III

“. . . AND NEVER, my unforgettable Arkady Makarovich, could you have employed your leisure time more usefully than now, having written these ‘Notes’ of yours! You’ve given yourself, so to speak, a conscious account of your first stormy and perilous steps on your career in life. I firmly believe that by this account you could indeed ‘re-educate yourself ’ in many ways, as you put it yourself. Naturally, I will not allow myself the least thing in the way of critical observations per se; though every page makes one ponder . . . for instance, the fact that you kept the ‘document’ so long and so persistently is in the highest degree characteristic . . . But out of hundreds of observations, that is the only one I will allow myself. I also greatly appreciate that you decided to tell, and apparently to me alone, the ‘secret of your idea,’ according to your own expression. But your request that I give my opinion of this idea per se, I must resolutely refuse: first, there would not be room enough for it in a letter, and second, I am not ready for an answer myself and still need to digest it. I will only observe that your ‘idea’ is distinguished by its originality, whereas the young men of the current generation fall mainly upon ideas that have not been thought up but given beforehand, and their supply is by no means great, and is often dangerous. Your ‘idea,’ for instance, preserved you, at least for a while, from the ideas of Messrs. Dergachev and Co., undoubtedly not so original as yours. And, finally, I concur in the highest degree with the opinion of the much-esteemed Tatyana Pavlovna, whom, though I know her personally, till now I had never been able to appreciate in the measure that she deserves. Her idea about your entering the university is in the highest degree beneficial for you. Learning and life will, in three or four years, undoubtedly open the horizon of your thoughts and aspirations still more widely, and if, after the university, you propose to turn again to your ‘idea,’ nothing will hinder that.

“Now allow me on my own, and without your request, to lay out for you candidly several thoughts and impressions that came to my mind and soul as I was reading your so candid notes. Yes, I agree with Andrei Petrovich that one might indeed have had fears for you and your solitary youth. And there are not a few young men like you, and their abilities always threaten to develop for the worse—either into a Molchalin-like obsequiousness⁴⁷ or into a secret desire for disorder. But this desire for disorder—and even most often—comes, maybe, from a secret thirst for order and ‘seemliness’ (I am using your word). Youth is pure if only because it is youth. Maybe in these so early impulses of madness there lies precisely this desire for order and this search for truth, and whose fault is it that some modern young men see this truth and this order in such silly and ridiculous things that it is even incomprehensible how they could believe in them! I will note, incidentally, that before, in the quite recent past, only a generation ago, these interesting young men were not to be so pitied, because in those days they almost always ended by successfully joining our higher cultivated strata and merging into one whole with them. And if, for instance, they were aware, at the beginning of the road, of all their disorderliness and fortuitousness, of all the lack of nobility, say, in their family surroundings, the lack of a hereditary tradition and of beautiful, finished forms, it was even so much the better, because later they themselves would consciously strive for these things and learn to appreciate them. Nowadays it is somewhat different—precisely because there is almost nothing to join.

“I will explain by a comparison or, so to speak, an assimilation. If I were a Russian novelist and had talent, I would be sure to take my heroes from the hereditary Russian nobility, because it is only in that type of cultivated Russian people that there is possible at least the appearance of a beautiful order and a beautiful impression, so necessary in a novel if it is to graciously affect the reader. I am by no means joking when I say this, though I myself am not a nobleman at all, which, however, you know yourself. Pushkin already sketched out the subjects of his future novels in his ‘Traditions of the Russian Family,’⁴⁸ and, believe me, it indeed contains all we have had of the beautiful so far. At least all we have had that has been somewhat completed. I do not say this because I agree so unconditionally with the correctness and truthfulness of this beauty; but here, for instance, there were finished forms of honor and duty, which, except among the nobility, are not only not finished anywhere in Russia, but are not even begun. I speak as a peaceful man and seeking peace.

“Whether this honor is good and this duty right—is another question; but for me it is more important that the forms precisely be finished and that there be at least some sort of order that is not prescribed, but that we ourselves have finally developed. God, the most important thing for us is precisely at least some order of our own! In this has lain our hope and, so to speak, our rest; finally at least something built, and not this eternal smashing, not chips flying everywhere, not trash and rubbish, out of which nothing has come in the last two hundred years.

“Do not accuse me of Slavophilism; I am saying it just so, from misanthropy, because my heart feels heavy! Nowadays, in recent times, something quite the opposite of what I have described above has been happening among us. It is no longer rubbish that grows on to the higher stratum of people, but, on the contrary, bits and pieces are torn with merry haste from the beautiful type, and get stuck into one heap with the disorderly and envious. And it is a far from isolated case that the fathers and heads of former cultivated families themselves laugh at something that their children may still want to believe in. What’s more, they enthusiastically do not conceal from their children their greedy joy at the unexpected right to dishonor, which a whole mass of them suddenly deduced from something. I am not speaking about the true progressists, my dearest Arkady Makarovich, but only about the riffraff, who have turned out to be numberless, of whom it is said: ‘Grattez le russe et vous verrez le tartare.’¹²² And, believe me, the true liberals, the true and magnanimous friends of mankind, are by no means so many among us as it suddenly seemed to us.

“But this is all philosophy; let us go back to the imaginary novelist. The position of our novelist in such a case would be quite definite: he would be unable to write in any other genre than the historical, for the beautiful type no longer exists in our time, and if any remnants remain, in the now-dominant opinion, they have not kept their beauty. Oh, in the historical genre it is still possible to portray a great many extremely pleasant and delightful details! One can even carry the reader with one so far that he will take the historical picture for something still possible in the present. Such a work, given great talent, would belong not so much to Russian literature as to Russian history. It would be an artistically finished picture of a Russian mirage, which existed in reality until people realized that it was a mirage. The grandson of the heroes portrayed in the picture portraying a Russian family of the average upper-class cultivated circle over three generations and in connection with Russian history—this descendant of his forebears could not be portrayed as a contemporary type otherwise than in a somewhat misanthropic, solitary, and undoubtedly sad guise. He should even appear as a sort of eccentric, whom the reader could recognize at first glance as someone who has quit the field, and be convinced that the field is no longer his. A bit further, and even this misanthropic grandson will vanish; new, as yet unknown persons will appear, and a new mirage; but what kind of persons? If they are not beautiful, then the Russian novel will no longer be possible. But, alas! is it only the novel that will turn out then to be impossible?