Collection of Posthumous Articles, Vol. 2

...“Aula”: original: "Es ist ein Ende mit der grossen Hochschule Ruthenias." It is the end of the great higher school of Ruthenia. Even the savage cholera of fanaticism—insane, shouting, denouncing, police-controlled (like everything in our country) under Magnitsky and Runich—swept by like a malignant cloud, beat the people it met on the road, and vanished, embodying itself in various Photiuses and Countesses. In the gymnasia and schools, the catechism was taught for the sake of form and for the examination, which constantly began with the “law of God.”

When the time came, K. entered the Medico-Surgical Academy. This was also a purely foreign institution, and also not particularly Orthodox. There, Just Christian Loder preached—a friend of Goethe, a teacher of Humboldt, one of that galaxy of strong and free thinkers who raised Germany to a height she had not dreamed of. For these people, science was still a religion, a militant propaganda; for them, freedom from theological chains was still new. They still remembered the struggle; they believed in victory and were proud. Loder would never have agreed to teach anatomy according to Philaret’s catechism. Beside him stood Fischer of Waldheim and the surgeon Hildebrandt, whom I have spoken of elsewhere. Not a word of Russian, not a Russian face, but various other German adjuncts, laboratory assistants, prosectors, and pharmacists: everything Russian was pushed to the background. We remember only one exception, Detkovsky. K. cherished his memory, and he likely had a good influence on the students; however, even in later times, the medical faculties did not live the common life of the universities, composed as they were of two nations—Germans and seminarists—but occupied themselves with their own business.

This business seemed insufficient to K., and this is the best proof that he was not a German and did not seek a profession above all else.

He could not have any special sympathy for his own domestic circle; from a young age, he loved to live by himself.