for you they were a source of nothing less than bliss. He could not imagine that there existed people for whom these pieces of glass were uninteresting. He touchingly begs everyone to buy a coloured photograph.
That night, walking up and down his immense room, he indulges in a monologue on the great Lumire, the discoverer of colour photography, and on sulphuric acid and potash. You sit and listen.
Every one of his passions turns at times into a mania, devouring him completely.
A whole period of his life was enriched by a love of gramophones—not love, but insane passion. He became ill, as it were, with gramophones, and several months were needed for his recovery.
Whatever trifle he grew interested in he distended to enormous proportions. I remember once in Kuokallo he became absorbed in playing gorodki.
"We can't play any more," said his exhausted companions, "it's dark, you can't see anything!"
"Light lanterns," he cried, "we'll play by lantern light."
"But we shall break them."
"What does it matter?"
At the first go he hit a lantern and smashed it to atoms, but he only cried:
"Light another at once!"
This lack of sense for limits was his outstanding characteristic. He was attracted to everything that was gigantic.
The mantelpiece in his room was as large as a door, and the room itself like a square. His house in the village of Bammelsu towered above all the surrounding ones: every beam weighed about three hundredweight: the foundation was of cyclopean blocks.
I remember his showing me, not long before the war, the plan of some grandiose edifice. "What sort of house is that?" I asked. "It is not a house, it's a table,” answered Leonid Andreyev. It appeared that he had given the architect a design for a storied table: the ordinary writing-desk was too small for him and constrained him.
A similar attraction to the enormous, magnificent, and pompous was apparent in him at every step. The hyperbolical style of his books reflected the hyperbolical style of his life. There was some
