De Piscibus Libri V et De Cetis Liber Unus

sharply transitioned me into adulthood. She knew of my sorrow regarding my curls, and on my birthday, the 25th of March, she combed her hair in a childlike manner again. A wonderful day was my birthday! She gave me an iron ring with a silver lining; engraved upon it were her name, some motto, some sign, a serpent's head, and so on; in the evening we read from memory a passage from the poem "Fingal" by Ossian, a popular romantic epic of the period—she was Moina, I was Fingal (in all likelihood I had memorized the verses for my birthday as a surprise), and since then I have not once opened Ozerov Vladislav Ozerov, a Russian tragic poet of the early 19th century. My studies became lazy again: lively sympathy pleased me more than a book. With no one and never before her had I spoken of feelings, and yet there were already many of them, thanks to the rapid development of my soul and the 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 to her about twenty times in her album in Russian, in French, in German, and I even remember in Latin. She listened to me in all seriousness and assured me even more that I was born to be a Roland Rollandini referring to a romanticized literary archetype of a hero or an Alcibiades the Athenian statesman and general; I loved her all the more for these assurances. I was warming myself then against all the cold of my short life with the sweet friendship of the Melenki peri an allusion to Persian mythology, often used in romantic literature to describe a beautiful, ethereal woman. Having shared the fruits of our sentiments, we began to read together—first various tales, "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Numa Pompilius," Florian, and so on, drenching them with rivers of burning tears; then we took up "Travels of Anacharsis," and she had the self-denial to listen to this—granted, extremely learned, useful, and intelligent, but nonetheless boring and lifeless seven-volume compilation.

I do not know if her influence on me was good in every sense. Despite many true and beautiful merits, the Melenki cousin was not free from the strained "sentimentality" that is inculcated in young women 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 maxims, that weed which 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 would simply not