"You ask me whether you have understood my novel aright, and what I
think of your opinion. Of course you understood it aright. Of course I
am overjoyed at your understanding of it; but it does not follow that
everybody will understand it as you do."

But it was not only his critical work that drew my father to Strakhof.
He disliked critics on the whole and used to say that the only people
who took to criticism were those who had no creative faculty of their
own. "The stupid ones judge the clever ones," he said of professional
critics. What he valued most in Strakhof was the profound and
penetrating thinker. He was a "real friend" of my father's,--my father
himself so described him,--and I recall his memory with deep affection
and respect.

At last I have come to the memory of the man who was nearer in spirit to
my father than any other human being, namely, Nikolai Nikolayevitch
Gay. Grandfather Gay, as we called him, made my father's acquaintance
in 1882. While living on his farm in the Province of Tchernigoff, he
chanced to read my father's pamphlet "On the Census," and finding a
solution in it of the very questions which were troubling him at the
time, without delay he started out and hurried into Moscow. I remember
his first arrival, and I have always retained the impression that from
the first words they exchanged he and my father understood each other,
and found themselves speaking the same language.

Just like my father, Gay was at this time passing through a great
spiritual crisis; and traveling almost the same road as my father in his
search after truth, he had arrived at the study of the Gospel and a new
understanding of it. My sister Tatyana wrote:

For the personality of Christ he entertained a passionate and tender
affection, as if for a near and familiar friend whom he loved with
all the strength of his soul. Often during heated arguments Nikolai
Nikolayevitch would take the Gospel, which he always carried about with
him, from his pocket, and read out some passage from it appropriate to
the subject in hand. "This book contains everything that a man needs,"
he used to say on these occasions.

While reading the Gospel, he often looked up at the person he was
talking to and went on reading without looking at the book. His face
glowed at such moments with such inward joy that one could see how near
and dear the words he was reading were to his heart.

He knew the whole Gospel almost by heart, but he said