As for serious articles in Russian, on sociology, for instance, or art and so forth, I don’t read them, simply out of timidity. For some reason in my childhood and youth I had a fear of porters and theatre attendants, and this fear has remained with me up till now. Even now I am afraid of them. It is said that only that which one cannot understand seems terrible. And indeed it is very difficult to understand why hall-porters and theatre attendants are so pompous and haughty and importantly polite. When I read serious articles, I have exactly the same indefinable fear. Their portentous gravity, their playfulness, like an archbishop’s, their over-familiar attitude to foreign authors, their capacity for talking dignified nonsense--“filling a vacuum with emptiness”--it is all inconceivable to me and terrifying, and quite unlike the modesty and the calm and gentlemanly tone to which I am accustomed when reading our writers on medicine and the natural sciences. Not only articles; I have difficulty also in reading translations even when they are edited by serious Russians. The presumptuous benevolence of the prefaces, the abundance of notes by the translator (which prevents one from concentrating), the parenthetical queries and _sics,_ which are so liberally scattered over the book or the article by the translator--seem to me an assault on the author’s person, as well as on my independence as a reader. Once I was invited as an expert to the High Court. In the interval one of my fellow-experts called my attention to the rude behaviour of the public prosecutor to the prisoners, among whom were two women intellectuals. I don’t think I exaggerated at all when I replied to my colleague that he was not behaving more rudely than authors of serious articles behave to one another. Indeed their behaviour is so rude that one speaks of them with bitterness. They behave to each other or to the writers whom they criticise either with too much deference, careless of their own dignity, or, on the other hand, they treat them much worse than I have treated Gnekker, my future son-in-law, in these notes and thoughts of mine. Accusations of irresponsibility, of impure intentions, of any kind of crime even, are the usual adornment of serious articles. And this, as our young medicos love to say in their little articles--quite _ultima ratio._ Such an attitude must necessarily be reflected in the character of the young generation of writers, and therefore I’m not at all surprised that in the new books which have been added to our _belles lettres_ in the last ten or fifteen years, the heroes drink a great deal of vodka and the heroines are not sufficiently chaste.