All Things are Possible - Lev Shestov

Every woodcock praises its own fen; Lermontov saw the sign of spiritual pre-eminence in dazzling white linen, and therefore his heroes always dressed with taste. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, despised show: Dmitri Karamazov wears dirty linen—and this is assigned to him as a merit, or almost a merit.

While he was yet young, when he wrote his story, Enough, Turgenev saw that something terrible hung over his life. He saw, but did not get frightened, although he understood that in time he ought to become frightened, because life without a continual inner disturbance would have no meaning for him.

Napoleon is reputed to have had a profound insight into the human soul; Shakespeare also. And their vision has nothing in common.

What we call imagination, which we value so highly in great poets—is, essentially, unbridled, loose, or if you will, even perverted mentality. In ordinary mortals we call it vice; but to the poets everything is forgiven on account of the benefit and pleasure we derive from their works. In spite of our high-flown theories we have always been extremely practical, great utilitarians. Two-and-a-half-thousand years went by before Tolstoy got up, and, in his turn, offered the poets their choice: either to be virtuous, or to stop creating and forfeit the fame of teachers. If Tolstoy did not make a laughing-stock of himself, he has to thank his grey hairs and the respect which was felt for his past. Anyhow, nobody took him seriously. Far from it; for never yet did poets feel so free from the shackles of morality as they do now. If Schiller were writing his dramas and philosophic essays to-day, he would scarcely find a reader. In Tolstoy himself it is not so much his virtues as his vices which we find interesting. We begin to understand his works, not so much in the light of his striving after ideals, but from the standpoint of that incongruity which existed between the ideas he artificially imposed upon himself, and the demands of his own non-virtu ous soul, which struggled ever for liberty. Nicolenka Irtenyev, in Childhood, and Youth, would sit for hours on the terrace, turning over in his mind his elder brother Volodya's love-making with the chambermaids. But, although he desired it "more than anything on earth" he could never bring himself to be like Volodya. The maid said to the elder brother, "Why doesn't Nicolai Fetrovitch ever come here and have a lark?" She did not know that Nicolai Petrovitch was sitting at that moment under the stairs, ready to give anything on earth to take the place of the scamp Volodya. "Everything on earth" is twice repeated. Tolstoy gives a psychological explanation of his little hero's conduct. "I was timid by nature," Nicolenka tells us, "but my shyness was increased by the conviction of my ugliness." Ugliness, the consciousness of one's ugliness, leads to shyness! What good can there be in virtue which has such a suspicious origin? And how can the morality of Tolstoy's heroes be trusted i Consciousness of one's ugliness begets shyness, shyness drives the passions inwards and allows them no natural outlet. Little by little there develops a monstrous discrepancy between the imagination and its desires, on the one hand, and the power to satisfy these desires, on the other. Permanent hunger, and a contracted alimentary canal, which does not pass the food through. Hence the hatred of the imagination, with its unrealised and unrealisable cravings.... In our day no one has scourged love so cruelly as Tolstoy in Power of Darkness. But the feats of the village Don Juan need not necessarily end in tragedy. "More than anything on earth," however, Tolstoy hates the Don Juans, the handsome, brave, successful, the self-confident, who spontaneously act upon suggestion, the conquerors of women, who stretch out their hands to living statues cold as stone. As far as ever he can he has his revenge on them in his writing.

In the drama of the future the whole presentation will be different. First of all, the difficulties of the dénouement will be set aside. The new hero has a past-reminiscent—but no present; neither wife, nor sweetheart, nor friends, nor occupation. He is alone, he communes only with himself or with imaginary listeners. He lives a life apart. So that the stage will represent either a desert island or a room in a large densely-populated city, where among millions of inhabitants one can live alone as on a desert island. The hero must not return to people and to social ideals. He must go forward to loneliness, to absolute loneliness. Even now nobody, looking at Gogol's Plyushkin, will feel any more the slightest response to the pathetic appeal for men to preserve the ideals of youth on into old age. Modern youths go to see Plyushkin, not for the sake of laughing at him or of benefiting from the warning which his terrible miserly figure offers them, but in order to see if there may not be some few little pearls there where they could be least expected, in the midst of his heap of dirt.