The Wood Demon

In a conversation with Sonya, Mikhail Lvovich Khrushchov admits that it’s difficult for him to be in the house where she lives with her father, the famous professor Serebryakov: “it’s hard and stuffy.” When he visits them, he more than once tried to convince those present that there’s no point in doing science or medicine if “we don’t spare those we work for.” Mikhail Lvovich finds the society that “dully destroys one another” intolerable—society that can easily cut down a forest for unnecessary luxury or “some two or three thousand.” But to the people around him he was incomprehensible and even strange, so they called him the Forest Spirit (Leshi).