account for this.

In the big house opposite someone was playing the piano at Dolzhikov's.
It was beginning to get dark, and stars were twinkling in the sky.
Here my father, in an old top-hat with wide upturned brim, walked
slowly by with my sister on his arm, bowing in response to greetings.

"Look up," he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the same
umbrella with which he had beaten me that afternoon. "Look up at
the sky! Even the tiniest stars are all worlds! How insignificant
is man in comparison with the universe!"

And he said this in a tone that suggested that it was particularly
agreeable and flattering to him that he was so insignificant. How
absolutely devoid of talent and imagination he was! Sad to say, he
was the only architect in the town, and in the fifteen to twenty
years that I could remember not one single decent house had been
built in it. When any one asked him to plan a house, he usually
drew first the reception hall and drawing-room: just as in old days
the boarding-school misses always started from the stove when they
danced, so his artistic ideas could only begin and develop from the
hall and drawing-room. To them he tacked on a dining-room, a nursery,
a study, linking the rooms together with doors, and so they all
inevitably turned into passages, and every one of them had two or
even three unnecessary doors. His imagination must have been lacking
in clearness, extremely muddled, curtailed. As though feeling that
something was lacking, he invariably had recourse to all sorts of
outbuildings, planting one beside another; and I can see now the
narrow entries, the poky little passages, the crooked staircases
leading to half-landings where one could not stand upright, and