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 staggering, nothing takes a man’s breath away like the beginning of any science.  From the first five or six lectures you are soaring on wings of the brightest hopes, you already seem to yourself to be welcoming truth with open arms.  And I gave myself up to science, heart and soul, passionately, as to the woman one loves.  I was its slave; I found it the sun of my existence, and asked for no other.  I studied day and night without rest, ruined myself over books, wept when before my eyes men exploited science for their own personal ends.  But my enthusiasm did not last long.  The trouble is that every science has a beginning but not an end, like a recurring decimal.  Zoology has discovered 35,000 kinds of insects, chemistry reckons 60 elements.  If in time tens of noughts can be written after these figures.  Zoology and chemistry will be just as far from their end as now, and all contemporary scientific work consists in increasing these numbers.  I saw through this trick when I discovered the 35,001-st and felt no satisfaction.  Well, I had no time to suffer from disillusionment, as I was soon possessed by a new faith.  I plunged into Nihilism, with its manifestoes, its ‘black divisions,’ and all the rest of it.  I ‘went to the people,’ worked in factories, worked as an oiler, as a barge hauler.  Afterwards, when wandering over Russia, I had a taste of Russian life, I turned