Ganz gave up inscribing anyone; but drawing was totally lost for us. No one wanted to learn drawing from that mercenary man.
III
My brother Alexander was at that time at Moscow, in a corps of cadets, and we maintained a lively correspondence. As long as I stayed at home this was impossible, because our father considered it his prerogative to read all letters addressed to our house, and he would soon have put an end to any but a commonplace correspondence. Now we were free to discuss in our letters whatever we liked. The only difficulty was to get money for stamps; but we soon learned to write in such fine characters that we could convey an incredible amount of matter in each letter. Alexander, whose handwriting was beautiful, contrived to get four printed pages on one single page of notepaper, and his microscopic lines were as legible as the best small type print. It is a pity that these letters, which he kept as precious relics, have disappeared. The state police, during one of their raids, robbed him even of these treasures.
Our first letters were mostly about the little details of my new surroundings, but our correspondence soon took a more serious character. My brother could not write about trifles. Even in society he became animated only when some serious discussion was engaged in, and he complained of feeling “a dull pain in the brain”—physical pain, as he used to say—when he was with people who cared only for small talk. He was very much in advance of me in his intellectual development, and he urged me forward, raising new scientific and philosophical questions one after another, and advising me what to read or to study. What a happiness it was for me to have such a brother!—a brother who, moreover, loved me passionately. To him I owe the best part of my development.
Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. “Read poetry,” he wrote: “poetry makes men better.” How often, in my after life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better. He himself was a poet, and had a wonderful facility for writing most musical verses; indeed, I think it a great pity that he abandoned poetry. But the reaction against art, which arose among the Russian youth in the early sixties, and which Turgenev has depicted in Bazarov (Fathers and Sons), induced him to look upon his verses with contempt, and to plunge headlong into the natural sciences. I must say, however, that my favorite poet was none of those whom his poetical gift, his musical ear, and his philosophical turn of mind made him like best. His favorite Russian poet was Venevitinov, while mine was Nekrasov, whose verses were very often unmusical, but appealed most to my heart by their sympathy for “the downtrodden and ill-treated.”
“One must have a set purpose in his life,” he wrote me once. “Without an aim, without a purpose, life is not life.” And he advised me to get a purpose in my life worth living for. I was too young then to find one; but something undetermined, vague, “good” altogether, already rose under that appeal, even though I could not say what that “good” would be.
Our father gave us very little spending money, and I never had any to buy a single book; but if Alexander got a few rubles from some aunt, he never spent a penny of it for pleasure, but bought a book and sent it to me. He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. “One must have some question,” he wrote, “addressed to the book one is going to read.” However, I did not then appreciate this remark, and cannot think now without amazement of the number of books often of a quite special character, which I read in all branches, but particularly in the domain of history. I did not waste my time upon French novels, since Alexander, years before, had characterized them in one blunt sentence: “They are stupid and full of bad language.”
The great questions concerning the conception we should form of the universe—our Weltanschauung, as the Germans say—were, of course, the dominant subjects in our correspondence. In our childhood we had never been religious. We were taken to church; but in a Russian church, in a small parish or in a village, the solemn attitude of the people is far more impressive than the mass itself. Of all that I ever had heard in church only two things had impressed me: the twelve passages from the Gospels, relative to the sufferings of the Christ, which are read in Russia at the night service on the eve of Good Friday, and the short prayer condemning the spirit of domination, which is recited during the Great Lent, and is really beautiful by reason of its simple, unpretentious words and feeling. Pushkin has rendered it into Russian verse.
Later on, at St. Petersburg, I went several times to a Roman Catholic church, but the theatrical character of the service and the absence of real feeling in it shocked me, the more so when I saw there with what simple faith some retired Polish soldier or a peasant woman would pray in a remote corner. I also went to a Protestant church; but coming out of it I caught myself murmuring Goethe’s words:—
“But you will never link hearts together
Unless the linking springs from your own heart.”
Alexander, in the meantime, had embraced with his usual passion the Lutheran faith. He kind read Michelet’s book on Servetus, and had worked out for himself a religion on the lines of that great fighter. He studied with enthusiasm the Augsburg declaration, which he
