"No--there was, "interposed P., an already old, gray-haired man; "desperate people have been plentiful before; only they did not resemble the desperate people of to-day. Some one said of the poet Yasicoff that in him was ecstasy, not directed toward anything--objectless ecstasy. So it was with those people--their despair was objectless. Let me relate to you the history of my cousin's son, Misha Polteff. It may serve as an example of the desperation of those days. He appeared in God's world in the year 1828, on the ancestral estate of his father, in one of the most obscure corners of an obscure province of the steppes. Misha's father, Andrei Nikolaevitch Polteff, I still remember well.
