“Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about it?” he said to himself, trying to express to himself all the thoughts and feelings he had passed through in that brief night. All the thoughts and feelings he had passed through fell into three separate trains of thought. One was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education. This renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was easy and simple. Another series of thoughts and mental images related to the life he longed to live now. The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it the content, the peace, and the dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably conscious. But a third series of ideas turned upon the question how to effect this transition from the old life to the new. And there nothing took clear shape for him. “Have a wife? Have work and the necessity of work? Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy land? Become a member of a peasant community? Marry a peasant girl? How am I to set about it?” he asked himself again, and could not find an answer. “I haven’t slept all night, though, and I can’t think it out clearly,” he said to himself. “I’ll work it out later. One thing’s certain, this night has decided my fate. All my old dreams of home life were absurd, not the real thing,” he told himself. “It’s all ever so much simpler and better.⁠ ⁠…”