of five I have been a great reader, as is not perhaps wonderful in a child who was never aware of learning to read.  At ten years of age I had read much of Victor Hugo and other romantics.  I had read in Polish and in French, history, voyages, novels; I knew “Gil Blas” and “Don Quixote” in abridged editions; I had read in early boyhood Polish poets and some French poets, but I cannot say what I read on the evening before I began to write myself.  I believe it was a novel and it is quite possible that it was one of Anthony Trollope’s novels.  It is very likely.  My acquaintance with him was then very recent.  He is one of the English novelists whose works I read for the first time in English.  With men of European reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was otherwise.  My first introduction to English imaginative literature was “Nicholas Nickleby.”  It is extraordinary how well Mrs. Nickleby could chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister Ralph rage in that language.  As to the Crummles family and the family of the learned Squeers it seemed as natural to them as their native speech.  It was, I have no doubt, an excellent translation.  This must have been in the year ’70.  But I really believe that I am wrong.  That book was not my first introduction to English literature.  My first acquaintance was (or were) the “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and that in the very Ms. of my father’s translation.  It was during our exile in Russia, and it must have been less than a year after my mother’s death, because I remember myself in the black blouse with a white border of my heavy mourning.  We were living together, quite alone, in a small house on the outskirts of the town of T—.  That afternoon, instead of going out to play in the large yard which we shared with our landlord, I had lingered in the room in which my father generally wrote.  What emboldened me to clamber into his chair I am sure I don’t know, but a couple of hours afterwards he discovered me kneeling in it with my elbows on the table and my head held in both hands over the Ms. of loose pages.  I was greatly confused, expecting to get into trouble.  He stood in the doorway looking at me with some surprise, but the only thing he said after a moment of silence was: 

“Read the page aloud.”

Luckily the page lying before me was not overblotted with erasures and corrections, and my father’s handwriting was otherwise extremely legible.  When I got to the end he nodded and I flew out of doors thinking myself lucky to have escaped reproof for that piece of impulsive audacity.  I have tried to discover since the reason of this mildness, and I imagine that all unknown to myself I had earned, in my father’s mind, the right to some latitude in my relations with his writing-table.  It was only a month before, or perhaps it was only a week before, that I had read to him aloud from beginning to end, and to his perfect satisfaction, as he lay on his bed, not being very well at the time, the proofs