A war-steed presently is brought; High-bred, but docile to his weight, As if it sensed the touch of fate, The charger shudders; eyes athwart, It struts amid the dust of battle, Proud of the hero in its saddle. No one interrupted me; no one asked me to stop. Triumphant, I recited the victorious lines: He bids the lords beneath his scepters, Both Swede and Russian, to his tent; And gaily mingling prey and captors Lifts high his cup in compliment To the good health of his “preceptors.” I stopped. With Pushkin’s powerful help, I had defeated my indifferent examiners. 43 Admitted to the life of all the people in the world, they had a whole world to discover. And the world, as Galina Apollonovna’s robe suggested, contained dragons, birds, gnarled trees, and countless other things that Apollonians called “nature.” “What is it that you lack?” asked the copper-shouldered and bronze- legged Efim Nikitich Smolich of Babel’s bewildered little boy, who wrote tragedies and played the violin but did not know how to swim. “Your youth is not the problem, it will pass with the years . . . What you lack is a feeling for nature.” He pointed with his stick at a tree with a reddish trunk and a low crown. “What kind of tree is that?” I did not know. “What’s growing on that bush?” I did not know that, either. We were walking through the little park next to Aleksandrovsky Avenue. The old man poked his stick at every tree; he clutched my shoulder every time a bird flew by and made me listen to the different calls. “What kind of bird is that singing?” I was unable to reply. The names of trees and birds, their division into