White Nights

With feeling he looks at the sunset, which slowly fades away in the cold Petersburg sky. When I say he looks, I’m lying: he doesn’t look, but he contemplates it somehow without thinking, as if he were tired or preoccupied at the same time with some other more interesting object, so that he can only cursorily, almost involuntarily, spare time for everything around him.

And you recall that your dreams were sad then as well, and even though it was not better then, nevertheless, you somehow feel that it was easier, that you lived more comfortably, that there wasn’t this black brooding that troubles you now; that you didn’t have these pangs of conscience, these gloomy, dismal pangs that now give you no peace night or day. And you ask yourself: Where are your dreams? And you shake your head and say: How quickly do the years fly by! And again you ask yourself: What have you done with your years? Where have you buried your best days? Did you live or not? Look, you say to yourself, look how cold the world is becoming. More years will pass, followed by gloomy solitude, and then doddering old age will come on a walking-stick, to be followed by anguish and despondency. Your fantastic world will grow pale, your dreams will wither, die and scatter like yellow leaves from the trees