De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem

Thus ended the period of the dormancy of my life. This is the preamble with which I entered the propylaea of youth. Marchal bequeathed to me a love for elegant form, a love for Greece and Rome, logical clarity, the history of French literature, and the art poétique poetic art of Boileau, whose first canto I remember to this day; Vasily Evdokimovich bequeathed a worship of Pushkin and the young literature, the metaphysical vagueness of romanticism, and a notebook of written verses, which I memorized even better than Boileau; Temira—a sincere, warm feeling of love and friendship, a tear for The Vicar of Wakefield, and then for herself, when she left for Melenki in the autumn. Ergo Therefore, on one side classicism in the form of Marchal, on the other romanticism in the form of Paciforsky, and life in the form of Temira—and in the center of it all, myself, an ardent boy, ready for any impressions, made wise beyond my years, developed partly forcibly, or more correctly, artificially, by the reading of novels and eternal solitude.

Thus my life continued until my fifteenth year.

II.

A charming time in the development of a person, when a child realizes himself as a youth and for the first time demands a share in all things human: activity boils, the heart beats, the blood is hot, there is much strength; and the world is so good, new, bright, full of triumph, jubilation, life... The prowess of Achilles and the dreaminess of Posa A character from Schiller's Don Carlos. fill the soul. A time of noble enthusiasms, self-sacrifices, Platonism, ardent love for humanity, boundless friendship: a brilliant prologue, which often, very often, is followed by a vulgar, philistine drama.

Reason ascends—but, passing through the clouds of fantasy, it