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 unflinch ingly 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.
