'university' branches of mathematics. What \Yas particula-rly remarkable, too, \vas that he never read more than one book, and that book, Francoeur's Course, he read constantly for ten years; but, being abstemious by temperament and having no love for luxury, he never went beyond a certain page.
I chose the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics because the natural sciences \Vere taught in that Faculty, and just at that time I developed a great passion for natural science.
A rather strange meeting had led me to these studies.
After the famous division of the family property in 1 822, which I have described, my father's older brother, Alexander, went to live in Petersburg. For a long time nothing was heard of him; then suddenly a rumour spread that he was getting married. He was at that time over sixty, and everyone knew that besides a grO\vn-up son he had other children. He did in fact marry the mother of his eldest son; the 'young woman,' was over fifty.
With this marriage he legitimised, as they said in the old days, his son. Why not all the children? It would be hard to say why, if we had not known his main purpose in doing what he did; his one desire was to deprive his brothers of the inheritance, and this he completely attained by legitimising the son. In the famous inundation of Petersburg in 1 824 the old man was drenched with water in his carriage. He caught cold, took to his bed, and at the beginning of 1 825 he died.
Of the son there were strange rumours. It was said that he was unsociable, refused to make acquaintances, sat alone for ever absorbed in chemistry, spent his life at his microscope, read even at dinner and hated feminine society. Of him it had been said in Woe from Wit,s
G Griboyedov's famous comedy, which appeared and had a large rirculation in manuscript copies in 182<�. its performance and publication being prevented by the censorship. \Vhen performt>d later it was in a very mutilated form. It was a lively satire on Moscow society and full of references to well-known persons, such as lzmaylov and Tolstoy 'the
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He is a chemist, lze is a botanist,
Our nephew, Prince Fedor,
He flies from women and even from me.
His uncles, who transferred to him the rancour they had felt for his father, never spoke of him except as 'the Chemist,' using this word as a term of disparagement, and assuming that chemistry was a subject that could by no means be studied by a gentleman.
Before his death the father used to persecute his son dreadfully, not merely affronting him with the spectacle of his greyheaded father's cynical debauchery, but actually being j ealous of him as a possible rival in his seraglio. The Chemist on one occasion tried to escape from this ignoble existence by means of laudanum. He happened to be rescued by a comrade, with whom he used to \York at chemistry. His father was thoroughly frightened, and before his death had begun to treat his son better.
After his father's death the Chemist released the luckless odalisques, halved the heavy obrok laid by his father on the peasants, forgave all arrears and presented them gratis with the army receipts for the full quota of recruits, which the old man had used to sell when he sent his house-serfs for soldiers.
A year and a half later he came to Moscow. I wanted to see him, for I liked him for the way he treated his peasants and because of the undes<>rv<>d ill-will his uncles bore him.
One morning a small man in gold spectacles, with a big nose, who had lost half his hair, and \vhose fingers were burnt by chemical reagents, called upon my father. My father met him coldly, sarcastically; his nephew responded in the same coin and gave him quite as good as he got: after taking each other's measure they began speaking of extraneous matters with external indifference, and parted politely but with concealed dislike.
l\1y father saw that here was a fighter who would not give in to him.
Th<>y did not become more intimate later. The Chemist very rarely visited his uncles; the last time he saw my father was aft<>r the Senator's death, when he came to ask him for a loan of thirty thousand roubl!•s for the purchase of some land. My father would not lend it. The Chemist was moved to anger and, rub-American.' Griboyedov was imprisoned in 1 825 in connection with the Fourteenth of December. ( Tr.)
This passage, not entirely accura tely quoted, is from Act III, scene 2.
( A .S. )
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bing his nose, observed with a smile, 'There is no risk whatever in it; my estate is entailed ; I am borrowing money for its improvement. I have no children and we are each other's heirs.'
The old man of seventy-five never forgave his nephew for this sally.
I took to visiting the Chemist from time to time. He lived in a way that was very much his own. In his big house on the Tverskoy Boulevard he used one tiny room for himself and one as a laboratory. His old mother occupied another l ittle room· on the other side of the corridor; the rest of the house \Vas neglected and remained exactly as it had been when his father left it to go to Petersburg. The blackened candelabra, the unusual furniture, all sorts of rarities, a clock said to have been bought by Peter I in Amsterdam, an arm-chair said to have come from the house of Stanislas Leszczynski/ frames without pictures in them, pictures turned to the wall, were all l eft anyhow, filling up three big, unheated and unlighted rooms. Servants were usually playing the torban and smoking in the hall, where i n old days they had scarcely dared to breathe or say their prayers. A manservant would light a candle and escort one through this arsenal, observing every time that I had better not take my cloak off for it was very cold in the big rooms. Thick layers of dust covered the horned trophies and various curios, the reflections of which moved together with the candle in the elaborate mirrors ; straw left from packing lay undisturbed here and there together with scraps of paper and bits of string.
Through a row of these rooms one reached at last a door hung with a rug, which led to the terribly overheated study. In this the Chemist, in a soiled dressing-gown lined with squirrel fur, was invariably sitting, surrounded by piles of books, and rows of phials, rctorts, crucibles, and other apparatus. In that study where Chevalier's microscope now reigned supreme and there was always a smell of chlorine, and where a few years before terrible piteous deeds had been perpetrated-in that study I was born. My father, on his return from foreign parts, before his quarrel with his brother, stayed for some months in his house, and in the same house my wife was born in 181 7. The Chemist sold the house two years later, and it chanced that I was in the house again at evening parties of Sverbeyev's,8 arguing there 7 Stanislas Leszczynski, King- of Poland from 1 702 to 1 709. His daughter Maria was married to Louis XV of France. (Tr. ) 8 Sverbeyev, Dmitry 1\"ikolayevich ( 1 799-1876). Representatives of the