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By Root 2264 0

but she did them differently. She went to the French theatre, but the play seemed to have some sort of connexion with her life; she read a book, and there were invariably lines in it which struck sparks in her own mind, passages which blazed with her own feelings, words which she had uttered the day before, as though the author had overheard her heart beating. There were the same trees in the woods, but their rustle had a special meaning for her; there was a living concord between her and them. The birds were not just chirping and twittering, but saying something to one another; and everything around her was speaking, everything responded to her mood; if a flower opened, she seemed to hear it breathe. Her dreams, too, had a life of their own: they were filled with visions and images to which she sometimes spoke aloud – they seemed to be telling her something, but so indistinctly that she could not understand; she made an effort to speak to them and ask them some question, but she, too, said something incomprehensible. It was her maid Katya who told her in the morning that she had been talking in her sleep. She remembered Stolz’s words: he often told her that she had not begun to live, and she was sometimes offended that he should regard her as a child when she was twenty. But now she realized that he had been right, that she had only now begun to live.

‘When all the powers of your organism awaken,’ Stolz used to say to her, ‘then life around you will also awaken, and you will see what you do not notice now, you will hear what you do not hear now: your nerves will become attuned to the music of the spheres and you will listen to the grass growing. Wait, don’t be in a hurry. It will come of itself!’ he used to threaten her.

It had come.

‘This is, I suppose, my powers asserting themselves, my organism awakening,’ she repeated his words, listening intently to the unfamiliar tremor within her and watching keenly and timidly each new manifestation of the awakening force.

She did not give way to day-dreaming, she did not succumb to the sudden rustle of the leaves, the nightly visions, to the mysterious whispers, when someone seemed to bend over her and say something indistinct and incomprehensible in her ear.

‘Nerves!’ she would sometimes say with a smile, through tears, scarcely able to overcome her fear and bear the strain of the struggle between the awakening forces within her and her weak nerves. She got out of bed, drank a glass of water, opened the window, fanned her face with her handkerchief, and recovered from the visions that haunted her asleep and awake.

As soon as Oblomov awakened in the morning, the first image that arose before him was the image of Olga with a sprig of lilac in her hand. He thought of her when he went to sleep, and she was beside him when he went for a walk or when he read. He carried on an endless conversation with her in his mind by day and by night. He kept adding to the History of Discoveries and Inventions some fresh discoveries in Olga’s appearance or character, invented occasions for meeting her accidentally or sending her a book or arranging some pleasant surprise for her. After talking to her at one of their meetings, he would continue the conversation at home, so that when Zakhar happened to come in he said to him in the very soft and tender voice in which he had been mentally addressing Olga: ‘You’ve again forgotten to polish my boots, you bald-headed devil! Take care, or you’ll catch it good and proper one day!’

But from the moment she had first sung to him, he was no longer care-free. He no longer lived his old life when it did not make any difference to him whether he was lying on his back or staring at a wall, whether Alexeyev was sitting in his drawing-room or he himself was at Ivan Gerasimovich’s, in those days when he expected nothing and no one either by day or by night. Now day and night, every hour of the morning and the evening had its own shape and form, and was either filled with rainbow radiance or colourless and gloomy, according to whether he spent it