MELIHOVO,
May 15, 1892.
... I have got hold of the peasants and the shopkeepers here. One had a
haemorrhage from the throat, another had his arm crushed by a tree, a third
had his little daughter sick.... It seems they would be in a desperate case
without me. They bow respectfully to me as Germans do to their pastor, I am
friends with them, and all goes well....
May 28, 1892.
Life is short, and Chekhov, from whom you are expecting an answer, would
like it to flash by brilliantly and with dash. He would go to Prince’s
Island, to Constantinople, and again to India and Sahalin.... But in the
first place he is not free, he has a respectable family who need his
protection. In the second, he has a large dose of cowardice. Looking
towards the future I call nothing but cowardice. I am afraid of getting
into a muddle, and every journey complicates my financial position. No,
don’t tempt me without need. Don’t write to me of the sea.
It is hot here. There are warm rains, the evenings are enchanting.
Three-quarters of a mile from here there is a good bathing place and good
sport for picnics, but no time to bathe or go to picnics. Either I am
writing and gnashing my teeth, or settling questions of halfpence with
carpenters and labourers. Misha was cruelly reprimanded by his superiors
for coming to me every week instead of staying at home, and now there is no
one but me to look after the farming, in which I have no faith, as it is on
a petty scale, and more like a gentlemanly hobby than real work. I have
bought three mousetraps, and catch twenty-five mice a day and carry them
away to the copse. It is lovely in the copse....
Our starlings, old and young, suddenly flew away. This puzzled us, for it
won’t be time for their migration for ever so long; but suddenly we learn
that the other day clouds of grasshoppers from the south, which were taken
for locusts, flew over Moscow. One wonders how did our starlings find out
that on precisely such a day and so many miles from Melihovo these insects
would fly past? Who told them about it? Truly this is a great mystery....
June 16.
... You want me to write my impressions to you.
My soul longs for breadth and altitude, but I am forced to lead a narrow
life spent over trashy roubles and kopecks. There is nothing more vulgar
than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile
talk, and its useless conventional virtue; my heart aches from the
consciousness that I am working for money, and money is the centre of all I
do. This aching feeling, together with a sense of justice, makes my writing
a contemptible pursuit in my eyes: I don’t respect what I write, I am
apathetic and bored with myself, and glad that I have medicine which,
anyway, I practise not for the sake of money. I ought to have a bath in
sulphuric acid and flay off my skin, and then grow a new hide....
MELIHOVO,
August 1.
My letters chase you, but do not catch you. I have written to you often,
and among other places to St. Moritz. Judging from your letters you have
had nothing from me. In the first place, there is cholera in Moscow and
about Moscow, and it will be in our parts some day soon. In the second
place, I have been appointed cholera doctor, and my section includes
twenty-five villages, four factories, and one monastery. I am organizing
the building of barracks, and so on, and I feel lonely, for all the cholera
business is alien to my heart, and the work, which involves continual
driving about, talking, and attention to petty details, is exhausting for
me. I have no time to write. Literature has been thrown aside for a long
time now, and I am poverty-stricken, as I thought it convenient for myself
and my independence to refuse the remuneration received by the section
doctors. I am bored, but there is a great deal that is interesting in
cholera if you look at it from a detached point of view. I am sorry you are
not in Russia. Material for short letters is being wasted. There is more
good than bad, and in that cholera is a great contrast to the famine which
we watched in the winter. Now all are working--they are working furiously.
At the fair at Nizhni they are doing marvels which might force even Tolstoy
to take a respectful attitude to medicine and the intervention of cultured
people generally in life. It seems as though they had got a hold on the
cholera. They have not only decreased the number of cases, but also the
percentage of deaths. In immense Moscow the cholera does not exceed fifty
cases a week, while on the Don it is a thousand a day--an impressive
difference. We district doctors are getting ready; our plan of action is
definite, and there are grounds for supposing that in our parts we too
shall decrease the percentage of mortality from cholera. We have no
assistants, one has to be doctor and sanitary attendant at one and the same
time. The peasants are rude, dirty in their habits, and mistrustful; but
the thought that our labours are not thrown away makes all that scarcely
noticeable. Of all the Serpuhovo doctors I am the most pitiable; I have a
scurvy carriage and horses, I don’t know the roads, I see nothing by
evening light, I have no money, I am very quickly exhausted, and worst of
all, I can never forget that I ought to be writing, and I long to spit on
the cholera and sit down and write to you, and I long to talk to you. I am
in absolute loneliness.
Our farming labours have been crowned with complete success. The harvest is
considerable, and when we sell the corn Melihovo will bring us more than a
thousand roubles. The kitchen garden is magnificent. There are perfect
mountains of cucumbers and the cabbage is wonderful. If it were not for the
accursed cholera I might say that I have never spent a summer so happily as
this one.
Nothing has been heard of cholera riots yet. There is talk of some arrests,
some manifestoes, and so on. They say that A., the writer, has been
condemned to fifteen years’ penal servitude. If the socialists are really
going to exploit the cholera for their own ends I shall despise them.
Revolting means for good ends make the ends themselves revolting. Let them
get a lift on the backs of the doctors and feldshers, but why lie to the
peasants? Why persuade them that they are right in their ignorance and that
their coarse prejudices are the holy truth? If I were a politician I could
never bring myself to disgrace my present for the sake of the future, even
though I were promised tons of felicity for an ounce of mean lying. Write
to me as often as possible in consideration of my exceptional position. I
cannot be in a good mood now, and your letters snatch me away from cholera
concerns, and carry me for a brief space to another world....
August 16.
I’ll be damned if I write to you again. I have written to Abbazzio, to St.
Moritz. I have written a dozen times at least, so far you have not sent me
one correct address, and so not one of my letters has reached and my long
description and lectures about the cholera have been wasted. It’s
mortifying. But what is most mortifying is that after a whole series of
letters from me about our exertions against the cholera, you all at once
write me from gay Biarritz that you envy my leisure! Well, Allah forgive
you!
Well, I am alive and in good health. The summer was a splendid one, dry,
warm, abounding in the fruits of the earth, but its whole charm was from
July onwards, spoilt by news of the cholera. While you were inviting me in
your letters first to Vienna, and then to Abbazzio I was already one of the
doctors of the Serpuhovo Zemstvo, was trying to catch the cholera by its
tail and organizing a new section full steam. In the morning I have to see
patients, and in the afternoon drive about. I drive, I give lectures to the
natives, treat them, get angry with them, and as the Zemstvo has not
granted me a single kopeck for organizing the medical centres I cadge from
the wealthy, first from one and then from another. I turn out to be an
excellent beggar; thanks to my beggarly eloquence, my section has two
excellent barracks with all the necessaries, and five barracks that are not
excellent, but horrid. I have saved the Zemstvo from expenditure even on
disinfectants. Lime, vitriol, and all sorts of stinking stuff I have begged
from the manufacturers for all my twenty-five villages. In fact Kolomin
ought to be proud of having been at the same high school with me. My soul
is exhausted. I am bored. Not to belong to oneself, to think about nothing
but diarrhoea, to start up in the night at a dog’s barking and a knock at
the gate (“Haven’t they come for me?”), to drive with disgusting horses
along unknown roads; to read about nothing but cholera, and to expect
nothing but cholera, and at the same time to be utterly uninterested in
that disease, and in the people whom one is serving--that, my good sir, is
a hash which wouldn’t agree with anyone. The cholera is already in Moscow
and in the Moscow district. One must expect it from hour to hour. Judging
from its course in Moscow one must suppose that it is already declining and
that the bacillus is losing its strength. One is bound to think, too, that
it is powerfully affected by the measures that have been taken in Moscow
and among us. The educated classes are working vigorously, sparing neither
themselves nor their purses; I see them every day, and am touched, and when
I remember how Zhitel and Burenin used to vent their acrid spleen on these
same educated people I feel almost suffocated. In Nizhni the doctors and
the cultured people generally have done marvels. I was overwhelmed with
enthusiasm when I read about the cholera. In the good old times, when
people were infected and died by thousands, the amazing conquests that are
being made before our eyes could not even be dreamed of. It’s a pity you
are not a doctor and cannot share my delight--that is, fully feel and
recognize and appreciate all that is being done. But one cannot tell about
it briefly.
The treatment of cholera requires of the doctor deliberation before all
things--that is, one has to devote to each patient from five to ten hours
or even longer. As I mean to employ Kantani’s treatment--that is clysters
of tannin and sub-cutaneous injection of a solution of common salt--my
position will be worse than foolish; while I am busying myself over one
patient, a dozen can fall ill and die. You see I am the only man for
twenty-five villages, apart from a feldsher who calls me “your honour,”
does not venture to smoke in my presence, and cannot take a step without
me. If there are isolated cases I shall be capital; but if there is an
epidemic of only five cases a day, then I shall do nothing but be irritable
and exhausted and feel myself guilty.
Of course there is no time even to think of literature. I am writing
nothing. I refused remuneration so as to preserve some little freedom of
action for myself, and so I have not a halfpenny. I am waiting till they
have threshed and sold the rye. Until then I shall be living on “The Bear”
and mushrooms, of which there are endless masses here. By the way, I have
never lived so cheaply as now. We have everything of our own, even our own
bread. I believe in a couple of years all my household expenses will not
exceed a thousand roubles a year.
When you learn from the newspapers that the cholera is over, you will know
that I have gone back to writing again. Don’t think of me as a literary man
while I am in the service of the Zemstvo. One can’t do two things at once.
You write that I have given up Sahalin. I cannot abandon that child of
mine. When I am oppressed by the boredom of belles-lettres I am glad to
turn to something else. The question when I shall finish Sahalin and when I
shall print does not strike me as being important. While Galkin-Vrasskoy
reigns over the prison system I feel very much disinclined to bring out my
book. Of course if I am driven to it by need, that is a different matter.
In all my letters I have pertinaciously asked you one question, which of
course you are not obliged to answer: “Where are you going to be in the
autumn, and wouldn’t you like to spend part of September and October with
me in Feodosia or the Crimea?” I have an impatient desire to eat, drink,
and sleep, and talk about literature--that is, do nothing, and at the same
time feel like a decent person. However, if my idleness annoys you, I can
promise to write with or beside you, a play or a story.... Eh? Won’t you?
Well, God be with you, then.
The astronomer has been here twice. I felt bored with her on both
occasions. Svobodin has been here too. He grows better and better. His
serious illness has made him pass through a spiritual metamorphosis.
See what a long letter I have written, even though I don’t feel sure
that the letter will reach you. Imagine my cholera-boredom, my
cholera-loneliness, and compulsory literary inactivity, and write to me
more, and oftener. Your contemptuous feeling for France I share. The
Germans are far above them, though for some reason they are called
stupid. And the Franco-Russian Entente Cordiale I am as fond of as
Tolstoy is. There’s something nastily suggestive about these cordialities.
On the other hand I was awfully pleased at Virchow’s visit to us.
We have raised a very nice potato and a divine cabbage. How do you manage
to get on without cabbage-soup? I don’t envy you your sea, nor your
freedom, nor the happy frame of mind you are in abroad. The Russian summer
is better than anything. And by the way, I don’t feel any great longing to
be abroad. After Singapore, Ceylon, and perhaps even our Amur, Italy and
even the crater of Vesuvius do not seem fascinating. After being in India
and China I did not see a great difference between other European countries
and Russia.
A neighbour of ours, the owner of the renowned Otrad, Count X, is staying
now at Biarritz, having run away from the cholera; he gave his doctor only
five hundred roubles for the campaign against the cholera. His sister, the
countess, who is living in my section, when I went to discuss the provision
of barracks for her workmen, treated me as though I had come to apply for a
situation. It mortified me, and I told her a lie, pretending to be a rich
man. I told the same lie to the Archimandrite, who refuses to provide
quarters for the cases which may occur in the monastery. To my question
what would he do with the cases that might be taken ill in his hostel, he
answered me: “They are persons of means and will pay you themselves....” Do
you understand? And I flared up, and said I did not care about payment, as
I was well off, and that all I wanted was the security of the monastery....
There are sometimes very stupid and humiliating positions.... Before the
count went away I met his wife. Huge diamonds in her ears, wearing a
bustle, and not knowing how to hold herself. A millionaire. In the company
of such persons one has a stupid schoolboy feeling of wanting to be rude.
The village priest often comes and pays me long visits; he is a very good
fellow, a widower, and has some illegitimate children.
Write or there will be trouble....
MELIHOVO,
October 10, 1892.
Your telegram telling me of Svobodin’s death caught me just as I was going
out of the yard to see patients. You can imagine my feelings. Svobodin
stayed with me this summer; he was very sweet and gentle, in a serene and
affectionate mood, and became very much attached to me. It was evident to
me that he had not very long to live, it was evident to him too. He had the
thirst of the aged for everyday peace and quiet, and had grown to detest
the stage and everything to do with the stage and dreaded returning to
Petersburg. Of course I ought to go to the funeral, but to begin with, your
telegram came towards evening, and the funeral is most likely tomorrow, and
secondly the cholera is twenty miles away, and I cannot leave my centre.
There are seven cases in one village, and two have died already. The
cholera may break out in my section. It is strange that with winter coming
on the cholera is spreading over a wider and wider region.
I have undertaken to be the section doctor till the fifteenth of
October--my section will be officially closed on that day. I shall dismiss
my feldsher, close the barracks, and if the cholera comes, I shall cut
rather a comic figure. Add to that the doctor of the next section is ill
with pleurisy and so, if the cholera appears in his section, I shall be
bound, from a feeling of comradeship, to undertake his section.
So far I have not had a single case of cholera, but I have had epidemics of
typhus, diphtheria, scarlatina, and so on. At the beginning of summer I had
a great deal of work, then towards the autumn less and less.
* * * * *
The sum of my literary achievement this summer, thanks to the cholera, has
been almost nil. I have written little, and have thought about literature
even less. However, I have written two small stories--one tolerable, one
bad.
Life has been hard work this summer, but it seems, to me now that I have
never spent a summer so well as this one. In spite of the turmoil of the
cholera, and the poverty which has kept tight hold of me all the summer, I
have liked the life and wanted to live. How many trees I have planted!
Thanks to our system of cultivation, Melihovo has become unrecognizable,
and seems now extraordinarily snug and beautiful, though very likely it is
good for nothing. Great is the power of habit and the sense of property.
And it’s marvellous how pleasant it is not to have to pay rent. We have
made new acquaintances and formed new relations. Our old terrors in facing
the peasants now seem ludicrous. I have served in the Zemstvo, have
presided at the Sanitary Council and visited the factories, and I liked all
that. They think of me now as one of themselves, and stay the night with me
when they pass through Melihovo. Add to that, that we have bought ourselves
a new comfortable covered carriage, have made a new road, so that now we
don’t drive through the village. We are digging a pond.... Anything else?
In fact hitherto everything has been new and interesting, but how it will
be later on, I don’t know. There is snow already, it is cold, but I don’t
feel drawn to Moscow. So far I have not had any feeling of dulness.
* * * * *
The educated people here are very charming and interesting. What matters
most, they are honest. Only the police are unattractive.
We have seven horses, a broad-faced calf, and puppies, called Muir and
Merrilees....
November 22, 1892.
Snow is falling by day, while at night the moon is shining its utmost, a
gorgeous amazing moon. It is magnificent. But nevertheless, I marvel at the
fortitude of landowners who spend the winter in the country; there’s so
little to do that if anyone is not in one way or another engaged in
intellectual work, he is inevitably bound to become a glutton or a
drunkard, or a man like Turgenev’s Pigasov. The monotony of the snowdrifts
and the bare trees, the long nights, the moonlight, the deathlike stillness
day and night, the peasant women and the old ladies--all that disposes one
to indolence, indifference, and an enlarged liver....
November 25, 1892.
It is easy to understand you, and there is no need for you to abuse
yourself for obscurity of expression. You are a hard drinker, and I have
regaled you with sweet lemonade, and you, after giving the lemonade its
due, justly observe that there is no spirit in it. That is just what is
lacking in our productions--the alcohol which could intoxicate and
subjugate, and you state that very well. Why not? Putting aside “Ward
No. 6” and myself, let us discuss the matter in general, for that is
more interesting. Let me discuss the general causes, if that won’t bore
you, and let us include the whole age. Tell me honestly, who of my
contemporaries--that is, men between thirty and forty-five--have given
the world one single drop of alcohol? Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all
the playwrights of to-day, lemonade? Have Ryepin’s or Shishkin’s
pictures turned your head? Charming, talented, you are enthusiastic; but
at the same time you can’t forget that you want to smoke. Science and
technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our
sort it is a flabby, stale, and dull time. We are stale and dull
ourselves, we can only beget gutta-percha boys, [Footnote: An allusion
to Grigorovitch’s well-known story.] and the only person who does not
see that is Stassov, to whom nature has given a rare faculty for getting
drunk on slops. The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity,
our lack of talent, or our insolence, as Burenin imagines, but in a
disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion.
We lack “something,” that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of
our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that
the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who
intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they
are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and
you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have
some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come
and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate
objects--the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country,
politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have
remote objects--God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity,
and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but,
through every line’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you
feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that
captivates you. And we? We! We paint life as it is, but beyond
that--nothing at all.... Flog us and we can do no more! We have neither
immediate nor remote aims, and in our soul there is a great empty space.
We have no politics, we do not believe in revolution, we have no God, we
are not afraid of ghosts, and I personally am not afraid even of death
and blindness. One who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears
nothing, cannot be an artist. Whether it is a disease or not--what it is
does not matter; but we ought to recognize that our position is worse
than a governor’s. I don’t know how it will be with us in ten or twenty
years--then circumstances may be different, but meanwhile it would be
rash to expect of us anything of real value, apart from the question
whether we have talent or not. We write mechanically, merely obeying the
long-established arrangement in accordance with which some men go into
the government service, others into trade, others write.... Grigorovitch
and you think I am clever. Yes, I am at least so far clever as not to
conceal from myself my disease, and not to deceive myself, and not to
cover up my own emptiness with other people’s rags, such as the ideas of
the sixties, and so on. I am not going to throw myself like Garshin over
the banisters, but I am not going to flatter myself with hopes of a
better future either. I am not to blame for my disease, and it’s not for
me to cure myself, for this disease, it must be supposed, has some good
purpose hidden from us, and is not sent in vain....
February, 1893.
My God! What a glorious thing “Fathers and Children” is! It is positively
terrifying. Bazarov’s illness is so powerfully done that I felt ill and had
a sensation as though I had caught the infection from him. And the end of
Bazarov? And the old men? And Kukshina? It’s beyond words. It’s simply a
work of genius. I don’t like the whole of “On the Eve,” only Elena’s father
and the end. The end is full of tragedy. “The Dog” is very good, the
language is wonderful in it. Please read it if you have forgotten it.
“Acia” is charming, “A Quiet Backwater” is too compressed and not
satisfactory. I don’t like “Smoke” at all. “The House of Gentlefolk” is
weaker than “Fathers and Children,” but the end is like a miracle, too.
Except for the old woman in “Fathers and Children”--that is, Bazarov’s
mother--and the mothers as a rule, especially the society ladies, who are,
however, all alike (Liza’s mother, Elena’s mother), and Lavretsky’s mother,
who had been a serf, and the humble peasant woman, all Turgenev’s girls and
women are insufferable in their artificiality, and--forgive my saying
it--falsity. Liza and Elena are not Russian girls, but some sort of Pythian
prophetesses, full of extravagant pretensions. Irina in “Smoke,” Madame
Odintsov in “Fathers and Children,” all the lionesses, in fact, fiery,
alluring, insatiable creatures for ever craving for something, are all
nonsensical. When one thinks of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenin,” all these young
ladies of Turgenev’s, with their seductive shoulders, fade away into
nothing. The negative types of women where Turgenev is slightly
caricaturing (Kukshina) or jesting (the descriptions of balls) are
wonderfully drawn, and so successful, that, as the saying is, you can’t
pick a hole in it.
The descriptions of nature are fine, but ... I feel that we have already
got out of the way of such descriptions and that we need something
different....
April 26, 1893.
... I am reading Pisemsky. His is a great, very great talent! The best of
his works is “The Carpenters’ Guild.” His novels are exhausting in their
minute detail. Everything in him that has a temporary character, all his
digs at the critics and liberals of the period, all his critical
observations with their assumption of smartness and modernity, and all the
so-called profound reflections scattered here and there--how petty and
naive it all is to our modern ideas! The fact of the matter is this: a
novelist, an artist, ought to pass by everything that has only a temporary
value. Pisemsky’s people are living, his temperament is vigorous.
Skabitchevsky in his history attacks him for obscurantism and treachery,
but, my God! of all contemporary writers I don’t know a single one so
passionately and earnestly liberal as Pisemsky. All his priests, officials,
and generals are regular blackguards. No one was so down on the old legal
and military set as he.
By the way, I have read also Bourget’s “Cosmopolis.” Rome and the Pope and
Correggio and Michael Angelo and Titian and doges and a fifty-year-old
beauty and Russians and Poles are all in Bourget, but how thin and strained
and mawkish and false it is in comparison even with our coarse and simple
Pisemsky! ...
What a good thing I gave up the town! Tell all the Fofanovs, Tchermnys,
_et tutti quanti_ who live by literature, that living in the country
is immensely cheaper than living in the town. I experience this now every
day. My family costs me nothing now, for lodging, bread, vegetables, milk,
butter, horses, are all our own. And there is so much to do, there is not
time to get through it all. Of the whole family of Chekhovs, I am the only
one to lie down, or sit at the table: all the rest are working from morning
till night. Drive the poets and literary men into the country. Why should
they live in starvation and beggary? Town life cannot give a poor man rich
material in the sense of poetry and art. He lives within four walls and
sees people only at the editors’ offices and in eating-shops....
MELIHOVO,
January 25, 1894.
I believe I am mentally sound. It is true I have no special desire to live,
but that is not, so far, disease, but something probably passing and
natural. It does not follow every time that an author describes someone
mentally deranged, that he is himself deranged. I wrote “The Black Monk”
without any melancholy ideas, through cool reflection. I simply had a
desire to describe megalomania. The monk floating across the country was a
dream, and when I woke I told Misha about it. So you can tell Anna Ivanovna
that poor Anton Pavlovitch, thank God! has not gone out of his mind yet,
but that he eats a great deal at supper and so he dreams of monks.
I keep forgetting to write to you: read Ertel’s story “The Seers” in
“Russkaya Mysl.” There is poetry and something terrible in the
old-fashioned fairy-tale style about it. It is one of the best new things
that has come out in Moscow....
YALTA,
March 27, 1894.
I am in good health generally, ill in certain parts. For instance, a cough,
palpitations of the heart, haemorrhoids. I had palpitations of the heart
incessantly for six days, and the sensation all the time was loathsome.
Since I have quite given up smoking I have been free from gloomy and
anxious moods. Perhaps because I am not smoking, Tolstoy’s morality has
ceased to touch me; at the bottom of my heart I take up a hostile attitude
towards it, and that of course is not just. I have peasant blood in my
veins, and you won’t astonish me with peasant virtues. From my childhood I
have believed in progress, and I could not help believing in it since the
difference between the time when I used to be thrashed and when they gave
up thrashing me was tremendous.... But Tolstoy’s philosophy touched me
profoundly and took possession of me for six or seven years, and what
affected me was not its general propositions, with which I was familiar
beforehand, but Tolstoy’s manner of expressing it, his reasonableness, and
probably a sort of hypnotism. Now something in me protests, reason and
justice tell me that in the electricity and heat of love for man there is
something greater than chastity and abstinence from meat. War is an evil
and legal justice is an evil; but it does not follow from that that I ought
to wear bark shoes and sleep on the stove with the labourer, and so on, and
so on. But that is not the point, it is not a matter of _pro and con_;
the thing is that in one way or another Tolstoy has passed for me, he is
not in my soul, and he has departed from me, saying: “I leave this your
house empty.” I am untenanted. I am sick of theorizing of all sorts, and
such bounders as Max Nordau I read with positive disgust. Patients in a
fever do not want food, but they do want something, and that vague craving
they express as “longing for something sour.” I, too, want something sour,
and that’s not a mere chance feeling, for I notice the same mood in others
around me. It is just as if they had all been in love, had fallen out of
love, and now were looking for some new distraction. It is very possible
and very likely that the Russians will pass through another period of
enthusiasm for the natural sciences, and that the materialistic movement
will be fashionable. Natural science is performing miracles now. And it may
act upon people like Mamay, and dominate them by its mass and grandeur. All
that is in the hands of God, however. And theorizing about it makes one’s
head go round.