Russian New Year

Me last hours of my life, I wonder, how will I be remembered? I think of what Engels said when Karl Marx died. With his death mankind is shorter by a head. I wonder what will be said of me.

It is through his books that Marx is remembered. While I, I've been a man of action, not of words. So will I be forgotten? Or worse still, will I be remembered only in the writings of bourgeois journalists who already have distorted my motive and minimized my importance in the revolutionary movement.

Especially in regard to the action, I undertook in Saint Bountall's Cathedral on the eve of the New Year. It is only Olga Carrozka, they write about, vastly exaggerating the role she played. Olga Carrozka, why she was a political ignoramus, elixed him of every bourgeois superstition.

She was nothing, a zero, a puppet, controlled by me. Olga believed that she was in love with me. I encouraged her in that illusion. She might prove valuable to me since she worked as a servant in the household of Prince Ogarez.

On Sundays, when she was allowed a few hours for herself, she invariably came to spend the time with me in my room near the university. Boris. Boris, it's nearly dark. Oh, you're leaving? Make sure the door is latched or in the draft of those stairs.

That's all you have to say. No goodbyes, nothing. You're like a stone. I would prefer steel. Sometimes I think I should stop coming here to steel. Perhaps you shouldn't. Boris, if I didn't come, what would you do?

I would read the newspaper from Geneva earlier. Why does it rise because I love someone else? You think I would be jealous? You take me for granted. Dr. Pinedrogulist took his wife for granted. Now, if they quarreled again, has she locked him out of the room again?