I have bored you already, but I must tell you one thing more: the clover
seed costs one hundred roubles a _pood_, and the oats needed for seed cost
more than a hundred. Think of that! They prophesy a harvest and wealth for
me, but what is that to me! Better five kopecks in the present than a
rouble in the future. I must sit and work. I must earn at least five
hundred roubles for all these trifles. I have earned half already. And the
snow is melting, it is warm, the birds are singing, the sky is bright and
spring-like.

I am reading a mass of things. I have read Lyeskov's "Legendary
Characters," religious and piquant--a combination of virtue, piety, and
lewdness, but very interesting. Read it if you haven't read it. I have read
again Pisarev's "Criticism of Pushkin." Awfully naive. The man pulls
Onyegin and Tatyana down from their pedestals, but Pushkin remains unhurt.
Pisarev is the grandfather and father of all the critics of to-day,
including Burenin--the same pettiness in disparagement, the same cold and
conceited wit, and the same coarseness and indelicacy in their attitude to
people. It is not Pisarev's ideas that are brutalizing, for he has none,
but his coarse tone. His attitude to Tatyana, especially to her charming
letter, which I love tenderly, seems to me simply abominable. The critic
has the foul aroma of an insolent captious procurator.

We have almost finished furnishing; only the shelves for my books are not
done yet. When we take out the double windows we shall begin painting
everything afresh, and then the house will have a very presentable
appearance.

There are avenues of lime-trees, apple-trees, cherries, plums, and
raspberries in the garden....