. It will already be a year and a half ago since we found ourselves at last after many wanderings and numerous calamities in this magnificent capital, adorned with innumerable monuments. Here, too, I obtained a position . . . I obtained it and I lost it again. Do you understand? This time it was through my own fault I lost it: for my trait had come out . . . We have now a corner at Amalia Fiodorovna Lippewechsel’s; and what we live upon and what we pay our rent with, I could not say. There are a lot of people living there besides ourselves. A most abominable Sodom . . . hm . . . yes . . . And meanwhile my daughter by my first wife has grown up; and what my daughter has had to put up with from her step-mother whilst she was growing up, I won’t speak of. For, though Katerina Ivanovna is full of generous feelings, she is a high-tempered lady, irritable, and will cut you off ...Yes. But it’s no use going over that! Sonia, as you may well imagine, has had no education. I did make an effort four years ago to give her a course of geography and world history, but as I was not very well up in those subjects myself and we had no suitable manuals, and what books we had . . . hm, anyway, we don’t have them now, those books, so all our instruction came to an end. We stopped at Cyrus of Persia.5 Since she has attained years of maturity, she has read other books of novelistic tendency and recently she had read with great interest a book she got through Mr. Lebeziatnikov, Lewes’ Physiology6—do you know it?—and even recounted extracts from it to us: and that’s the whole of her education. And now may I venture to address you, dear sir, on my own account with a private question.