My Universities

About this time there appeared among my friends a strange-looking student who went about in an over-coat very much the worse for wear and in a short blue shirt which he often had to pull down at the back in order to conceal the somewhat defective condition of his trousers. He was short-sighted and wore an eyeglass, his beard was parted in the middle and his hair, cut in the '"'nihilist'" fashion, was reddish and long and wonderfully thick and fell down to his shoulders in straight, hard lines. Something in his face reminded me of an ikon of Jesus Christ. He moved about slowly, unwillingly, as though under a spell; when questions were put to him, he answered them shortly, half-sullenly, half-mockingly. I noticed that he, himself, spoke in questions (interrogatively), like Socrates. People did not Like him and avoided him.

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I had made his acquaintance and, although he was about four years older than I, we very soon became great friends. His name was Nikolai Saccharovitch Vassiljef, and he was studying chemistry.

He was a splendid fellow, intelligent and with a perfect erudition, but, like most gifted Russian people, he was eccentric; for instance, he would eat pieces of rye-bread, spreading a thick layer of quinine on them and, smacking his lips, try to convince me that quinine was the best of dainties. Also that it was wholesome, that it quelled the impetus of the ''racial instinct." He used to try on his own skin experiments which were far from being harmless; one day he swallowed a dose of "kali bromati" and smoked opium on top of it, which nearly caused him to die in terrible agony; another time he took a solution of some metallic acid, which also nearly finished him. The doctor, a surly old man, who was sent for to assist him, examined the remains of the solution and said:

"A horse would have died of this. Perhaps even a couple of horses. You will have to pay for this, too, you may be sure." These experiments destroyed his teeth: they became green and gradually fell out. He ended by poisoning himself — I do not know whether it was intentionally or by mistake — in 1901 in Kiev as he worked in the capacity of assistant doctor to Professor Konovalov, investigating indigoids.

But in the years 1889-1890 he was a strong man, of broad build, capable of the best kind of queer humour when he was alone with me, although malicious in the presence of others. We had at that time undertaken to do some accounts for the local board of the Zemstvo — work that brought us one rouble a day. I

can remember Nikolai sitting with his head bent over his desk, singing away in a small, intentionally-vulgar tenor voice, to the tune of the French song: "Regarde par ci, regarde par la."

"Twice forty-four

And twenty-two — One hundred ten, One hundred ten."

He sang like that for ten minutes, half an hour, and went on again, his tenor voice sounding more abominable than ever. At last, at the end of my patience, I used to appeal to him: "Stop that noise."

He would throw a glance at the clock — and, approvingly:

"You have a fairly good nervous system. Not every one would be able to stand this kind of torture for more than forty-seven minutes. One day I sang the 'Hallelujah' to a medical friend of mine, but he flung a brass ash-tray at my head at the end of the thirteenth minute. And he was presumptuous enough to study psychiatry!"

He was continually reading German philosophers and intended to write an essay on Hegel and Swedenborg. His perception of the "phenomenology of the spirit" was a humorous one: lying on the sofa which we called the "Caucasian mountain ridge," he used to clap the book to his breast, swing his legs in the air and cry with laughter.

When I asked him what he was laughing about he answered, regretfully:

"My dear fellow, I don't know how to explain it to you — it is too subtile. You will not understand.

But it really is great fun, you know." And when I insisted on his explaining, he would begin to speak to me endlessly and enthusiastically of the 'mysticism of reason" of which I actually understood very little and I grieved over this very much.

Of his own studies of philosophy he used to say: "This, old man, is just as interesting as chewing sun-flower seeds and just about as profitable."

When he came back from Moscow for the holidays, I came to him, of course, with all my questions and he rejoiced over them very much.

"Ah! philosophy needed? Splendid! I like that. You can get all the spiritual food you need from me." He offered to give me several lectures on this subject.

"It will make it easier for you and I hope you will find it more pleasant than struggling over Lewes."

A few days after this conversation, I was sitting, late in the evening, in a half-demolished summer-house of a desolate and neglected garden. The apple and cherry trees were covered with thick lichen (herpes), bushes of raspberries, red currants and gooseberries grew in disorder, spreading their rampant branches on the paths where Nikolai's father, an official of the ecclesiastic consistory, attired in a grey dressing-gown roamed aimlessly, grumbling and coughing from time to time. His mind had become feeble with old age.

Large sheds rose from all sides and surrounded the place like one huge wall, so that the garden seemed to be situated at the bottom of a square black hole, and as the night approached, the hole became deeper. The air was oppressive; a heavy smell of refuse, warmed by the hot sun of June, came from the yard.

"Let us philosophise," said Nikolai, smacking his

lips with enjoyment over every word. He was sitting in a corner of the summer-house, leaning over a table dug into the ground. The light of his cigarette illuminated in flashes his queer face and its reflection played in the eyeglasses. Nikolai was feverish; he felt chilly and muffled himself up in his thin old coat, scraping the earthen floor with his feet and making the table creak angrily under his weight.

I was listening intensely to the slightly lowered voice of my friend; he explained to me very clearly and fascinatingly the system of Democritus, told me all about the theory of the atom and how it is accepted by science, then, suddenly: '"Wait a bit," he said, and remained silent for a long time, smoking one cigarette after another.

The night had come, a moonless night, the sky over the garden was black, the air still more oppressive. And in the house next door, where lived the psychiatrist Kashchenko, a violin was singing softly, while from the open garret window one could hear an old man coughing.

"You see, my dear fellow," went on Nikolai, smoking hard and lowering his voice still a little, "you must think these matters over very carefully. Someone — I have forgotten exactly who it was — said once, and very justly too, that the convictions of educated men are just as conservative as the habits of thought that belong to the illiterate and superstitious people. This is a heresy — but there is a sad truth buried in it. And, to my opinion, it is only too mildly expressed. Think this over well and always remember it."

I remember very well these words, which form what I think was the best, the truest advice ever given to

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me. 'They somehow shattered me, their sound rung loudly in the depths of my soul and my attention became still more concentrated.

"I would not care for you to become anything else than what you are now to the end of your days. Always remember this, what I know you feel already: that freedom of thought is the only and most precious freedom given to man. And only he really has it who never accepts anything on faith — without investigating it. Only he who has completely grasped the continuity of life's development, its uninterrupted movement, the infinite shifting of reality."

He got up from his chair, walked round the table and sat down by my side. "All that I have told you can be said in a very few words: live with your own brains. That's all. I do not want to fill your head with my opinions. Altogether I do not want to teach anyone anything besides mathematics. And most specially so — not you, do you understand? I am only telling you all about it. And IJ think it is disgusting to try and make anyone resemble oneself. JI, particularly, do not want you to think the same way as I do; this would be no les at all, for, my dear old fellow, I think badly."

He threw his cigarette onto a ground and trampled on it heavily with his foot. And immediately lighting another one and warming the nail of his thumb in the light of the match, he went on, smiling sadly:

"You see, I think that humanity will continue unto the very end to describe facts and draw from these descriptions more or less fortunate conjectures as to the essence of truth, or else, leaving the facts uncon-

sidered, it will go on creating visions. Apart from this, above this, there is,God, but God is something which I do not accept. It is possible that He exists — but I do not want Him. You see how badly I think? Yes, old man... There are people who consider that idealism and materialism are equal errors of the reason. They are like devils who have had enough of hell but who fear the dull harmony of paradise." He sighed and sat listening to the song of the violin.

"Clever people say that we know only that which we think concerning something that we see. But we do not know whether that which we think and how we think of it is right. And you — you must not believe in this, either. Look out for yourself. .. ."

I was deeply moved by his words, in which I understood enough to feel the pain buried in his soul. We shook hands and stood some time like that in silence. That moment was a very good one. Probably one of the happiest I have gone through in all my life — and that life has been such a varied one that it could have afforded to give me more of them. However, human nature is greedy — that is one of its merits, although owing to some misunderstanding, or more so to a certain hypocrisy, it is considered a vice.

We got out on the street and stopped at the gate, listening to the distant thunder. Flashes of lightning glided on the black sky, while in the east the clouds were already in flames and smelted in the fires of the dawn.

"Thank you, Nikolai."

"Rubbish!"

I turned to go away.

"Look here'' — Nikolai's voice rang out gaily and

distinctly — '"'there is a Netshaeff man, Orloff, who lives in Moscow! A splendid old man. He is known to say: "The truth is that which your perception of it is." You think of this. Well, good-bye. See you to-morrow."

I walked a few paces away and looked round. Nikolai was leaning against the lamp-post, looking at the sky, eastwards. Blue ringlets of smoke rose above his masses of hair. I left him feeling myself in a state of lyrical enthusiasm. Now, at last, the "gates of great mysteries" lay open in front of me.

But on the next day Nikolai gave me a terrifying picture of the world as it lived in the mind of Empedocles. That queer world had, I think, something particularly fascinating for my lector, for he described it to me enthusiastically, with great clearness, and smacked his lips with relish oftener than was his wont.

It was late in the evening, just about the same hour as the day before, and it had rained hard the whole time; the trees were damp and between them shadows roamed and the wind sighed.

In this chaos of gloomy disconnection, in the dumb whirlwind of bodies torn and scattered, move triumphantly, in mutual antagonism, Hate and Love, so alike that they cannot be distinguished the one from the other. A bluish phantom-like radiance shines around them, reminding one of the winter sky on a sunny day, and throws a light, deathly in its monotony, on all the moving figures. I could not listen to Nikolai, engrossed as I was in the contemplation of this vision, feeling as if I, too, was moving along slowly in this terrific world, torn to pieces, blown up from inside and falling in a winding line, into a

cold blue radiance. I was so overwhelmed by what I had seen that, being in a state of torpor, I could not bring myself to answer Nikolai's questions.

"Are you asleep? You do not listen."

"I cannot."

"Why?"

I explained to him.

"My dear fellow, your imagination is far too unbridled," he told me, lighting a cigarette. "This must not be encouraged. Shall we go for a walk?"

We went to the "Slope," along the street where pools of water shone here and there. Our shadows crawled hastily on the roofs of the houses and on the road. Nikolai was saying that one ought to whitewash the rags in paper factories with chloral natrium — that this would make it better and cheaper. He also told me of the work of some professor who was trying to discover how to lengthen the wood-fibre. But my eyes still watched the floating hands and saw somebody's sad eyes.

The next day a telegram summoned Nikolai back to Moscow to the University and he went away, urging me to leave off philosophy until his return.

I remained behind with my head full of troubled thoughts and a disturbed soul, and after several days had gone by I began to feel that my brains were smelting and boiling and giving birth to the queerest of thoughts, to phantom-like visions and pictures. I was filled with a sensation of anguish which sapped all my vitality and I began to fear for my reason. But I was brave, and decided to reach to the limit of my fear — which was probably the thing that saved me. I went through terrible nights, full of anxiety. Sit-

ting sometimes on the "Slope," watching the dim outlines of the pastures beyond the Volga and the sky, strewn with a golden rain of stars, I used to wait for the moment when suddenly, in the blue darkness of the sky, there should appear a huge round stain like the opening of a fathomless well; a flaming finger would thrust itself out of it and threaten me.

I also saw God — the Almighty — exactly as he is represented on ikons and pictures, with a pleasant grey-bearded face and indifferent eyes. He sits, all alone, on a big, heavy throne and sews with a golden needle and a blue thread a hideously long white shirt, which falls down to the earth as a diaphanous cloud. Around Him there is a void and you cannot watch it without terror, for it gets broader and deeper continually. Behind the river, up to the sky, on the dark outlines beyond, rises a human ear, just an ordinary ear, with coarse hair in the ear-shell. There it comes — and listens to all that I am thinking about. I killed innumerable quantities of people with a long doubleedged sword as supple as a whip, belonging to some executioner of the Middle Ages. Men and women came to me from right and left, and approached silently, with bent heads, humbly stretching out their necks. An unknown creature stood behind me and it was at his will that I killed them all, while he breathed cold needles into my brain.

A naked woman used to come up to me. She had the claws of a bird, instead of human feet; golden rays shone out of her breasts. She came up and poured handfuls of burning oil on my head and, suddenly blazing up like a tuft of wadding, I disappeared.

The night-watch Ibrahim Gubaidullin picked me

up several times on the upper path of the "Slope" and brought me home, tenderly persuading me in his Armenian brogue:

"If you ill, why go out? A man ill must lie in bed at home."

Sometimes, worn out by my delirious visions, I used to run down to the river and bathe — this refreshed me a little. At home I was awaited by two trained mice, who lived behind the wooden border of the wall; they had nibbled a hole through it at the level of the table and crawled straight onto the cloth as soon as they heard me busying myself with the supper which my landlady used to set for me at night.

And this is what I saw there: the funny little animals would grow into small devils and, sitting on the tobacco-box, swinging their hairy legs, observed me in a dignified manner, while a dull voice — I did not know whose it was — whispered to me as softly as the fall of rain to the ground:

"Devils are to be divided into different categories, but they have a mutual aim in helping people to seek for miseries."

"This is a lie," I would cry out, angrily. "No one looks out for miseries."

And then came No One. I heard him fidget with the bolt of the gate, open the front door, the entrance, and — there he was, right inside my room. He is as round as a soap-bubble, he has no hands, and the dialplate of the clock serves as a face to him, the fingers on the dial being carrots — for the latter I have an idiosyncrasy from my childhood. I know that this is the husband of the woman I love — only he has changed his dress in order that I should not know

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him. I can see him turn into a real person — a fat little man with a small flaxen beard and a soft expression in his eyes; he smiles at me and tells me all the things that I think of his wife, hard and unflattering things which can be known to no one except myself.

"Get out!" I cry to him.

Then I hear a knock at the wall behind my back — it is my kind and clever landlady, Felicata Tikhomilowna. Her knocking brings me back to the world of realities. I pour some cold water over my head, and so as not to bang doors and disturb the sleepers I crawl through the window into the garden, where I remain until the morning.

In the morning, at breakfast, my landlady says:

"You cried out again in your sleep to-night. .

I feel unutterably ashamed of myself; I despise myself.

. .. At that time I was working as clerk to the advocate A. I. Lanin, a splendid man, to whom I feel greatly indebted in every way. One day as I came to the office, I met him furiously brandishing some papers and shouting:

"Are you mad? My dear sir, look what you have written in the official appeal! Please copy it all over again, as the term runs out to-day. If it is a joke, it is a poor one, I may tell you."

I took the complaint and found these verses written out very distinctly in the text:

"The right lasts eternally, The pain of my soul is great, If only I could pray fervently, If only I knew the happiness of faith."

These verses were just as much of a surprise for me as they were for my boss. I stared at them and could hardly believe that I was their author.

In the evening, as we were working, A. I. came up to me and said:

"You must forgive me for having scolded you. But I was so surprised, don't you see? ...What is the matter with you? You are looking very upset lately and you have grown thin."

"I suffer from insomnia," I answered.

'Well, there is a cure for that."

Yes, something had to be done about it. An end had to be put to those visions and nocturnal conversations with different people who came unseen and went away mysteriously as soon as the consciousness of reality returned to me; an end to this far too exciting life on the very verge of madness.

I had already reached the stage when I waited anxiously for wonderful things to happen even in broad daylight.

If one of the houses in town had suddenly jumped over my head I certainly would not have been greatly startled. There seemed to me to be no reason why the drayman's horse should not rise on its hind legs and announce in a deep bass voice:

"Anathema — "

Or sometimes I would see a woman in a straw hat and yellow gloves sitting on a bench of the promenade along the Kremlin wall. If I come up to her and say, "There is no God," she will throw an astonished glance at me and exclaim, deeply hurt:

"What do you mean? And what about me?' And immediately transformed into a winged creature,

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she would fly away, the whole earth would grow with large trees without leaves, greasy blue slime would drop from their branches, and JI, as a criminal, would be sentenced to remain a frog for twenty-three years and to ring the great resounding bell of the Veskesensky Church day and night. I feel an invincible desire to tell the lady that there is no God, but, knowing well what the consequences of my sincerity would be, I slip away quietly as fast as I can.

Everything is possible. It is also possible that nothing exists in reality; therefore I must touch every fence, wall and tree in order to convince myself that it exists. This gives me a certain confidence. If you keep striking your fist on something hard you actually know that it is there.

The earth is very malicious. You walk on her with assurance, just as the others do, and all of a sudden her consistency disappears under your feet; she becomes as penetrable as air, but remains dark, and your soul rushes headlong into this darkness for a time which seems an eternity, though it lasts only a few seconds.

The sky is also not to be relied upon; it can at any moment change its dome-like shape to the shape of a pyramid turned downward, whose edge will then recline on my skull and I will have to remain immovably on one spot until the moment comes when the iron stars, which hold the sky together, will be corroded by rust; then all will crumble into reddish dust and I will be buried under it. Everything is possible. It is only impossible to live in a world of such possibilities.

My soul was in great pain. And had I not con-

vinced myself two years ago through personal experience of the baseness and stupidity of suicide I would have surely applied that method for curing myself.

The psychiatrist, a small, dark, hunch-backed man, who lived alone and had an intelligent and sceptical mind, questioned me a long time concerning the life I lead, then slapping his strangely white hand on my knee he said:

"First of all, my dear man, you've got to send all your books to the devil, as well as all the other rub-bish among which you live. You have got a strong constitution and it is a shame to let yourself get into such a condition. You need physical exertion. How about women? Oh, this is no good at all. Leave abstinence to others and find a little girl who will play the game well; that will do you good." He gave me more advice equally unpleasant and repulsive to me, wrote out two prescriptions and ended with a few _ sentences which I can recall perfectly.

"I have heard some things about you, and please forgive me if you do not like what I am going to say, I think you must be a so-called primitive man.

"And with such people imagination usually domi-

nates logical reflection. All that you have read, all that you have seen, only served to rouse your imagination, and the latter is impossible to reconcile with reality, which is also phantastical, but in its own way." And also then: "Some ancient sage has said:

'Who likes to contradict is not capable of doing any- —

thing thoroughly.' "This is well said. First of all, get thoroughly to the end of a thing, then contradict it. That is right."

And as he saw me out he added with the smiie of a gay old devil:

"Don't forget about the little girl."

A few days after this I left Nijni to go to the Simbirsk colony of Tolstoists, and, on arriving there, learnt from the peasants the tragi-comic story of its destruction.

I AM a night-guard at the Station Dobrinka. From

six o'clock at night until six in the morning I walk about round the warehouses with a cudgel in my hand; the wind howls out of thousands of mouths from the steppes, driving with it huge clouds of snow, and out of their grey thickness emerge locomotives slowly gliding backwards and forwards, sighing heavily, dragging behind them the black links of trains. It is as though someone was leisurely entangling the whole earth with an unbroken chain and dragging it through the skies that are crumbled into a cold white dust. The screeching of iron, the jingling of the links, the strange creaking, the soft howling — all that is floating about together with the snow. At the warehouse in the line, in the dim whirlwinds of snow, two black figures are moving about. Those are Cossacks, who have come to steal flour. Catching sight of me, they jump aside and hide in the snow heap; but a few moments later, through the wail and rustling of the snow-storm, I can hear their beggarly complaints and beseechings, their promises to give me money, also swearing.

"Leave that off, fellows," I tell them.

It bores me to listen to them. I do not want to talk to them, for I know that they are not poor men, that it is not need that drives them to steal, but that they are doing it for trade, for drink and for women.

Sometimes they send the pretty grass-widow, the wife of a Petersburg Cossack, Lioska Grafova, to try and soften my heart towards them. She unbuttons her jacket and blouse and exhibits her bosom to the guards; her breasts are elastic like gristle and stand in a horizontal line.

"Look at them, like cannons they are,'' she boasts of them provokingly. 'Well, let us put it at one sack of wheat, second rate? Settled? No? Well, then, third?"

The young lad from Tambov, the religious-minded Baikoff, bargains with her in a business-like way, also the Tartar from Usman, the crippled Ibrahim.

She stands in front of them, her chest uncovered, the snow melting away on her skin. Then, shrugging her shoulders, she swears at them: "Make up your minds, you damned katzaps, you skunks! You confounded filthy tripe, wherever shall you find such a sweet as I am, you dog's carrion!"

She despises Russian peasants. She has a deep, strong voice and her handsome face is lighted by a pair of insolent cat's eyes. Ibrahim leads her under the roof of the warehouse while her friends, throwing the empty sacks on the sleigh, depart.

~The shamelessness of that woman is repulsive to me, and I pity so intensely her beautiful healthy body. Ibrahim used to call Lioska the bitch and spat in disgust remembering her embraces, while Baikoff softly and thoughtfully muttered:

"One ought to kill such as she...

On feast days, particularly dressed, with creaking goat-leather boots and a crimson handkerchief tied

1 Name which Little Russians use for Big Russians.

204. MY UNIVERSITY DAYS

round her thick chestnut-coloured hair, she goes to the town, and there offers her body to the "intelligentsia," treating all the customers with equal insolence and contempt. When she turned to me, trying to bring me under her spell, I drove her away from my quarters, but on one warm moonlight night I fell asleep sitting on the stairs of the warehouse and as I opened my eyes I found Lioska standing in front of me. _ She stood, her hands stuck in the pockets of her overcoat, knitting her brows, her stately figure well illuminated by the moon.

"Don't be afraid; I've not come to steal. I'm just walking about... ."

Judging by the stars, it was long past midnight.

"It's rather late for a walk, isn't it?"

"A woman lives in the night," replied Lioska, sitting down at my side. 'And you, what are you sleeping for? Is it that what you're paid for?"

She got a handful of sun-flower seeds out of her pocket and, munching them, she asked:

"You can read, they say. Tell me, where's the town Obolak?"

"TI don't know."

"The Virgin Mary has appeared there; she is painted on images with her hands lifted up in the air and the Child lying in her lap..."

"Ahalatzk."

"Where is it?"

"Somewhere in the Ural, or in Siberia."

She passed her tongue over her lips and said: "What if I was to go there? ...It's so far, though. But I suppose I must."

"What for?"

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"To pray. I'm such a sinner. All on account of you males. Have you got a smoke?"

She lighted a cigarette, warning me:

"Don't you tell the Cossacks about it; they don't like it when a woman puffs smoke." Her face, flushed by the winter breeze, was very beautiful; the dark pupils of her eyes shone dazzlingly in the opaline ovals round the eyeballs.

A golden ray flashed in the sky; the woman made the sign of the cross, saying:

"God rest his soul! My soul'll fall also like this one day. When is it that you're more lonely — on light nights or in the dark ones? I feel especially lonely in the light ones.' She spat on her cigarette and, throwing it to the ground and yawning broadly, proposed to me: "Shall we have some fun?"

And as I refused, she added indifferently:

"People enjoy me ...they all say so... .

I spoke to her gently and tenderly of her repulsive shamelessness. Without looking at me she answered in calm, even tones:

"It's from being bored that I lost my shame. [I'm PeWet, (BAT

It was strange for me to hear the word "man" coming from her lips; it sounded somehow different, unusual. And the woman, throwing her head back and watching the sky, went on, slowly:

"I am not to blame; it's said with some reason that it's by God's will that a woman's rated by her legs. I can't be blamed for that... .'' She sat silently for a while, then got up and looked about.

"T'll go to the station-master."

And she slowly followed the railway lines, strewn

with silver by the moon, while I remained sitting, crushed by the words: "Vow: bored, (Mani aie I could not understand at that time the "boredom" of people whose life begins and continues in wide spaces, in an emptiness, brightly illuminated by the sun or by the moon, in large plains, when a man can see clearly his smallness and nullity, where there is very nearly nothing that should strengthen his will and desire to live. _ People glided past in front of me who were strangers to all that I thought and did; every one of them thrust his reflection into my soul, and in the incessant shifting of these reflections I felt myself doomed to the torture of understanding the non-understandable. Here I can see before me in a fierce whirlwind Afrikan Petrovsky, the station-master, a broad-shouldered, long-armed athlete; he has the bulging dark eyes of a lobster, a huge black beard and is all covered with hairs like a wild beast, but speaks, strangely enough, in a high tenor voice and, getting angry, whizzes through his nose, swelling his large Kalmuk nostrils. He is a thief — orders the weighers to break open the vans bringing cargo from the Caspian Sea. The weighers bring him silks and candies; he sells the stolen goods and arranges at nights in his flat ''"Monastic pleasures." He is a cruel man, knocks about mercilessly the station guards, and it is said that he thrashed his wife to death. Outside office hours he arrays himself in a crimson silk shirt, black velvet trousers, his feet are shod in high Tartar boots out of green Morocco leather, and on his black head of curly hair he wears a lilac Tartar cap embroidered with

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gold. Thus disguised, he resembles a public-house singer dressed as a "boyar."

He is often visited by the assistant of the rural police inspector, Masloff, a bald-headed, clean shaven man who looks like a priest, has the sharp nose of a bird of prey and small foxy eyes. His nickname is "the actress." Often the soap-boiler, Tikhon Stepakhin, comes to see him, a red-haired, fine looking peasant as heavy as an ox, always sleepy. The workmen in his factory continually get poisoned with something and are putrified alive; he has been judged and sentenced several times for damages caused to them. Another visitor is the deacon Voroshiloff, a drunken, filthy, slovenly little man who plays to perfection the guitar and the accordion and has a pock-marked face with high cheek bones framed in grey hairs, thick like the quills of a hedgehog. His hands are - well cared for, like a woman's, and his beautiful bright blue eyes are called: "The stolen eyes."

Usually they are all joined by girls from the farms and the women from the Cossack villages; sometimes Lioska comes with them, too. In a small room, crowded with sofas, they all sit down to a heavy round table arrayed with smoked fowl, hams, conserves, baked apples, watermelons and sour cabbage. Among all these splendours is a large "quarter" of vodka. Petrovsky and his friends chew, munch, suck the vodka out of a silver "brotherly" jar which contains a quarter of the bottle — all that in silence. They have saturated themselves. Stepakhin is belching like a Bashkir, crossing himself continually; the deacon, with a tender smile on his lips, is tuning the guitar. Then they pass into another large room, where there is no

furniture except half a dozen chairs, and begin to sing.

They sing beautifully. Petrovsky has a tenor, Stepakhin a deep, soft bass, the deacon has a fine baritone. Masloff cleverly accompanies the master of the house. The women, too, all have fine voices. Especially prominent by the pureness of its sound is the contralto of the Cossack's wife Kubassova. Lioska's voice is shrill; the deacon often lifts at her a threatening finger. They sing piously, as though they were singing in church, and all look sternly at each other; only Stepakhin, standing with wide-spread legs, has bent down his head and his face wears a look of amazement, as though he hardly believes himself that the endless velvety stream of the sound is actually issuing from his own throat. The songs are painfully sad; sometimes they choose some churchsong and sing it solemnly; often it is: "Open the gates of repentance."

The whites of Petrovsky's lobster-eyes are blood-shot and he straightens out his whole body like a soldier in line and shouts:

"Deacon — dance! Tikhon, come on! Some life, boys!"

"Here we are!" replies the deacon readily, brandishing the guitar and craftily running his fingers on the strings; with the agility of a conjurer, he starts playing a "trepak."' Stepakhin is dancing. The wooden face of the soap-boiler is lit by a dreamy smile, his heavy body suddenly displays a supple, feline grace, he glides swiftly about the room like a sheatfish in a dim pool,

1 Russian national dance.

all his limbs in beautiful, rhythmical convulsions and noiselessly shuffling his feet, making ingenuous figures, watches the people around him with the look of a happy mortal. He dances in a fascinating way, and although the Cossack's wife Kubassova, with shrill cries, saunters around him temptingly and gracefully, Stepakhin puts her into the shade by the wonderful beauty of the movements of his powerful body. This dancing intoxicates every one. Afrikan Petrovsky is raging from joy; he yells, whistles, flourishes his head, shaking the tears away from his eyes. The deacon, stopping to play, embraces Stepakhin, kisses him and, stifling with emotion, mutters:

"Tikhon ... this is divine ... this is like church. ... Dear fellow, all, all will be forgiven"

And Masloff turns around them and shouts:

"Tikhon! You'reatsar! A genius! A murderer!"

Those people have drunk a "quarter" of vodka, but it is only now that they become tipsy and it seems to me that this intoxication is caused by joy, by mutual affection and praises. The women are tipsy, too; their eyes glisten greedily, their cheeks are flushed, they fan themselves with hankerchiefs and are excited like horses kept too long without movement and who -have been led out of some dark stables into a wide yard, into the light of a warm spring day.

Lioska, her mouth half-closed, watches Stepakhin with angry, moistened eyes, and, rocking to and fro on her chair, scrapes the floor with the soles of her shoes.

Outside the wind whistles and howls and drones in

the chimney, white wings rustle against the window-panes. Stepakhin, wiping the sweat of his face with a handkerchief, says gently and guiltily:

"Thanks to the dancers, good people have no respect: 40r es eg

Petrovsky fiercely gives the good people a wonderful variety of bad names, and the women cry out affectedly, trying to prove that they are ashamed. But the combinations of the licentious words triumphantly display the beautiful flexibility of the Russian language.

Again the deacon plays, and now it is Petrovsky's turn to dance. With a fierce audacity he turns about with crashes and thuds and shrill cries as though tearing and breaking to pieces something that stands in his way. Lioska is dancing too, and, like a man possessed, Masloff also clumsily jumps about. The room is filled with a trample of feet, whistles and yelping, a continual flashing of women's skirts, and among all this, hammering away the tempo with his heels, Petrovsky shouts violently, vengefully: "Heigho! I'm a ruined man." One can hear how he scrapes his teeth together. In this frenetic gaiety, there is no merriment, no light-winged joy that lifts a man over the earth — it is very nearly a state of religious enthusiasm, and reminds one of the meetings of the "'khlisti'"; of the dances of the dervish, in the Transcaucasus. In this whirlwind of bodies — there is a crushing strength and its everlasting restlessness seems to me very near despair. All these men are gifted in their own way, I should say weirdly gifted; they intoxicate each other by a common ecstatic love for the song, the dance, the female body, for the triumphant

beauty of movement and sound. All that they do resembles a divine service of the savages. Petrovsky relieves me of my duty,, to enable me to take part in the "Monastic life,"' because I know many good songs, can declaim them rather well and also manage to swallow, without getting drunk, a quantity of vodka, which I do not care about. '"Peshkov, fire away!"' he shouts — he shouts even when he kisses a woman; to growl like a beast — is a necessity for him.

I lean against the wall and "fire away.' Choosing intentionally touching and beautiful songs, I declaim them, trying to draw away the cover from the beauty of the words and the emotion which is hidden in them. And I submit to their ineffable sadness, which is close to my soul, although hostily denied by reason.

"Dear God!" clamours the deacon, pressing his head between his hands, his small and tender palms disappearing completely in the masses of grey hairs. Stepakhin looks at me in amazement and I think with a certain envy; his face twitches unpleasantly. Petrovsky has clasped his teeth together so firmly that his cheek bones swell up like bumps. And Masloff, having placed Kubassova on his knees, has forgotten all about her and stares at the ground like a sick dog.

I cannot understand what it is I want from these people, but sometimes it seems to me that if one should succeed in saturating their souls with songs to the brim they would somehow become different and more close to myself. Here they are, embracing me -rapturously, admiring and kissing me.

"You rascal," says Masloff to me, stroking my hand. Stepakhin kisses me in silence.

'Have a drink, the end'll be the same, whatever

you do!" roars Petrovsky, while Lioska, flinging up her hands, says:

"I'm in love with him — I say it openly, that I'm in love — even my feet shake from it... ." . And ina moment, insatiable, they demand more and more.

Behind the windows, in the darkness torn by the lights of the station, the heavy, red-eyed serpents of trains crawl in an iron rumble, the globe-shaped figures of conductors and engine-oilers roam, shaking about their hanging lanterns. The window-panes are blown over with smoke and steam and when the engines whistle, the window-panes answer with a soft, plaintive sound. There, in the night, life follows its hard trail, not connected in any way with the fierce, ecstatic worship of beauty continued in that room.

I know they are worthless people — but they worship beauty with a religious tremor, they serve it with self-denial, they get drunk with its poison and are capable of killing themselves for its sake.

Out of these contradictions rises a cloud of misty longing, that smothers me, while the ecstasy of their raptures reaches its highest point. But all the songs have been sung, all the dances have been already danced.

"Undress the women," shouts Petrovsky. It was Stepakhin who did the undressing; he never hurried over it, carefully untying the strings, unfastening the hooks, and in a business-like way folding together in a corner the blouses, the skirts and shirts.

They walked round the women, sighing with amazement, and praised their bodies just as rapturously as a moment ago they had praised the song and the dance. Then again they went to the table in the

— — ee

smaller room, and ate and drank — and after that began an indescribable, unspeakable night-mare. The animal strength of those men did not surprise me, but it filled me with awe to watch their somewhat hostile treatment of the women, the beauty of whom they had religiously worshiped a moment ago. In their sensuality I felt a mixture of refined vengeance and it seemed that this vengeance was born of despair, of the incapacity to empty themselves, to relieve themselves of something that disfigured and oppressed them.

I remember the cry of Stepakhin that startled me so intensely: he caught sight of the reflection of his face in the glass: his red face had become purple, fawn-coloured, his eyes were abnormally protruding, he muttered: "Fellows, look here, my God!" and roared:

"My face is not a human one, look! It's not a human one, fellows!" |

He seized a bottle and flung it at the glass. "There, get it, you devil's snout, here you are.' He was not drunk, although he had had a lot to drink, and when the deacon tried to appease him, he said very reasonably:

"Get away, deacon...I know — what can I expect? I don't live a human life. Am Ia man? Instead of a soul I've got a hairy devil in me; now, get away...There's nothing todo done! ..."

Something dark and terrible lived and tossed about in every one of them. The women yelped from the pain but accepted their cruelty as something inevitable, even pleasant, and Lioska intentionally provoked Petrovsky by her cries:

"Now, go on, again, once more. Pinch hard, now,

now..." The cat-like pupils of her eyes grew larger and larger and in those moments there was something in her that resembled the martyrs in pictures — I was afraid that Petrovsky would kill her.

Once, at dawn, walking away with her from the station-master's, I asked her why she allowed them to ill-treat and torture her. "But it's himself that is tortured. They're all like that. The deacon, for instance, himself cries over it."

"Why is that?"

"The deacon? Because he is old, his strength gives way. And the others, Afrikan and Stepakhin — you will not understand for why...And I know, but don't find the words to explain it. I know altogether a lot, but don't find the words, while I gather my words — the thoughts run away — and when the thoughts are there — the words fail."

She actually must have understood something in those raging powers; I can well recall how bitterly she cried, on a spring night, saying:

"I pity you so, you don't know how I pity you. ...You'll be done with, here, like a bird in a fire, in the smoke. Oh, how I pity you all..." And with the tender words of a mother, with the fearless wisdom of a person who has looked deep into the darkness of the soul and got frightened of it, she spoke to me a long time of things terrible and shameless.

It seems to me now, that I was assisting at a hard struggle of two principles — those of the beast-and of the man: the man strives to satisfy once and for all the animal in himself, free himself from the latter's

insatiable desires which grow, however, more and

MY UNIVERSITY DAYS Als

more, inexorably submitting the man to their power. At that time those violent feasts of the flesh filled me with repulsion and misery, mixed with compassion for the people, especially for the women. But, drowned in grief, I still continued participating in the delirious pleasures of "Monastic life"; to use pompous words, I suffered then from "fanaticism of knowledge," I was captured and led by the fanatic of knowledge himself, that is, Satan.

"You must know all, you must understand all," sternly, hardly opening his mouth, Romass used to say to me, sucking at his pipe, spitting smoke and watching how the blue ringlets got tangled in the grey hairs of his beard.

"It is not right to live without justification — that would mean to live a useless life. So that you must grow used to look into all the clefts and holes, in the idea that there, perhaps, the truth which you seek is hidden. Live fearlessly, without avoiding the terrible and unpleasant. Only that is terrible and unpleasant which you fail to understand. There!"

Therefore I peered everywhere, without sparing myself, and learnt to know a lot that perhaps it would have been better for me not to know, but that is necessary to impart to people, yes, necessary, for it is their life, the hard, filthy drama of the struggle between man and beast, where the man attempts to conquer the elements within and without himself. If there is anything on earth really sacred and great it is the incessant growth of man, valuable even then when he is hateful.

Besides, having penetrated attentively into the

game of life, I lost the capacity of hating, and not because it is hard — hatred is very easily acquired — but because it is useless and even abasing, for, after all, one hates something that belongs to oneself.

Yes, philosophy, and especially the philosophy of morals, is a dull matter, but when the soul is bruised to blood by life and cries bitterly from an inexhaustible love to the "magnificent trifle' — man, it is then forced to philosophise in the hope of finding some consolation.

Having lived three or four months in the Station Dobrinka, I felt that it was more than I could stand, for apart from the ecstatic meetings at Petrovsky's, I began to be despotically persecuted by his cook, Maremiana, a woman of forty-six years and nearly six feet high, having once been weighed in the luggagehouse on the balance ''Firhauks" she carried a weight of two hundred fifty-three pounds. On her coppery, moon-shaped face, her round green eyes flashed angrily, reminding one of oxygenated copper; under the left eye she had a huge mole, which caused it to frown mistrustfully. She could read, read rapturously the lives of saints and with the whole strength of her enormous heart hated the emperors Diocletian and Decius. "Had I got hold of them, I'd have scratched their eyes out!" she said, viciously. But this fierceness, directed to the deep past, did not prevent her to tremble like a slave before "'the actress" Masloff. In the hours of the drunken suppers she served him piously, peering into his false eyes with the look of a happy

dog. Sometimes, pretending to be drunk, he lay down

on the floor, beating his chest and moaning: "Oh, I'm

feeling bad, I'm dying...2' She would snatch him up in her arms in terror, and carry him away like a child into the kitchen.

His name was Martin, but often in her fear of him she mixed his name with that of her master and called him: "Martiken."

Then he would jump up from the floor and squall hideously:

"Wha-at? How did you say?"

She pressed her hands to her stomach, bowed down ~ to the floor before him and begged in a voice, hoarse from terror: |

"Forgive me, for God's sake... .

He tried to frighten her still more by a whistling, shrill yelp — then the huge woman stood in silence, guiltily flapping her eyes, out of which sprung out small dim greenish tears. Everybody laughed and Masloff, butting his head into her stomach, said to her gently: "Well, well, that's all right, you scarecrow. ...- Go, now, nursie."'

And as she departed, cautiously, he would say, not without pride: "A buffalo she is — but her heart is of a wonderful tenderness..."

At the beginning of our acquaintance Maremiana was also good-natured and kind as a mother towards me, but one day I said something to her, blaming her slavish meekness in regard to "the actress." She sprung away from me, as though I had scalded her with boiling water. The green balls of her eyes became blood-shot, fawn-coloured; she sat down heavily on a bench, stifling in angry indignation, shaking with her whole body, and muttered:

"You little c-cad, what are you thinking of? You

dare to speak like that of him? In such words? Ill ... he'll ...you ought to be crumbled to pieces for it! Are you mad? He, more saintly than the saints — and you, what are you?"

And suddenly cried out:

"One ought to poison you, you wolf's soul! Out with you!"

I was abashed by this explosion of amazing fury and in spite of my youth conceived that I had touched brutally there something really sacred or sore. But how could I guess that this heap of flesh and grease, covering up a huge skeleton, carried in her depths something inviolable and dear to her heart? That was the way in which life taught me to grasp the equanimity of people, respect the mysterious that lived in them, and treat them with greater care and consideration.

After this incident, Maremiana began hating me violently, savagely. She laid on my shoulders a quantity of duties attached to the household of the station-master. When relieved of my watch after a sleepless night, I had to go and split wood and take it to the kitchen and the rooms, clean the plate, heat the stoves, look after Petrovsky's horse and a lot more, which occupied nearly a half of my day, leaving me no spare time for reading or sleeping. The woman openly threatened me:

"Tll tyrannise you so that you'll run away to the Caucasus." I remembered Barinoff's sentence: 'One wants to get used to the Caucasus," and addressed a petition to the authorities in Borissoglebsk in which I stated Maremiana's tyranny in verse. My petition had some success and I was removed to the luggage

station of Borissoglebsk and charged to guard tarpaulins and sacks and repair them.

There I got acquainted with a wide group of the "intelligentsia." They were nearly all "unreliable," had tasted the prison and the exile, had read a lot, knew different languages — they were expelled students, seminarians, statisticians, a naval officer and two officers of the army.

This group of about sixty men had been gathered | in the Volga towns by a certain M. E. Adaduroff, a business man, who had offered to the Board of the GriaseBaritzin railway to put an end to the incredible thieving of goods that occurred there, by the combined efforts of these people. They took this matter up very passionately — revealed the tricks of the stationmasters, weighers, conductors and workmen and boasted before one another on the successful chase of thieves. It always seemed to me that they ought to be doing something else, conforming more to their dignity, capacities and history, for at that time I was only vaguely conscious of the fact that it is forbidden in Russia to "sow the wise, the good, the eternal." I walked in the middle between the original town people and the "'Kulturtraeger"' of a peculiar type and it amused me to see the incompatible differences of these groups. The whole town knew, of course, that the "Adadurovtzi' were "politicians, of those whom one hangs," and watching intently the activities of these men, hated them heartily and feared them. It was unpleasant to notice the evil, cowardly and revengeful glances of the inhabitants; they hated the '"'Ada-

1 Name given to suspicious revolutionaries by the government in Russia.

durovtzi" in fear — as their own personal enemies, and in faith as the enemies of the "Tsar and the country."

My friend Pavel Krinkoff, the turner, sitting with me in the bar, drinking beer, deliberated loudly: "How can one allow such people to work! One must send them to deserted islands, make Robinson Crusoes of them! And still better, hang them all! Two years ago they used to hang them all in Petersburg!"

Krinkoff was a thoroughly well-read man, was enthusiastic over geography and Jukovsky's verses, owned about twenty good books and among them the "Case of the First of March." He handed me this book very mysteriously and said:

"There, take this and read what they are like! And take care; if they catch you with it, you're done for!"

He was not the only one who reasoned in that way.

I made the acquaintance of the writer StarostinManenkoff — he served in the chancery of the Wares Department of the Griase-Tsaritsin Railway.

He was middle-sized and stout and resembled a castrato by his puffy, hairless face and colourless, expressionless eyes; his heavy gait and vague movements | enforced this resemblance. His flabby body was a receptacle for innumerable and varied illnesses, and his susceptibility sharpened them still more. He sighed continually, crunched, coughed and spat in all directions — in the empty maccaroni case which served him as waste-paper basket, in flower-pots on the window-sill, in the ash-tray and also right on the floor, . near the door. He strained his whole body before spitting, then watched the result and grievously shaking his bald head, said: '"'That's bad."

In the evenings, in his small room with fustian curtains and pots of fuchsia and geraniums on the window-sill, an ikon of the martyrs Kirill and Ulita hang- 'ing in the corner, he used to sit at the table, crowded with heaps of papers and writings and drink vodka in little sips, eating some onion on the top of it and complained in a squeaking tone:

"Glieb Uspensky ridicules the peasant and I write with the blood of my heart! You who read, tell me: where, in what lies the difference between Uspensky and Leikin? Nevertheless, he is printed in the best reviews, whereas I..."

His stories were published in provincial papers, but once or twice they got into the review "Dielo." Starostin liked to be reminded of this.

I reminded him of it.

"Well, what of that?" he retorted sadly, but not so plaintively. '"That's so little, when I... ."

He crawled from his chair to the floor, then on all fours under the wide bed and got out from there a large bundle tied up in a grey shawl; then clapping his -hand on it, lifted a cloud of dust and cried, smothering from it:

"There, there it is, already! Written with the juice of my heart! Yes, yes, with its blood!"

His face grew purple, his eyes filled with drunken tears. But one day, being sober, he read to me a story he had just written about a peasant who, during a fire, saved the favourite horse of the rural policeman, who an hour before the deed had knocked out two teeth of the heroical peasant for the theft of a polepin. The peasant was badly burnt during his act of

salvation and was sent to the hospital. Starostin read this touching story and cried with joy, muttering rapturously:

"How well this is written, how intimate it is! Yes, yes, my friend. Learn to penetrate to the soul..."

His story I did not like at all, but the joy of the author also nearly drove me to tears. His genuine emotion moved me sincerely.

But why did this unpleasantly laughable man cry? I asked him to give me the manuscript to let me read over at home. No, the story was written with intentional plaintiveness and sweetness like the false petitions of the "miserable sufferers" to the kind and rich widows. But, all the same, what was it that provoked those sincere tears of their author and this childish joy of his? 'I don't like your story," I owned to Starostin. Lovingly gathering the pages of the manuscript, he sighed:

"You're coarse, that's what you are! And you have no understanding."

"What is it that touches you in it?"

"The soul," he cried angrily, "the soul shines in it!"

He scolded me to his satisfaction, then drank some vodka and said, impressively: "You must learn! You write verses — that is silly. You mustn't do it. You will not become a Nadson, you're made of different stuff; you have no heart, you're coarse. Remember: Pushkin ruined his unusual talent on verses. Prose is real, sacred literature, honest prose is."'

He was to me the incarnation of this sacred prose and its thick smoke smothered me already. He had a mistress, his landlady, a woman with huge breasts and a back part that could not find place in a chair.

On her name-day, Starostin solemnly presented her with a wide straw armchair, that moved her greatly. She kissed her beloved three times on the lips, and said, turning to me: "There, young man, learn from the elder how to make love to a woman." Starostin stood next to me, smiling happily and pulling at his grey ears, soft like a dog's.

It was a bright day at the end of March, fuchsias grew in quantities on the windowssills, the spring murmur of brooks poured into the room, impregnated with the smell of hot pie, soap and tobacco. My youth and ignorance did not prevent me from perceiving with anguish the possibility of vulgar and complicated dramas being concealed in the "sacred, honest prose."

Dreaming of great heroical deeds and the brilliant joys of life, I guarded the tarpaulins and sacks, the logs, sleepers and bucklers from the Cossacks of the neighbouring station. I used to read Shakespeare and Heine and then, suddenly remembering the actuality that was slowly putrifying around me, I would sit or lie for hours doing nothing, incapable of understanding anything, as though stunned by a knock on the head with a stick.

In the town, imbued with smells of grease, soap and rotten meat, the mayor induced the clergy to offer "Te Deums" on the banishment of devils from the well in his yard. The teacher of the town college thrashed his wife on Saturdays in the bath-house; sometimes she succeeded in escaping from him and would run away in the garden, naked and fat, while he rushed after her, with rods in his hands. The neighbours of the teacher __used to invite their friends to watch this performance _ through the clefts of the hedge.

I used to go there too and watch the audience; one day I even fought with one of the loafers and was nearly brought to the police-station for it. A man in the crowd tried to calm me down by saying:

"Now, now, what are you so hot-tempered for? Everyone likes to look at that sort of thing. You won't see that even in Moscow."

The clerk of the railway office at whose house I rented a corner room for one rouble a month, sincerely tried to convince me that all the Jews were not only swindlers but also hermaphrodites. I argued with him and one night, together with his wife and brother, he came up to my bed to certify himself whether I was a Jew or not. I had to sprain his arm and knock out some of his brother's teeth in order to get rid of them.

But although I saw that all these people lived merely in order to eat, and that their favourite, most cherished occupation was to heap up supplies of the most varied food, as though expecting a universal hunger plague — it was they who governed life, they who moulded it filthily and narrowly.

After all that I had seen, the life of the clever and kind "intelligentsia" seemed to me both dull and colourless; it seemed to flow outside that delirious, shadowy bustle that formed the sickly actuality of the unbroken every-day life. The more attentively I watched, the more uneasy and anxious I felt myself to be. It seemed that the "intelligentsia" was not conscious of its own isolation and solitude in the small and dirty town, where all the people treat them like hostile strangers, do not want to hear either of Mik-

hailovsky or Spencer and have no interest for the question, how considerable is the part of the personality in an historical process?

At parties, the "'intelligentsia"' timidly made love to unknown grey little women; two of them, two sisters, were wonderfully like bats. I can see the thick-set, bandy-legged figure of Masin, a former naval officer, _who had a special liking for Schopenhauer, and spoke eloquently and rapturously of the "metaphysics of love," of the "instinct of race," slightly affectedly pronouncing these words. The bats, pulling up their legs, lowered their eyes and wrapped themselves up tightly in their winged grey pederines, as though fearing that the words of the philosopher would display their nudity. And very soon Masin received from the brother of the bats, an important official of the Railway Board, the following note:

"If you, my dear sir, do not stop speaking before my sisters on the metaphysics of love, I will box your ears for you and address a complaint on you to the Chief of the railway line."

I watched and listened to all this and remembered the nights in Petrovsky's house, where, naked to its depths, the fierce and dark drama of instinct unfolded itself, and, blinding the reason, displayed the raving, despairing games of love. Half-savage people, thieves and drunkards rose to a state of ecstasy, beautifully and adeptly singing their wonderful national songs, while "philosophers," "radicals" and ''narodniki" sang clumsily plaintive, vulgar little ditties like: _ "?Twas not the autumn drizzling rain," "There, where __ the miry Boulak," or:

"Copernik worked all his life To prove that the earth's turning round! The dunce!" ...

I had neither the brains nor the imagination nor the power to join together those two worlds — separated by a deep split of natural estrangement.

And now, at this hour, when I am writing about all what happened more than thirty years ago and see distinctly before me both the types of people, I feel myself completely powerless to trace with words the figures of the short-sighted bookworms in spectacles or eye-glasses, in "'blousing" trousers, in varied waistcoats and monotonously speckled mantles of learned words. And this is not because the ones are coarse and angular and easier to grasp, while the others are smoothly polished by the iron of books. No, the reason of it, to my mind, lies in a deep, I should say racial, anyway inner, moral isolation.

On one side tosses about eternally and senselessly the power of instinct; on the other flutters like a wingless bird the reason, locked up in the filthy cage of actuality. I think that in no other country have the creative powers of life been torn apart so mercilessly as they have been in Russia. When I spoke with a certain fear of the nightly ecstatic meetings at Petrovsky's, I felt the concealed envy of the people of "culture" towards the joys of life of the savages, and often it seemed to me that the pleasures of Petrovsky were

1 Author's Note — The anxious perception of the moral alienation of the "intelligentsia," that is the intellectual principle, from the popular element, has obstinately persecuted me all my life. In my literary works I often broached this topic; it inspired my story "My

Companion," etc. Gradually this perception grew into the presentiment of a catastrophe.

condemned not in their substance, but only outwardly, formally, from a feeling of "decency."

Only P. B. Bajenoff said, sighing heavily:

"Peuh! how terrible it is!"

And added, chewing his beard:

"Td have gone under among them like a bull in quagmire. The stronger the movement the sooner is it swallowed by mire. Yes. I understand that such as you are attracted by them; we others live an unleavened and every-day shallow life. And there — it is an epical existence. Do you know that Petrovsky ought to have been judged long ago but has a 'strong hand' in the Board? Some time ago they made a search in his house for another matter: a theft of tea out of a train. He took a paper out of his table and said, handing it to the inquiring judge: 'Here I have written down all that I have honestly stolen.' "' Bajenoff frowned, thoughtfully closed his eyes, threw his hands up behind his neck and, after a short silence, said, smiling:

"What he had honestly — stolen — only a Russian could say anything of that kind, I assure you. We are really called, I think, to join the unjoinable... We can be terribly gay, we can love cruelly...And so on, in the same way... ."

He got up from his chair, stretched himself out, spread out his hands and ended: "'But, all the same, we Russians are a fine people! That is why, probably, we are unhappy beyond all measure..." Bajenoff was one of the few people who roused in me a feeling of great sympathy and sincere respect. He was a

_ seminarian from Tomsk and managed after a lot of

trouble to get into the Kiev University, but was ex-

pelled in the second year for being "unreliable" and imprisoned theré for several months. He had long hair which made him look like a disguised priest, and moved about with the precautions of an athlete that added to his broad tall figure a dignified stateliness unusual in a seminarian. He had a wonderfully soft voice but no ear whatever and treated music with hostility, saying:

"It draws one in the chaos. .

His half-closed grey eyes looked tenderly out of a broad, pock-marked face in a dark square beard. I felt something clever and patronising in his relationship with me and the others. He told me in a very interesting way the story of the development of Christianity, spoke captivatingly of the sects in the dark ages, helped me to read the "History of Inductive Sciences" of Whewell. When he talked, he used to walk noiselessly and lightly up and down the room, his hands in his pockets and lifting his eyebrows, shake his head about — that was the only gesture with which he underlined the most considerable points of his speech. But at times, in the middle of a sentence, without finishing it, he started thinking, biting the hairs of his beard with his lips, scratching with his small finger his high forehead, disfigured by small-pox, and stood like that for a long time, in silence. Those moments — I do not know why — always filled me with a vague anguish. One day I asked him what he was thinking of?

"Such a lot of intellect is spent uselessly, such a lot of it," he said softly. "And what an intellect!"

He often spoke very convincingly of the beauty and power of thought.

"After all, my lad, all is decided by reason — that is the lever that will in time overturn the whole world."

"And the point of support?' I asked.

"The people," he said with conviction, shaking his head. "In particular — you, your brains."'

I liked him very much, and believed in him sincerely.

On a quiet night, lying with him in the steppe, I told him how the policeman Nikiforich had spoken to me of compassion and what the Tolstoyan had said of the Bible and Darwin. He listened to me attentively, in silence, and replied:

"Darwin is the truth that I do not like, just as I would not have liked hell, if it had been the truth. But you see, my boy, the less friction among the different parts of a machinery, the better it works. In life it is the other way round: the stronger the friction — the more rapidly life reaches its aim and acquires a greater wisdom. And wisdom is justice, the harmony} 'of interests. Consequently — it is necessary to acknowledge struggle as the actual law of life. And there your policeman is right: if life is a struggle — there is no place for compassion in it."

He grew thoughtful, lying on his back, looking into the sky with wide-open eyes.

The sun, sinking behind the clouds, had set fire to them and had melted in them, forming a huge wood-pile of crimson coals, their red rays reposing in the steppe; and a rosy dew sprinkled the grey stalks of last year's grass-blades. The aroma of spring grass and flowers became stronger, more intoxicating. Bagenoft suddenly sat up, lighted a cigarette, but threw it away immediately, saying with a frown:

"I think that humanitarian ideas have come too late in life — about three thousand years too late. Well, I must go back to the town — are you coming?"

At the end of May, I was removed as a weigher to the Station Krutaja of the Volga-Don branch, and in June I received from Borissoglebsk a letter from a friend of mine, a book-binder, in which he informed me that Bajenoff had shot himself in the field by the cemetery; in the letter he had enclosed Bajenoff's note:

"Misha, sell my things and pay my landlord seven roubles, thirty kopecks. Have the books of Whewell nicely bound and send them to Krutaja; Peshkoff to Maximich, the 'old head' — Spencer I also leave to him. The other books are for you. The pile of books in Latin and Greek send to Kiev — the address is enclosed in them. Good-bye, my friend. B."

Having read the note I felt stunned, as though stricken at the heart. It was hard to have to reconcile oneself with the departure from life of this man who seemed so strong of spirit, so sober-minded.