A fellow-student, Nazáryef, has given us his impression of Tolstoy as a student. He says: I kept clear of the Count, who from our first meeting repelled me by his assumption of coldness, his bristly hair and the piercing expression of his half-closed eyes. I had never met a young man with such a strange and, to me, incomprehensible air of importance and self-satisfaction.... At first I seldom met the Count, who in spite of his awkwardness and bashfulness had joined the small group of so-called 'aristocrats.' He hardly replied to my greetings, as if wishing to intimate that even here we were far from being equals, since he drove up with a fast trotter and I came on foot.... It so happened that Nazáryef and Tolstoy were both late for a lecture on History one day, and were incarcerated together by order of the Inspector. One gathers that Tolstoy was in those days particularly careful of his personal appearance, his clothes indicating his aristocratic pretensions. But though externally the Tolstoy of 1846 differed greatly from the Tolstoy of forty years later, his conversation ran on much the same lines as in later life, and was uttered with the intensity of conviction and the flashes of dry humour which have since made even the most didactic of his writings so readable. Their conversation in their place of confinement having led to some mention of Lérmontof's poem, _The Demon_, Tolstoy took occasion to speak ironically of verse generally, and then, noticing a volume his companion had of Karamzín's _History of Russia_, he attacked History as the dullest and almost the most useless of subjects. A collection of fables and useless details, sprinkled with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names.... Who wants to know that the second marriage of John the Terrible, with Temrúk's daughter, took place on 21st August 1562; and his fourth marriage, with Anna Alexéyevna Koltórsky, in 1572? Yet they expect me to grind all this, and if I don't, the examiner gives me a 'one.' Later on, says Nazáryef, 'the, to me, irresistible force of Tolstoy's doubts fell upon the University, and on University teaching in general. The phrase, "The Temple of Science," was constantly on his lips. Remaining perfectly serious himself, he portrayed our professors in such a comical light that, in spite of all my efforts to appear indifferent, I laughed like one possessed.... "Yet," said Tolstoy, "we both had a right to expect that we should leave this temple useful men, equipped with knowledge. But what shall we really carry away from the University?... What shall we be good for, and to whom shall we be necessary?" Nazáryef says that in spite of the feeling half of dislike, half of perplexity, that Tolstoy evoked in him, he well remembers that he was dimly conscious of something remarkable, exceptional, and at the same time inexplicable, about him.