Six hours' delay. I turn and study the waiting room, plunged in darkness. The truth is, they could all easily spend several more nights here. They could get used to living here! Just like this, on a spread-out newspaper, backed up against the radiator, with nothing but a can of food for nourishment. The notion suddenly seems to me perfectly plausible – an all-too-plausible nightmare. For in these small towns a thousand leagues from civilization, this is what life consists of: waiting, resignation, hot stickiness in the depths of your shoes. And this station besieged by the snowstorm is nothing other than a microcosm of the whole country's history. Of its innermost character. The vast spaces that render any attempt at action absurd. The superabundance of space that swallows up time, that equalizes all delays, all lapses of time, all plans. "Tomorrow" means "someday, perhaps," the day when the space, the snows, and destiny allow it. Fatalism…

Mainly from vexation, I take a turn along the well-trodden paths of the national character, those accursed questions of "Russianness" that so many brilliant brains have grappled with. A land outside history.

The crushing inheritance of Byzantium. Two centuries of the Tartar yoke. Five centuries of serfdom. Revolutions. Stalin. "East is East"…

After a few such laps around the circuit, the mind comes back to the dull geniality of the present day and lapses into helpless silence. These fine phrases explain everything and nothing. When confronted by the evidence of this night, this sleeping mass, with its smell of wet overcoats, weary bodies, alcohol fumes, and warm canned food, they fade away. For how can one sit in judgment on this old man as he lies there on his open newspaper, a human being touching in his resignation, and quite insufferable for the same reason, a man who has certainly been through the empire's two great wars, survived the purges, the famines, but who nevertheless thinks he deserves nothing better than this resting place on a floor covered with spittle and cigarette butts?