owever, we spent our
childhood there in the country. We were just like peasant's children,
spent days and nights in the fields and the woods, minded the house,
barked the lime-trees, fished, and so on.... And you know once a man has
fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in
the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to
the day of his death he will be drawn to the country. My brother pined
away in the Exchequer. Years passed and he sat in the same place, wrote
out the same documents, and thought of one thing, how to get back to the
country. And little by little his distress became a definite disorder, a
fixed idea--to buy a small farm somewhere by the bank of a river or a
lake.

"He was a good fellow and I loved him, but I never sympathised with the
desire to shut oneself up on one's own farm. It is a common saying that
a man needs only six feet of land. But surely a corpse wants that, not a
man. And I hear that our intellectuals have a longing for the land and
want to acquire farms. But it all comes down to the six feet of land. To
leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide
yourself in a farmhouse is not life--it is egoism, laziness; it is a
kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not
six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in
full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free
spirit.

"My brother Nicholai, sitting in his office, would dream of eating his
own _schi_, with its savoury smell floating across the farmyard; and of
eating out in the open air, and of sleeping in the sun, and of sitting
for hours together on a seat by the gate and gazing at the field and the
forest. Books on agriculture and the hints in almanacs were his joy, his
favourite spiritual food; and he liked reading newspapers, but only the
advertisements of land to be sold, so many acres of arable and grass
land, with a farmhouse, river, garden, mill, and mill-pond. And he would
dream of garden-walls, flowers, fruits, nests, carp in the pond, don't
you know, and all the rest of it. These fantasies of his used to vary
according to the advertisements he found, but somehow there was always a
gooseberry-bush in every one. Not a house, not a romantic spot could he
imagine without its gooseberry-bush.

"'Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the
veranda drinking tea and your