Ekim Bey

While I was getting better we conversed and chatted about all kinds of things, but gradually our talks began to take a philosophical turn, and when I had recovered we parted as friends, and from then on kept up an uninterrupted correspondence.

That year he left the military school in Germany to enter medical school, as his inner convictions had changed during this time and impelled him to give up his military career in order to become an army physician.
Four years passed.

One day, in the Caucasus, I received a letter from him in which he wrote that he was already a physician and would like to see me, and at the same time to visit the Caucasus which had interested him for a long time, and he asked when and where he could meet me.
I was living that summer in the town of Suram, where I was at work making objects in pIaster-of-Paris. I sent him a telegram that I was impatiently awaiting his arrival. A few days later he came.

That year Pogossian, Yelov and Karpenko, who had been a friend of my boyhood, had also come to Suram to spend the summer. Ekim Bey soon became intimate with these comrades of mine and felt like an old friend of theirs.

We spent the entire summer in Suram, from where we frequently made short excursions, usually on foot. We climbed the Suram mountain pass, and explored the environs of Borzhom and Mikhaïlov in order to come in contact with the people in these places who had not yet been exposed to the effects of contemporary civilization, and once we even visited the famous Khevsurs, who have driven all the learned ethnographers mad.

Ekim Bey, living several months in such conditions with us— young men of his own age who were already thoroughly stuffed with all kinds of Don Quixotic aspirations—and taking part in all our exchanges of opinion, was willy-nilly drawn into our ‘psychopathy’ and, like us, burned with eagerness to jump over his own knees.

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