De Piscibus Libri V et De Cetis Liber Unus

sentimentality diluted and sweetened the "burning power," and consequently acted according to the pharmacopoeia of Schiller (*); the very age partly contributed to the development of tenderness. For me, the time was arriving when childhood ends and youth begins: this usually happens at sixteen. The naive beauty of childhood disappears, while youthful beauty has not yet appeared; there is disharmony in the features: they become coarser, there is no grace; the voice shifts from thin to thick, the eyes are languid and at times sparkle, the cheeks are pale and at times flush—physical coming-of-age arrives. The same thing happens in the soul: indefinite feelings, the germs of passions, agitation, languor, the feeling of something secret, unknown, and following that, youth, enthusiastic lyricism full of love, open arms to the whole world of God... An early bloomer, I reached this epoch sooner, and the buds in my soul unfolded at fourteen; I felt that childhood had ended and youth had begun, and I was offended that no one noticed the transition in my being. Unfortunately, Vasily Evdokimovich noticed this and began, by virtue of that, to teach me aesthetics, in which, if he will forgive me for saying so, he was extremely limited, and he forced me to write articles at that time. It is a pity, a great pity, that when we moved from the old house to the new one, these articles were lost! With what pleasure I would read them now! What did I not write! There were articles written in competition with Temira, there were literary reviews, and in them I "destroyed" classicism. Vasily Evdokimovich would go into raptures, making corrections (and no wonder—it was his own thoughts that were being repeated by me). I translated my reviews into French and proudly handed them to Marshal the author's French tutor: "See, this is how I respect your Boileau." There were also historical articles: a comparison of Marfa Boretskaya a historical figure, often called Marfa the Mayor, who defended the independence of Novgorod (that is, not the real one, but the Spartan Marfa about whom Karamzin wrote a story) with Zenobia of Palmyra; Boris Godunov with Cromwell. It is a pity that I did not write my comparisons in French, for I am sure that they were so inept that they would have ended up as examples in Noël's Course of Literature, in the section Paralèles et Caractères.

(*) See the epigraph cited above.