Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/293

Rh of a new life burst into flames over Russia, Kovalevsky hastened back from his exile, and took his place among those who were fighting for the triumph of the three great principles that were inscribed so inspiringly upon his life-banner, the great principles that he himself, not the least among many others, had taught his countrymen to love, to cherish, to prize so dearly as to be ready to lose their life in a struggle for their ascendancy.

He was destined to behold the slow dawn, and the clouds that dimmed its resplendent glory soon after its very first rays pierced the gloom. He died at the time when the clouds, grown darkest and blackest, were just beginning to roll away, when the rays of the rising sun were beginning again to make their way into the open, piercing the sombre shadows, when the promise of a glorious sunrise was unmistakable on every side. His great body will not have been lying long in the ground when the sun of liberty, equality, and progress will shine forth upon the political and social firmament of Russia.

Maxim Maximovich Kovalevsky was born in 1851, in Kharkov. His father was a prominent figure among the gentry of the district, and his many private and public duties kept him fully occupied, affording him very little opportunity to devote any attention to his son. The boy's education was left entirely in the hands of his mother, of whom Kovalevsky says in his memoirs that "this able and unusually kind woman, who had received a fine artistic and aesthetic education, despite her youth, beauty and success in society, devoted herself solely to the education of her son." From her and from his French and German tutors, who had charge of his education after he was eight years old, he acquired his love of the artistic, which he preserved all his life. In his early youth he acquired the knowledge of the French and the German languages. The knowledge of the English language was not acquired until he was fifteen, while he did not learn Italian and Spanish until he was twenty-eight. Of his tutors, he remembered especially the Frenchman, who taught him French literary and political history, mythology, and other subjects at a very early age.

When he was thirteen, his father's financial affairs took a turn for the worse, and the boy was sent to a gymnasium, entering the fifth year. He remained at the gymnasium for four years. The course of study offered there did not satisfy him; in his efforts to master the essentials of Latin grammar and rhetoric, in his constant attempts to overcome his aversion to the dryness and inadequacy of the method as well as the content of the school work, he found himself forgetting much of the genuinely interesting knowledge that he had acquired with his private tutors. He relates the following incident, which is extremely characteristic of his recollections of this period of his life. At his final examinations, in answer to a question in mythology, he had to bring out the connection between the heroes of the