“You are quite right, Nadejda Filaretovna, in thinking that I am able to understand your inward mind and temperament. I venture to believe that you have not made a mistake in considering me a kindred spirit. Just as you have taken the trouble to study public opinion about me, I, too, have lost no opportunity of learning something about you and your manner of life. I have frequently been interested in you as a fellow-creature in whose temperament I recognised many features in common with my own. The fact that we both suffer from the same malady would alone suffice to draw us together. This malady is misanthropy; but a peculiar form of misanthropy, which certainly does not spring from hatred or contempt for mankind. People who suffer from this complaint do not fear the evil which others may bring them, so much as the disillusionment, that craving for the ideal, which follows upon every intimacy. There was a time when I was so possessed by this fear of my fellow-creatures that I stood on the verge of madness. The circumstances of my life were such that I could not possibly escape and hide myself. I had to fight it out with myself, and God alone knows what the conflict cost me! “I have emerged from the strife victorious, in so far that life has ceased to be unbearable. I was saved by work--work which was at the same time my delight. Thanks to one or two successes which have fallen to my share, I have taken courage, and my depression, which used often to drive me to hallucinations and insanity, has almost lost its power over me. “From all I have just said, you will understand I am not at all surprised that, although you love my music, you do not care to know the composer. You are afraid lest you should miss in my personality all with which your ideal imagination has endowed me. You are right. I feel that on closer acquaintance you would not find that harmony between me and my music of which you have dreamt. “Accept my thanks for all your expressions of appreciation for my music. If you only realised how good and comforting it is to a musician to know one soul feels so deeply and so intensely all that he experienced himself while planning and finishing his work! I am indeed grateful for your kind and cordial sympathy. I will not say what is customary under the circumstances: that I am unworthy of your praise. Whether I write well or ill, I write from an irresistible inward impulse. I speak in music because I have something to say. My work is ‘sincere,’ and it is a great consolation to find you value this sincerity. “I do not know if the march will please you.... if not, do not hesitate to say so. Perhaps, later on, I might be more successful.