"He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of him, but I
never sympathized with this desire to shut himself up for the rest of
his life in a little farm of his own. It's the correct thing to say
that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what
a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our
intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm,
it's a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of
earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life,
to retreat and bury oneself in one's farm--it's not life, it's egoism,
laziness, it's monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good
works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole
globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities
and peculiarities of his free spirit.

"My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office, dreamed of how he
would eat his own cabbages, which would fill the whole yard with such a
savoury smell, take his meals on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit
for whole hours on the seat by the gate gazing at the fields and the
forest. Gardening books and the agricultural hints in calendars were
his delight, his favourite spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading
newspapers, too, but the only things he read in them were the
advertisements of so many acres of arable land and a grass meadow with
farm-houses and buildings, a river, a garden, a mill and millponds, for
sale. And his imagination pictured the garden-paths, flowers and fruit,
starling cotes, the carp in the pond, and all that sort of thing, you
know. These imaginary pictures were of different kinds according to the
advertisements which he came across, but for some reason in every one
of them he had always to have gooseberries. He could not imagine a
homestead, he could not picture an idyllic nook, without gooseberries.