We flew more slowly than usual, and I was able to follow with my eyes the
immense expanse of my native land gradually unfolding before me, like
the unrolling of an endless panorama. Forests, copses, fields, ravines,
rivers--here and there villages and churches--and again fields and forests
and copses and ravines.... Sadness came over me, and a kind of indifferent
dreariness. And I was not sad and dreary simply because it was Russia I was
flying over. No. The earth itself, this flat surface which lay spread out
beneath me; the whole earthly globe, with its populations, multitudinous,
feeble, crushed by want, grief and diseases, bound to a clod of pitiful
dust; this brittle, rough crust, this shell over the fiery sands of our
planet, overspread with the mildew we call the organic, vegetable kingdom;
these human flies, a thousand times paltrier than flies; their dwellings
glued together with filth, the pitiful traces of their tiny, monotonous
bustle, of their comic struggle with the unchanging and inevitable, how
revolting it all suddenly was to me. My heart turned slowly sick, and I
could not bear to gaze longer on these trivial pictures, on this vulgar
show.... Yes, I felt dreary, worse than dreary. Even pity I felt nothing of
for my brother men: all feelings in me were merged in one which I scarcely
dare to name: a feeling of loathing, and stronger than all and more than
all within me was the loathing--for myself.
‘Cease,’ whispered Alice, ‘cease, or I cannot carry you. You have grown
heavy.’
‘Home,’ I answered her in the very tone in which I used to say the word
to my coachman, when I came out at four o’clock at night from some Moscow
friends’, where I had been talking since dinner-time of the future of
Russia and the significance of the commune. ‘Home,’ I repeated, and closed
my eyes.