I said that probably all writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life; I also said that I liked active people who desire to resist the evil of life by every means, even violence.
"And violence is the chief evil," he exclaimed, taking me by the arm. "How will you get out of that contradiction, inventor? Now your My Travelling Companion isn't invented—it's good just because it isn't invented. But when you think, you beget knights, all Amadises and Siegfrieds."
I remarked that as long as we live in the narrow sphere of our anthropomorphous and unavoidable "travelling companions," we build everything on quicksands and in a hostile medium.
He smiled and nudged me slightly with his elbow: "From that very, very dangerous conclusions can be drawn. You are a questionable Socialist. You are a romantic, and romantics must be monarchists—they always have been."
"And Hugo?"
"Hugo? That's another thing. I don't like him, a noisy man."
He often asked me what I was reading, and always reproached me if I had chosen, in his opinion, a bad book.
"Gibbon is worse than Kostomarov; one ought to read Mommsen, he's very tedious, but it's all so solid."
When he heard that the first book I ever read was The Brothers Semganno, he even got angry:
"Now, you see—a stupid novel. That's what has spoilt you. The French have three writers, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert; and, well, perhaps Maupassant, though Tchekhov is better than he. The Goncourts are mere clowns, they only pretended to be serious. They had studied life from books written by inventors like themselves, and they thought it a serious business; but it was of no use to a soul."