Tolstoi was reminded by this saying of Michael Angelo’s of a peasant who without any training cut wonderful figures in wood and said, when Tolstoi expressed surprise at the art with which he did it:
“It is inside there. I am only taking off what is not needed.”
Tolstoi said that Turgenev, in his ecstasy over Pushkin’s description of Lensky’s death in Onegin, said that the wonderful rhyme—ranen, stranen—seemed to be inevitable.
Then Tolstoi recollected certain of Tyutchev’s poems, whom he rates very highly.
I asked him if he knew Tyutchev.
Tolstoi said:
“When after the Sevastopol campaign I lived in Petersburg, Tyutchev, then a famous author, did me, a young writer, the honour to call on me. And then, I remember, how surprised I was that he, who had all his life mixed in court circles—he was a friend, in the purest sense, of the Empress Marie Alexandrovna—who spoke and wrote French more easily than Russian, picked out for special praise, when he expressed his admiration for my Sevastopol stories, a certain soldiers’ expression; and this sensitiveness to the Russian language surprised me in him extraordinarily.”
The conversation arose about writers’ fees.
Tolstoi turned to P. Biryukov and said: