Piotr Karpenko

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Soon after his recovery his parents took him to Russia, where later he passed his examinations and was admitted to some technical institute.

 

For several years after this incident I did not see Karpenko, but regularly on each of my Saint’s­ days and birthdays I received a long letter from him, in which he usually began by describing his inner and outer life in detail and went on to ask my opinion on a long list of questions which interested him, chiefly on religious subjects. His first serious enthusiasm for our common ideas arose seven years after the duel I have described.

One summer, while travelling to Kars for the holidays by mail­ coach—at that time there was no railway there—he passed through Alexandropol, and learning that I was there at the time, he stopped off to see me. I had gone to Alexandropol that summer in order to carry out, in solitude and without being disturbed, certain practical experiments relating to questions which particularly interested me then, concerning the influence of the vibrations of sound on various types of human beings as well as on other forms of life.

The day he arrived I had lunch with him, and suggested that he should accompany me to the large stable which I had converted into an original kind of laboratory, where I used to spend every afternoon. He examined everything that I had there and became so interested in what I was doing that, when he left that day for Kars to visit his family, he decided to return in three days. On his return he stayed with me almost the entire summer, going only for a day or two, from time to time, to see his family in Kars.

At the end or the summer several members of our recently formed group, the Seekers of Truth, joined me in Alexandropol with the object of going to make some excavations among the ruins of Ani, the ancient capital of Armenia. On this expedition Karpenko joined us for the first time, and, being in contact for several weeks with various members of our group, he was gradually drawn into the sphere of the questions which interested us.

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