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“What in the devil, Avrámoff, are you always talking about?” he continued, feigning annoyance in order to cover his shame. “Excess of reading seems to have muddled your brain.”

“I speak the pure truth, your royal Highness,” retorted Avrámoff, not in the least hurt, “I have myself experienced the power of those evil spirits; it was Satan who enticed me when I asked your father, the Tsar, to let me print Ovid and Virgil. I have already issued one book with drawings of the gods and their mad doings, and ever since I seem to have been beside myself, and subject to insatiable lechery. The Lord has forsaken me, and all sorts of strange gods, especially Bacchus and Venus, have begun to haunt my dreams.”

“In what guise?” asked Alexis, his curiosity now aroused.

“Bacchus appeared to me in the shape of Martin Luther the heretic, just as you see him in paintings, a red-faced German with a belly as round as a beer barrel. Then Venus took the form of a girl whom I had known during my stay in Amsterdam: a nude body, white as foam, scarlet lips and impudent eyes. And when I awoke in the bath-house, for this devil’s work happened there, the sly witch had changed to the priest’s serf girl, Akoulína, who reviling me for hindering her having a bath, impudently struck me across the face with a bunch of wet birch twigs, and jumping into a snow drift in the yard—it happened in winter—she melted away in thin air.”