He dreamed he was driving somewhere in the steppes, where he had been stationed long ago. A peasant was driving him in a cart with a pair of horses, through snow and sleet. He was cold, it was early in November, and the snow was falling in big wet flakes, melting as soon as it touched the earth. And the peasant drove him smartly, he had a long blond beard. He was not an old man, somewhere around fifty, and he was wearing a gray smock. Not far off was a village. Dmitri could see the black huts. Half the huts were burned down, there were only charred beams left. And as they drove in, there were peasant women along the road, a lot of women, a whole row, all thin and wan, with their faces a sort of brownish color, especially one at the edge, a tall, bony woman, who looked forty but might have been only twenty. In her arms was a crying baby. And her breasts seemed so dried up that there was not a drop of milk in them. And the child cried and cried, and held out its little bare arms, with its little fists blue from cold.

“Why are they crying? Why are they crying?” Dmitri asked, as they dashed by.

“It’s the babe,” answered the driver. “The babe is crying.”

Dmitri was struck by his saying, in his peasant way, “the babe.” He liked the peasant’s calling it a “babe.” There seemed more pity in it.

“But why is it crying?” Dmitri persisted stupidly. “Why are its little arms bare? Why don’t they wrap it up?”

“The babe’s cold. Its little clothes are frozen and don’t warm it.”

“But why is it? Why?” Dmitri still persisted.

“Why, they’re poor people, burned out. They’ve no bread. They’re begging because they’ve been burned out.”

“No, no.” Dmitri still did not understand. “Tell me why it is those poor mothers stand there? Why are people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don’t they hug each other and kiss? Why don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why don’t they feed the babe?”

And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless, yet he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it just in that way. And he felt that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before, was rising in his heart, and that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do something for them all, so that the baby should cry no more, so that the dark-faced, dried-up mother should not weep, that no one should shed tears again from that moment. He wanted to do all this at once, at once, regardless of obstacles, with the recklessness of the Karamazovs.

~The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky