Harassed, ill in body and in mind, he started forth without
any object in view, without any thought-out plan, merely in order
to hide himself somewhere, wherever it might be, and get some rest
from the moral tortures which had become insupportable to him.
"To fly, to fly!" he said in his deathbed delirium as he lay
at Astapova.
"Has papa considered that mama may not survive the separation
from him?" I asked my sister Sasha on October 29, when she was on
the point of going to join him at Shamerdino.
"Yes, he has considered all that, and still made up his mind
to go, because he thinks that nothing could be worse than the state
that things have come to here," she answered.
I confess that my explanation of my father's flight by no
means exhausts the question. Life is complex and every explanation
of a man's conduct is bound to suffer from one-sidedness. Besides,
there are circumstances of which I do not care to speak at the
present moment, in order not to cause unnecessary pain to people
still living. It may be that if those who were about my father
during the last years of his life had known what they were doing,
things would have turned out differently.
The years will pass. The accumulated incrustations which hide
the truth will pass away. Much will be wiped out and forgotten.
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