. You were
speaking of sopranos when you stopped; go right on from there. But
ashamed you ought to be. If I did not know with what pride and passion
you are devoted to your calling ..."

"Say nothing about a 'calling,' Lisaveta Ivanovna. Literature is not a
calling, but a curse--let me tell you that. When does this curse begin
to be perceptible? Early, terribly early. At a time when by rights one
ought still to be living in peace and harmony with God and the world.
You begin to feel yourself marked out, to feel yourself in a mysterious
antagonism to other men, to every-day and decent men, and the abyss of
irony, unbelief, opposition, knowledge, and feeling which cuts you off
from the world yawns deeper and deeper; you are lonely, and from then
on all possibility of understanding is over. What a fate! Suppose your
heart sufficiently alive, sufficiently affectionate still, to feel it a
terrible one ... Your self-consciousness takes fire, because you among
thousands feel that your brow bears the mark and that it escapes no
one, I knew an actor of genius who as a man had to struggle with morbid
embarrassment and instability. His over-sensitive ego-feeling, together
with a lack of parts to play, of histrionic activity, had that effect
upon this perfect artist and impoverished human being ... An artist, a
real one, not one whose official profession is art, but a predestined
and pre-condemned artist, you can pick out of a thousand men,
with a little sharpness of sight. The feeling of separation and of
non-membership, of being recognized and observed, is in his face,
something at once regal and perplexed. In the features of a prince
walking in ordinary clothes through a crowd one can see something
similar. But here no ordinary garb does any good, Lisaveta. Disguise
yourself, mask yourself, dress like an attache or like a lieutenant of
the Guard on leave: you will scarcely need to lift your eyes and utter
a word before every one will know that you are not a man, but something
strange, something that estranges, that is different ...

"But _what_ is the artist? Toward no question has mankind's indolence
and inertia of discernment proved more unyielding than toward this one.
'Such things are a gift,' humbly say the good people who are under the
influence of an artist, and because cheerful and exalted effects,
according to their good-natured view, must quite inevitably have
cheerful and exalted origins, nobody suspects that we may