cover up my own emptiness with other people's rags, such as the ideas of
the sixties, and so on. I am not going to throw myself like Garshin over
the banisters, but I am not going to flatter myself with hopes of a
better future either. I am not to blame for my disease, and it's not for
me to cure myself, for this disease, it must be supposed, has some good
purpose hidden from us, and is not sent in vain....




February, 1893.


My God! What a glorious thing "Fathers and Children" is! It is positively
terrifying. Bazarov's illness is so powerfully done that I felt ill and had
a sensation as though I had caught the infection from him. And the end of
Bazarov? And the old men? And Kukshina? It's beyond words. It's simply a
work of genius. I don't like the whole of "On the Eve," only Elena's father
and the end. The end is full of tragedy. "The Dog" is very good, the
language is wonderful in it. Please read it if you have forgotten it.
"Acia" is charming, "A Quiet Backwater" is too compressed and not
satisfactory. I don't like "Smoke" at all. "The House of Gentlefolk" is
weaker than "Fathers and Children," but the end is like a miracle, too.
Except for the old woman in "Fathers and Children"--that is, Bazarov's
mother--and the mothers as a rule, especially the society ladies, who are,
however, all alike (Liza's mother, Elena's mother), and Lavretsky's mother,
who had been a serf, and the humble peasant woman, all Turgenev's girls and
women are insufferable in their artificiality, and--forgive my saying
it--falsity. Liza and Elena are not Russian girls, but some sort of Pythian
prophetesses, full of extravagant pretensions. Irina in "Smoke," Madame