“They belonged to the sect which believes in the resurrection of the dead here on earth. Their idea is that people must try to resurrect all those who have died in the past. They believe that by hard work for centuries mankind will achieve it. For this purpose one must study all things of antiquity and restore them. Fedorov was librarian to the Rumyantsev Museum and was a passionate collector of all old things: portraits, objects, etc. Mankind must cease to multiply and everything will be resurrected. That is their ideal. It turns out that Vladimir Solovev and Dostoevsky to some extent--there is a letter to this effect--believed in this idea. “Fedorov, I think, is still alive. He must be over eighty. All his life he has lived as an ascetic. When I once visited him in the spring and saw his thin overcoat, I asked him: ‘Do you wear a thin overcoat already?’ and he replied: ‘Christ said, if you have two cloaks, give them to him who has none, and I have two overcoats.’ And after that he always wore only a thin coat. He received a very small salary, ate very, very little, slept almost on the bare boards, helped the poor, and denied himself everything. He wrote a great deal, but his works remain in manuscript: his disciples have no money to publish them, and no publisher can be found to publish them.” There was a plague of poisonous flies at Yasnaya Polyana this summer which made one’s face swell when they bit one. Tolstoi said: “Once, when I was younger, I wanted to write a story about a young man who stayed in the summer at a friend’s house where there was a young girl. The very first day they fell in love and raved about each other. At night, when he was asleep, a fly bit his lip, and half his face swelled up. His lip and cheek were swollen, and his face looked idiotic. When the girl saw him in the morning their love at once came to an end. There were no more illusions: she noticed a number of faults in him which she had not noticed at all the day before.” The conversation was about Father Gregory Petrov.[4] Tolstoi said of him: “As was the case with Ambrosii of the Optino Monastery, he is becoming the slave of his popularity. Generally speaking, fame, popularity, is a dangerous thing. It is also harmful because it prevents one from looking upon people simply, in a Christian way. Now, for instance, I find Gorky very pleasant as a man, and yet I can’t behave to him with perfect sincerity. His popularity prevents me from doing so. It is as if he were not in his right place. To him, too, his popularity is dangerous. His long novels are worse than his short stories, his plays are worse than his novels, and his addresses to the public are simply revolting.