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The subject expands into a very long novel, and I think it will be amusing, but now I am only at the third chapter. . . . I wish to show, at least from one point of view, all Russia." Gogol declared that he did not write a single line of these early chapters without thinking how Pushkin would judge it, at what he would laugh, at what he would applaud.

Now I understand this little, mean, reptile impulse of catering to the one whom you seek, this feeling that the parvenu must have felt, this sensation of the necessity of flattering, for which one blushes in the nights, for which one can't sleep and turns endlessly in warm cushions. The parvenu! Pushkin said: ... and an exchange of silent glance Forever took away his chance....

He suddenly realised that he was eagerly expecting Kupfer! Did he want to question him, or perhaps even to confide in him?... But Kupfer did not make his appearance. Then Aratov took down Pushkin, read Tatiana's letter, and convinced himself again that the 'gipsy girl' had not in the least understood the real force of the letter. And that donkey Kupfer shouts: Rachel! Viardot!

A noble by birth! a rich man a favorite of the gods, you may say, as Pushkin has it, and what did he come to? He drank and dissipated and there you are he's murdered." After a couple of hours the examining magistrate drove up.

Besides his novels Merezhkovsky has published several essays, on Pushkin, Maykov, Korolenko, Calderon, the French neo-romanticists, Ibsen and others.... The most important of all are: "The Causes of the Decadence of Modern Russian Literature" and "Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky."

I looked up, and the familiar lines of Pushkin about the golden moon of Spain flashed into my mind. And indeed this was a golden moon. At this moment she radiated rivers of golden light, poured forth liquid gold into the tossing lake at our feet, and sprinkled with golden dust every blade of grass, every pebble, as far as the eye could reach, all round us.

Tolstoi was born as late as 1828, Turgenieff in 1818 and Pushkin, the half-negro poet-humorist, was born in 1799. Contemporary with these writers was Mikhail Ivanovitch Glinka the first of the great modern composers of Russia. Still later we come to Wassili Vereschagin, the best known of the Russian painters, who was not born until 1842.

In 1831 he had the good fortune to meet the poet Pushkin, and a few months later in the same year he was presented to Madame Smirnova; these friends gave him the entree to the literary salons, and the young author, lonesome as he was, found the intellectual stimulation he needed. It was Pushkin who suggested to him the subjects for two of his most famous works, "Revizor" and "Dead Souls."

Pushkin called fame a bright patch on a ragged garment; we all understand it as Pushkin does that is, more or less subjectively but no one has yet given a clear, logical definition of the word.... I would give a good deal for such a definition!" "Why do you feel such a need for it?"

These eleven volumes of Pushkin are priced at thirty-two-and-a-half roubles, and I have only thirty roubles. Let us add to them these two-and- a-half roubles of yours, and buy the books together, and make them our joint gift." The old man was overjoyed, and pulled out his money en masse; whereupon the huckster loaded him with our common library.