My Universities

My Universities

Listening to him, I kept thinking, how to warn the strangers on the Ribnoriadskaia that Nikiforich was watching them? — There, in some rooms, lived a Sergei Somoff, a man just returned from exile in Jalontorovsk, of whom I had heard very interesting things. "Clever people must live in heaps — like, for instance, bees in a hive or wasps in their nests. The Tsar's kingdom .. ."

SF okie? is already nine o'clock,"' ny the woman.

"The devil!"

Nikiforich got up, buttoning his ene

"Well, Pll go in a cab to save time. Good-bye, old chap! Come on whenever you like, do!"

Leaving the sentry-box, I swore I would never come again to "have tea" with Nikiforich — he was repulsive to me, although his way of thinking interested me very much. His words on the unwholesomeness of compassion agitated me strongly and ground themselves into my mind very deeply. I felt there was some truth in them, and it was somehow offensive that it should have come from a policeman.

Discussions on that topic were not rare and one of them drove me especially into a state of furious agitation. A "Tolstoyan" had appeared in town. It was the first one I had met: a tall, sinewy man, swarthy of face, with the black beard of a goat and

the thick lips of a negro. He walked with a stoop and watched the ground, but at times with a brusque movement he would throw back his bald head and scold with the passionate gleam of his dark moistened eyes; a kind of hatred burnt in his sharp glance. We were sitting and talking together in the flat of a professor, where there were a great number of young people and among them a slim, refined little priest, a doctor of theosophy, in a black silk cassock. It showed off to a great advantage his pale handsome face, lit by the dry little smile of a pair of cold grey eyes.

The Tolstoyan spoke a long time of the eternal inflexibility of the great truths of the Bible; his voice was a trifle smothered, his sentences short, but the words rang out harshly. One felt in them the intensity of true faith; he accentuated them by a monotonous, cutting gesture of his hairy left hand; the right one was stuck into his trouser pockets.

"An actor," one heard whispered in the corner.

"Yes, he is very theatrical, there is no doubt of thathes we

I had just read a book — I think it was by Frepaire — of the struggle led by Catholics against science, and it seemed to me that in front of me was one of those who believed fiercely in the salvation of the world through the intensity of love, who are ready out of clemency to people to cut them to pieces and burn them on fires.

He was dressed in a white shirt with broad sleeves and a little old grey overcoat — this, too, distinguished him from the others. At the end of his sermon he cried:

"Now tell me — are you with Christ or with Darwin?"

He threw this question like a stone into the corner were the young sat and from where glances of fear and admiration were directed at him by the young men and girls. His speech had evidently amazed everyone — for they sat silent, with heads bent down. He looked round with a burning glance and added, sternly:

"Only Pharisees can attempt to combine these two irreconciliable theses and by doing this they lie shamelessly to themselves and corrupt others with their lies..."' Then the priest got up, carefully threw back the sleeves of his cassock and spoke again, fluently, with a poisonous kindness and a condescending smile.

"You evidently sustain the old vulgar opinion of Pharisees, which is, however, not only coarse but also totally unfair..."

And, to my great amazement, he started proving that Pharisees were honest and true guardians of the sacred testament of the Hebrews and that the people always joined with them against their enemies.

"Take, for instance, Flavius Josephus. .. ."

Jumping up and cutting Josephus to pieces with a crushing gesture, the Tolstoyan shouted:

"Now, too, the people march with their enemies against their friends, but the people march against their will, they are driven and violated! What do I care about your Josephus!"

The little priest and the others had torn the fun-

__ damental topic of the discussion into small bits and

dissipated it. 'Truth is Jove," exclaimed the Tol-

stoyan and his eyes sparkled with hatred and disdain.

I felt myself intoxicated with these words, hardly able to grasp the thoughts hidden in them, the earth under my feet was unsteady, shaken by a whirlwind of words, and I often felt with despair that there did not exist in the world a man more dull and stupid than I was. And the Tolstoyan, wiping the sweat off his purple face, cried fiercely, "Throw away the Bible, forget it, in order not to lie! Crucify Christ for a second time, that will be more honest!"

Before me stood the question: if life is an uninterrupted struggle for happiness on earth — then clemency and love must only interfere with the success of the struggle?

I got to know the name of the Tolstoyan. It was Klopsky. I also found out where he lived and went to him on the next evening. He lived in the house of two young girls, owners of a country place in the neighbourhood. He was sitting with them in the garden at a table in the shade of a huge lime-tree. Dressed in white trousers and an equally white shirt, showing a dark hairy chest — long, dry and awkward, he quite corresponded to my idea of the homeless Apostle, the preacher of the truth.

He was eating raspberries and milk with a silver spoon, and swallowed them with relish, smacking his fat lips and blowing the white drops after every spoon from his scarce whiskers which were like those of a cat. One young girl stood at the table handing the dish to him; the other leant against the trunk of the lime-tree, her hands folded on her breast, looking dreamily into the dusty, hot sky.

They were both dressed in light lilac dresses and were wonderfully alike.

He spoke to me kindly and readily of the creative force of love, saying that one ought to develop in one's soul that feeling, as the only one capable of "connecting man with the spirit of the world" — with the love which is dispersed everywhere in life.

"It is only through this that you can tie a man up. Without love — you cannot understand life. Those who say that the law of life is struggle are blind souls doomed to perdition. Fire is not to be conquered by fire just as evil is not to be conquered by the strength of evil."

But when the young girls, arm in arm, disappeared inside the garden, towards the house, that man, looking at them with half-closed eyes, asked:

"And you — who are you?"

And on hearing my story he began to tell me, striking his fingers on the table, that a man was a man everywhere and that one ought not to strive to change one's place in life, but to develop the spirit in a feeling of love for people.

"The lower a man stands the nearer he is to the real truth of life, to its sacred wisdom. .. ."

I felt doubtful as to his knowledge of that 'sacred wisdom," but kept silent, noticing that he was bored by my presence — he looked at me with a repulsive glance, yawned, threw his arms about the back of his head, stretched out his feet, and, shutting his eyes with an air of exhaustion, muttered as if half-asleep:

"An entire submission to love is the law of

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He started, threw up his hands.as if grasping at something in the air and stared at me in terror:

'What? I'm tired, forgive me." Then he again closed his eyes and drew his teeth together as if in pain, disclosing them; his lower lip went down and the upper one lifted up and the sparse bluish whiskers stiffened.

I went away with an hostile feeling towards him and a vague doubt concerning his sincerity.

A few days after I brought some rolls to a doctor friend of mine, a bachelor and a drunkard, and there again I met Klopsky. He had probably spent a sleepless night, for his face was ashen grey and his eyes red and swollen; it seemed to me that he was drunk. The fat little doctor, drunk to tears, was sitting in his underclothes on the floor among a chaos of dis-

placed furniture, beer bottles, overcoats; he had a'

guitar in his hands and, rocking to and fro, growled:

"The gates of mercy be opened to us..."

Klopsky sharply and angrily shouted:

"There is no mercy! We will petrify through love or be crushed in the struggle for love; it is all one; we are doomed to perdition..."

Grabbing me by the shoulder, he dragged me into the room and said to the little doctor: '"There now, ask him, what is it he wants? Ask him, does he want love for people?"

The doctor looked at me with watery eyes and laughed.

"That's the baker. I owe him money." He strived to keep his balance, stuck his hand into his pocket, took out a key and handed it to me.

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"There, take everything you want."

But the Tolstoyan, snatching the key from me, motioned me to the door.

"You can go. You'll get what you need later on."

And flung the rolls received from me onto the sofa in the corner.

He did not recognise me and I was very glad of it. When I left them I carried away in my memory his words of the perdition through love and a repulsion for him in my heart. Very soon I heard that he had declared his love to one of the young girls at whose house he lived, and on the same day to the other one. The sisters imparted to each other their joy and it soon turned into a hatred towards the lover; they ordered the servant to tell the preacher to leave their house immediately. He disappeared from the town.

The question as to the meaning of love and mercy in the lives of men, a terrible and complicated question, rose early in life and in front of me — at first in the shape of a vague but sharp sensation of disharmony in my soul, then in the definite shape of clear and distinct words:

"What is the part played by love?"

All that I had read was imbued with ideas of Christianity, humanism, clamours of compassion for people, for the best people I knew at that time spoke of this eloquently and passionately.

All that I could observe directly was entirely strange to all compassion for people. Life was stretched out in front of me like an uninterrupted chain of cruelty and hatred, like an endless filthy

struggle for the possession of trifles. I personally needed only books — the rest had no importance in my eyes. |

It was enough to go out in the street and sit for an hour at the gate to understand that all these cabmen, porters, workmen, officials and merchants lead another life than I and the people I cared for, that they sought other aims and went different ways — those, however, whom I respected and believed in were strangely isolated and superfluous among the majority who were building up life in the dirty little cunning work of bustling ants. That life seemed to me ridiculous all through in its stupidity and deadly dulness. And often I noticed that people were merciful and loving only in words, submitting in their actions to the common order of life.

I was taking all this very hard. One day the veterinary surgeon Lavroff, all yellow and swollen from hydropsy, told me, breathing heavily:

"One must endeavour to bring cruelty to such a point of development that people should tire of it, that it should become repulsive to everyone, like this cursed autumn, for instance." The autumn was an early one, it was rainy and cold, and rich with epidemics and suicides. Lavroff also poisoned himself with "kali zianicum," not wanting to wait to be smothered by hydropsy.

"He gave medical treatment to animals — and did like one!" was the epitaph pronounced by his landlord, the tailor Mednikoff, a thin little pious man who knew by heart all the acathistus to the Virgin Mary. He used to smack his children — a girl of seven and a schoolboy of eleven — with a three-edged

strap and beat his wife on the legs with a bamboo cane and then complain:

"The judge sentenced me, saying that I had intercepted this system from a Chinese, when I never in my life saw a Chinese except in pictures and posters."

One of his apprentices, a gloomy crooked-legged man, whose nickname was "the husband of Dunka," used to say of his master:

"Tm afraid of those meek men who are pious. A raging man one notices directly, and one has time to hide from him, whereas the meek one crawls onto you unawares like the crafty serpent in the grass, and all of a sudden stings you in the most disclosed part of your soul...Yes, I'm afraid of the meek..."

In the words of the "husband of Dunka," a meek and cunning little spy loved by Mednikoff, there was some truth.

It seemed to me sometimes that the meek, mollifying ones lighten the stony heart of life, soften and fertilise it, but oftener, observing the number of the meek, their skilful adaptability to everything mean, the vague changefulness and flexibility of their souls, their appalling complaints, I felt myself like a horse tied up amidst a cloud of gad-flies. I thought of all this as I walked away from the policeman.

The wind sighed and the lights of the lanterns trembled, but it looked as though it were the dark grey sky that trembled, sowing an October rain as thin as dust onto the earth. A wet prostitute was dragging a drunken man along the street, holding him by the hand and pushing him on; he was mutter-

ing something and crying. The woman said in a low, tired voice: 'Such is your fate... ."

"Yes," I thought, "I, too, am dragged along and pushed into unpleasant corners where I am exhibited all the filth and the sadness and confronted with strangely diverse people. I am tired of it all."

Perhaps I thought of this in different words, but I know that this idea flashed in my mind exactly on that mournful night and I felt there for the first time the weariness of my soul and the caustic mouldiness of my heart. And from that hour I began to suffer badly, looking at myself from aside with a cold, strange, hostile glance.

I noticed that nearly every man clumsily and awkwardly superposes on himself the contradictions not merely of words and of actions, but also of feelings and this capricious game depressed me. I could feel that the same kind of thing was happening to me — and that made it still worse. I was thrown about in different directions, attracted by women and books and workmen and gay students, but I did not get anywhere and lived "nor here — nor there," rolling about head over heels, while a strong, unseen hand lashed me with a hot, unseen whip.

Hearing that Jakov Shaposhnikoff had been taken to a hospital, I decided to go and visit him there, but as I entered the house a crooked-mouthed fat woman in spectacles and a white shawl out of which hung red, unboiled ears, said to me drily:

"He's dead."

_And seeing that I remained staring at her instead of going away, she got angry and began screaming at me:

"Well, what more do you want?"

I got angry, too, and said to her: ''You are a dunce."

"Nikolai — come and drive this man away!"

Nikolai was wiping some brass rods with a rag; he smacked his lips and lashed me with one of the rods on the back. Then I took him by the scruff of the neck, carried him out on the street and deposited him into a pool of water in front of the hospital. He did not seem at all surprised, treated the whole matter with great calmness. After sitting a few moments there in silence, staring at me with wide-open eyes, he got up and said:

"You dog!"

I went to the garden of Dirgavin and sat there on a bench under the statue of the poet, experiencing a strong desire to commit something evil and hideous, something that would provoke a whole crowd of people to throw themselves at me and thus enable me to beat them. But in spite of the day being a holiday, the garden was desolate and there was not a soul about. The wind alone was fluttering, driving along the dry leaves and rustling with the unglued poster on the lantern. A transparently blue cold twilight descended on the garden. The huge bronze idol rose above me. I watched him and thought: there lived on earth a lonely man Jakov, who was exterminating - God with all the strength of his soul and now he is dead and his death is an ordinary, common death. There was in this something very offensive and very hard. And Nikolai was an idiot — he ought to have fought with me or called the police and sent me off Oe

I went to see Rubzoff. He was sitting in his dis-

mal lodging at his table in front of a small lamp, mending his waistcoat. "Jakov is dead," I told him.

The old man lifted his hand with a needle in it, in the evident desire of crossing himself, but then only made a gesture of despair and, catching at something with the thread, swore softly but expressively and then grumbied:

'Well — we shall die, all of us — such is our stupid custom, yes, old chap! He is dead and another man, a brazier I knew, has also been done for, discounted! Last Sunday, it was, with policemen. I knew him through Guri. A clever fellow! He used to go about a lot with the students. Have you heard, they say the students are striking — is that true? Come here and sew up my waistcoat for me; I don't see a thing Jif ba?

He handed me his ragged clothes and the needle and cotton, and, folding his hands on his back, be- _ gan marching up and down the room, coughing and grunting. "From time to time — here and there — there flashes a light — and then the devil blows it out — and again it is dull! What an unhappy town this is! I will get away from here while the ships still go to and fro on the river..."'. He stopped, and, scratching his skull, asked: 'But where shall I go? I've been everywhere. Yes. I've been everywhere, but have only worn myself out."

He spat on the floor and added:

"What a blasted life! One lives, one lives and one does not find anything — either for the soul or the body!"

He remained silent, standing in the corner by the door as if listening to something, then came up to

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me resolutely and sitting down on the edge of the table:

"Tl tell you what, Lexei my Maximich — Jakov was wrong in wasting his big heart on swearing at God. Neither God nor king will become any better if I abjure them, but what one ought to do is to get furious at oneself and renounce all this mean life — there! Ah, had I not been so old, had I come earlier into the world — I'll soon be quite blind — yes, my boy, that will be terrible! You've sewed it up? Thanks. ...Let's go to the bar and have some tea..."

On the way there, groping at my shoulders in the darkness and tottering, he muttered:

"You remember my word — there will come a day when people will lose their patience and their tempers and start destroying everything — they will crush all their nonsense into dust. Yes, they'll lose pant, eS

We never got to the bar, knocking against the siege - of a "house of consolation"' by the sailors: the gates of this institution were being guarded and protected by workmen of Alafonzoff. '"There's a fight here every holiday," Rubzoff said approvingly, taking off his spectacles and recognising among the protectors some of his friends, immediately mixed into the battle, inciting them and setting them on:

'Hold on, factory boys! Squeeze the frogs! Smother the roach, right-o!" It was terrifying and amusing to see the agility and enthusiasm with which the old men acted, pushing through the crowd of sailors, rivermen, repulsing their blows and throwing them to the ground by a push of the shoulder. They all fought without anger, gaily, for the sake of the

fight itself, from an overflow of strength; a dark heap of bodies gathered together at the gates pressing the factory workmen to them; the boards cracked and one could hear provoking screams: "Thrash the bald chief!" Two men scrambled on the roof and from there sang away gaily:

"We're no thieves nor knaves nor highwaymen, We're only sailor-boys and fishermen!"

The policeman whistled, brass buttons flashed in the darkness, mud splashed under the feet — and from the roof still rang out:

"We throw our nets on dry banks and merchants' houses, on roomy sheds and coach-houses..."

"Hold on! You don't strike a man _ who's COW Otte tetee

"Old boy — hold your cheek-bone. Fighters!" Then Rubzoff and I and yet five more enemies or friends were taken to the police station and the calmed shadows of the autumn night followed us with a cheerful song:

"Ah, we've caught the forty pikes From which one makes fur-coats."

"What splendid folk there are on the Volga!" Rubzoff was saying with rapture, blowing his nose repeatedly and spitting — then he whispered to me:

"You, run along. Choose the right moment and

we What do you want to go to the police-station or?" | SS a a

And together with a tall sailor we rushed into a by-street, scrambled over a hedge, and over another one, and from this night I never met again my dear, clever old friend, Nikita Rubzoff. Around me it became gradually desolate. The students' rioting was beginning — its sense I could not grasp — it was unclear to me. I perceived in it a gay bustle, but felt there to be no drama and thought that for the joy of learning in the University one could bear the greatest of tortures. Had anyone proposed to me: "Now, go and learn, but in return, every Sunday on the Nikolai Square, we will thrash you with logs of wood!" I would, most assuredly, have accepted this condition.

One day, passing by the bakery of Semenoff, I heard that the bakers were preparing to go to the University and thrash the students. "We'll go at them with weights!" they said with joyful fierceness. I began to argue with them and swear at them, then suddenly felt that I had no desire and no words to defend the students with. I remember going out of the cellar like a maimed man, with an invincible, deathly grief and longing in my heart. And in the night I sat on the bank of the lake, throwing stones into the black waters and thinking in five words, which I repeated incessantly:

"What am I to do?"

In despair I began to learn to play the violin and used to practice in the night in the shop, disturbing the guard and the mice. I loved music and started to learn with great enthusiasm, but my teacher, the violinist of the Theatre Orchestra, one day during my 'lesson — I had left the shop for a moment — opened a drawer of the safe which I had forgotten to lock and

on my return I found him filling his pockets with money. Seeing me come in, he stretched out his neck, turned to me his dull, clean-shaven face and said in a low voice: '"Well — you can beat me!" His lips trembled, and curious, big, oily tears flew out of his colourless eyes...

I wanted to strike him. To prevent myself from doing so I sat down on the floor, with my fists pressed underneath me, and ordered him to put the money back into the safe. He unloaded his pockets and went to the door, but stopping there, said in an idiotically high and terrible voice:

"Give me ten roubles."

I gave them to him, but left off studying the violin.

In December I decided to commit suicide. I tried to describe the motives of this decision of mine in the story: "An Event in the Life of Makar." But my attempt was not successful — the story came out in a clumsy unpleasant way and lacked inner truth. One of its merits is, so I think, the absolute lack of truth ~ in it. The facts are truthful, but they look as though they were described by some one else and as though the whole story were not about me.

Having bought the revolver of a trumpeter at the market I found it loaded with four cartridges and shot at my chest, thinking to strike the heart, but only succeeded in perforating a lung, and in a month, feeling very discountenanced and silly, I was again working in the bakery. But that was not for long. One evening at the end of March, as I returned to the shop from the bakery I found in my room the "Khokhol' sitting on a chair at the window, pensively smoking a thick cigarette and watching attentively the

clouds of smoke rising in the air. "Are you free?" he asked before even having greeted me.

"Yes, for twenty minutes."'

"Sit down, let's have a talk." He was, as always, tightly bound up in a coat of black leather, his fair beard was spread on his broad chest and over an obstinate forehead bristled hard, short-cut hair. He wore thick peasants' boots from which emanated a strong smell of tar.

"Well," he began quietly and not loudly, 'don't you want to come and stay with me? I live in the village Krasnovidovo forty-five versts down the Volga. Dve got a shop there, you can help me along with it; that will take up little of your time. I have also got a lot of good books and will assist you in your studies. Well, what do you think of this — do you agree?"

Ces?

"Then I'll expect you on Friday at the harbour of Kurbatoff; ask there for the cargo-boat from Krasnovidovo, belonging to Vassili Pankov. But [ll be on the place by that time and will catch sight of you. So long!" He got up and stretched out his broad palm to me — with the other hand he was getting out of his breast pocket a huge round silver watch at which he looked and said:

"We've done it in six minutes. Oh, yes: my name is Mikheilo Antonovich Romass. That's so."

He went out, without turning round, putting his feet firmly on the ground and carrying with ease his powerful, well-cast body.

Two days later I sailed to Krasnovidovo...The Volga has just broken up; grey, mellowed blocks. of

ice float unsteadily on the surface of the troubled waters, the flat-bottomed ship overtakes them and they rub against the stern, creaking and crumbling into pointed crystals from the shock. A high wind is playing about, throwing the waves fiercely against the bank; the sun shines radiantly and is reflected in vividly white trusses by the bluish glass of the ice-blocks. The cargo-boat, heavily loaded with barrels, sacks and cases, has set its sail. The young peasant Pankoy, smartly dressed in a coat of sheep-skin embroidered with many-coloured braid, is steering. His face is peaceful; his eyes have a cold glance; he is silent and reminds one little of a peasant. On the prow of the ship, with outspread legs stands Pankov's workman, Kukushkin, a dishevelled little peasant in a tattered over-coat, tied up with a string, and a crumpled priest's hat. His face is covered with bruises and scratches. He pushes about the ice-blocks with his huge boat-hook and swears contemptuously:

"Get out of the way, you!"

I am sitting with Romass on packing-cases under the sail and he speaks to me softly:

"The peasants don't like me, especially the rich ones. That hostility will pass on to you, of course."

Kukushkin, placing the hook across the stern, under his feet, says rapturously, turning his face to us:

"The priest, Antonovich, is the one who hates you the anost ecaise

"That's true," confirms Pankov.

"You're like a bone in the ugly dog's throat!"

"But I have some friends too and you will have some also," I can hear the Khokhol saying. It is cold. The sun of March warms poorly.

Kukushkin, filling his pipe with tobacco, philosophises:

"Well, of course, you're not the priest's wife, but, according to his profession his duty's to love every being, as it says in books."

"Who is that licked you so hard?" asks Romass, laughing. '"Peuh! Some men of dark professions; skunks they were, surely!"

Kukushkin answers contemptuously and with pride:

"No, that's all rot! but it happened once that artillerymen beat me when I was all by myself! That was some fight, I assure you! I can't make out how it was that I kept alive!"

"What did they beat you for?" asks Pankov.

"When? Yesterday? Or the artillerymen?"

"Well, yesterday!"

"How should I know what they beat one for? Our men are like goats — you want only to touch them — they go at you. They think it's their profession to fight!"

"IT suppose," put in Romass, "that it is for your tongue that they beat you; you're far too incauSOUS i.

"That may be! I have a curious mind, and I've got the habit of asking about things. And I am glad when I learn something new!" 'The prow of the ship struck hard against an ice-block, the stern creaked fiercely. Kukushkin snatched his gaff, while Pankov remarked reproachfully: "Look out for your business, Stepan!"

They continue quarrelling good-naturedlty, while Romass explains to me: |

"The ground is worse here than it is in our Ukraine, but the people are better. Very capable sei they

are en

I listen to him, attentively, and believe in every word he says. I like his calmness and his wonderfully even speech, so simple and carrying weight. One feels that this man knows a lot and that he has his own standard for people. I am particularly glad that he does not ask me the reason why I tried to kill myself? Every other man in his place would have wanted to know about it long ago and that question bored me so intensely. It is so hard to answer it. The devil alone knows why I wanted to kill myself; I would have probably given some lengthy and absurd explanation of it to the Khokhol. And altogether I did not want to think of it at all. It is so nice to be on the Volga, everything here is so free. and bright.

The ship sails along the bank. On its left, the river expands very far, breaking into the sandy bank of the pastures. One can see how the water rushes onto the shore, flooding and shaking the bushes that grow on the coast and there joins with the clear and stormy currents of spring brooks, flowing along the clefts and hollow ways of the earth. The sun smiles, young rooks sparkle in its rays with the black steel of their feathers and busily croak as they build their nests. On the places exposed to the ardour of suntrays, the bright green bristle of grass touchingly makes its way through the earth towards the sun. The body is cold, but the soul sings with a quiet joy that also brings forth the tender buds of luminous hopes. How splendid the earth looks in spring:

_ I hear the voice of the Khokhol coming to me as in a dream.

"There is a fisherman there but I am sure you will like him 26

We reached Krasnovidovo about midday. There, on a high steep hill rises the blue cupola of a church from which are stretched out, in a line, on the edge of the hill, strong, well-built huts, glistening with the yellow planks of their roofs and the brocaded shelters of straw. It is all simple and beautiful.

How often have I admired that village as I sailed past it on the ships! When I began to unload our cargo-boat together with Kukushkin, Romass, handing me the sacks from the stern, remarked:

"By Jove, you've got some strength!" And without looking at me:

"And your chest — does it ache?''

"Not at all."

I was greatly moved by the tact concealed in his question — far less than anything else did I want the peasants to know of my attempt at suicide.

Down the slope of the hill, stepping in pools sparkling like silver, came a long, thin peasant, making large strides, slipping and swinging from side to side. He was bare-footed and wore only a shirt and a pair of trousers, his beard curled like that of an apostle and his hair formed a thick reddish hat on his head. Coming up to the shore he shouted in a loud and friendly voice:

"Welcome!"

He turned round, lifted a_ thick rod, then another one, placed them leaning on the stern and jumping lightly on board the flat-bottomed ship, commanded:

"Lean with your feet on the rods to prevent them

from gliding from the stern, and receive the barrels. Come here, you lad over there, and help!"

He was picturesquely handsome and evidently very strong. On his pink face, with a large, straight nose, his blue eyes flashed sternly.

"You'll get a cold, Isot," said Romass.

"T% Don't you fear."

We rolled the barrel of petroleum on to the shore. Isot asked, looking at me from head to foot:

"A clerk?"

"You try and fight with him!" proposed Kukushkin.

"I see someone's been having a go at your nose again?"

''What's one got to do with them?"

"With whom?"

"'Wi' those who beat..."

"You hopeless creature ..." said Isot, with a sigh, and turned to Romass.

One could notice that the man treated Romass with friendly and slightly patronising solicitude, although Romass was about ten years his senior. And in half an hour I was sitting in the clean and cosy room of a brand new hut, whose walls had not yet. lost the smell of resin and tow. A quick, sharp-eyed woman was setting the table for supper. Romass was unpacking cases with books and laying them on the shelf near the stove.

"Your room is in the attic,"' he told me.

Out of the window in the attic one can see a part of the village and the ravine in front of our hut, where the roofs of bath-houses lie hidden among the bushes.

Beyond the ravine — are the gardens and the black fields, disappearing in soft curves towards the blue crests of the wood, far away on the horizon. Sitting astride on the roof of the bath-house is a blue peasant holding in one hand an axe, while the other one is pressed to his forehead as he watches the Volga below. A cart is creaking on its wheels, from afar one can hear the doleful lowing of a cow, and the murmur of brooks. An old woman all dressed in black comes out of the gate and turning back to it says resolutely:

"May you all Soak!

Two urchins, busily stopping the flow of the brook with stones and mud, rush away at the sound of her voice, while she, lifting a chip of wood from the ground, spits on it and throws it into the water. Then, stepping in a man's high boots, she destroys the construction of the boys and goes down towards the river.

How shall I live over here?

We are summoned for supper. Downstairs, Isot sits at the table, stretching out his long feet with purple soles and talks about something, but stops, seeing me come.

"Well?" frowns Romass. "Go on."

"There's nothing more to say. I've told you everything. It remains that we have decided to settle everything ourselves. You must go about with a revolver or at least with a. thick cane. We mustn't speak too freely before Barinoff — both he and Kukushkin have the loose tongues of women. And you, my boy, do you like fishing?"

"Nig.

Romass began talking of the necessity of organising

the peasants and the small orchard owners and tearing them out of the grip of engrossers. Isot listened to him attentively and said:

"The 'peace-eaters' will give you some trouble, for Sure." .

"We il see.-

"There's no doubt of that!"

I watched Isot and kept thinking:

"Surely, this is the kind of peasant about whom Karonin and Zlatovrutsky write their stories..."

Was it possible that I had succeeded at last in approaching something earnest and that from now on I was to work with people of real action?

Isot, having finished his dinner, was saying:

"You, Mikheilo Antonovich, don't you be in a hurry. No good ever comes of acting in haste. All must be done at leisure."

When he had gone, Romass said thoughtfully:

"He is a clever, honest fellow. It is a pity that he is not educated. He can hardly read. But he studies obstinately. You must help him in that."

Until late at night he acquainted me with the prices of the wares in the shop and explained to me: "I sell cheaper than do the two other shopkeepers in the village — of course they don't like that. They play dirty tricks on me and intend to beat me. I live here not because I like it or find the trade profitable, but for other reasons. It is an idea rather like the one of your bakery..."

I told him that I had guessed so much.

"Well... yes. ... What is there else to do but to teach people reason, eh?"

The shop was locked up, we walked about in it,

lamp in hand, and on the street someone was always walking about, carefully stepping in the mud and at times heavily scrambling onto the steps of the entrance.

"Do you hear that noise? That's Kirilka, a drunkard and a pauper, a wicked animal, who likes to do wicked things like a pretty girl does flirting. Be careful what you say to him and altogether..."

Afterwards, in the room, having lighted his pipe, and leaning with his broad back to the stove with half-closed eyes, he blew ringlets of smoke into his beard and slowly building up a clear and simple speech, told me that he had noticed long ago, how uselessly I was spending the years of my youth.

"You are a gifted fellow, stubborn by nature and, as it seems, with the best of aspirations. You must learn, but it must be in such a way that the book should not shut out the people to you. A little old sectarian once said very justly: 'Every knowledge emanates from man.' - People teach more brutally and painfully but their knowledge impregnates itself more strongly."

He spoke of the idea, which was so familiar to me: that at first one should strive to awaken the intellect of the country. But in the familiar words I perceived a new and deeper sense.

"Your students, over there, they talk a lot of their love for the people. Tl say this to them: one cannot love the people. Those are mere words: love for the people ..." He laughed into his beard, looked at me searchingly and began walking up and down the room, continuing to speak very impressively. "To love means to agree, to be indulgent, to leave unno-:

ticed, to forgive. With all that one must go to a woman. But — is it possible not to notice the ignorance of the people, to agree with the errors of their mind, to indulge in all their meannesses and forgive all their cruelties? Do you think it is?"

TaN On

"You see? 'You all, over there, you sit and read and sing Nekrasoff; well, you know, you won't go far with Nekrasoff. This is what one must inspire in the peasant: you, my dear man, you are not a bad person as far as you are concerned, but you live badly and are incapable yourself of doing anything that should improve and adorn your life. An animal is more reasonable in this way, he looks after himself, and the animal certainly depends upon himself better. Everything grows out of you, the simple peasant: the nobility, the clergy, the scientists, the kings — they have all been peasants. You see? You understand? Well, therefore you must learn to live, so as no one would get the better of you."

He went into the kitchen and told the woman to put the kettle to boil, then started showing me his books, nearly all of them treating on scientific matters: Buckle, Lowell, Hartpole, Lecky, Lubbock, Taylor, Mill, Spencer, Darwin — and the Russians — Pissareff, Dobrolinkov, Chernishevsky, Pushkin, "Fregat Pallada" of Goncharoff, and Nekrasoff.

He stroked them with his broad palm as gently as though they were kittens and explained, excitedly: "Good books, these are! This is a very rare one: the censor had it burnt. You must read it if you want to know what a state is."

He handed me Hobbes' "Leviathan." 'This too

speaks of the state but in a much lighter and gayer shape." The gay book proved to be Machiavelli's "The Prince:"

At the tea-table he told me shortly about himself. He was the son of a Tchernigov blacksmith, and used to grease the trains at the Station Kiev; there he became acquainted with revolutionaries and organised a' small self-educating circle of workmen. After that he was arrested and imprisoned for about two years, then exiled into the Jakoutsk district for ten years.

"At the beginning, living there among the Jakouts, in anomad encampment, I thought I'd go under. The winter there, bless it, is such, you know, that the brains of a man literally freeze up. It is true that brains there are of no use whatever. Then I saw that some Russians were stuck here and there, not many of them, but still, there were some! And in order they should not be lonely, from time to time others would be kindly sent to join them. There lived the student Vladimir Korolenko, for instance — he is also back by now. I lived on good terms with him — but afterwards we separated. We were too alike in many ways and friendships never prosper on likenesses. But he was an earnest, obstinate man, adept in every kind of work. He even painted ikons — this I did not like. Now, they say he writes very well in different reviews."

We talked for a long time, until midnight, for he evidently wished to establish me immediately and firmly at his side. It was the first time that I felt so earnestly at my ease with a man. After my attempt at suicide, my self-estimation had suffered considerably, I felt myself to be a nobody, I had a guilty conscience and I was ashamed to live. I think Romass

understood this and in a simple, human way opened to me the door into his own life. And by doing so — straightened me out. An unforgettable day it was!

We opened the shop on Sunday after church and the peasants immediately began gathering round our entrance. The first to come was Matrei Barinoff, an unwashed, dishevelled man with the long arms of a monkey and an absent-minded look in his handsome, rather feminine eyes:

"What does one hear in town?" he asked after having greeted us and, without waiting for an answer, shouted out to Kukushkin:

"Stepan! Your cats have guzzled the cock up again!?

And then he told us that the Governor had gone to Petersburg to see the Tsar and solicit that all the Tartars should be transplanted to the Caucasus and Turkestan. He praised the Governor. "He is a clever one. Knows his business."

"You've invented all this yourself,' Romass remarked quickly.

"IT? When?"

"I don't know."

"How little you believe in people, Antonovich," said Barinoff reproachfully, shaking his head compassionately: "I can say — I pity the Tartars. One needs to get used to the Caucasus."

A small, thin little man approached cautiously, wearing a tattered jacket evidently not belonging to him; his grey face was distorted with a convulsion that tore open his dark lips into a sickly smile; his sharp left eye winked incessantly and over it trembled a grey eyebrow cut up in scars.

"Salute to Migun!" Barinoff said mockingly. "What is it you've stolen to-night?"

"Your money," answered Migun in a tenor voice, taking off his hat to Romass.

The owner of our hut also came out and our neighbour Pankov, too, in a waistcoat and a red handkerchief tied round his neck, rubber shoes on his feet and a silver chain, long as a pair of reins, adorning his breast. He measured up Migun with an angry glance.

"If you go on, you old devil, climbing into my orchard, I will poke a pike into you!"

"There we are again, at the usual kind of conversation," quietly remarked Migun, and added, sighing: "How can one live — if one does not thrash?"

Pankov began scolding him, but he only added:

"And why am I an old devil? I'm only fortyMAM en "At Christmas you were fifty-three!" exclaimed Barinoff. "You told us yourself that you were fifty-three! Why do you lie?"

Then came the grave, bearded old peasant Susloff and the fisherman Isot — altogether there were now about ten people. The Khokhol was sitting on the steps at the door of the shop, smoking his pipe and silently listening to the discussion of the peasants, who had all established themselves on the stairs and the benches around him.

Migun and Kukushkin were peacefully discussing the obscure question: who is it that fights more fiercely, the merchant or the nobleman? Kukushkin affirmed that it was the merchant, but Migun defended the

landowner, and his resounding little tenor voice drowned the disordered speech of Kukushkin.

"Mister Fingeroff's father pulled Napoleon Bonaparte by the beard. And Mister Fingeroff himself at times used to grab two men by the scruff of their necks, spread out his hand and strike them together with their foreheads. And the thing was done! Both lay motionless."'

"Yes, that'l1l make one lie down, sure,' agreed Kukushkin, adding, however: "Well, anyhow, the merchant eats more than the nobleman..."

The fine looking Susloff, sitting on the top step of the stairs, complained: '"The peasant stands unsteadily on the earth, Mikheilo Antonovich! He wasn't allowed to live in that way when there were masters; every man was tied down to his job... ."

"Well — why don't you write a petition and beg them to give you back the servitude,'"' answered Isot. Romass looked up at him in silence and began shaking out his pipe on the balustrade.

I was waiting for him to begin speaking. Andé listening attentively to the disconnected sentences of the peasants, I tried to picture to myself what the Khokhol would say. It seemed to me that he had already missed several opportunities to mix into their conversation. But he followed their discourse with indifferent silence, sitting motionless like an idol and watching how the wind wrinkled up the water in the pools and drove about the clouds, gathering them into one thick grey heap. A ship was driving on the river; from below rose the shrill song of the girls and the sound of an accordion. A drunkard was striding along the street, hiccoughing and growling and swinging his

MY UNIVERSITY DAYS Lal

hands. His legs were folded together in an unnatural fashion and he continually tumbled down in the pools. The peasants spoke slower and slower; their words rang with depression and I too became infected with a gentle sadness, because the cold sky threatened rain and [ recalled the incessant noise of the town, the diversity of its sounds, the rapid current of people on the streets, the swiftness of their speech and the quantities of words which excited the mind.

In the evening at the tea-table I asked the Khokhol when was it that he found time to speak with the peasants? 'What about?" he asked. And having listened to me carefully: "Well, you know, if I started speaking to them on those topics, and in the street, Id get sent back to Jakoutsk at once..." He stuck some tobacco into his pipe, lighted it, surrounded himself with smoke and began speaking quietly and memorably of the peasant, whom he considered to be prudent and distrustful. He, the peasant, is afraid of himself, of his neighbour, and still more so of every stranger, said Romass. Thirty years have not yet passed since he has been granted freedom, and every forty-year-old peasant has been born a slave and remembers it only too well. And he thinks: it is hard - to understand what is freedom. On first thought freedom seems to mean to live as one likes! But then you perceive that you are surrounded with authorities and that everybody tries to interfere with your life. The Tsar took the peasantry from the landowner — therefore the Tsar now is the sole sovereign over all the peasantry. And again — what does freedom mean, then? All of a sudden the day shall come when the Tsar will explain what it means. The

peasant believes intensely in a Tsar who is the sole sovereign of the earth and of all its riches. As he took the peasants from the landowners — he can in the same way seize the ships and shops from the merchants. The peasant is a Tsarist — he understands that too many cooks spoil the broth. He awaits the day when the Tsar will proclaim to him the meaning of freedom. And then! Seize what you can, all of you! They all wait for that moment to come and are afraid of it at the same time, for every one of them lives on his guard, anxious not to miss the decisive day of a general distribution. And he is afraid of himself, too, for he wants a lot — and there is heaps to get hold of, but how is one to do it? 'They are all keen on the same thing. And again, all round there is an innumerable amount of authorities clearly hostile to the peasant and, for that matter, also to the Tsar. But one cannot do without them either, for what should come of it all if not a general brawl.

The wind angrily splashed the window-panes with a heavy spring shower. A grey mist floated in the street, and in my soul something dull and grey crawled too. The quiet, low voice continued thoughtfully:

"One must suggest to the peasant that he should gradually learn to transfer the power from the hands of the Tsar into his own, one must tell him that the people should acquire the right of choosing all their authorities out of their own midst — yes, all of them, the policeman and the Governor and the Tsar..."

"But that might last for a hundred years."

"And what did you think? That you'll get it all settled by Whitsuntide?" Romass asked seriously.

In the evening he went out and about eleven o'clock

I heard a shot fired out somewhere very near. I rushed into the darkness under the rain and saw Mikheilo Antonovich's big black figure coming to the gate, carefully and leisurely evading the streams of water.

"What, sir? It's I who fired the shot."

"At whom?"

"Some people rushed at me over there, with pikes. I said to them: 'Let me go or I'll fire. No, they wouldn't listen. So I fired into the sky; that will not harm them."

He stood in the fore-room, taking off his clothes, Squeezing out his wet beard and snorting like a horse.

"My shoes are all rotten, damn them! I must go and have a change. Can you clean a revolver? Please do, or else it will grow rusty. You must smear it with oil of some kind..." I was full of admiration for his unshatterable calmness and the gentle obstinacy of his grey eyes. Combing out his hair in front of the glass in the other room, he warned me:

"You must be careful when you go to the village, especially in the evenings, or on holidays — for they will probably want to beat you, too. But don't carry a stick about with you, for that provokes the bullies and can suggest to them that you are afraid. And 'there is nothing to be afraid of. They are, themselves, rather a cowardly people."

I began living in a splendid way, every day bringing me something new and important. And I greedily read books on natural history, for Romass used to tell me:

"This, Maximich, one must know best of all and before everything else, for all the best intellect of man is concealed in this science." In the evenings,

three times a week, came Isot, and I taught him to read. At first he treated me mistrustfully, with a slightly mocking smile, but after a few lessons he told me good-naturedly:

"You explain well! You ought to become a teacher, Tay AAs

And one day he suddenly proposed: "They say you're very strong; let's pull at a stick and see who's got more muscles!"

We got a cane in the kitchen, sat down on the floor and, propping the plants of our feet against one another, tried for a long time to lift one another up. The Khokhol was watching us with a smile and inciting us.

Isot learnt well and very diligently, and often won- 'dered about things in a charming way: sometimes during the lesson he'd suddenly get up, take a book off the shelf and read two or three lines with a great effort, lifting up his eyebrows. Then, blushing fiercely, he'd look at me, saying with amusement:

"Just think! I'm damned if I don't read!"

There was in him a charming and touching ingenuousness, something childish and transparent, and I found him more and more like the fine peasant of whom one reads in books. Like nearly all fishermen, he was a poet, and loved the Volga, the quiet nights, enjoying solitude and a life of contemplation. He watched the stars and asked: '"The Khokhol says that it may be that there, too, there is a life like ours; what do you think, can that be true? What if one made a sign to them and asked them how they live? Perhaps better and in a more cheerful way than we dome

Altogether he was satisfied with his life — he was an orphan and a pauper, and in his quiet and beloved job of a fisherman was not dependent on anyone. But he had an hostility towards the peasants and warned me:

"Don't you believe that they are kind — they are a cunning folk, a false one — don't you be fooled by them. To-day they are one way with you — to-morrow they'll be another. Each sees only himself and anything social they consider a drudgery."

And with a hatred unusual in this man of a soft heart he spoke of the "'peace-eaters," the rich. He was handsome and strong and was loved by women, who besieged him.

"Yes, I admit I'm lucky in that matter," he confided good-naturedly. "I know it's offensive to the husbands; I'd also swear were I in their shoes. But how is one to resist being kind to a woman? She is like a second soul of yours. She lives without heart, without a caress, works like a horse — and that's all. The husbands have no time for her — while I am a free man. There are many who know what the husband's fist is like already in the first year of their marriage. Yes, yes, I know I sin in this, that I have some fun with them, but there's one thing I beg of them: don't you be angry with one another — there's enough of me for all of you. Don't envy each other — you're all the same to me, I'm kind to youall. .. ."

And smiling gaily through his beard he continues:

"One day, don't you know, I nearly had a go at a lady. She came from the town for the summer. A beauty, white as milk, and her hair as fair as flax. And such kind blue eyes she had. I used to sell fish

to her and couldn't help looking at her. 'What is it you want? she asks. 'You can well guess yourself, I tell her. 'Well,' she says, 'you wait and I'll come to you in the night.' And she came. Only she felt awkward on account of the mosquitoes, they were biting her the whole time — so that we didn't get along at all. 'I can't,' she said; 'they bite so frightfully,' and she nearly cried over it. The day after, her husband arrived, a judge of some kind. Yes, so they are, the ladies," he ended with sadness and reproach. 'Mosquitoes get into their way..."

Isot praised Kukushkin very strongly. 'You watch him — he is a good sort! He isn't liked, but that's wrong! He's got a loose tongue, it is true, but then — every — "

Kukushkin had no land and was married to a drunken workwoman, a small but a very strong and wicked little creature. He had let his hut to the smith and lived himself in the bath-house, working at Cankova. He revelled in news and when there was none to be told he invented himself the most incredible stories, always stringing them onto the same thread. "Mikheilo Antonovich — have you heard? The policeman from Tinkovo is going to become a monk; 'I'm darned,' he says, 'if 'm going to go on bullying the peasants. If that's my profession, to hell with it? "

The Khokhol replies seriously: "If you don't look out, all the authorities will scatter like this and leave you all to yourselves."

Kukushkin considers this possibility, in the meantime pulling straw, hay and corn out of his uncombed flaxen hair.

The village considers Kukushkin a nonentity, and

his stories and peculiar thoughts exasperate the peasants and provoke their mockeries and strong words. But they always listen to him with interest and attention as though expecting to find some truth among his fanciful ideas.

"An empty-headed beggar," so he is called by steady people. And only the fopling Pankov says earnestly:

"Stepan is a man with a secret."

Kukushkin is a very capable workman; he is a cooper, a stove-setter, knows bee-keeping, teaches the women to breed fowl, can make also a clever carpenter, and is always successful in his undertakings, although he works slowly and unwillingly. He loves cats, and keeps about ten fat animals, big and small, in his bath-house.

He used to know how to read, but has forgotten it and does not want to bring it back to his memory. Very clever by nature, he is always the first to grasp the essential meaning in the words of the Khokhol.

"So — so," he says, wrinkling up his face like a child when it is given some bitter medicine, "'so Ivan Gresni was not a bad one for small people..." He, Isot and Pankov used to come to us in the evenings and often sat until midnight, listening to the Khokhol's tales on the creation of the world, on the life in foreign countries, on the revolutionary convulsions of the people. Pankov likes the French revolution.

"That's a real turning in life," he approves.

Pankov has let his hut to Romass, and added the shop to it against the wish of all the Croesuses of the village. They hate him for it, although he treats them with complete indifference, speaks of them contemptuously. Country life rather weighs on him,

'Had I had some kind of profession I'd have lived In towne 45"

Very neat, always carefully dressed, he carries himself with dignity and is intensely self-conscious; his mind is a cautious and a mistrustful one.

Pankov treated me at first with a certain animosity, I should say even hostility, and tried sometimes to scold me in a masterful fashion, but he soon left off doing this, although I felt all the time that there remained in him a hidden mistrust in my regard, and as to me — I, too, did not care much for him.

I can recall so well the evenings in the clean small room with the whitewashed walls. The windows are closed with shutters, a lamp burns on the table in the corner and in front of it sits a man with a steep forehead, a long beard and closely-cut hair who speaks quietly: "The sense of life lies in the idea that man should get away as far as possible from the beasteeecn

Three peasants sit listening attentively; all have good eyes and clever faces. Isot always sits motionless, as if listening to a faint rumour perceptible to him alone. Kukushkin fiddles as though bitten by mosquitoes, and Pankov, pulling at his fair moustache, reflects carefully: "So it was necessary all the same for the people to divide into classes..."

It pleases me that Pankov never speaks roughly to Kukushkin, his workman, and always listens attentively to the wonderful fancies of the dreamer.

The discussion finished, I go to my attic and sit there at the open window, watching the sleeping village and the fields where reigns an unbroken silence. The darkness of the night is pierced by the brightness

of the stars, which are the further from me the nearer they are to the earth. The stillness imposingly compresses my heart while the mind flows into the boundless space and enables me to see thousands of villages pressed just as violently to the earth as this one is. All is motionless and peaceful around me.

The life of the village appears to me in all its joylessness. I have often read and heard that people in the country lead a more wholesome and sincere life than those in town. But here I see the peasants living in an untiring drudgery; among them there are many who are wasted and exhausted by incessant toil, and hardly any of them are cheerful. The artisans and workmen of the town, although working no less, live more gaily and do not complain so wearily and monstrously of life as these sullen people. The peasant's life does not seem simple to me — it demands an intense concentration on the earth and a lot of intuitive artfulness in regard to others. And there is no cordiality in this existence, which is so poor of intellect. One perceives that all these people of the village live groping in the darkness like the blind, are incessantly afraid of something, mistrust each other; there is something of the wolf in them.

It is hard for me to understand why they so obstinately dislike the Khokhol, Pankov, and all 'our' people, who are striving to live with their reason.

I am distinctly conscious of the superiority of the town, of its thirst for happiness, of the bold inquisitiveness of its mind and the diversity of its aims and aspirations.

And always'in nights like this I recall in my memory two citizens of the town:

"F, Katucin anpD Z. NEBEI

"Watchmakers; also repair diverse instruments of

surgery, sewing machines, musical boxes of different systems, other apparatus, etc."

This inscription is to be found over the little narrow door of a small shop. On each side of the door there are two windows covered with dust, and at one of them sits F. Kalugin, a bald man with a yellow bump on his head and a magnifying glass in his eye. He is fat and has a round face which smiles untiringly as he fiddles with miniature pincers in the different watch-works, and sings, opening a round mouth hidden under the grey bristle of a moustache. At the other window sits Z. Nebei, with curly black hair, a huge crooked nose, large plum-shaped eyes and a sharp little beard. He is long and lanky and looks like a Mephistopheles. He also bustles about, arranging and putting in order the tiniest of articles, and from time to time shouts unexpectedly in a low bass:

"Tra-ta-ta-ta-ta."

Behind their backs there rises a chaos of cases and machines, wonderful wheels, aristons, globes; all the shelves are encumbered with metal objects of different shapes, and on the walls are an innumerable quantity of clocks swinging their pendulums. I would readily watch these people at their work the whole day, but my long body obstructs their view; they make the most horrible grimaces at me, brandish their hands and drive me away. I go, thinking with envy: "What happiness lies in knowledge." I respect these people and am convinced that all the mysteries of the machines

a i

and instruments are known to them and that they can repair anything in the world. Those are people for you!

As to the country, I do not like it and the peasants I cannot understand. The women complain mostly of their illnesses; they always have "something that rolls up to the heart" or "presses in the breast," and suffer continually with "pains in the stomach." They speak of all this very willingly, sitting on holidays in front of their huts, or down by the Volga. - They are all terribly irritable, and swear at each other fiercely. On account of an earthen jug, worth twelve kopecks, three families fought one day with pikes, broke the arm of an old woman and the shoulder of a young boy. And brawls like that happen every week.

The boys treat the girls with open cynicism and fool about with them; they'll get hold of a girl in the field, lift up her skirts and tie them up like a broom over her head. That is called "making a flower out of her." The girls, naked to the waist, swear at them and yelp, but evidently enjoy that game, for it is noticeable that they untie their skirts more leisurely than is necessary.

In church, at evening mass, the boys pinch the girls' backs — it seems as though they went there for nothing else. The priest, noticing this, spoke to them one Sunday about it from the pulpit.

"You swine! Can you not find another place for your abominations?"

"In the Ukraine the people are, I dare say, greater poets, as far as religion is concerned," says Romass. "Here, under faith in God, one understands the coars-

est instincts of fear and avidity. Here there is no sincere love for God, no raptured admiration of His beauty and strength.

"Maybe it is better so; it will be easier for them to free themselves from religion, for, I assure you, it is the most unwholesome of prejudices!"

The boys here are boastful, but cowardly. They have attempted three times already to thrash me, overtaking me in the street, but up till now they have not succeeded in this; only once they struck my foot with a stick. Of course I did not tell Romass of those encounters, but, noticing that I limped, he guessed, himself, what the matter was.

"Ah, you did get a little surprise all the same, didn't I tell you, eh?" Although he doesn't advise me to go out in the night, I go sometimes to the Volga through the orchards and sit there, under the willows, watching through the transparent veil of the night the river underneath and the pastures beyond it. The stately and slow current of the Volga is rich in golden rays of an unseen sun reflected by a dead moon. I do not like the moon; there is something sinister in it and it rouses in me, as it does in a dog, a sadness and a desire to howl gloomily at it. I rejoiced when I heard that it does not shine with its own light, that it is a dead planet and that there is not and never can be any life on it. Until then I imagined it to be inhabited with coppered people, formed of triangles, who move like compasses and crushingly ring church bells as in fasting-time.

Watching how the stream of the Volga fluctuates the brocaded ray of light and, borne somewhere far away in the darkness, disappears into the black shad-

a a a an)

ows of the hilly bank, I feel my mind becoming steadier and sharper. I experience a peculiar lightness in thinking of something that is not to be expressed in words, something foreign to all that has happened to me in the day. The majestic movement of the waters is nearly perfectly silent. Along the dark and wide toad glides a ship like a monstrous bird in fiery feathers; it is followed by a soft murmur, like the trembling of heavy wings. A spark of light swims under the pastured coast, a sharp red ray, and stretches from it: it is a fisherman towing, but it seems as though one of the homeless stars had descended from the sky onto the river and flutters over the water like a flower of fire. All that has been read in books develops into queer and fanciful ideas, the imagination indefatigably weaves pictures of unrivalled beauty and one feels as though one was swimming in the soft air of the night together with the river...Isot usually joins me; in the night he seems still larger and still more lovable.

"Here you are again?" he says, and, sitting down at my side, remains silent for a long time, concentratedly watching the river and the sky and stroking the fine silk of his golden beard.

"T'll learn all there is to learn, read all there is to read — and will go then along all the rivers and everything will be clear to me...And [ll teach other people — yes, I will. It is so good, my lad, to be able to share one's soul with a man! Even the women, some of them, if you speak to them soul to soul, they understand. Some time ago one of them, sitting in my boat, asks me:

"And what shall happen to us when we die? I

don't believe,' says she, 'either in hell or in heaven.' D'you hear? They, my boy, they tooare .. ."

Failing to find the right word, he remained silent for a moment and added finally "'living souls."

Isot was a man of the night. He was wonderfully awake to all beauty, and expressed it in a wonderful way, with the words of a dreaming child. He believed fearlessly in God, in the church-like notion of Him and he imagined Him as a big, fine-looking old man, a kind and clever master of the world, who cannot conquer all evil only because —

"He's got no time for it; there's too many men come about! But never mind; he'll manage it all right, you'll see. But Christ, Him I cannot understand at all. What am I to do with Him? There's God — well, what more do I want? And here's another one, if you please. The Son, so they say. What of that, that he's the Son? God's not yet dead, is he?"

But oftener Isot sits in perfect silence, thinking of something, and only from time to time murmurs, sighing:

SY 5. (thats Naw it.is a. 3

"What?"

"That is about myself..."

And sighs again, looking into the dim space.

"How splendid life is!"

I agree with him.

"Yes, it is splendid."

The velvet stream of dark water moves powerfully along. Over it stretches itself in a curve the silvery line, the Milky Way; the big stars sparkle like golden larks, and the heart gently sings its unreasonable thoughts on the mysteries of life. Far away beyond

a oe | _

the pastures rays of sun break out from the reddish clouds and — here it comes, spreading its peacock's tail on the skies.

"What a wonderful thing, the sun!" mutters Isot, smiling happily.

IV

I HAD long ago experienced the necessity of know-

ing how the world in which I live came to be, and what was my perception of it? This natural and, after all, fairly modest desire grew little by little into an unsurmountable obsession and with all the energy of youth I started to burden my friends with "childish" questions. Some of them honestly could not understand me and offered books by Lowell and Lubbock; others cruelly made fun of me and found that I had set my mind on "nonsense." Somebody gave me George Henry Lewes' "History of Philosophy." I thought it very dull and hard to read, and laid it aside.