It would be murder.

To turn her into a fine lady, the wife of Dmitri Andreich Olenin, like a Cossack woman here who is married to one of our officers, would be still worse.

Now could I turn Cossack like Lukashka, and steal horses, get drunk on chikhir, sing rollicking songs, kill people, and when drunk climb in at her window for the night without a thought of who and what I am, it would be different: then we might understand one another and I might be happy.
'I tried to throw myself into that kind of life but was still more conscious of my own weakness and artificiality.

I cannot forget myself and my complex, distorted past, and my future appears to me still more hopeless.

Every day I have before me the distant snowy mountains and this majestic, happy woman.