The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

will agree in the 19th century to be called Plenira, Temira, Selena, or Uslad. I soon rebelled against this classical naming, and to spite Boileau original: "Et changer, sans respect de l'oreille et du son / Lycidas en Pierrot, et Philis en Toinon. Art Poétique." And to change, without respect for the ear or the sound, / Lycidas into Pierrot, and Philis into Toinon., I advised her to call herself Toinon; and when the second volume of "Eugene Onegin" was published, I strongly advised her to simply remain Tatyana, as the priest had christened her. The change of name did little to help: Tanya, as before, whenever she met with the "pale friend of the globe" a poetic reference to the moon, would make a lyrical appeal to it, and as before, she compared her life to flowers thrown into the "turbulent waves" of the Klyazma River. In her leisure hours, she loved to weep over her bitter lot and the persecutions of fate (which, incidentally, pursued her so modestly that its blows were entirely invisible to outsiders) and over the fact that "no one in the world understands her." This was the La Fontaine element; no better was the Genlisian-moral one: she—the same I, who read who-knows-what—begged me not to touch Werther, recommended moral books, and so on. Now all this seems ridiculous to me, but at the time, Tanya was a Valkyrie for me: I submissively obeyed her prophecies. She knew her authority very well and therefore oppressed me; whenever I revolted and she saw the danger of losing her power, tears would flow from her eyes, and friendly, warm reproaches from her lips. I would feel sorry for her; I felt guilty, and her throne stood unshaken once again. It should be noted that girls around the age of eighteen generally love to school a boy who falls into their hands, testing upon him the weapons prepared for more important conquests; yet, how those same boys school them later, for eighteen years in a row, and the further it goes, the worse it gets! And so, I listened to Tanya, played the sentimentalist, and at times, moral maxims—pale and gaunt—served as the finale of my speeches. I imagine that in those moments I was very ridiculous; it was difficult to bind my lively character with the candy-wrapper of false sensitivity, and it did not suit me at all to scatter moral maxims made of treacle without the ginger of Genlisian morality. But what can be done! I went through this, and perhaps it was not entirely bad.