it’s not only the devil no one dares to look straight in the face, for no one dares to look straight at himself, and it’s not only children who like being soothed to sleep. Our older inventions came to us from the East, our later ones we’ve borrowed, and half spoiled, from the West, while we still persist in talking about the independence of Russian art! Some bold spirits have even discovered an original Russian science; twice two makes four with us as elsewhere, but the result’s obtained more ingeniously, it appears.’ ‘But wait a minute, Sozont Ivanitch,’ cried Litvinov. ‘Do wait a minute! You know we send something to the universal exhibitions, and doesn’t Europe import something from us.’ ‘Yes, raw material, raw products. And note, my dear sir: this raw produce of ours is generally only good by virtue of other exceedingly bad conditions; our bristles, for instance, are large and strong, because our pigs are poor; our hides are stout and thick because our cows are thin; our tallow’s rich because it’s boiled down with half the flesh.... But why am I enlarging on that to you, though; you are a student of technology, to be sure, you must know all that better than I do. They talk to me of our inventive faculty! The inventive faculty of the Russians! Why our worthy farmers complain bitterly and suffer loss because there’s no satisfactory machine for drying grain in existence, to save them from the necessity of putting their sheaves in ovens, as they did in the days of Rurik; these ovens are fearfully wasteful--just as our bast shoes and our Russian mats are,--and they are constantly getting on fire. The farmers complain, but still there’s no sign of a drying-machine. And why is there none? Because the German farmer doesn’t need them; he can thrash his wheat as it is, so he doesn’t bother to invent one, and we ... are not capable of doing it! Not capable--and that’s all about it! Try as we may! From this day forward I declare whenever I come across one of those rough diamonds, these self-taught geniuses, I shall say: “Stop a minute, my worthy friend! Where’s that drying-machine? let’s have it!” But that’s beyond them! Picking up some old cast-off shoe, dropped ages ago by St. Simon or Fourier, and sticking it on our heads and treating it as a sacred relic--that’s what we’re capable of; or scribbling an article on the historical and contemporary significance of the proletariat in the principal towns of France--that we can do too; but I tried once, asking a writer and political economist of that sort--rather like your friend, Mr. Voroshilov--to mention twenty towns in France, and what do you think came of that? Why the economist in despair at last mentioned Mont-Fermeuil as one of the French towns, remembering it probably from some novel of Paul de Kock’s. And that reminds me of the following anecdote. I was one day strolling through a wood with a dog and a gun----’ ‘Are you a sportsman then?’ asked Litvinov.