At once all the horror and all the stupidity of unnatural death were revealed to me ...  Or here is something else about death ...  A certain friend of mine died, a captain in the infantry—­a drunkard, a vagabond, and the finest soul in the world.  For some reason we called him the Electrical Captain.  I was in the vicinity, and it fell to me to dress him for the last parade.  I took his uniform and began to attach the epaulettes to it.  There’s a cord, you know, that’s drawn through the shank of the epaulette buttons, and after that the two ends of this cord are shoved through two little holes under the collar, and on the inside—­the lining—­are tied together.  Well, I go through all this business, and tie the cord with a slipknot, and, you know, the loop won’t come out, nohow—­either it’s too loosely tied, or else one end’s too short.  I am fussing over this nonsense, and suddenly into my head comes the most astonishingly simple thought, that it’s far simpler and quicker to tie it in a knot—­for after all, it’s all the same, no one is going to untie it.  And immediately I felt death with all my being.  Until that time I had seen the captain’s eyes, grown glassy, had felt his cold forehead, and still somehow had not sensed death to the full, but I thought of the knot—­and I was all transpierced, and the simple and sad realization of the irrevocable, inevitable perishing of all our words, deeds, and sensations, of the perishing of all the apparent world, seemed to bow me down to the earth ...  And I could bring forward a hundred such small but staggering trifles ...  Even, say, about what people experienced in the war ...  But I want to lead my thought up to one thing.  We all pass by these characteristic trifles indifferently, like the blind, as though not seeing them scattered about under our feet.  But an artist will come, and he will look over them carefully, and he will pick them up.  And suddenly he will so skillfully turn in the sun a minute bit of life that we shall all cry out:  ’Oh, my God!  But I myself—­myself—­have seen this with my own eyes.  Only it simply did not enter my head to turn my close attention upon it.’  But our Russian artists of the word—­the most conscientious and sincere artists in the whole world—­for some reason have up to this time passed over prostitution and the brothel.  Why?  Really, it is difficult for me to answer that.  Perhaps because of squeamishness, perhaps because of pusillanimity, out of fear of being signalized as a pornographic writer; finally, from the apprehension that our gossiping criticism will identify the artistic work of the writer with his personal life and will start rummaging in his dirty linen.  Or perhaps they can find neither the time, nor the self-denial, nor the self-possession to plunge in head first into this life and to watch it right up close, without prejudice, without sonorous phrases, without a sheepish pity, in all its monstrous simplicity and every-day activity.  Oh, what a tremendous, staggering and truthful book would result!”