Reflections: Various Variations on Old Themes

baric dramas of Shakespeare, although talent might flicker in them; he believed that a poet’s inspiration could only flow into the clay forms of Batteux and La Harpe; he believed that the soulless poem of Boileau was the Corpus juris poëticis Body of poetic law; he believed that no one had written better prose than Cicero; he believed that a drama required three unities just as a Jew required circumcision. For all this, there was no vulgarity in a single word of Marchal’s. He began reading Racine with me at the very time I fell into the hands of Schiller’s "The Robbers"—Karl Moor’s gang led me into the Bohemian forests of Romanticism for a long time. Vasily Evdokimovich unremittingly helped the robbers, and the Chinese slippers of the La Harpe viewpoint were tearing at the seams and leather.

From what has been said, it is already clear that the whole of my education was unsystematic; because of this, I learned very little, and instead of a harmonious whole, a disorderly mass of various bits of knowledge, commonplaces, and things intertwined with fantasies and dreams formed in my head. Science, however, was not a dead letter for me, but a living part of my existence; but we shall see that later. To the time of which I am speaking belongs the most interesting article of my childhood. The world of books did not satisfy me; my blossoming soul demanded living sympathy, affection, a companion, love, not a book—and I finally summoned up sympathy for myself, and from the pure breast of a girl.

Now with the sugar's

Soothing juice

Tame the harsh, burning force.

Schiller.

Back in those days, when Mme. Iro and Mme. Berta were still alive, Bouchot had not yet left for Metz, and Karl Karlovich had not yet flown to paradise to the sounds of an organ, a relative who came from the Vladimir Province sometimes visited us; at first, she was a little girl, then a little older. She always arrived from Melenki accompanied by her aunt, who looked strikingly like the Princess of Angoulême and Brussels lace; this aunt had the pleasant habit of depositing money in the pawnshop annually. At