Collection of Posthumous Articles, Vol. 2

The rest of the surrounding environment could only offend and repel him. He began to read, and read, Schiller.

K. later translated all of Shakespeare, but he could never erase Schiller from himself.

Schiller was unusually well-suited to our student. Posa and Max, Karl Moor and Ferdinand—all students, student-robbers: all of this was a protest of the first dawn, of the first indignation. More active in heart than in intellect, K. understood and mastered the poetic reflection of Schiller, his revolutionary philosophy in the dialogues, and he stopped there. He was satisfied; criticism and skepticism were completely alien to him.

A few years after Schiller, he encountered other reading, and his moral life was definitively decided. Everything else passed without a trace and occupied him little. The nineties—that enormous, colossal tragedy in the Schillerian vein, with its reflections and blood, with its gloomy virtues and bright ideals, with that same character of dawn and protest—engulfed him. Even here, K. did not account for himself. He took the French Revolution like a biblical legend; he believed in it, he loved its faces, and he had personal prejudices and hatreds toward it. Nothing called him behind the scenes.

This is how I met him in 1831 at Pasek’s, and this is how I left him in 1847 at Chornaya Gryaz.

A dreamer—not romantic, but rather ethical-political—it is unlikely he could have found in the Medico-Surgical Academy of that time the environment he was looking for. A worm gnawed at his heart, and medical science could not kill it. Moving away from the people around him, he lived more and more into one of those faces that filled his imagination. Running into completely different interests everywhere, into petty little people, he began to turn wild, and grew accustomed to frowning.