"Coming up to the Neva, I stopped for a minute and cast a searching glance down the river, into the murky distance thick with frost, which suddenly had flushed with the last purple of sunset, burning itself out on the misty horizon. Night settled down over the city, and with the sun's last gleam, all the boundless expanse of the Neva's glade, which had swollen out of the frozen snow, crumbled apart in infinite myriads of sparks emitting from the needle-pointed rime. It turned to frost at 20 degrees... The frozen vapor fell in clouds from the tired horses, from the running people. The close air vibrated at the tiniest sound, and columns of smoke from all the roofs on both banks arose like giants, and were carried upward through the cold heaven, intertwining and unwinding on their way so that, it seemed, new buildings were rising over the old ones, and a new city was being assembled in the air... It seemed, in the end, that all this world, with all its inhabitants, both the strong and the weak, with all their inhabitations, whether beggars' shelters or gilded palaces, at this hour of twilight resembled a fantastic, enchanted vision, a dream which in its turn would instantly vanish and waste away as vapor in the dark blue heaven. Suddenly a certain strange thought began to stir inside me. I started and my heart was as if flooded in that instant by a hot jet of blood which had suddenly boiled up from the influx of a mighty sensation which up until now had been unknown to me.
In that moment, as it were, I understood something which up to that time had only stirred in me, but had not as of yet been fully comprehended. I saw clearly, as it were, into something new, a completely new world, unfamiliar to me and known only through some obscure hearsay, through a certain mysterious sign. I think that in those precise minutes, my real existence began... Tell me, gentlemen, have I not been a fantast, have I not been a mystic since my very childhood? Nothing, nothing whatever, one sensation..."
-Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Petersburg Dreams in Verse and Prose
