authors, their ability to split straws
with dignity--all that is beyond my understanding; it is intimidating
and utterly unlike the quiet, gentlemanly tone to which I am accustomed
when I read the works of our medical and scientific writers. It
oppresses me to read not only the articles written by serious Russians,
but even works translated or edited by them. The pretentious, edifying
tone of the preface; the redundancy of remarks made by the translator,
which prevent me from concentrating my attention; the question marks
and "sic" in parenthesis scattered all over the book or article by the
liberal translator, are to my mind an outrage on the author and on my
independence as a reader.

Once I was summoned as an expert to a circuit court; in an interval one
of my fellow-experts drew my attention to the rudeness of the public
prosecutor to the defendants, among whom there were two ladies of good
education. I believe I did not exaggerate at all when I told him that
the prosecutor s manner was no ruder than that of the authors of serious
articles to one another. Their manners are, indeed, so rude that I
cannot speak of them without distaste. They treat one another and the
writers they criticize either with superfluous respect, at the sacrifice
of their own dignity, or, on the contrary, with far more ruthlessness
than I have shown in my notes and my thoughts in regard to my future
son-in-law Gnekker. Accusations of irrationality, of evil intentions,
and, indeed, of every sort of crime, form an habitual ornament of
serious articles. And that, as young medical men are fond of saying in
their monographs, is the _ultima ratio!_ Such ways must infallibly have
an effect on the morals of the younger generation of writers, and so I
am not at all surprised that in the new works with which our literature
has been enriched during the last ten or fifteen years the heroes drink
too much vodka and the heroines are not over-chaste.

I read French books, and I look out of the window which is open; I
can see the spikes of my garden-fence, two or three scraggy trees, and
beyond the fence the road, the fields, and beyond them a broad stretch
of pine-wood. Often I admire a boy and girl, both flaxen-headed and
ragged, who clamber on the fence and laugh at my baldness. In their
shining little eyes I read, "Go up, go up, thou baldhead!" They are
almost the only people who care nothing for my celebrity or my rank.

Visitors do not come to me ev