say: 'Eat! Soup is the great thing in
life!' I believed, and ate the soup ten times a day, ate like a
shark, ate till I was disgusted and stupefied. My nurse used to
tell me fairy tales, and I believed in house-spirits, in wood-elves,
and in goblins of all kinds. I used sometimes to steal corrosive
sublimate from my father, sprinkle it on cakes, and carry them up
to the attic that the house-spirits, you see, might eat them and
be killed. And when I was taught to read and understand what I read,
then there was a fine to-do. I ran away to America and went off to
join the brigands, and wanted to go into a monastery, and hired
boys to torture me for being a Christian. And note that my faith
was always active, never dead. If I was running away to America I
was not alone, but seduced someone else, as great a fool as I was,
to go with me, and was delighted when I was nearly frozen outside
the town gates and when I was thrashed; if I went to join the
brigands I always came back with my face battered. A most restless
childhood, I assure you! And when they sent me to the high school
and pelted me with all sorts of truths--that is, that the earth
goes round the sun, or that white light is not white, but is made
up of seven colours--my poor little head began to go round!
Everything was thrown into a whirl in me: Navin who made the sun
stand still, and my mother who in the name of the Prophet Elijah
disapproved of lightning conductors, and my father who was indifferent
to the truths I had learned. My enlightenment inspired me. I wandered
about the house and stables like one possessed, preaching my truths,
was horrified by ignorance, glowed with hatred for anyone who saw
in white light nothing but white light. . . . But all that's nonsense
and childishness. Serious, so to speak, manly enthusiasms began
only at the university. You have, no doubt, Madam, taken your degree
somewhere?"

"I studied at Novotcherkask at the Don Institute."

"Then you have not been to a university? So you don't know what
science means. All the sciences in the world have the same passport,
without which they regard themselves as meaningless . . . the
striving towards truth! Every one of them, even pharmacology, has
for its aim not utility, not the alleviation of life, but truth.
It's remarkable! When you set to work to study any science, what
strikes you first of all is its beginning. I assure you there is
nothing more attractive and grander, nothing is so