MOSCOW,
September 30, 1889.
... I do not think I ought to change the title of the story. [Footnote: “A
Dreary Story.”] The wags who will, as you foretell, make jokes about “A
Dreary Story,” are so dull that one need not fear them; and if someone
makes a good joke I shall be glad to have given him the occasion for it.
The professor could not write about Katya’s husband because he did not know
him, and Katya does not say anything about him; besides, one of my hero’s
chief characteristics is that he cares far too little about the inner life
of those who surround him, and while people around him are weeping, making
mistakes, telling lies, he calmly talks about the theatre or literature.
Were he a different sort of man, Liza and Katya might not have come to
grief.
October, 1889.
I am afraid of those who look for a tendency between the lines, and who are
determined to regard me either as a liberal or as a conservative. I am not
a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a
monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing
more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate
lying and violence in all their forms, and am equally repelled by the
secretaries of consistories and by Notovitch and Gradovsky. Pharisaism,
stupidity and despotism reign not in merchants’ houses and prisons alone. I
see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation.... That is
why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for
scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard
trade-marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human
body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most
absolute freedom--freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may
take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.
MOSCOW,
February 15, 1890.
I answer you, dear Alexey Nikolaevitch, at once on receiving your letter.
It was your name-day, and I forgot it!! Forgive me, dear friend, and accept
my belated congratulations.
Did you really not like the “Kreutzer Sonata”? I don’t say it is a work of
genius for all time, of that I am no judge; but to my thinking, among the
mass of all that is written now, here and abroad, one scarcely could find
anything else as powerful both in the gravity of its conception and the
beauty of its execution. To say nothing of its artistic merits, which in
places are striking, one must be grateful to the novel, if only because it
is keenly stimulating to thought. As one reads it, one can scarcely refrain
from crying out: “That’s true,” or “That’s absurd.” It is true it has some
very annoying defects. Apart from all those you enumerate, it has one for
which one cannot readily forgive the author--that is, the audacity with
which Tolstoy holds forth about what he doesn’t know and is too obstinate
to care to understand. Thus his statements about syphilis, foundling
hospitals, the aversion of women for the sexual relation, and so on, are
not merely open to dispute, but show him up as an ignoramus who has not, in
the course of his long life, taken the trouble to read two or three books
written by specialists. But yet these defects fly away like feathers in the
wind; one simply does not notice them in face of the real worth of the
story, or, if one notices them, it is only with a little vexation that the
story has not escaped the fate of all the works of man, all imperfect and
never free from blemish.
My Petersburg friends and acquaintances are angry with me? What for? For
my not having bored them enough with my presence, which has for so long
been a bore to myself! Soothe their minds. Tell them that in Petersburg
I ate a great many dinners and a great many suppers, but did not fascinate
one lady; that every day I was confident of leaving by the evening train,
that I was detained by my friends and by _The Marine Almanack_, the
whole of which I had to look through from the year 1852. While I was in
Petersburg, I got through in one month more than my young friends would in
a year. Let them be angry, though!
* * * * *
I sit all day long reading and making extracts. I have nothing in my head
or on paper except Sahalin. Mental obsession. Mania Sachalinosa.
Not long ago I dined with Madame Yermolov. [Translator’s Note: The
celebrated actress.] A wild-flower thrust into the same nosegay with the
carnation was the more fragrant for the good company it had kept. So I,
after dining with the star, was aware of a halo round my head for two days
afterwards ...
Good-bye, my dear friend; come and see us....