* * * * *

He picked his teeth and put the toothpick back into the glass.

* * * * *

The husband and wife could not sleep; they began to discuss how bad literature had become and how nice it would be to publish a magazine:  the idea carried them away; they lay awake silent for awhile.  “Shall we ask Boborykin to write?” he asked.  “Certainly, do ask him.”  At five in the morning he starts for his work at the depot; she sees him off walking in the snow to the gate, shuts the gate after him....  “And shall we ask Potapenko?” he asks, already outside the gate.

* * * * *

When he learnt that his father had been raised to the nobility he began to sign himself Alexis.

* * * * *

Teacher:  “‘The collision of a train with human victims’ ... that is wrong ... it ought to be ’the collision of a train that resulted in human victims’ ... for the cause of the people on the line.”

* * * * *

Title of play:  Golden Rain.

* * * * *

There is not a single criterion which can serve as the measure of the non-existent, of the non-human.

* * * * *

A patriot:  “And do you know that our Russian macaroni is better than the Italian?  I’ll prove it to you.  Once at Nice they brought me sturgeon—­do you know, I nearly cried.”  And the patriot did not see that he was only gastronomically patriotic.

* * * * *

A grumbler:  “But is turkey food?  Is caviare food?”

* * * * *

A very sensible, clever young woman; when she was bathing, he noticed that she had a narrow pelvis and pitifully thin hips—­and he got to hate her.

* * * * *

A clock.  Yegor the locksmith’s clock at one time loses and at another gains exactly as if to spite him; deliberately it is now at twelve and then quite suddenly at eight.  It does it out of animosity as though the devil were in it.  The locksmith tries to find out the cause, and once he plunges it in holy water.

* * * * *

Formerly the heroes in novels and stories (e.g.  Petchorin, Onyeguin) were twenty years old, but now one cannot have a hero under thirty to thirty-five years.  The same will soon happen with heroines.

* * * * *

N. is the son of a famous father; he is very nice, but, whatever he does, every one says:  “That is very well, but it is nothing to the father.”  Once he gave a recitation at an evening party; all the performers had a success, but of him they said:  “That is very well, but still it is nothing to the father.”  He went home and got into bed and, looking at his father’s portrait, shook his fist at him.