How sad and pitiful human beings are! How difficult their lot in this world, how trying for their enigmatical souls! What does the human soul grope for? To what end is it striving through blood and tears? + 

Each day I hear tales about the sad procession of refugees from Poland and Volhinia along every road. We have grown so used to the word “refugee,” meeting it in print and counting it in figures, that we do not realise its meaning. What woeful pictures they must make along the roads, even now at this moment, with their rumbling carts, their ailing children, crying and coughing, their hungry bellowing cattle! What large numbers of them there are! Whole nations moving from place to place, and, like Lot’s wife, looking back at the smoke and the flames of the burning towns and villages behind them! There are not enough carts or horses, and one hears that bullocks and big dogs are harnessed, and sometimes men, too, and they drag their own loads as man must have dragged his belongings in ancient days when he was first pursued.⁠ ⁠… + 

How difficult it is to imagine the sights that are to be seen along our roads! The refugees stream down the usually deserted, muddy country roads, making them crowded as the Nevsky on a holiday. How long will this unknown force pursue us? + 

Another sad piece of news came today. The Bulgarians have attacked the Serbians in some place called Kniajevetz. Even this we were not spared. Brothers are to kill brothers. The soul shrinks at the thought that this race is to perish, that this sparsely-grown meadow is not to be spared the mower’s scythe. With what feelings of anguish must they be waiting and listening for the advance! “They are coming!” It would not take much to wipe out the Serbs. Didn’t the Turks massacre eight hundred thousand Armenians, as the papers tell us? But why speak of it? I weep and weep; I pity them all; each moment the heart is torn by some fresh disaster. I don’t know whether to pray for the chastisement of the Bulgarian traitors or to bow down to the incomprehensible mysteries of the human soul. + 

An article I happened to come across about the poor Armenians, brought me nearer to cursing than to pity and tears. It took me the whole of a sleepless night to get over it. This is what was seen by an eyewitness: I set it down word for word. “The most awful sights were seen by our unique eyewitness in Bitlis. He had scarcely reached Bitlis when in a wood he came upon a group of newly massacred men, and near them, completely naked, and hanging feet upwards, were three women. Close to one of the women, with arms outstretched to its mother, was a year-old child. The mother was still alive, her face bloodshot; she, too, stretched out her arms to the child, but they could not reach each other.” + 

How could I sleep with that awful image before my eyes? It was as much as I could do to breathe. The blood rushed to my head as though I had been hanging by my feet, and at moments I nearly choked. I did not shed tears, curiously; my tears were dry for that night. I was filled with a raging fury; I wanted to curse those murderers. I say nothing of the newly massacred men⁠—have we not accustomed ourselves to regard men as sheep, and to be touched only by a conventional emotion in like circumstances? and have we not enough of these “newly slaughtered” in our own slaughterhouse? but the woman and the child! The woman and the child.⁠ ⁠… + 

She was still living; she might have been hanging like that, head downwards, for half an hour, for an hour, perhaps. What horrible red circles must have danced before her eyes when the blood rushed to her brain? How did she breathe? How did her heart beat? And through the turbid redness, through the dark obscurity of death, she could distinguish the image of her child; she could see only her crawling infant with what remained of her sight, and with all the human force she possessed, she stretched out her purple arms to it, and her purple swollen face. To any other being that horrible purple face would have been terrifying, but the innocent babe strove to get to her, still knowing her to be his mother. “But they could not reach each other.” + 

In the wildest nightmare the whole of that night I tried to unite those outstretched hands. Each moment it seemed that success was mine, that the hands would touch, and that some eternally glorious life would come about with that contact, but some unknown force seemed to drag them asunder, and me with them. I shook myself, to come to my senses (I regretted that I had given up smoking; a smoke would have been very soothing just then) but again the nightmare returned, and it seemed to have neither beginning nor end. Once more I was trying to unite the hands; they seemed so close; but again that unknown, invisible force dragged them apart. The blood that rushed to my head and the despair nearly choked me. The nightmare became truly awful in the end. The hands no longer strove towards each other, but were stretched out to me, to my throat, and they seemed to grip it like a vice, and there were not four hands only, but numbers and numbers of them.⁠ ⁠… + 

Fimotchka rushed in when she heard my groans, to find out what was the matter. She gave me some ether and valerian drops, and had a soothing effect on me by the sight of a living person. When she was gone the nightmare returned, but not in its acutest form. The hands were no longer at my throat, but striving vainly to touch each other as at first, and I was holding forth eloquently in our office on the subject, and waving my long arms about. It was not until morning that I fell into a dreamless sleep. Today I was filled with many strange thoughts and emotions. I stared at every pair of hands I saw, whether busy or idle, and longed for their union. I thought of Sashenka’s mother and of mothers in general. I wonder why a mother doesn’t see that in mourning for her own son she is aiming at some other woman’s son, and that all are mourning alike? Perhaps they do see it? the thing is so simple. Another force is at work. Who is it strives for union, and who prevents it? “But they could not reach each other,” the eyewitness said. + 

My anger has left me, my sadness returned, and once more the tears flow. Whom can I curse, whom can I judge, when we are all alike unfortunate? Suffering is universal; hands are outstretched to each other, and when they touch. Mother Earth and her Son, the great solution will come. But I will not live to see it. And what have I done to deserve it? As a “cell” I have lived, as a “cell” I must die. The only thing I can ask of fate is that my suffering and my death should not have been wasted. I accept both submissively. But I cannot quite resign myself to this helplessness. My heart is aglow, and I stretch out my hand and cry, “Come, let us join hands! I love you, I love you.⁠ ⁠…” + 

And my tears flow fast. + 