![]() ![]() ![]() They have always received me ungraciously. Their father managed it, but now there is only a little pension. What must it come to even to keep them in slippers. A widow and five daughters, all marriageable young ladies. A distant relation - a collegiate counsellor, however. I went out in search of diversion, I hit upon a funeral. What's the meaning of this bobok? I must divert my mind. I am beginning to see and hear strange things, not voices exactly, but as though someone beside me were muttering, "bobok, bobok, bobok!" My character is changing and my head aches. "Your style is changing," he said "it is choppy: you chop and chop - and then a parenthesis, then a parenthesis in the parenthesis, then you stick in something else in brackets, then you begin chopping and chopping again." Hang it though, why am I maundering on? I go on grumbling and grumbling. has gone out of his mind, means that we are sane now." No, it doesn't mean that yet. I remember a witty Spaniard saying when, two hundred and fifty years ago, the French built their first madhouses: "They have shut up all their fools in a house apart, to make sure that they are wise men themselves." Just so: you don't show your own wisdom by shutting someone else in a madhouse. And they have so muddled things up that there is no telling a fool from a wise man. In old days, once a year at any rate a fool would recognise that he was a fool, but nowadays not a bit of it. The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool - a faculty unheard of nowadays. So it seems the critics can call them mad, but they cannot produce anyone better. Well, but after all, these so-called madmen have turned out cleverer than ever. "however, one ought to have foreseen it long ago." That is rather artful so that from the point of view of pure art one may really commend it. And in such language! "With such original talent. That is what they call realism.Īnd as to madness, a great many people were put down as mad among us last year. And didn't he succeed in getting my warts in his portrait - to the life. They have no ideas, so now they are out for phenomena. I believe that the artist who painted me did so not for the sake of literature, but for the sake of two symmetrical warts on my forehead, a natural phenomenon, he would say. I have wasted four roubles over stamps alone for them. The letter I sent last week to an editor's office was the fortieth I had sent in the last two years. I give them all sorts of counsels and admonitions, criticise and point out the true path. Though indeed I do send round letters to the editors gratis and fully signed. Well, so that's the whole extent of my literary activity. We knock each other's last teeth out nowadays. Voltaire's no good now nowadays we want a cudgel, not Voltaire. I am thinking of making a collection of the bons mots of Voltaire, but am afraid it may seem a little flat to our people. I have brought out some six little works of this kind in the course of my life. I compiled the "Art of pleasing the ladies", a commission from a bookseller. " I made a nice little sum over a panegyric on his deceased excellency Pyotr Matveyitch. I write advertisements for shopkeepers too: "Unique opportunity! Fine tea, from our own plantations. They did not even understand, for the most part I translate from the French for the booksellers. "What sort of salt do you want?" I asked with a sneer. Those articles I took about from one editor to another everywhere they refused them: you have no salt they told me. I have written articles - they have been refused. I have written a novel, it has not been published. I do not resent it: but God knows I am not enough of a literary man to go out of my mind. Nowadays humour and a fine style have disappeared, and abuse is accepted as wit. But no, he doesn't care to do it indirectly. Say it indirectly, at least that's what you have style for. In print everything ought to be decorous there ought to be ideals, while instead of that. It may be so, but think of putting it so bluntly into print. I read: "Go and look at that morbid face suggesting insanity." An artist painted my portrait as it happened: "After all, you are a literary man," he said. I did not resent it, I am a timid man but here they have actually made me out mad. SEMYON ARDALYONOVITCH said to me all of a sudden the day before yesterday: "Why, will you ever be sober, Ivan Ivanovitch? Tell me that, pray."Ī strange requirement. (1873) A bobok is a small bean Translated by Constance Garnett. ![]()
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