Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Contents
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
Notes
Preface

“With his usual comic and cruel candour, Dostoevsky concedes that his observations may be sour and jaundiced, and it is characteristic of him that he does not conceal his bias.”
Saul Bellow

“The real nineteenth-century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.”
Albert Camus

“Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss!”
Albert Einstein

“The only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

1

Instead of a Preface

FOR MONTHS NOW, my friends, you have been urging me to give you a description of my impressions while travelling in foreign lands, never suspecting that you are thereby placing me in a quandary. What shall I tell you? What shall I say that is new, that has not been told before? Who of us Russians (those, at least, that read periodicals) does not know Europe twice as well as he knows Russia?

I have put down “twice” merely out of politeness, I should probably have said “ten times better”. Besides, apart from these general considerations, you are well aware that I, of all people, have nothing to tell and least of all can I give a methodical account of anything, because there was no method in my sightseeing, and even when I did see anything I did not have time to examine it very closely.

I visited Berlin, Dresden, Wiesbaden, Baden-Baden, Cologne, Paris, London, Lucerne, Geneva, Genoa, Florence, Milan, Venice, Vienna and a few other places (to which I went twice), and the whole tour took me precisely two and a half months! Now, I ask you, is it possible to see anything thoroughly while travelling over so
many roads in the course of two and a half months?

You will remember that I composed my itinerary while still in St Petersburg. I had never been abroad, but I longed to go there even as a small child, when, still unable to read, I listened agape, enthralled and terror-struck in turn, to my parents’ bedtime reading of Mrs Radcliffe’s novels, which put me into a fever and kept me awake at night. When at last I wrenched myself away from my preoccupations and went abroad, I was forty years of age and, naturally enough, I was not content with seeing as much as possible; I wanted to see everything – yes, everything – despite the time limit.

Besides, I was quite incapable of coolly choosing places to visit. Heavens, how much I expected from my tour! “It doesn’t matter if I don’t look at things in great detail,” I thought. “I shall, at least, have seen everything and been everywhere, and all I have seen will have fused itself into one whole and made up a kind of general panorama. I shall, at one fell swoop, have had a bird’s-eye view of the entire ‘land of holy miracles’,* like the Promised Land from the mountain – in perspective. In fact, I shall experience a new, wonderful and mighty impression.” After all, what do I regret most now, sitting at home and recalling my summer time wanderings?

Not that I saw nothing in great detail, but that, although I have been almost everywhere, I have not, for example, been in Rome. And in Rome I might, perhaps, have missed the Pope… In fact, I was overwhelmed by an unquenchable thirst for something new, for a constant change of place, for general, synthetic, panoramic, perspective impressions.

Now what do you expect from me after such a confession? What shall I tell you? What shall I depict? A panorama? A perspective? A bird’s-eye view of something? But you will probably be the first to tell me that I have flown too high. Besides, I consider myself to be a conscientious man, and I should not at all like to tell lies, or even travellers’ tales. But even should I limit myself to depicting and describing the panoramic view, I could not fail to tell lies, and not even because I am a traveller, but simply because in such circumstances as mine it is impossible not to lie. Reason it out for yourselves.

Berlin, for instance, made a very sour impression on me and I stayed only twenty-four hours in it. But I know now that I have wronged Berlin, that I have no right to my assertion that it makes a sour impression. There is a dash of sweetness in it, at the very least.

And what was the cause of that fatal mistake of mine? Simply the fact that, though a sick man, suffering from an attack of liver, I sped along through rain and fog to Berlin for two whole days and nights, and when I arrived after a sleepless journey, yellow, tired and broken, I noticed suddenly and at the very first glance that Berlin was incredibly like St Petersburg. The same monotonously straight streets, the same smells, the same… (but I cannot enumerate all the things they had in common!)

Blow me, I thought to myself, it was really hardly worthwhile spending a back-breaking forty-eight hours in a railway carriage only to see the replica of what I had just left. I did not even like the lime trees, to preserve which a Berliner will sacrifice all he holds most dear, even his constitution; and what can be dearer to a Berliner than his constitution?

Besides, all Berliners, all of them without exception, looked so German that (oh, horror!) without so much as an attempt to see Kaulbach’s frescoes,* I slipped away to Dresden as fast as I could, deeply convinced in my heart of hearts that it needed a special knack to get used to a German and that at first he was very difficult to bear in large masses.

In Dresden I was unfair even to German women. I decided immediately when I stepped out into the street that no sight was more horrible than a typical Dresden woman, and that even Vsevolod Krestovsky,* that poet of love and the most inveterately joyful of all Russian poets, might despair and come to doubt his vocation. Of course I felt the very same minute that I was talking nonsense and that under no circumstances whatever could he possibly come to doubt his vocation. A couple of hours later I realized what it was: back in my hotel bedroom I put out my tongue in front of a mirror and had to

confess that my opinion of the ladies of Dresden was in the highest degree slanderous. My tongue was yellow and unpleasant… “Can it really be true” thought I, “that man, that lord of creation, is so dependent on his own liver? How low!”

With these comforting thoughts I went off to Cologne. I admit to having expected a lot from the cathedral, of which I reverently made drawings in my youth when I studied architecture. On my way back through Cologne a month later, when I saw the cathedral a second time on my return from Paris, I almost “asked its forgiveness on my knees” for not having fully grasped its beauty, just like Karamzin* fell on his knees in front of a Rhine waterfall.

But all the same, that first time I did not like the cathedral at all; it seemed to me to be nothing but a piece of lace, lace and lace again, a bit of fancy goods, something like a paperweight, some 500 feet high.

“Not very majestic,” I decided, just as our grandfathers concluded about Pushkin: “His writings are too light,” they used to say, “not enough of the lofty style in them.”

I suspect that this first opinion of mine was influenced by two circumstances, the first of them being eau de Cologne. Jean Maria Farina* is situated next to the cathedral, and no matter at which hotel you stay, whatever your mood, however hard you may be trying to hide from your enemies and particularly from Jean Maria Farina, his clients are sure to find you, and then it is the case of “eau de Cologne ou la vie”* – one of the two, there is no other choice. I cannot vouch for the fact that these are the very words people shout – “eau de Cologne ou la vie” – but who knows, perhaps they are? I remember at that time I kept imagining I could hear them.

The second circumstance which irritated me and made me unfair in my judgements was the new Cologne bridge. The bridge is excellent, of course, and the town is justly proud of it, but I thought it was too proud of it. Naturally this made me angry. Besides, the collector of pennies at the entrance to the marvellous bridge should not have made me pay that reasonable tax with an air of fining me for some misdemeanour of which I myself was not aware.

I don’t know, but it struck me that the German was trying to bully me. “He has probably guessed,” I thought, “that I am a foreigner, and a Russian at that.” Anyway, his eyes almost as good as said: “You see our bridge, you miserable Russian? Well, you are a mere worm in comparison with our bridge and with every German man because you haven’t got a bridge like that.” You must agree this is enough to make one take offence. The German never said it, of course, and never even harboured it in his thoughts perhaps, but it does not matter. I was so convinced that that was what he wanted to say, that I completely lost my temper. “Damn it all,” I

thought, “We have something to be proud of too,