“...knew not only the names, but the contents of all the books in the Rumyantsev Library. He refused promotions and distributed his salary, less than 400 rubles a year, to museum guards and the poor. Slept on bare boards. A Moscow old man with radiant eyes, an eccentric or a saint, died in 1903 in a hospital. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov called him their teacher. It was Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov...”