Hanseatic
importance of the German town Hanau, of which there was promise in the
epoch between 1413 and 1428, and on the special and obscure reasons
why that promise was never fulfilled. This dissertation was a cruel
and skilful thrust at the Slavophils of the day, and at once made him
numerous and irreconcilable enemies among them. Later on--after he had
lost his post as lecturer, however--he published (by way of revenge,
so to say, and to show them what a man they had lost) in a progressive
monthly review, which translated Dickens and advocated the views of
George Sand, the beginning of a very profound investigation into the
causes, I believe, of the extraordinary moral nobility of certain
knights at a certain epoch or something of that nature.

Some lofty and exceptionally noble idea was maintained in it, anyway.
It was said afterwards that the continuation was hurriedly forbidden and
even that the progressive review had to suffer for having printed the
first part. That may very well have been so, for what was not possible
in those days? Though, in this case, it is more likely that there
was nothing of the kind, and that the author himself was too lazy to
conclude his essay. He cut short his lectures on the Arabs because,
somehow and by some one (probably one of his reactionary enemies) a
letter had been seized giving an account of certain circumstances, in
consequence of which some one had demanded an explanation from him. I
don't know whether the story is true, but it was asserted that at the
same time there was discovered in Petersburg a vast, unnatural, and
illegal conspiracy of thirty people which almost shook society to its
foundations. It was said that they were positively on the point of
translating Fourier. As though of design a poem of Stepan Trofimovitch's
was seized in Moscow at that very time, though it had been written six
years before in Berlin in his earliest youth, and manuscript copies had
been passed round a circle consisting of two poetical amateurs and one
student. This poem is lying now on my table. No longer ago than last
year I received a recent copy in his own handwriting from Stepan
Trofimovitch himself, signed by him, and bound in a splendid red leather
binding. It is not without poetic merit, however, and even a certain
talent. It's strange, but in those days (or to be more exact, in the
thirties) people were constantly composing in that style. I find it
difficult to describe the subject,