Reflections: Various Variations on Old Themes

interrupted by a new face. To the man of French grammar was added a man of Russian grammar, Vasily Evdokimovich Pacifersky, a medical student. My God, how he used to bang the door when he arrived, how he would take off his galoshes, how he would stomp! He wore his hair terribly long and never combed it after leaving the Ryazan Diocesan Seminary; he placed wild stresses on foreign words according to school rules, and he generously supplied French words with the Greek lambda λ and the Russian hard sign ъ at the end. But gratitude to the medical student: he had a warm human soul, and he was the first person with whom I began to study, although not from the very beginning.

While it was a matter of grammar, which lagged, and geography and arithmetic, which ran as outriders, Pacifersky found in me a stubborn laziness and absent-mindedness that astonished even Bouchot, who was astonished by nothing (as I said) except the cathedral church in Metz. He did not know what to do, not belonging to the number of professional teachers ready to explain their science for an hour for a fee to a stone wall. Vasily Evdokimovich would take the money while blushing and several times wanted to quit giving lessons. Finally, he changed one of the "outriders" a metaphor for his teaching subjects, and, having hastily read in Geym, published by Tit Kamenetsky, about Australia—a part of the world invented only for balance and unnecessary—he took up history. Instead of assigning lessons in Schreck a German textbook author "up to the fingernail mark," he would tell me what he remembered and how he remembered it; the next day I had to repeat it to him "in my own words," and I began to study history with the greatest diligence. Pacifersky was surprised and, exhausted by my laziness in grammar, he acted like a true student: he put it aside, and instead of tormenting me with the distinctions between e and ѣ, he took up literature. I repeat, he had a human soul that sympathized with the beautiful—and the lazy student, who during class would occupy himself by carving hieroglyphs into the desk, quickly assimilated the school-romantic views of the future medico-surgeon. Pacifersky's lessons contributed much to the early development of my abilities. At twelve, I remember myself as a perfect child, despite my read-