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116 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1847
He was devoured by a passion that is the deepest, most insatiable known to man, one which drains his entire life from him, and which leaves a creature such as Ordynov not one single foothold in the sphere of practical, everyday activity. This passion was book-learning. During this time it gnawed away his youth, poisoned his rest at night with a slow, intoxicating venom, deprived him of wholesome food and fresh air…
The old man was tall, still erect and vigorous, but emaciated and deathly pale… His long, straggling beard, which was half grey, reached down to his chest, and from under lowering beetle brows his eyes glittered with a hectic, inflamed light, haughty and staring.
Tears were stinging her shadowed, dark-blue eyes, which were lowered beneath long, glittering eyelashes that stood out against the milky whiteness of her features, and were rolling down her blanched cheeks. At her lips a smile flickered; but her face bore the traces of some indeterminate, childlike fear and of a mysterious horror.
Everything in his existence had been disjointed and displaced; he had a hollow feeling that his whole life had been split in half; he was possessed by one single yearning, one single expectation, and no other thought disturbed his mind.
Suddenly he had the impression that the old man’s face had broken into a laugh all over, and that a diabolical, icy, hope-destroying cackle detonated in the room. A hideous black thought slithered like a serpent into his brain.