traditions--and have young ladies all that? To advise young ladies to take
up farming is much the same as to advise them to be bears, and to bend
yokes....

I have no money, but I live in the country: there are no restaurants and no
cabmen, and money does not seem to be needed.




MELIHOVO,
April 13, 1895.


I am sick of Sienkiewicz's "The Family of the Polonetskys." It's the Polish
Easter cake with saffron. Add Potapenko to Paul Bourget, sprinkle with
Warsaw eau-de-Cologne, divide in two, and you get Sienkiewicz. "The
Polonetskys" is unmistakably inspired by Bourget's "Cosmopolis," by Rome
and by marriage (Sienkiewicz has lately got married). We have the catacombs
and a queer old professor sighing after idealism, and Leo XIII, with the
unearthly face among the saints, and the advice to return to the
prayer-book, and the libel on the decadent who dies of morphinism after
confessing and taking the sacrament--that is, after repenting of his errors
in the name of the Church. There is a devilish lot of family happiness and
talking about love, and the hero's wife is so faithful to her husband and
so subtly comprehends "with her heart" the mysteries of God and life, that
in the end one feels mawkish and uncomfortable as after a slobbering kiss.
Sienkiewicz has evidently not read Tolstoy, and does not know Nietzsche, he
talks about hypnotism like a shopman; on the other hand every page is
positively sprinkled with Rubens, Borghesi, Correggio, Botticelli--and that