half, he received his degree of licentiate of letters.[5] Most of
his class-mates became school-teachers, but he preferred to pursue
his studies. Medicine tempted him. He left for Zhouriev (formerly
Dorpat, already famous for its department of medicine) and entered
the university, where, at the end of six years, he received his
doctor's degree.

[5] On the continent of Europe, a university degree between that
of bachelor and of doctor.

Two years before, in 1892, a cholera epidemic had broken out in
Russia. Young Smidovich, then a fourth-year student, asked to be
sent immediately to a province in the East, where the epidemic was
spreading like wildfire. He remained there several months, in fact
until the plague had gone. As a doctor's assistant in an infirmary
organized in one of the mining districts of the government of
Ekaterinoslav, he witnessed a peasant revolt in which several
doctors were killed and others cruelly burned by the exasperated and
ignorant mob. Veressayev has traced these sad events with tremendous
power in his story, "Astray."

His doctor's degree in his pocket, he went to Tula, where he
practised for several months, but soon the position of house-surgeon
was offered to him in the Botkin Hospital in St. Petersburg. He
remained there seven years, till 1901, when, by order of the
Minister of the Interior, who has charge of all hospital
appointments, he was forced to retire from office and was expelled
from St. Petersburg and forbidden to reside in either of the two
capitals, Moscow or St. Petersburg. The reason for this was, that
the name Veressayev appeared on the petition of the "intellectuals"
which had been given to the Minister of the Interior, protesting
against the brutal attitude of the police during a student
manifestation in the Kazan cathedral on March 4, 1901. This petition
brought severe punishment to almost all the people whose names were
signed to it. Veressayev went abroad; he visited Italy, France,
Germany and Switzerland.

Gifted with poetic inspiration, he had begun writing at an early
age. He was not more than fourteen when he translated some poems of
Koerner and Goethe into Russian verse. Later, when at college, he
wrote some short prose tales, which were published in various
papers. But it was in 1896, when the "Russkoe Bogatsvo," the large
St. Petersburg review, had published his two important stories,
"Astray" and "The Contagion," that renown came to him. It came so
s