Odintsov in "Fathers and Children," all the lionesses, in fact, fiery,
alluring, insatiable creatures for ever craving for something, are all
nonsensical. When one thinks of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenin," all these young
ladies of Turgenev's, with their seductive shoulders, fade away into
nothing. The negative types of women where Turgenev is slightly
caricaturing (Kukshina) or jesting (the descriptions of balls) are
wonderfully drawn, and so successful, that, as the saying is, you can't
pick a hole in it.

The descriptions of nature are fine, but ... I feel that we have already
got out of the way of such descriptions and that we need something
different....




April 26, 1893.


... I am reading Pisemsky. His is a great, very great talent! The best of
his works is "The Carpenters' Guild." His novels are exhausting in their
minute detail. Everything in him that has a temporary character, all his
digs at the critics and liberals of the period, all his critical
observations with their assumption of smartness and modernity, and all the
so-called profound reflections scattered here and there--how petty and
naive it all is to our modern ideas! The fact of the matter is this: a
novelist, an artist, ought to pass by everything that has only a temporary
value. Pisemsky's people are living, his temperament is vigorous.
Skabitchevsky in his history attacks him for obscurantism and treachery,
but, my God! of all contemporary writers I don't know a single one so