and who possess only the sentiment of negation; in a word, savages. Mikhaïlof is one of these. He is the son of a majordomo, or ober-lakeï, at Moscow, and never had any education. When he entered the academy, and had made a reputation, he was willing to be taught, for he is not a fool; and, with this end in view, he turned to that source of all learning, — the magazines and reviews. Now you know in the good old times, if a man — let us say a Frenchman — wanted to get an education, he would study the classics, — the preachers, the tragic poets, the historians, the philosophers; and you can see all the intellectual labor that involved. But nowadays he turns to negative literature, and succeeds very speedily in getting a smattering of such a science. And, again, twenty years ago, he would have found in this same literature traces of the struggle against the authorities and secular traditions of the past; he would have understood from this dispute that there was some thing else. But now he turns directly to a literature where the old traditions are of no avail at all, but men say up and down there is nothing — natural selection, évolution, struggle for existence, negation, and all. In my article.... "
"Do you know," said Anna, after exchanging several glances with Vronsky, and noticing that he was not interested in the artist's education, but was occupied only with the thought of helping him and getting him to paint the portrait. "What do you say?" said she, resolutely cutting short Golenishchef's verbiage, "let us go and see him."
Golenishchef , after deliberating, readily consented; and, as the artist lived in a remote quarter, they had a carriage called. An hour later, Anna, occupying the same seat in the calash with Golenishchef and Vronsky, drove up to an ugly new house in a distant part of the city. When they learned from the concierge's wife, who came to receive them, that Mikhaïlof permitted visitors to his studio, but that he was now at his lodgings a few steps distant, they sent her to him with their cards, and begged to be admitted to see his paintings.
