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246
SÖNYA KOVALÉVSKY
Sönya often jestingly acknowledged this dependence
on her surroundings, and once wrote a note to my
brother, saying:
Dear Professor : Shall you come to my lecture to-morrow?
Do not, if you are tired. I will try to lecture as well as if you
were there.
Once, when I had sent her some birthday wishes in
rhyme, she replied in the following verses,
characteristic of herself, in which, as often before, she terms
herself a chameleon:
The changeful chameleon, you always knew,
So soon as he sits alone in his nook,
Is dull and ugly and gray in his look;
But in a bright light he is lovely to view.
No beauty has he, but he always reflects
What around him exists of beautiful hue;
He can shimmer alike in gold, green, or blue,
And of all his friends’ hues there is none he rejects.
In this creature, meseems, my likeness I see;
For, dearest of friends, wherever you go
I go in your steps; for it is ay so
That I can’t stay behind, nor be turned back from thee.
To a friend such as you all my reverence is due;
You write and you paint and you draw and what not.
These things are to me but rubbish and rot,
But, mercy upon me ! you poetize too!
In the character of Alice, Sönya, as I have already
remarked, thought to reproduce herself. Indeed, some
of the sentences in the book are so characteristic of her
that they are almost reproductions of words that she
actually spoke. In the great scene of Hjalmar (1st
part, act iii., sc. 2) she has tried to give expression to
her own ardent desire for tenderness, and union with
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