‘You may trample me in the mud.’ He heard Alexei Alexandrovich’s words and saw him before his eyes, and he saw Anna’s face with its feverish flush and shining eyes, looking tenderly and lovingly not at him but at Alexei Alexandrovich; he saw his own stupid and ridiculous figure, as it seemed to him, when Alexei Alexandrovich drew his hands away from his face. He stretched his legs out again, threw himself on the sofa in the same position, and closed his eyes.
‘Sleep! Sleep!’ he repeated to himself. But with his eyes closed he saw still more clearly the face of Anna as it had been on that evening, so memorable for him, before the race.
‘It is not and will not be, and she wishes to wipe it from her memory. And I cannot live without it. How, how can we be reconciled?’ he said aloud, and began unconsciously to repeat these words. The repetition of the words held back the emergence of new images and memories which he felt thronging in his head. But not for long. Again, one after another, the best moments presented themselves with extreme rapidity, and together with them the recent humiliation. ‘Take your hands away,’ Anna’s voice says. He takes his hands away and senses the ashamed and stupid look on his face.
He went on lying there, trying to fall asleep, though he felt that there was not the slightest hope, and he went on repeating in a whisper the accidental words of some thought, wishing to hold back the emergence of new images. He listened - and heard, repeated in a strange, mad whisper, the words: ‘Unable to value, unable to enjoy; unable to value, unable to enjoy.’
‘What is this? Or am I losing my mind?’ he said to himself. ‘Maybe so. Why else do people lose their minds, why else do they shoot themselves?’ he answered himself and, opening his eyes, was surprised to see an embroidered pillow by his head, made by Varya, his brother’s wife. He touched the pillow’s tassel and tried to recall Varya and when he had seen her last. But to think of something extraneous was painful. ‘No, I must sleep!’ He moved the pillow and pressed his head to it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes closed. He sat up abruptly. ‘That is finished for me,’ he said to himself. ‘I must think what to do. What’s left?’ His thought quickly ran through his life apart from his love for Anna.
‘Ambition? Serpukhovskoy? Society? Court?’ He could not fix on any of them. That had all had meaning once, but now nothing remained of it. He got up from the sofa, took off his frock coat, loosened his belt and, baring his shaggy chest in order to breathe more freely, paced up and down the room. ‘This is how people lose their minds,’ he repeated, ‘and shoot themselves ... so as not to be ashamed,’ he added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it. Then with a fixed gaze and tightly clenched teeth he went to the table, took his revolver, examined it, turned it to a loaded chamber, and lapsed into thought. For a couple of minutes, his head bowed in an expression of mental effort, he stood motionless with the revolver in his hands and considered. ‘Of course,’ he said to himself, as if a logical, continuous and clear train of thought had brought him to an unquestionable conclusion. In fact, this‘of course’ that he found so convincing was only the consequence of a repetition of exactly the same round of memories and notions that he had already gone through a dozen times within the hour. It was the same memory of happiness lost for ever, the same notion of the meaninglessness of everything he saw ahead of him in life, the same consciousness of his humiliation. The sequence of these notions and feelings was also the same.
‘Of course,’ he repeated, when his thought started for the third time on the same enchanted round of memories and thoughts, and, putting the revolver to the left side of his chest and forcefully jerking his whole hand as if clenching it into a fist, he pulled the trigger. He did not hear the sound of the shot, but a strong blow to his chest knocked him off his feet. He tried to catch hold of the edge of the table, dropped the revolver, staggered and sat down on the floor, looking around himself in surprise. He did not recognize his room as he looked from below at the curved legs of the table, the wastepaper basket and the tiger-skin rug. The quick, creaking steps of his servant, walking through the drawing room, brought him to his senses. He made a mental effort and understood that he was on the floor, and, seeing blood on the tiger-skin and on his hand, understood that he had tried to shoot himself.
‘Stupid! I missed,’ he said, groping for the revolver with his hand. The revolver was close by him, but he groped for it further away. Continuing to search, he reached out on the other side and, unable to keep his balance, fell over, bleeding profusely.
