Dacha Term Analysis

“It’s clear that it made no difference to this ‘poor knight’ who his lady was or what she might do. It was enough for him that he had chosen her and believed in her ‘pure beauty,’ and only then did he bow down to her forever; and the merit of it is that she might have turned out later to be a thief, but still he had to believe in her and wield the sword for her pure beauty. It seems the poet wanted to combine in one extraordinary image the whole immense conception of the medieval chivalrous platonic love of some pure and lofty knight; naturally, it’s all an ideal.”

“Nihilists are still sometimes knowledgeable people, even learned ones, but these have gone further, ma’am, because first of all they’re practical. This is essentially a sort of consequence of nihilism, though not in a direct way, but by hearsay and indirectly, and they don’t announce themselves in some sort of little newspaper article, but directly in practice, ma’am; it’s no longer a matter, for instance, of the meaninglessness of some Pushkin or other, or, for instance, the necessity of dividing Russia up into parts; no, ma’am, it’s now considered a man’s right, if he wants something very much, not to stop at any obstacle, even if he has to do in eight persons to that end.”