III
Bad-Ems, August 24, 1879.
Much respected and worthiest Konstantin Petrovich, I received your two letters here and am deeply grateful to you for them, particularly for the first one in which you speak of my spiritual state. You are perfectly, deeply right, and your thoughts have only strengthened me. But I am sick in soul, and diffident. Sitting here, in sad and utter solitariness, I have become depressed against my will. However, I ’ll ask you this: can one remain quiet in our time? See, you yourself point out in your second letter (and what is a letter?) all the unbearable facts which are taking place; I am now busy with the novel (and I shall finish it only next year!), and yet I am tormented with the desire to continue The Journal of an Author, for there is, indeed I have, something to say—and just as you would wish—without barren, behind-scenes polemics, but with a firm and fearless word. And every one now, those even who have something to say, are afraid. What are they afraid of? Positively—of a ghost. The ‘common European’ ideas of science and enlightenment stand despotically over every one, and no one dares to speak. I understand too well why Gradovsky’s last articles, greeting the students as the intelligentsia, had such a tremendous success with our ‘Europeans.’ The fact of the matter is that he sees the whole remedy for all the present-day horrors of our unsettledness in that very Europe, in Europe alone. My literary position (I never spoke to you about this) I consider almost phenomenal: as a man steadily writing against European principles, who has compromised himself for ever with The Possessed, that is, by his reaction and obscurantism—how that man, apart from all Europeanisers, their reviews, their newspapers, their critics, is yet acknowledged by our young generation, by that very unsettled nihilism-ridden young generation, etc.? This has been expressed to me by them, from many places, in individual declarations and by whole bodies of them. They have already declared that from me alone they expect a sincere and sympathetic word, and that myself alone they consider as their leading writer. These declarations of the young generation are known to the literary workers, to the bandits of the pen and the sharpers of the Press, and they are very much impressed by it. Otherwise, how would they let me write freely! They would devour me, like dogs, but they are afraid, and wonder confusedly what will come of it all.
Here I read the nasty rag Golos,—Lord, how stupid, how abominably lazy and stagnantly petrified. Believe me, my anger at times is transformed into positive laughter, for instance in reading the articles of the schoolboy thinker, E. Markov, on the woman question. It is sheer stupidity, the utter nakedness of stupidity. You say you did not like Pouzykovich’s paper. Yes, indeed; but it is quite impossible to speak to that man, quite impossible to advise him, he is so touchily self-confident. Above all, he cares only about the circulation; as to all the rest he does things with an extraordinarily easy conscience. Your opinion of what you read from the Karamazovs flattered me much (concerning the power and energy of the work), but you put at once the most necessary question: that for the time being I have not given a reply to all those atheistic propositions, but the reply is urgent. That is just the point, and my whole trouble and my whole uneasiness is about that. For I had intended Book VI, The Russian Monk, to be as a reply to all this negative side; it will appear on August 31. And therefore I fear on its account: will it be a sufficient reply? The more so because the answer is, indeed, not a direct one, not an answer to the propositions expressed before (in The Great Inquisitor and elsewhere) point by point, but an indirect one. In my reply is represented something directly opposite to the world-conception expressed in the earlier book, but again it is represented not point by point, but, so to say, in an artistic picture. And that’s just what worries me, that is, shall I be understood and shall I achieve even a particle of my aim. Added to this are still the demands of art: I needed to represent a modest character and a majestic one, whereas life is full of comicality and is grand only in its inner sense, so that against my will, because of the demands of art, I was compelled in the life-history of my monk to touch also on some rather frivolous sides, so as not to injure the artistic realism. Then there are the monk’s precepts, at which people will just shout that they are absurd, for they are too ecstatic; certainly, they are absurd in the everyday sense, but in the other, the inner sense, I think they are right. Anyhow, I worry much, and I should very much like to have your opinion, for I value and respect it very much. I wrote the book with great love.
But I see I have talked too much about my work. On September 1 or 2, I shall be in Petersburg (hastening to Staraya Roussa to my family), I shall call on you (I don’t know at what time, I can’t settle beforehand), and if I am lucky I may find you in, and see you if only for a short while. Good-bye, kindest and sincerely respected Konstantin Petrovich, may God grant you many years to live—there can be no better wish in our time, for such men as you must live. Now and then a silly and sinful idea flashes across my mind: what will happen to Russia, if we, the last of the Mohicans, die? True, I instantly smile at myself. Yet nevertheless we must live and work untiringly. And are not you a worker? Apropos: Pouzykovich having heard from me the content of your letter concerning the dispatch of the prisoners to Saghalien, pressed me to let it be published in the Grazhdanin. Of course I did not let him have it.—Wholly your F. DOSTOEVSKY.