straightforward logic of Europe; but are taking what's good from abroad intact. A single adaptation in its application to the peasants' sphere is enough. . . . There 's no doing away with communal ownership! . . . Certainly, certainly, I ought not to be ill-humoured ; but to my misfortune I chanced upon a Russian "rough diamond," and had a talk with him, and these rough diamonds, these self-educated geniuses, would make me turn in my grave!'
'What do you mean by a rough diamond?' asked Litvinov.
'Why, there 's a gentleman disporting himself here, who imagines he 's a musical genius. "I have done nothing, of course," he 'll tell you. "I 'm a cipher, because I 've had no training, but I 've incomparably more melody and more ideas in me than in Meyerbeer." In the first place, I say: why have you had no training? and secondly, that, not to talk of Meyerbeer, the humblest German flute-player, modestly blowing his part in the humblest German orchestra, has twenty times as many ideas as all our untaught geniuses; only the flute-player keeps his ideas to himself, and doesn't trot them out with a flourish in the land of Mozarts and Haydns; while our friend the rough diamond has only to strum some little waltz or song, and at once you see him with his hands
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