le estate and the rank of nobility. After his death the
little estate went in debts and legal expenses; but, anyway, we had
spent our childhood running wild in the country. Like peasant children,
we passed our days and nights in the fields and the woods, looked after
horses, stripped the bark off the trees, fished, and so on.... And,
you know, whoever has once in his life caught perch or has seen the
migrating of the thrushes in autumn, watched how they float in flocks
over the village on bright, cool days, he will never be a real townsman,
and will have a yearning for freedom to the day of his death. My brother
was miserable in the government office. Years passed by, and he went on
sitting in the same place, went on writing the same papers and thinking
of one and the same thing--how to get into the country. And this
yearning by degrees passed into a definite desire, into a dream of
buying himself a little farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a
lake.

"He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of him, but I
never sympathized with this desire to shut himself up for the rest of
his life in a little farm of his own. It's the correct thing to say
that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what
a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our
intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm,
it's a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of
earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life,
to retreat and bury oneself in one's farm--it's not life, it's egoism,
laziness, it's monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good
works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole
globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities
and peculiarities of his free spirit.

"My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office, dreamed of how he
would eat his own cabbages, which would fill the whole yard with such a
savoury smell, take his meals on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit
for whole hours on the seat by the gate gazing at the fields and the
forest. Gardening books and the agricultural hints in calendars were
his delight, his favourite spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading
newspapers, too, but the only things he read in them were the
advertisements of so many acres of arable land and a grass meadow with
farm-houses and buildings, a river, a garden, a mill and millponds,