There is no table of contents in this book.

“The world is a single text, endlessly repeating and commenting upon itself.”

“The past is not what happened, but what you remember.”

“How much of a man’s life is spent just getting from one place to another.”

“The greatest art is the art of being silent, but no one wants to learn it.”

“The real journey is always internal, even if the wheels are turning outside.”

Dedicated to Klara Mikhailovna Rosenthal

“And who knows… perhaps the sole goal on earth toward which mankind strives consists only in the continuous process of achieving, in other words—in life itself, and not properly in the goal…”

F. Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground

“And how importunate, how insolent your outbursts are, and yet at the same time, how afraid you are!”

F. Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground

The train was a day train, but it was winter, the very heart of it—late December, and furthermore, the train was heading towards Leningrad—northward, so it quickly grew dark outside the windows. Only the Moscow suburban stations—dacha platforms covered with snow, with a chain of flashing lamps merging into a single fiery ribbon—flared up with bright lights as they rushed backward, as if tossed by some invisible hand. The stations flew past with a dull rumble, as if the train were crossing a bridge. The rumble was muffled by the double window frames, which almost hermetically sealed the carriage, with murky, half-frozen panes, but the station lights still broke through the glass and traced a line of fire. Further on, one could sense the boundless snowy expanses, and the carriage swayed heavily from side to side—a broadside roll—especially near the vestibule.

When it became completely dark outside the windows and only the vague whiteness of the snow remained, and the Moscow dachas ended, and the reflection of the carriage with all its lamps and sitting passengers began to run alongside me in the window, I took a book from the net above me, a book I had started in Moscow and specially brought for the journey to Leningrad. I opened it at the place marked by a bookmark with Chinese hieroglyphs and some elegant oriental drawing. I had taken this book from my aunt, the owner of a large library, and secretly I did not intend to return it—I had it rebound because it was very old, almost falling apart. The binder had trimmed the pages so they were all smooth, one even with the next, and enclosed it in a solid cover, onto which he pasted the first, title page of the book. This was the diary of Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevskaya, published by some liberal publishing house still conceivable at the time—perhaps Vekhi, or Novaya Zhizn, or something else of that nature—with dates given in both new and old style, with words and entire phrases in German or French without translation, and the obligatory prefix “M-me” (Madame), used with scholastic diligence. It was the decipherment of her shorthand notes, which she kept during the first summer after her marriage, abroad.