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By Root 2346 0

or depression about them; they spent their days without being bored or apathetic; they never exchanged a dull word or look; their conversation never came to an end and was sometimes heated. Their ringing voices resounded in the rooms and reached the garden, or tracing the pattern of their dreams, they quietly communicated to each other the first scarcely perceptible stirrings of thought, the barely audible murmur of the soul. And their silence was sometimes the thoughtful happiness of which Oblomov had dreamed, or the solitary mental work over the endless material they provided for each other. They often sank into silent amazement before the eternally new and resplendent beauty of nature. Their sensitive souls could not get used to this beauty: the earth, the sky, the sea – everything awakened their feelings – and they sat in silence side by side and looked through the same eyes and with one heart at this glory of creation and understood each other without words. They did not meet the morning with indifference; they could not sink dully into the twilight of a warm, starry, southern night. They were kept awake by the constant excitement of the soul and the need to think together, to feel and to talk!… But what was the subject of these heated discussions, quiet conversations, readings, and long walks? Why, everything! While they were still abroad, Stolz lost the habit of reading and working alone: here, alone with Olga, he did not even think alone. He could scarcely manage to keep pace with the agonizing rapidity of her thought and will.

The question of what he was going to do in his family circle was no longer urgent – it had solved itself. He had to initiate her even into his business life, for she felt stifled unless she took an active part in life. He did nothing without her knowledge or active participation, whether it was building, or something to do with her own or Oblomov’s estate, or the company’s business transactions. Not a single letter was posted without her reading it, not a single idea, and still less its realization, was kept from her; she knew everything, and everything interested her because it interested him. At first he did it because he found it impossible to hide anything from her: if he wrote a letter or conducted a conversation with an agent or contractor – it was done in her presence; later he continued this from habit, and at last it became a necessity for him too. Her remarks, advice, approval or disapproval were esteemed by him as a necessary check-up on his plans: he saw that she understood as well as he, that she thought and reasoned no worse than he…. Zakhar resented such ability in his wife, and many men resent it – but Stolz was happy! And reading and learning – the perpetual nourishment of thought and its endless development! Olga was jealous of every book and article she was not shown and was seriously angry or offended if he did not think it worth while showing her something he considered too serious, boring, or incomprehensible to her; she called it pedantic, vulgar, retrograde, and scolded him for being ‘an old German stick-in-the-mud’. They often had lively scenes about it. She was angry and he laughed, she grew angrier and made it up with him only when he stopped pulling her leg and shared his ideas, knowledge, and reading with her. The end of it was that she wanted to read about and to know everything he wanted to. He did not force technical terms on her in order to boast idiotically of a ‘learned wife’. If she had uttered a single word or hinted at such a claim on his part, he would have blushed more than if she had replied with a blank look of ignorance to an elementary question that did not as yet form part of a woman’s education. He merely wanted – and she doubly so – that there should be nothing inaccessible to her understanding, if not to her knowledge. He did not draw diagrams or figures for her, but discussed everything with her and read a great deal without pedantically avoiding economic theories or social or philosophical questions; he spoke with passion and enthusiasm