My faith in my
lucky star barely persisted a few years unassailed. My childish idea had
been very much strengthened when, at fifteen years of age, in the first
part of my finishing examination, I received _Distinction_ in all
my subjects, and received a mighty blow when, at seventeen, I only had
_Very Good_ in five subjects, thus barely securing Distinction for
the whole.
I ceased to preoccupy myself about my likeness to Petsjorin after having
recovered from a half, or quarter, falling in love, an unharmonious
affair, barren of results, which I had hashed up for myself through
fanciful and affected reverie, and which made me realise the fundamental
simplicity of my own nature,--and I then shook off the unnatural
physiognomy like a mask. Belief in my own unbounded superiority and the
absolutely unmeasured ambition in which this belief had vented itself,
collapsed suddenly when at the age of eighteen, feeling my way
independently for the first time, and mentally testing people, I learnt
to recognise the real mental superiority great writers possess. It was
chiefly my first reading of the principal works of Kierkegaard that
marked this epoch in my life. I felt, face to face with the first great
mind that, as it were, had personally confronted me, all my real
insignificance, understood all at once that I had as yet neither lived
nor suffered, felt nor thought, and that nothing was more uncertain than
whether I might one day evince talent.
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