Book: Diary of a writer. Page 1

You can respect a person very much while radically disagreeing with him.

Self-purification through suffering is easier - easier than the fate that you make for many of them as a complete justification at trial. You only instill cynicism in his soul, leaving him with a tempting question and ridicule of you.

The people, calling the criminal unfortunate, never ceased to consider him a criminal.

Energy, labor and struggle - this is how the environment is processed.

Among the ideas hidden in the Russian people - the ideas of the Russian people - is the name of crime as misfortune, and of criminals as unfortunate.

After all, there is so little - little by little we will come to the conclusion that there are no crimes at all, and everything is environment

After all, having become the best ourselves, we will correct the environment and make it better. After all, this is the only way to correct it.

In the meantime, in their humility, the people are confused. Who looked into the innermost recesses of his heart? Can anyone here say that they are completely familiar with the Russian people?

Christ is, after all, the ideal of human beauty, an unattainable type that cannot be repeated even in the future.

In China I would be a great writer; here it is much more difficult. Everything there is provided and designed for a thousand years; here everything is upside down for a thousand years.

The Russian people, as it were, enjoy their suffering.

Education, on the other hand, will be based on where we have begun, that is, on their denial of all his past and on the curse to which he himself must betray his past. A little bit we will teach a man from the people to read, immediately make him smell Europe, immediately begin to seduce him with Europe, well, at least with the sophistication of life, decency, costume, drinks, dances - in a word, we will make him ashamed of his former laptya and kvass, ashamed of his ancient songs, and although there are several beautiful and musical ones, but we will still make him sing rhyming vaudeville, no matter how angry you are at it. In short, for a good purpose, we, by the most numerous and all means, will act primarily on the weak strings of character, as it was with us, and then the people are ours. He will shame his former and curse him. Who curses his former, he is already ours - this is our formula!

Pushkin loved the people exactly as the people demand, and he did not guess how to love the people, did not prepare, did not study: he himself suddenly turned out to be the people. He bowed before the truth of the people, he recognized the truth of the people as his own. Despite all the vices of the people and many of its stinking habits, he was able to discern the great essence of his spirit when no one almost looked at the people like that, and took this essence of the people into his soul as an ideal. And this was when the most humane and European-developed lovers of the Russian people frankly regretted that our people were so low that they could not rise to the level of the Parisian street crowd. In fact, these amateurs have always despised the people.

By the way, I would like to note: among those who wrote about our self-intoxication and teased us with it after Sevastopol, there were several new young writers who at that time attracted great attention of society and aroused in it ardent sympathy for their denunciations. And, however, so many impudent and filthy people immediately joined these truly well-wishing accusers, there was so much whistle, so many people who did not understand at all what the essence of the matter was, and yet imagined themselves to be the saviors of Russia, moreover, it appeared in their there are so many even outspoken enemies of Russia that, in the end, they themselves damaged the business that they joined and which was led by talented people. But at first they were successful, solely because the pure-hearted Russian people, who really thirsted then everywhere for renewal and a new word, did not discern in them scoundrels, people without talent and without convictions, and even corrupt ones. On the contrary, they thought that they were for Russia, for its interests, for renewal, for the people and society.