9 o’c. at night. Spiritually I feel better. But I have no intellectual, artistic work, and I am melancholy. Just now I felt that particular Christmas softening and gentleness, and poetical impulse. My hands are cold, I want to cry and to love ...
December 26, Moscow.
I am still not writing anything, but I feel my thoughts revive. The devil still does not leave me.
[I] thought to-day about The Diary of a Mad Man.[165] The principal thing is that I have understood my filial relation to God, brotherhood,—and my attitude to the whole world has changed.
1897
There is still nothing good to write about myself. I feel no need of working and the devil does not leave me. Have been ill for about 6 days.
Began to reread Resurrection and reached up to his decision to marry and threw it away with disgust. It is all untrue, invented, weak. It is hard to repair a spoiled thing. In order to repair it, there is necessary: 1) alternately to describe his feeling and life, and hers,[166] and 2) sympathetically and seriously hers, and critically and with a smile, his. I shall hardly finish it. It is all very spoilt.