“In that case, allow me to introduce myself,” said my companion, rising from his seat a little:

“Ivan Ilyitch Shamohin, a Moscow landowner of a sort.⁠ ⁠… You I know very well.”

He sat down and went on, looking at me with a genuine and friendly expression:

“A mediocre philosopher, like Max Nordau, would explain these incessant conversations about women as a form of erotic madness, or would put it down to our having been slaveowners and so on; I take quite a different view of it. I repeat, we are dissatisfied because we are idealists. We want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and to everything in the world. When we are young we adore and poeticize those with whom we are in love: love and happiness with us are synonyms. Among us in Russia marriage without love is despised, sensuality is ridiculed and inspires repulsion, and the greatest success is enjoyed by those tales and novels in which women are beautiful, poetical, and exalted; and if the Russian has been for years in ecstasies over Raphael’s Madonna