Prince Yuri Lubovedsky
Vitvitskaïa died in Russia from a cold she caught while on a trip on the Volga. She was buried in Samara. I was there at the time of her death, having been called from Tashkent when she fell ill.
Recalling her now, when I have already passed the halfway mark of my life and have been in almost all countries and seen thousands of women, I must confess that I never have met and probably never will meet another such woman.
And so, to continue my interrupted story of my elder comrade, my essence-friend Prince Lubovedsky, I will say that soon after my departure from Constantinople he also left, and I did not see him again for several years. But thanks to letters which I received from him periodically, I was kept more or less informed as to where he was and what was the most important interest of his life at the given time.
First he went to the island of Ceylon, and then undertook a journey up the river Indus to its source. After that he wrote to me at various times from Afghanistan, from Baluchistan, from Kafiristan, until our correspondence suddenly ceased; and from then on there was neither news nor rumour of him.
I was convinced that he had perished on one of his journeys, and little by little I had become accustomed to the thought that I had lost for ever the man nearest to me, when suddenly, quite unexpectedly, I ran across him again in exceptional circumstances in the very heart of Asia.
In order to throw more light on this last meeting of mine with a man who, according to my notions, represents in contemporary conditions of life an ideal worthy of imitation, I must again interrupt my present story to say something about a certain Soloviev, who also became my friend and comrade. Soloviev was later an authority on what is called Eastern medicine in general, and on Tibetan medicine in particular, and he was also the world’s greatest specialist in the knowledge of the action of opium and hashish on the psyche and organism of man.
My last meeting with Yuri Lubovedsky took place during a journey in Central Asia on which I was accompanied by Soloviev.
134