“...No matter what he strived for, no matter what he was looking for, fate allowed him to reach the end of his aspirations, and at the very end it cut off the successes he had achieved and destroyed all his achievements. She disliked Nikiforov from his very birth and prepared misfortune for him already in infancy. It was she who pushed the hand of his nanny so that she would drop the baby, and crooked his spine, making Semyon Gavrilovich physically underdeveloped and hunchbacked for the rest of his life. Fate gave him intelligence and talent - and at every step prevented him from demonstrating his abilities. She surrounded him with difficult living conditions and, weak, forced him to bear backbreaking labor and struggle to earn money from childhood for the sake of a piece of bread. She endowed Nikiforov with a thirst for life, without giving anything to quench this thirst...”