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316
APPENDICES
APPENDIX P
Aides-de-camp.—I. P. H.
APPENDIX G
While yet a mere child, but already an acute observer, she
had witnessed the great crisis of the liberation of the Russian
serfs. In her romance, " The Vorontzoff Family," she tells the
impression produced on the noble proprietors by this crisis.
Tlie daughter of one of these proprietors becomes a nihilist,
and is taken a prisoner to Siberia. The author read this book
aloud to a scientific circle in Stockholm shortly before her
death, and produced great enthusiasm. Fortunately the
manuscript was found complete, and will be published.
Of the other romance, the "Væ Victis," only one chapter was
published. Its fundamental conception reveals, more than any
other work, its author’s nature.
APPENDIX H
Madame Kovalévsky very accurately described this fluttering
to and fro between mathematics and literature in a letter to
Madame Schabelskoy. "I understand," she says, "your
surprise at my being able to busy myself simultaneously with
literature and mathematics. Many who have never had an
opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confound it with
arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however,
it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination,
and one of the leading mathematicians of our century states the
case quite correctly when he says that it is impossible to be a
mathematician without being a poet in soul. Only, of course,
in order to comprehend the accuracy of this definition, one
must renounce the ancient prejudice that a poet must invent
something which does not exist, that imagination and invention
are identical. It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive
that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others
look. And the mathematician must do the same thing. As for
myself, all my life I have been unable to decide for which I had
the greater inclination, mathematics or literature. As soon as
my brain grows wearied of purely abstract speculations it im-
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