De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem

sharply transitioned her into adulthood. She knew of my grief regarding my curls, and on my birthday, March 25th, she styled her hair in a childlike manner again. It was a wonderful day, my birthday! She gave me an iron ring with a silver lining; inscribed on it were her name, some sort of motto, some sort of sign, a serpent's head, and so on. In the evening, we recited a passage from Fingal A poem by James Macpherson, attributed to Ossian. from memory—she was Moina, I was Fingal (I had probably memorized the verses for my birthday as a surprise). Since then, I have not opened Ozerov Vladislav Ozerov, a popular Russian tragic poet of the early 19th century. even once. My studies became lazier again; living sympathy pleased me more than a book. With no one, and never before her, had I spoken about feelings, and yet there were already many of them, thanks to the rapid development of my soul and my reading of novels. It was to her that I imparted my first dreams—dreams as colorful as birds of paradise and as pure as a child’s babble. I wrote in her album about twenty times, in Russian, in French, in German, and, as I recall, even in Latin. She listened to me with great seriousness and assured me even more that I was born to be Roland A legendary paladin of Charlemagne. or Alcibiades An Athenian statesman and general.. I loved her even more for these affirmations. I was warming myself then, against all the cold of my short life, with the sweet friendship of the "Melenski peri" A reference to a beautiful, fairy-like creature from Persian mythology.. After exchanging the fruits of our sentiments, we began to read together—first various tales, The Vicar of Wakefield, Numa Pompilius, Florian, and the like, bathing them in rivers of burning tears; then we tackled Voyage of Anacharsis A popular fictional travelogue of ancient Greece by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy., and she had the self-denial to listen to this—granted, extremely learned, useful, and intelligent, but nonetheless boring and lifeless—compilation in seven volumes.

I do not know if her influence on me was good in every sense. For all her true and beautiful virtues, my Melenski cousin was not free from the strained "sentimentality" that is instilled in girls in the dormitories of female boarding schools, where they prick initials into their arms with pins, where they make vows not to remove a certain ribbon for a year. Nor was she free from moralizing sententiae, that weeds that filled the novels and comedies of the past century. She loved to be called Temira, and all our relatives called her that; this alone proves the sentimentality. Truly, a person simply would not...