168. To HIS MOTHER[1]
P.S. Today I read an amusing newspaper article on the inhabitants of Mars in connection with a new English book by Lowell, Mars and Its Canals. Lowell is an astronomer who has worked for a long time in a special observatory which, I believe, is the best in the world (in America).
It is a scientific work. It argues that Mars is inhabitable, that the canals are a miracle of engineering, that people on that planet must be two and two-thirds the size of our people here, and that they, furthermore, have trunks and are covered with feathers or animal skins and have four or six legs. Hmm... the author[2] cheated us by describing the Martian beauties only in part, according to the principle that “... the deceit that elevates is dearer to us than a host of vulgar truths”.[3]
A new story by Gorky has been published—The Last.
[1]The letter to which this is the postscript has been lost.—Ed
. [2] A. Bogdanov, author of the novel Krasnaya Zvezda (The Red Star).—Ed.
[3] These words are from Alexander Pushkin’s The Hero.