In order to support them, the shelves were connected by big
wooden beams, and between them was a thin birch-wood door, behind
which stood my father's writing-table and his old-fashioned
semicircular arm-chair.

There are portraits of Dickens and Schopenhauer and
Fet [6] as a young man on the walls, too, and the well-known
group of writers of the Sovremennik [7] circle in 1856,
with Turgenieff, Ostrovsky, Gontcharof,
Grigorovitch, Druzhinin, and my father, quite young
still, without a beard, and in uniform.

[6] Afanasyi Shenshin, the poet, who adopted
his mother's name, Fet, for a time, owing to official
difficulties about his birth-certificate. An intimate friend of
Tolstoy's.

[7] "Sovremennik," or "Contemporary Review,"
edited by the poet Mekrasof, was the rallying-place for the "men
of the forties," the new school of realists. Ostrovsky is
the dramatist; Gontcharof the novelist, author of
"Oblomof"; Grigorovitch wrote tales about peasant
life, and was the discoverer of Tchekhof's talent as a
serious writer.


My father used to come out of his bedroom of a morning--it
was in a corner on the top floor--in his dressing-gown, with his
beard uncombed and tumbled together, and go down to dress.