The Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

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suddenly translated it into adulthood. She knew my grief over my curls, and on my birthday, the 25th of March, she combed her hair like a child's again. My birthday was a wonderful day! She gave me a cast-iron ring with a silver lining. On it was engraved her name, some sort of motto, some sort of sign, a snake’s head, and so on. In the evening, we read from memory an excerpt from "Fingal"—she was Moina, I was Fingal referring to James Macpherson’s Ossianic poems, translated into Russian by Ozerov (I had probably been memorizing the verses for my birthday as a surprise). Since that time, I have not opened Ozerov once. My studies became lazier again: living sympathy pleased me more than a book. With no one, ever, before her, had I spoken about feelings, and meanwhile, there were many of them already, thanks to the rapid development of my soul and the reading of novels. To her, I transferred my first dreams, dreams as motley as birds of paradise and as pure as a child’s babble. To her, I wrote in her album about twenty times, in Russian, in French, in German, and, I recall, even in Latin. She listened to me with great seriousness and assured me even more that I was born to be Roland Rollandini referring to a romantic literary hero or Alcibiades. I loved her even more for these certifications. I was warming myself then, for all the cold of my short life, with the sweet friendship of the Melenki peri referring to a beautiful, fairy-like creature from Persian mythology. Having exchanged the fruits of our feelings, we began to read together—first various tales, "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Numa Pompilius," Florian, and so on, bathing them in rivers of burning tears. Then we took up "Travels of Anacharsis," and she had the self-denial to listen to this—admittedly extremely learned, useful, and intelligent, but nonetheless boring and lifeless compilation in seven volumes.

I do not know if her influence on me was good in every sense. With many true and beautiful merits, the Melenki cousin was not free from the strained "sentimentality" that is instilled in girls in the dormitories of women's boarding schools, where they pierce monograms into their skin with needles, where they take vows not to take off a certain ribbon for a year. Nor was she free from moral sentences, that chaff which filled the novels and comedies of the last century. She loved to be called Temira, and all our relatives called her that. This alone proves the sentimentality. Honestly, a person would simply not agree in the 19th century to be called Plenira, Temira, Selena, or Uslad.