es ... come to your senses, Lisaveta. I am not that,
I say, as far as living emotion is concerned. You see, the man of
letters fails to understand, after all, that life still likes to go on
living, that it is not ashamed of living after it _has_ been put into
words and 'redeemed.' Lo and behold, it keeps on sinning unflinchingly
despite its redemption at the hand of literature; for all action is sin
in the eyes of the mind ...

"I am ready to make my point, Lisaveta. Listen to me. I am a lover of
life--this is a confession. Take it and keep it, for I never made it to
any one else. They say, they have actually written and printed it, that
I hate or fear or despise or loathe life. I have liked to hear that,
for it flattered me; but it is none the less false. I love life ... You
smile, Lisaveta, and I know why. But I conjure you, do not regard what
I am just saying as literature. Do not think of Cesar Borgia or of any
drunken philosophy that elevates him to its escutcheon. He is nothing
to me, this Cesar Borgia. I have the poorest possible opinion of him,
and I shall never in my life understand how men can revere the
extraordinary and the demoniacal as an ideal. No, 'life,' standing as
it does in eternal contrast to intellect and art--not as a vision of
bloody greatness and barbarous beauty, not as the unusual does it appear
to us unusual men; on the contrary, the normal, decorous, and amiable
are the realm of our longing, and these are life in its seductive
banality. That man is far from being an artist, my dear, whose ultimate
and deepest passion is the exquisite, eccentric, and satanic, who knows
no yearning for the innocent, simple, and vital, for a little friendship,
devotion, familiarity, and human happiness--the furtive and consuming
yearning, Lisaveta, for the raptures of the commonplace.

"A human friend! Will you believe that it would make me proud and happy
to possess one friend among human beings? But so far I have had
friends only among demons, goblins, deep-souled monsters, and spirits
mute with knowledge: that is, among men of letters.

"At times I get on to some platform or other, find myself in a hall
face to face with people who have come to listen to me. Do you know
that I often watch myself surveying the audience, and catch myself
stealthily looking around with the question in my heart: who is it that
has come to me, whose applause and thanks are reaching me, with whom
will my art procure me an ideal