Precisely it is what people have failed to comprehend, and therefore have designated as fatalism. As regards other details of the article, I must await the sequel (which I haven’t yet received). At any rate your thoughts are lucid, logical, definitely conceived, and most admirably expressed. Certain details, though, I don’t entirely agree in. We could treat these questions quite otherwise, were we talking to one another, instead of writing. In any case, I regard you as the only representative of our criticism with whom the future will reckon….
I thank you, my kind and much-esteemed Nikolay Nikolayevitch, for the great interest that you show in me. My health is as satisfactory as hitherto, and the attacks are even less violent than in Petersburg. Lately (that is, till about six weeks ago), I have been much occupied with the end of my “Idiot.” Do write and give me the opinion you promised on the book; I await it eagerly.
I have my own idea about art, and it is this: What most people regard as fantastic and lacking in universality, I hold to be the inmost essence of truth. Arid observation of everyday trivialities I have long ceased to regard as realism — it is quite the reverse. In any newspaper one takes up, one comes across reports of wholly authentic facts, which nevertheless strike one as extraordinary. Our writers regard them as fantastic, and take no account of them; and yet they are the truth, for they are facts. But who troubles to observe, record, describe, them? They happen every day and every moment, therefore they are not “exceptional.”…
The Russians are often unjustly reproached with beginning all sorts of things, making great plans — but never carrying out even the most trivial of them.
This view is obsolete and shallow, and false besides. It is a slander on the Russian national character; and even in Bielinsky’s time it was prevalent. How paltry and petty is such a way of driving home actualities! Always the same old story! In this way, we shall let all true actuality slip through our fingers. And who will really delineate the facts, will steep himself in them?
Of Turgenev’s novel I don’t wish even to speak; the devil knows what it may mean! But is not my fantastic “Idiot” the very dailiest truth? Precisely such characters must exist in those strata of our society which have divorced themselves from the soil — which actually are becoming fantastic. But I’ll talk of it no more! In my book much was written in haste, much is too drawn-out, much has miscarried; but much, too, is extremely good. I am not defending the novel, but the idea. Do tell me your view of it; and, of course, quite frankly. The more you find fault with me, the higher shall I rate your honest….
XLVIII. To his Niece Sofia Alexandrovna
FLORENCE, March 8 [20], 1869.
You have, as I begged you, answered all my letters regularly by return, my dear and precious friend Sonetchka. But I have broken my word, and made you wait more than a fortnight for my answers. This time I can’t even excuse myself by pressure of work, for all my jobs have long been ready and delivered. I can explain my silence only by the depressed state of mind in which I have been.
The Roussky Viestnik did not answer my request for money for seven weeks (so that I had to wait through all Lent); only to-day have I received the money, though I had depicted my desperate situation to the people there more than two months ago. They write with many apologies, that they have not been able to send me the money any sooner, because as always at the beginning of the year, they were confronted with a terrible lot of work that could not be postponed, and with the accounts.
And it is a fact that about New Year one never can get anything out of them; it was wont to be so in earlier days, and I can still remember how in the years 1866 and 1867 they made me wait whole months for an answer, just as now. So we’ve had anything but an easy time of it — we were even in actual distress. If we had not been able to borrow two hundred francs from an acquaintance, and to get a further hundred from other sources, we might easily have died of hunger in this foreign town.
But what worried us most was the constant suspense and uncertainty. In such circumstances, I could not possibly write to anyone, not even you, my dear. Evidently the staff, as I gather from their letter, wish to retain me as a contributor; otherwise they would not have granted me a further advance. Indeed I can’t complain of Katkov, and am even grateful to him for the many advances he has made me. Journals are impoverished nowadays, and don’t usually give any advances; but in the very beginning, before I even began to write the novel, I had 4,0 — roubles from these people.
For that reason I must not be either angry or disloyal…. I must strive even harder than hitherto to make myself useful to them. You write that people declare the magazine has lost ground. Is that really possible? I can’t at all believe it; of course not because I am a contributor, but because the paper is, in my opinion, the best in Russia, and strikes a really consistent note. To be sure, it is a little dry; and the literary side is not always up to the mark (but not oftener than in the other magazines; all the best works of modern literature have appeared therein: “War and Peace,”
“Fathers and Sons,” etc., to say nothing of more distant years; and the public knows that well); critical articles are rare (but often very remarkable, particularly when it is not a question of so-called fine literature); but then there appear annually, as every subscriber knows, three or four strikingly able, apt, individual, and in these days most necessary articles, such as one finds nowhere else. The public knows that, too. Therefore I believe that the paper, even if it is dry and addressed to a particular section of the public, cannot possibly lose ground.
In the year 1867, Katkov told me, in the presence of Lyubimov and the editorial secretary, that the paper had five hundred more subscribers than the year before, which was to be attributed entirely to the success of my “Raskolnikov.” I hardly think that “The Idiot” will have obtained fresh subscribers for the paper; therefore I am doubly glad that, despite the manifest failure of the story, they still depend on me. The editors beg me to excuse them for being unable to bring out the conclusion in the December number, and propose to send it to subscribers as a supplement. This is quite peculiarly painful for me. Have you had the conclusion? Do write and tell me. I get the Roussky Viestnik here, however; perhaps the supplement will come with the February number.
From Petersburg I am told quite frankly that “The Idiot” has certainly many shortcomings, and is generally regarded as a falling off; but nevertheless has been followed with great interest by those who read at all. And that is really the utmost I aimed at. As to the shortcomings, I perfectly discern them myself; I am so vexed by my errors that I should like to have written a criticism of the book. Strachov means to send me his article on “The Idiot”; I know that he is not among my partisans.
I clearly perceive that I am writing only about myself to-day; but as I am now in that vein, I’ll go on, and I beg you to hear me patiently. On all these literary matters depends now my whole future, and my return to Russia. My dearest wish is to embrace you all, and ever to remain with you; perhaps it will really come true some day! I needn’t emphasize the fact, dear friend (and you will be sure to understand me), that my whole literary activity has embodied for me but one definite ideal value, but one aim, but one hope — and that I do not strive for fame and money, but only and solely for the synthesis of my imaginative and literary ideals, which means that before I die I desire to speak out, in some work that shall as far as possible express the whole of what I think.
At the moment I am meditating a novel. It will be called “Atheism”; I think that I shall succeed in saying all that I wish to say. But think, my dear: I cannot possibly write here. I must absolutely be in Russia, I must see and hear everything, I must take my own part in Russian life; and besides; the work would take at least two years. I can’t do it here, and must therefore write something else in the meantime.
On this account, life abroad becomes more unbearable to me every day. You must know that I should have 6,000, or at the very least 5,000, roubles before I can think of returning to Russia. I reckoned originally on the success of “The Idiot.”
