De Piscibus Libri V et De Cetis Liber Unus

agree in the 19th century to be called Plenira, Temira, Selena, or Uslad. I soon rebelled against the classical name and advised her, to spite Boileau Nicolas Boileau, French poet and critic known for his "Art of Poetry" (*), to call herself Toinon; and when the second volume of "Onegin" Alexander Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" came out, I advised her decisively to remain Tatyana, just as the priest had christened her. The change of name did not help much: Tanya, as before, at every meeting with the "pale friend of the globe" a romanticized way of referring to the moon, made a lyrical appeal to her, and as before compared her life to flowers thrown into the "violent waves" of the Klyazma a river in Russia; in her spare hours, she loved to weep over her bitter fate, over the persecutions of destiny (which, however, pursued her very modestly, so that its blows were entirely unnoticeable from the outside), and over the fact that "no one in the world understands her." This is the La Fontaine element; no better than it was the Genlis Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis, a French writer known for moralistic educational literature moralistic one: she—who was reading God knows what—begged me not to touch Werther Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther", recommended moral books, and so on. Now all this seems ridiculous to me, but back then Tanya was a valkyrie for me: I submissively obeyed her prophecies. She knew her authority very well and therefore oppressed me; when I became indignant, and she saw the danger of losing her power, tears flowed from her eyes, along with friendly, warm reproaches from her lips; I began to feel sorry for her; I seemed guilty to myself, and her throne stood unshakable once again. It must be noted that young women of about eighteen generally like to school the boy who falls into their hands and upon whom they test the weapons prepared for more important conquests; but then, how those boys school them in return, for eighteen years in a row, and the further it goes, the worse it gets! And so, I listened to Tanya, I was sentimental, and at times moralizing sentences, pale and thin, served as the finale of my speeches. I imagine that in those moments I was very ridiculous; it was difficult to bind my lively character with the candy wrapper of false sensitivity, and it did not suit me at all to carve moralizing sentences out of molasses without the ginger of Genlis's morality. But what could be done! I went through it, and perhaps it was not so bad:

(*) And change, without respect for the ear and sound / Lycidas into Pierrot, and Phyllis into Toinon. Art Poétique.