ABSTRACT
A WOMAN in Vladikavkaz, being told she could not live long, grew so much in love with the idea of death that she ordered her coffin in advance, and lay in it in her bedroom and had a mock funeral, just to see what it felt like. That was an incident rather typical of the life of the intelligentia of the place. There are many nerveless, sad, despairing people there, people with no apparent means of happiness, people of morbid imagination and a will to be unhappy. All around them Nature has outdone herself with seductive charm; the sun flashes on the mountains, the myriad flowers smile in the valleys, the happy peasantry flood the town with jovial, laughing faces, but all in vain. “The fact is,” as I said to Ivan Savilief, “Adam was only the first modern man; the peasants are still living in their Edens. All your modern Adam and Eves have got to get saved somehow.” The Baptist, who, it must be remembered, was still a peasant, and by no means one of the educated classes, was very happy. And his notion was that the sad people needed to believe; they needed faith. They got as near to happiness as it was possible for them. They got as far as feet could carry them, but for the last gulf they needed wings.
