Pleshtcheyev is staying with us. They all look upon him as a demi-god, consider themselves happy if he bestows attention on somebody’s junket, bring him flowers, invite him everywhere, and so on.... And he “listens and eats,” and smokes his cigars which give his admirers a headache. He is slow to move, with the indolence of old age, but this does not prevent the fair sex from taking him about in boats, driving with him to the neighbouring estates, and singing songs to him. Here he is by way of being the same thing as in Petersburg—i.e., an ikon which is prayed to for being old and for having once hung by the side of the miracle-working ikons. So far as I am concerned I regard him—not to speak of his being a very good, warm-hearted and sincere man—as a vessel full of traditions, interesting memories, and good platitudes.
... What you say about “The Lights” is quite just. You say that neither the conversation about pessimism nor Kisotcha’s story in any way help to solve the question of pessimism. It seems to me it is not for writers of fiction to solve such questions as that of God, of pessimism, etc. The writer’s business is simply to describe who has been speaking about God or about pessimism, how, and in what circumstances. The artist must be not the judge of his characters and of their conversations, but merely an impartial witness. I have heard a desultory conversation of two Russians about pessimism—a conversation which settles nothing—and I must report that conversation as I heard it; it is for the jury, that is, for the readers, to decide on the value of it. My business is merely to be talented—i.e., to know how to distinguish important statements from unimportant, how to throw light on the characters, and to speak their language. Shtcheglov-Leontyev blames me for finishing the story with the words, “There’s no making out anything in this world.” He thinks a writer who is a good psychologist ought to be able to make it out—that is what he is a psychologist for. But I don’t agree with him. It is time that writers, especially those who are artists, recognized that there is no making out anything in this world, as once Socrates recognized it, and Voltaire, too. The mob thinks it knows and understands everything; and the more stupid it is the wider it imagines its outlook to be. And if a writer whom the mob believes in has the courage to say that he does not understand anything of what he sees, that alone will be something gained in the realm of thought and a great step in advance.
TO A. N. PLESHTCHEYEV.
SUMY, June 28, 1888.
... We have been to the province of Poltava. We went to the Smagins’, and to Sorotchintsi. We drove with a four-in-hand, in an ancestral, very comfortable carriage. We had no end of laughter, adventures, misunderstandings, halts, and meetings on the way.... If you had only seen the places where we stayed the night and the villages stretching eight or ten versts through which we drove! ... What weddings we met on the road, what lovely music we heard in the evening stillness, and what a heavy smell of fresh hay there was! Really one might sell one’s soul to the devil for the pleasure of looking at the warm evening sky, the pools and the rivulets reflecting the sad, languid sunset....
... The Smagins’ estate is “great and fertile,” but old, neglected, and dead as last year’s cobwebs. The house has sunk, the doors won’t shut, the tiles in the stove squeeze one another out and form angles, young suckers of cherries and plums peep up between the cracks of the floors. In the room where I slept a nightingale had made herself a nest between the window and the shutter, and while I was there little naked nightingales, looking like undressed Jew babies, hatched out from the eggs. Sedate storks live on the barn. At the beehouse there is an old grandsire who remembers the King Goroh [Translator’s Note: The equivalent of Old King Cole.] and Cleopatra of Egypt.
Everything is crumbling and decrepit, but poetical, sad, and beautiful in the extreme.