everybody else had gone to bed. Sometimes, when anything was
written quite illegibly, she would go to my father's study and
ask him what it meant. But this was very rare, because my mother
did not like to disturb him.

When it happened, my father used to take the manuscript in
his hand, and ask with some annoyance, "What on earth is the
difficulty?" and would begin to read it out aloud. When he came
to the difficult place he would mumble and hesitate, and
sometimes had the greatest difficulty in making out, or, rather,
in guessing, what he had written. He had a very bad handwriting,
and a terrible habit of writing in whole sentences between the
lines, or in the corners of the page, or sometimes right across
it.

My mother often discovered gross grammatical errors, and
pointed them out to my father, and corrected them.

When "Anna Karenina" began to come out in the "Russky
Vyestnik," [10] long galley-proofs were posted to my
father, and he looked them through and corrected them.

[10] A Moscow monthly, founded by Katkof, who
somehow managed to edit both this and the daily
"Moskovskiya Vyedomosti," on which "Uncle
Kostya" worked at the same time.


At first the margins would be marked with the ordinary
typographical signs, letters omitted, marks of punctuation, etc.;