Mark André ’s Reviews > The Insulted and the Injured > Status Update

It’s no joke to become a married man, is it_ _ I’ll no longer be a boy then ... I mean I shall be just like other people... that is, other married men.

Vanya, listen, if I do l-ove Alyosha madly, insanely, yet perhaps I love you even more as m y friend. I feel, I know that I couldn’t go on living without you. I need you. I need your soul, your heart of gold_ _ Oh, Vanya, what a bitter, a terrible time is before us!”

A writer, a poet. It seems strange somehow. When has a poet made his way in the world, risen to high rank? They’re only scribbling fellows after all, an unreliable lot.

How was I to tell them straight out that I did not wiant to enter the service, but wanted to write novels?

Incidentally, I’ve always found mulling over my com- positions and imagining how they are likely to turn out more enjoyable than actually committing them to paper, and not just out of laziness. I wonder why that is!

And in her eyes I read:
“We might have been happy together for ever.

...he seemed in a great panic about something. For after all, what had he to fear? He’d carried a girl off from her father, and when she was with child he had abandoned her. What was there remarkable in that? A charming, pleasant, bit of mischief, and nothing more. That was nothing for a man like the prince to be afraid of! Yet he was afraid. . . . And that made me suspicious.

(I may add here that he never once suggested that I should go with them, which, from what I know of his character, he certainly would have done . . . under other circumstances . . . that is, if he had not been aware of my love for Natasha.)

(I may add here that he never once suggested that I should go with them, which, from what I know of his character, he certainly would have done . . . under other circumstances . . . that is, if he had not been aware of my love for Natasha.)

When I work under such a strain my nerves get strung up to a peculiar tension; my imagination is clearer, I feel more vividly and deeply, and even my style is entirely under my control, so that work done under pressure always turns out better.