seriously in me and was bound to reach its resolution. But I lacked resolve for that resolution. Three weeks later it was all over, and the resolve came, but owing to a very strange circumstance.

Here in my explanation I am noting down all these numbers and dates. For me, of course, it will make no difference, but now (and maybe only at this moment) I want those who will judge my act to be able to see clearly from what logical chain of conclusions my "ultimate conviction" came. I just wrote above that the final resolution, which I lacked for the accomplishing of my "ultimate conviction," came about in me, it seems, not at all as a logical conclusion, but from some strange jolt, a certain strange circumstance, perhaps quite unconnected with the course of events. About ten days ago Rogozhin came to see me on business of his own, which I need not discuss here. I had never seen Rogozhin before, but I had heard a lot about him. I gave him all the information he needed, and he quickly left, and as he had come only for information, the business between us should have ended there. But he interested me greatly, and I spent that whole day under the influence of strange thoughts, so that I decided to call on him myself the next day, to return the visit. Rogozhin was obviously not glad to see me, and even hinted "delicately" that there was no point in our continuing the acquaintance; but all the same I spent a very curious hour, as he probably did, too. There was this contrast between us, which could not fail to tell in both of us, especially me: I was a man whose days were already numbered, while he was living the fullest immediate life, in the present moment, with no care for "ultimate" conclusions, numbers, or anything at all that was not concerned with what . . . with what . . . well, say, with what he's gone crazy over; may Mr. Rogozhin forgive me this expression of, shall we say, a bad writer, who is unable to express his thought. Despite all his ungraciousness, it seemed to me that he was a man of intelligence and could understand a great deal, though he had little interest in extraneous things. I gave him no hint of my "ultimate conviction," but for some reason it seemed to me that he guessed it as he listened to me. He said nothing, he is terribly taciturn. I hinted to him, as I was leaving, that in spite of all the differences between us and all the contrasts—les extrémités se touchent*¹⁷ (I explained it to him in Russian), so that he himself might not be so far from my "ultimate conviction" as it seemed.

* Extremes meet.

To this he responded with a very sullen and sour grimace, stood up, fetched my cap for me himself, pretending that I was leaving on my own, and quite simply led me out of his gloomy house on the pretext of politely seeing me off. His house struck me; it resembles a graveyard, but he seems to like it, which, however, is understandable: such a full, immediate life as he lives is too full in itself to need any setting.

This visit to Rogozhin was very exhausting for me. Besides, I had been feeling unwell since morning; by evening I was very weak and lay in bed, and at times felt very feverish and even momentarily delirious. Kolya stayed with me till eleven o'clock. However, I remember everything that he said and that we talked about. But when my eyes closed at moments, I kept picturing Ivan Fomich, who had supposedly received millions in cash. He did not know where to put it, racked his brains over it, trembled from fear that it might be stolen from him, and finally seemed to decide to bury it in the ground. I finally advised him, instead of burying such a heap of gold in the ground for nothing, to cast it into a little gold coffin for the "frozen" child, and to dig the child up for that purpose. Surikov took this mockery of mine with tears of gratitude and at once set about realizing the plan. It seems I spat and left him there. Kolya assured me, when I had completely come to my senses, that I had not been asleep at all, but had been talking with him the whole time about Surikov. At moments I was in great anguish and confusion, so that Kolya left in alarm. When I got up to lock the door after him, I suddenly remembered the picture I had seen that day at Rogozhin's, in one of the gloomiest rooms of his house, above the door. He himself had shown it to me in passing; I think I stood before it for about five minutes. There was nothing good about it in the artistic respect; but it produced a strange uneasiness in me.

This picture portrays Christ just taken down from the cross. It seems to me that painters are usually in the habit of portraying Christ, both on the cross and taken down from the cross, as still having a shade of extraordinary beauty in his face; they seek to preserve this beauty for him even in his most horrible suffering. But in Rogozhin's picture there is not a word about beauty; this is in the fullest sense the corpse of a man who had endured infinite suffering before the cross, wounds, torture, beating by the guards, beating by the people as he carried the cross and fell down under it, and had finally suffered on the cross for six hours (at least

according to my calculation). True, it is the face of a man who has only just been taken down from the cross, that is, retaining in itself a great deal of life, of warmth; nothing has had time to become rigid yet, so that the dead man's face even shows suffering as if he were feeling it now (the artist has caught that very well); but the face has not been spared in the least; it is nature alone, and truly as the dead body of any man must be after such torments. I know that in the first centuries the Christian Church already established that Christ suffered not in appearance but in reality, and that on the cross his body, therefore, was fully and completely subject to the laws of nature. In the picture this face is horribly hurt by blows, swollen, with horrible, swollen, and bloody bruises, the eyelids are open, the eyes crossed; the large, open whites have a sort of deathly, glassy shine. But, strangely, when you look at the corpse of this tortured man, a particular and curious question arises: if all his disciples, his chief future apostles, if the women who followed him and stood by the cross, if all those who believed in him and worshipped him had seen a corpse like that (and it was bound to be exactly like that), how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect? Here the notion involuntarily occurs to you that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature are so powerful, how can they be overcome? How overcome them, if they were not even defeated now, by the one who defeated nature while he lived, whom nature obeyed, who exclaimed: "Talitha cumi" and the girl arose, "Lazarus, come forth" and the dead man came out?¹⁸ Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, strange though it is—in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems precisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily. The people who surrounded the dead man, none of whom is in the painting, must have felt horrible anguish and confusion on that evening, which at once smashed all their hopes and almost their beliefs. They must have gone off in terrible fear, though each carried within himself a tremendous thought that could never be torn out of him.