magnificent. There is warmth, there is space, an immensity of water and of
greenery and delightful people. We spent six days on the Psyol, ate and
drank, walked and did nothing: my ideal of happiness, as you know, is
idleness. Now I am at Melihovo again. There is a cold rain, a leaden sky,
mud.

* * * * *

It sometimes happens that one passes a third-class refreshment room and
sees a cold fish, cooked long before, and wonders carelessly who wants that
unappetising fish. And yet undoubtedly that fish is wanted, and will be
eaten, and there are people who will think it nice. One may say the same of
the works of N. He is a bourgeois writer, writing for the unsophisticated
public who travel third class. For that public Tolstoy and Turgenev are too
luxurious, too aristocratic, somewhat alien and not easily digested. There
is a public which eats salt beef and horse-radish sauce with relish, and
does not care for artichokes and asparagus. Put yourself at its point of
view, imagine the grey, dreary courtyard, the educated ladies who look like
cooks, the smell of paraffin, the scantiness of interests and tasks--and
you will understand N. and his readers. He is colourless; that is partly
because the life he describes lacks colour. He is false because bourgeois
writers cannot help being false. They are vulgar writers perfected. The
vulgarians sin together with their public, while the bourgeois are
hypocritical with them and flatter their narrow virtue.




MELIHOVO,
February 25, 1895.