My intimacy with Vitberg was a great relief to me at Vyatka. His serious simplicity and a certain solemnity of manner suggested the churchman to some extent. Strict in his principles, he tended in general to austerity rather than enjoyment; but this strictness took nothing from the luxuriance and richness of his artistic fancy. He could invest his mystical views with such lively forms and such beautiful colouring that objections died on your lips, and you felt reluctant to examine and pull to pieces the glimmering forms and shadowy pictures of his imagination.
His mysticism was partly due to his Scandinavian blood. It was the same play of fancy combined with cool reflection which we see in Swedenborg;[[106]] and that in its turn resembles the fiery reflection of the sun’s rays when they fall on the ice-covered mountains and snows of Norway.
[106]. Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish mystic and founder of a sect.
Though I was shaken for a time by Vitberg’s influence, my positive turn of mind held its own nevertheless. It was not my destiny to be carried up to the third heaven; I was born to inhabit earth alone. Tables never turn at my touch, rings never quiver when I look at them. The daylight of thought is my element, not the moonlight of imagination.
But I was more inclined to the mystical standpoint when I lived with Vitberg than at any other period of my life.
There was much to support Vitberg’s influence—the loneliness of exile, the strained and pietistic tone of the letters I received from home, the love which was mastering my whole being with ever increasing power, and an oppressive feeling of remorse for my own misconduct.[[107]]
[107]. He refers to an intrigue he was carrying on at Vyatka.
Two years later I was again influenced by ideas partly religious and partly socialistic, which I took from the Gospel and from Rousseau; my position was that of some French thinkers, such as Pierre Leroux.[[108]]
[108]. A French publicist and disciple of Saint Simon, 1797-1871.
My friend Ogaryóv plunged even before I did into the waves of mysticism. In 1833 he began to write a libretto for Gebel’s oratorio of Paradise Lost; and he wrote to me that the whole history of humanity was included in that poem! It appears therefore that he then considered the paradise of his aspirations to have existed already and disappeared from view.