and which has its history for me. Here is the big grey house with the
chemist's shop; at this point there used to stand a little house, and in
it was a beershop; in that beershop I thought out my thesis and wrote
my first love-letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil, on a page headed
"Historia morbi." Here there is a grocer's shop; at one time it was kept
by a little Jew, who sold me cigarettes on credit; then by a fat peasant
woman, who liked the students because "every one of them has a mother";
now there is a red-haired shopkeeper sitting in it, a very stolid man
who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are the gloomy gates of
the University, which have long needed doing up; I see the bored porter
in his sheep-skin, the broom, the drifts of snow.... On a boy coming
fresh from the provinces and imagining that the temple of science
must really be a temple, such gates cannot make a healthy impression.
Altogether the dilapidated condition of the University buildings, the
gloominess of the corridors, the griminess of the walls, the lack of
light, the dejected aspect of the steps, the hat-stands and the benches,
take a prominent position among predisposing causes in the history of
Russian pessimism.... Here is our garden... I fancy it has grown neither
better nor worse since I was a student. I don't like it. It would be
far more sensible if there were tall pines and fine oaks growing here
instead of sickly-looking lime-trees, yellow acacias, and skimpy pollard
lilacs. The student whose state of mind is in the majority of cases
created by his surroundings, ought in the place where he is studying
to see facing him at every turn nothing but what is lofty, strong and
elegant.... God preserve him from gaunt trees, broken windows, grey
walls, and doors covered with torn American leather!

When I go to my own entrance the door is flung wide open, and I am met
by my colleague, contemporary, and namesake, the porter Nikolay. As he
lets me in he clears his throat and says:

"A frost, your Excellency!"

Or, if my great-coat is wet:

"Rain, your Excellency!"

Then he runs on ahead of me and opens all the doors on my way. In my
study he carefully takes off my fur coat, and while doing so manages
to tell me some bit of University news. Thanks to the close intimacy
existing between all the University porters and beadles, he knows
everything that goes on in the four faculties, in the office, in the
rector's private room, in the li