The amazing astronomer is at Batum now. As I told her I should go to Batum
too, she will send her address to Feodosia. She has grown cleverer than
ever of late. One day I overheard a learned discussion between her and the
zoologist Wagner, whom you know. It seemed to me that in comparison with
her the learned professor was simply a schoolboy. She has excellent logic
and plenty of good common sense, but no rudder, ... so that she drifts and
drifts, and doesn't know where she is going....

A woman was carting rye, and she fell off the waggon head downwards. She
was terribly injured: concussion of the brain, straining of the vertebrae
of the neck, sickness, fearful pains, and so on. She was brought to me. She
was moaning and groaning and praying for death, and yet she looked at the
man who brought her and muttered: "Let the lentils go, Kirila, you can
thresh them later, but thresh the oats now." I told her that she could talk
about oats afterwards, that there was something more serious to talk about,
but she said to me: "His oats are ever so good!" A managing, vigilant
woman. Death comes easy to such people....




August 28.


I send you Mihailovsky's article on Tolstoy. Read it and grow perfect. It's
a good article, but it's strange; one might write a thousand such articles
and things would not be one step forwarder, and it would still remain
unintelligible why such articles are written....

I am writing my Sahalin, and I am bored, I am bored.... I am utterly sick