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… Do you remember how we used, in talk and by letter, to reason together about love and indulge in all sort of subtleties? But in actual life it turns out that real love is a feeling utterly unlike what we pictured to ourselves. Love, indeed, is not a feeling at all, it’s a malady, a certain condition of soul and body. It does not develop gradually. One cannot doubt about it, one cannot outwit it, though it does not always come in the same way. Usually it takes possession of a person without question, suddenly, against his will–for all the world like cholera or fever…. It clutches him, poor dear, as the hawk pounces on the chicken, and bears him off at its will, however he struggles or resists…. In love, there’s no equality, none of the so-called free union of souls, and such idealisms, concocted at their leisure by German professors…. No, in love, one person is slave, and the other master; and well may the poets talk of the fetters put on by love. Yes, love is a fetter, and the heaviest to bear. At least I have come to this conviction, and have come to it by the path of experience; I have bought this conviction at the cost of my life, since I am dying in my slavery.

What a life mine has been, if you think of it! In my first youth nothing would satisfy me but to take heaven by storm for myself…. Then I fell to dreaming of the good of all humanity, of the good of my country. Then that passed too. I was thinking of nothing but making a home, family life for myself … and so tripped over an ant-heap–and plop, down into the grave…. Ah, we’re great hands, we Russians, at making such a finish!

But it’s time to turn away from all that, it’s long been time! May this burden be loosened from off my soul together with life! I want, for the last time, if only for an instant, to enjoy the sweet and gentle feeling which is shed like a soft light within me, directly I think of you. Your image is now doubly precious to me…. With it, rises up before me the image of my country, and I send to it and to you a farewell greeting. Live, live long and happily, and remember one thing: whether you remain in the wilds of the steppes–where you have sometimes been so sorrowful, but where I should so like to spend my last days–or whether you enter upon a different career, remember life deceives all but him who does not reflect upon her, and, demanding nothing of her, accepts serenely her few gifts and serenely makes the most of them. Go forward while you can. But if your strength fails you, sit by the wayside and watch those that pass by without anger or envy. They, too, have not far to go. In old days, I did not tell you this, but death will teach any one. Though who says what is life, what is truth? Do you remember who it was made no reply to that question? … Farewell, Marya Alexandrovna, farewell for the last time, and do not remember evil against poor ALEXEY.