De Piscibus Libri V et De Cetis Liber Unus

Thus ended the period of the dormancy of my life. This is the background with which I entered the propylaea of youth. Marshal 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 of Boileau, whose first canto I still remember to this day; Vasily Evdokimovich bequeathed a devotion to Pushkin and the young literature, the metaphysical vagueness of romanticism, and a notebook of written verses, which I committed to memory even better than Boileau; Temira bequeathed a sincere, warm feeling of love and friendship, a tear for "The Vicar of Wakefield," and later for her own self when she left for Melenki in the autumn. Ergó Therefore, on one side classicism in the form of Marshal, on the other romanticism in the form of Patsiforsky an associate of the tutor Vasily Evdokimovich, and life in the form of Temira—and in the center of it all, I myself, an ardent boy, ready for any impressions, having matured beyond my years, developed partly forcibly, or more accurately, artificially, by the reading of novels and eternal loneliness.

Thus my life continued until my fifteenth year.

II.

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

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