What?

SAVVA (lightly)

Inescapable human stupidity.

LIPA

I don’t know.

SAVVA

I do.  Here you see only a small fragment of life, but if you could see and hear all of it—­When I first read their newspapers, I laughed and thought it was a joke.  I thought they were published in some asylum for the insane.  But I found it was no joke.  It was really serious, Lipa, really serious.  And then my head began to ache with an intolerable pain. (He presses his hand to his forehead)

LIPA

Your head began to ache?

SAVVA

Yes.  It’s a peculiar pain.  You don’t know what it is like.  Few people know what it is.  And the pain continued until I resolved—­

LIPA

What?

SAVVA

To annihilate everything.

LIPA

What are you saying?

SAVVA

Yes, yes, everything.  All that’s old.

LIPA (in amazement)

And man?

SAVVA

Man is to remain, of course.  What is in his way is the stupidity that, piling up for thousands of years, has grown into a mountain.  The modern sages want to build on this mountain, but that, of course, will lead to nothing but making the mountain still higher.  It is the mountain itself that must be removed.  It must be levelled to its foundation, down to the bare earth.  Do you understand?

LIPA

No, I don’t understand you.  You talk so strangely.

SAVVA

Annihilate everything!  The old houses, the old cities, the old literature, the old art.  Do you know what art is?

LIPA

Yes, of course I know—­pictures, statues.  I went to the Tretyakov art gallery.

SAVVA

That’s it—­the Tretyakov, and other galleries that are bigger still.  There are some good things in them, but it will be still better to have the old stuff out of the way.  All the old dress must go.  Man must be stripped bare and left naked on a naked earth!  Then he will build up a new life.  The earth must be denuded, Lipa; it must be stripped of its hideous old rags.  It deserves to be arrayed in a king’s mantle; but what have they done with it?  They have dressed it in coarse fustian, in convict clothes.  They’ve built cities, the idiots!