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Moscow, { ?}
14/27 November 1901

Very Honoured Miss!

On the first place I must offer you my apologies for
the liberty of addressing myself to you, not having
the honour of knowing you personnally [sic], for which I beg
you graciously to pardon me.

I would beg you to imagine the following situation;
A young man at a very early age, feeling himself
called to a scientific career endowed with an ardent
striving for the interests of knowledge, arrived at
the necessarily fixed persuasion that an answering
following up of the intense desisre in his nature for
intellectual work, alone could give a meaning to his
existence. At that moment he understood his vocation.
His interior enlightenment, however, on the question of
his self determination was far from being in accord
with the exterior conditions of his life. In his eighteenth
year he lost his father, and this meant that to his share
now fell the sollicitude for his family. From this year
he maintained a difficult struggle against want and
deprivation, with contradictions arising from his
broad ideals of concentrated scientific labours, and the
absolute impossibility on account of his external circumstances,