You have seen this astonishingly well; how frightfully have I always suffered from it, for I have always been aware that it was so. And I have made another great mistake besides: without calculating my powers, I have allowed myself to be transported by poetic enthusiasm, and have undertaken an idea to which my strength was not equal. (N.B. — The force of poetic enthusiasm is, to be sure, as for example with Victor Hugo, always stronger than the artistic force. Even in Pushkin one detects this disproportion.) But I destroy myself thereby.
I must further add that the move to Russia and the many anxieties which await me in the summer, will immensely injure the novel. Anyhow, I thank you for your sympathy. What a pity it is that we shall not see one another for so long. In the meantime
I am your most devoted
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY.
LXV. To Nikolay Nikolayevitch Strachov
DRESDEN,
May 18 [30], 1871.
MUCH-ESTEEMED NIKOLAY NIKOLAYEVITCH, So you really have begun your letter with Bielinsky, as I foresaw. But do reflect on Paris and the Commune. Will you perchance maintain, as others do, that the whole thing failed simply because of the lack of men, and as a result of unfavourable circumstances?
Through the whole of this 19th century, that school has dreamed of the setting-up of earthly paradises (for instance, the phalansteries), and then, directly it came to action (as in the years 1848, 1849, and now), has shown a contemptible incapacity for any practical expression of itself.
At bottom, the entire movement is but a repetition of the Russian delusion that men can reconstruct the world by reason and experience (Positivism). But we have seen enough of it by now to be entitled to declare that such impotence as is displayed can be no chance phenomenon. Why do they cut off heads?
Simply because it’s the easiest of all things to do. To say something sensible is far more difficult. Effort is, after all, a lesser thing than attainment. They desire the common good, but when it comes to defining “good,” can only reiterate Rousseau’s aphorism — that “good” is a fantasy never yet ratified by experience. The burning of Paris is something utterly monstrous: “Since we have failed, let the whole world perish!” — for the Commune is more important than the world’s weal, and France’s! Yet they (and many others) see in that madness not monstrosity, but only beauty. Since that is so, the aesthetic idea must be completely clouded over in the modern mind.
A moral basis (taken from Positivist teachings) for society is not only incapable of producing any results whatever, but can’t possibly even define itself to itself, and so must always lose its way amid aspirations and ideals. Have we not sufficient evidence by this time to be able to prove that a society is not thus to be built up, that quite otherwhere lie the paths to the common good, and that this common good reposes on things different altogether from those hitherto accepted?
On what, then, does it repose? Men write and write, and overlook the principal point. In Western Europe the peoples have lost Christ (Catholicism is to blame), and therefore Western Europe is tottering to its fall. Ideas have changed — how evidently! And the fall of the Papal power, together with that of the whole Romano-German world (France, etc.) — what a coincidence!
All this would take long wholly to express, but what I really want to say to you is: If Bielinsky, Granovsky, and all the rest of the gang, had lived to see this day, they would have said: “No, it was not to this that we aspired! No, this is a mistake; we must wait a while, the light will shine forth, progress will win, humanity will build on new and healthier foundations, and be happy at last!”
They would never admit that their way can lead at best but to the Commune or to Felix Pyat. That crew was so obtuse that even now, after the event, they would not be able to see their error, they would persist in their fantastic dreaming. I condemn Bielinsky less as a personality than as a most repulsive, stupid, and humiliating phenomenon of Russian life. The best one can say for it is that it’s inevitable. I assure you that Bielinsky would have been moved, to-day, to take the following attitude: “The Commune has accomplished nothing, because before all things it was French — that is to say, was steeped in nationalism.
Therefore we must now seek out another people, which will not have the tiniest spark of national feeling, but will be ready, like me, to box its mother’s (Russia’s) ears.” Wrathfully he would continue to foam forth his wretched articles; he would go on reviling Russia, denying Russia’s greatest phenomena (such as Pushkin), so that he might thus make Russia seem to turn into an empty nation, which might take the lead in universal human activities. The Jesuitry and insincerity of our prominent public men, he would regard as great good fortune. And then, for another thing: you never knew him; but I had personal intercourse with him, and now can give his full measure.
The man, talking with me once, reviled the Saviour, and yet surely he could never have undertaken to compare himself and the rest of the gentry who move the world, with Christ. He was not capable of seeing how petty, angry, impatient, base, and before all else covetous and vain, they, every one of them, are. He never asked himself the question: “But what can we put in His place? Of a surety not ourselves, so evil as we are?” No; he never reflected in any sort of way upon the possibility that he might be evil; he was to the last degree content with himself, and in that alone is expressed his personal, petty, pitiable stupidity.
You declare that he was gifted. He was not, in any way. My God, what nonsense Grigoryev did write about him! I can still remember my youthful amazement when I read some of his purely aesthetic efforts (as, for instance, on “Dead Souls”); he treated Gogol’s characters with incredible superficiality and lack of comprehension, and merely rejoiced insanely that Gogol had accused somebody. In the four years of my sojourn here abroad, I have re-read all his critical writings.
He reviled Pushkin, when Pushkin dropped his false note, and produced such works as the “Tales of Bielkin,” and “The Negro of Peter the Great.” He pronounced the “Tales of Bielkin” to be entirely valueless. In Gogol’s “Carriage,” he perceived not an artistic creation, but a mere comic tale. “He wholly abjured the conclusion of “Eugène Onegin.” He was the first to speak of Pushkin as a courtier. He said that Turgenev would never make an artist; and he said that after he had read Turgenev’s very remarkable tale of “The Three Portraits.”
I could give you, on the spur of the moment, countless proofs that he had not an atom of critical sense, nor that “quivering sensibility” of which Grigoryev babbled (simply because he too was a poet).
We regard Bielinsky and many another of our contemporaries through the still enduring glamour of fantastic judgments.
Did I really write you nothing about your article on Turgenev? I read it, as I read all your writings, with great delight, but at the same time with some degree of vexation. Once you had admitted that Turgenev has lost grasp, that he has no idea what to say about certain manifestations of Russian life (he jeers at them, every one), you were bound to admit as well that his artistic powers are at ebb in his recent work — for it could not be otherwise.
But on the contrary you hold that his recent work is on the same level with his earlier. Can both statements be accepted? Possibly I am myself mistaken (not in my judgment of Turgenev, but in my interpretation of your article). Perhaps you have merely expressed yourself confusedly…. Know this: all that school is no more than “Landed-proprietor’s Literature.” And that kind of literature has said all it had to say (particularly well in the case of Leo Tolstoy).
It has spoken its last word, and is exempt from further duty. A new school that may take its place is still to come; we have not had time to produce it. The Reschetnikovs have said nothing. Nevertheless, the works of a Reschetnikov demonstrate the necessity for a new note in literature, which shall replace that of the landed proprietors — however repellently such a writer expresses himself.
LXVI. To Mme. Ch. D. Altschevsky:
PETERSBURG,
April 9, 1876.
You write that I am squandering and abusing my talents on bagatelles in the Diary. You are not the first from whom I have heard that. And now I want to say this to you and others: I have been driven to the conviction that an artist is bound to make himself acquainted, down to the smallest detail, not only with the technique of writing, but with everything — current no less than historical events — relating to that reality which he designs to show forth.
We have only one writer who is really remarkable in that respect: it is Count Leo Tolstoy. Victor Hugo, whom I extraordinarily admire as a novelist (only think: Tchutchev, who is now dead, once got positively angry with me on account of this view of Hugo, and said that my “Raskolnikov” was much greater than Hugo’s “Misérables”) — is certainly prone to be too long-winded in his description of details, but he gives us
