There is such a thing as crime, there is no such thing as crime; there is no such thing as justice, there are no just men; atheism, Darwinism, the Moscow bells.⁠ ⁠… But alas, he no longer believes in the Moscow bells; Rome, laurels.⁠ ⁠… But he has no belief in laurels even.⁠ ⁠… We have a conventional attack of Byronic spleen, a grimace from Heine, something of Petchorin⁠—and the machine goes on rolling, whistling, at full speed. “But you may praise me, you may praise me, that I like extremely; it’s only in a manner of speaking that I lay down the pen; I shall bore you three hundred times more, you’ll grow weary of reading me.⁠ ⁠…”

Of course it did not end without trouble; but the worst of it was that it was his own doing. People had for some time begun shuffling their feet, blowing their noses, coughing, and doing everything that people do when a lecturer, whoever he may be, keeps an audience for longer than twenty minutes at a literary matinée. But the genius noticed nothing of all this. He went on lisping and mumbling, without giving a thought to the audience, so that everyone began to wonder. Suddenly in a back row a solitary but loud voice was heard: