Reflections: Various Variations on Old Themes

sharply transitioned her into adulthood. She knew my grief over her curls, and on my birthday, the 25th of March, she did her hair in the child-style again. My birthday was a wonderful day! She gave me a cast-iron ring with a silver lining; on it was engraved her name, some motto, some sign, a snake’s head, etc.; in the evening, we recited an excerpt from "Fingal" by heart—she was Moina, I was Fingal (I had probably learned the verses by heart for my birthday as a surprise for myself); since then, I have never once opened Ozerov. Studies went even more lazily: living sympathy pleased me more than books. I had never spoken of feelings with anyone before her, and meanwhile, there were already many of them, thanks to the rapid development of my soul and the reading of novels; it was to her that I imparted my first dreams, dreams as motley as birds of paradise and as pure as a child’s babble; I wrote in her album about twenty times, in Russian, French, German, and, I remember, even in Latin. She listened to me with great seriousness and assured me all the more that I was born to be a Roland a reference to the Paladin of Charlemagne or an Alcibiades the Athenian statesman and general; I loved her even more for these assurances. Back then, I was warming myself against all the cold of my short life with the sweet friendship of the Melenki peri. Having exchanged the fruits of our sentiments, we began to read together—first various tales, "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Numa Pompilius," Florian, and so on, bathing them in rivers of burning tears; then we took up "Travels of Anacharsis," and she had the self-denial to listen to this—let us say, extremely learned, useful, and intelligent, but nevertheless boring and lifeless compilation in seven volumes.

I do not know if her influence on me was good in all respects. Despite many true and beautiful merits, the Melenki cousin was not free from the strained "sentimentality" that is instilled in girls in the dormitories of women’s boarding schools, where they pierce monograms into their skin with needles and make vows not to take off a certain ribbon for a year; she was also not free from moralizing maxims, that tares-like weed that filled the novels and comedies of the last century. She loved to be called Temira, and all her relatives called her that; this alone proves the sentimentality; truly, a simple person just does not