“I once belonged to the guild of authors, and from habit I watch and am interested in everything that goes on there.”
Tolstoi quoted a few instances of misstatements and inaccuracies in writers like Uspensky and Korolenko, but said that these were only slips. But when psychological mistakes are made, when the characters in novels and stories do what, from their spiritual nature, they cannot do, it is a terrible failing, and the works of the Andreevs, etc., are full of such mistakes. Even in Gorky it is always happening. For instance, it is the case in his story about the silver clasps, or in the opinions of the women in Three. His Burghers is utterly uninteresting. The surroundings are indefinite, untypical; nobody can make anything of it at all.
“I am always afraid of falling into the old man’s habit of being unable to appreciate or to understand the present. But I try my best and genuinely can find no beauty in the modern tendencies of art. There has recently appeared a very just article by E. Markov on Gorky. The writer, rather timidly—for Gorky has become such an idol that people dare not speak of him—has pointed out correctly that modern Russian literature has completely turned away from those high moral problems which it formerly pursued. And indeed what a complete denial of moral principles there is! You may be vicious, you may rob or kill; there is nothing to restrain the individual; all is allowed....
“But still I am impressed by the fact that Gorky is translated in Europe and greatly read there. Undoubtedly there is something new in him. His chief merit is that he was the first to draw the world of outcasts and tramps from the life, which until then no one had attempted. In this respect he did what Turgenev and Grigorovich did in their day for the world of peasants.
“I love Chekhov very much and value his writings, but I could not make myself read his play, The Three Sisters. What is it all for? Generally speaking, modern writers have lost the conception of drama. Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that, when it is untied, the whole man is made visible. Now, I allowed myself to criticize Shakespeare. But with him every character is alive; and it is always clear why he acts as he does. In Shakespeare’s theatre there were boards with inscriptions ‘moonlight,’ ‘a house,’ because (Heaven be praised!) the whole attention was concentrated on the substance of the drama. Now it is just the opposite.”
Tolstoi spoke with disgust of Andreev’s Abyss, and said:
“With regard to Leonid Andreev, I always remember a story by Ginzburg about a boy who cannot pronounce the letter ‘r’ and says to his friend: ‘I went for a walk and suddenly I see a wolf.... Are you fwightened? Are you fwightened?’
“So Andreev also keeps on asking me: ‘Are you fwightened?’ and I am not in the least frightened.”
Yesterday the conversation was about the Hertzen, Bakunin, and Belinsky circle. Tolstoi said:
“The most characteristic thing about that circle was a kind of epicureanism, or at least the denial of, the complete failure to understand, a religious conception of the world. Doctor Nikitin, for instance, was surprised that I did not think Gogol mad. They thought him mad, because he believed in God. And they could not even understand what was going on in his soul.”