There was some talk of nihilists in this book. I remember that, according to Prince Meshtcheski, a nihilist was such a poisonous person that his very glance would kill a fowl. What he wrote about nihilists struck me as being offensive and rude, but I understood nothing else, and fell into a state of melancholy. It was evident that I could not appreciate good books; for I was convinced that it was a good book. Such a great and beautiful lady could never read bad books.
"Well, did you like it?" she asked me when I took back the yellow novel by Meshtcheski.
I found it very hard to answer no; I thought it would make her angry. But she only laughed, and going behind the portière which led into her sleeping-chamber, brought back a little volume in a binding of dark-blue morocco leather.
"You will like this one, only take care not to soil it."
This was a volume of Pushkin's poems. I read all of them at once, seizing upon them with a feeling of greed such as I experienced whenever I happened to visit a beautiful place that I had never seen before. I always tried to run all over it at once. It was like roaming over mossy hillocks in a marshy wood, and suddenly seeing spread before one a dry plain covered with flowers and bathed in sun-rays. For a second one gazes upon it enchanted, and then one begins to race about happily, and each contact of one's feet with the soft growth of the fertile earth sends a thrill of joy through one.
Pushkin had so surprised me with the simplicity and music of poetry that for a long time prose seemed unnatural to me, and it did not come easy to read it. The prologue to "Ruslan" reminded me of grandmother's best stories, all wonderfully compressed into one, and several lines amazed me by their striking truth.
There, by ways which few observe,
Are the trails of invisible wild creatures.
I repeated these wonderful words in my mind, and I could see those footpaths so familiar to me, yet hardly visible to the average being. I saw the mysterious footprints which had pressed down the grass, which had not had time to shake off the drops of dew, as heavy as mercury. The full, sounding lines of poetry were easily remembered. They adorned everything of which they spoke as if for a festival. They made me happy, my life easy and pleasant. The verses rang out like bells heralding me into a new life. What happiness it was to be educated!
The magnificent stories of Pushkin touched me more closely, and were more intelligible to me than anything I had read. When I had read them a few times I knew them by heart, and when I went to bed I whispered the verses to myself, with my eyes closed, until I fell asleep. Very often I told these stories to the orderlies, who listened and laughed, and abused me jokingly. Sidorov stroked my head and said softly:
"That's fine, is n't it? O Lord—"