Dead Souls

In childhood he was a clever, talented boy, now lively, now pensive. By a lucky or unlucky chance, he landed in a school of which the director was, in his own way, a remarkable man, despite certain whimsicalities. Alexander Petrovich possessed the gift of sensing the nature of the Russian man and knew the language in which to speak to him. No child left his presence crestfallen; on the contrary, even after a severe reprimand, he would feel a certain cheerfulness and a desire to smooth over the nastiness or trespass committed. The crowd of his charges seemed to look so mischievous, casual, and lively that one might have taken them for disorderly, unbridled freebooters. But that would have been a mistake: one man's power was felt only too well by these freebooters. There was no mischief maker or prankster who would not come to him on his own and tell all the mischief he had done. The least movement of their thoughts was known to him. In all things he acted extraordinarily. He used to say that one ought first of all to awaken ambition in a man—he called ambition the force that pushes a man forward—without which he cannot be moved to activity. Many times he did not restrain playfulness and prankishness at all: in elementary playfulness he saw the awakening development of the soul's qualities. He needed it in order to see precisely what lay hidden in a child. So an intelligent doctor looks calmly at the temporary fits approaching and the rashes appearing on the body, not combatting them, but studying them attentively, so as to find out for certain precisely what is concealed inside the man.

He did not have many teachers: the majority of the subjects he taught himself. And, truth to tell, he knew how to convey the very soul of a subject in a few words, without any of the pedantic terminology, the enormous views and opinions that young professors like to flaunt, so that even a young child could see clearly the precise need for this subject. He maintained that what man needed most was the science of life, that once he knew that, he would then know for himself what he must occupy himself with predominantly.