we can divert ourselves with these beautiful rags and remember those who were clad in them, whom they made so charming. To confound you with the charm of the expression, I say, “Let not these rags lie unused in the wardrobe of our affliction!”
Friend: Bravo, bravo!
Master: There
