Laughter is convulsive, and if, during the first minute a man laughs at everything, during the second moment he blushes and despises his laughter and that which caused it. It took all ofHeine's genius to make up for two or three repulsive jokes about the deceased writers Berne and Platen and a lady who was still alive.3 For a time the public shied away from him, and he made peace with them only through his extraordinary talent.
Without a doubt, laughter is one of the most powerful means of destruction; Voltaire's laughter struck and burned like lightning. From laughter idols fall, as do wreaths and frames, and a wonder-working icon turns into a dark and badly drawn picture. With its revolutionary leveling power, laughter is terribly popular and catchy; having begun in a modest study, it moves in widening circles to the limits of literacy. To use such a weapon not against the absurd Trinity of censors—in which Timashev plays the Holy listener—but as its trident, means to join it in the poisoning of thought.
We ourselves saw very well the blunders and mistakes of investigative literature and the awkwardness of the first open discussion; what is surprising in the fact that people who their whole lives were robbed by neighborhood police, judges, and governors now have a lot to say? And they have kept silent about even more!
When did our taste become so spoiled and refined? For ten years we put up with chatter about all the Petersburg camellias and courtesans, who, in the first place, are as alike as sisters the world over, and, second, have this in common with cutlets, that while one may from time to time enjoy them, there is simply nothing that need be said afterward.4
"But why are investigative writers such poor narrators, and why do their stories resemble court cases?" That comment may be relevant to individuals, but not to a movement. Someone who poorly and dully conveys the tears of the peasant, the brutality of the landowner, and the thievery of the police, you can be sure will do an even poorer job describing how a golden- haired girl spilled the water she had scooped up from a pool, and how a dark-eyed youth, seeing the swift-flowing liquid, regretted that it was not flowing over his heart.5
There were outstanding works in "investigative literature." Do you fancy that you can now noisily throw all the stories by Shchedrin and others into the water with Oblomov's arms around their neck? Gentlemen, you are too extravagant!
You have no pity for these articles because the world about which they write is alien to you; it interests you only to the extent that one is forbidden to write about it. Plants native to the capital, you have sprung up between Gryaznaya Street and the Moyka Canal, and what lies beyond the city limits seems foreign to you. The coarse picture of a story like "Transport"—with carts stuck in the mud, and ruined peasants who gaze with despair at a ferry, waiting one day, and another, and a third—cannot interest you as much as the long odyssey of some half-wild, icy nature, which drags on, drifts off, and disintegrates into meaningless detail.6 You are prepared to sit at a microscope and analyze this rot (not looking for pathologies, which are contrary to the purity of art; art must have no use and while it may at times be somewhat harmful, base utilitarianism will kill it)—doing so stimulates your nerves. We, quite to the contrary, cannot—without yawning and disgust—follow physiological descriptions of some sort of Neva wood lice who have outlived that heroic period in which their ancestors—and there were many—were Onegins and Pechorins.
And besides, the Onegins and Pechorins were completely authentic, and expressed the real grief and destructiveness of Russian life at that time. The sad fate of the superfluous person, a casualty only because he had developed into a human being, revealed itself then not only in narrative poems and novels, but on the streets and in drawing rooms, in villages and in cities. Our most recent literary recruits needle these delicate dreamers who were broken without a fight, idle people who could not find their way in the environment in which they lived. It's a shame they do not come to any conclusions—I happen to think that had Onegin and Pechorin been able— like many others—to make peace with the Nicholaevan era, Onegin would be Viktor Petrovich Panin, and Pechorin would not have perished on the way to Persia, but would, like Kleinmikhel, be running the transportation system and interfering with railway construction.7
The era of Onegins and Pechorins has passed. In Russia now there are no more superfluous people; now, to the contrary, there are not enough people for the work that is required. Anyone who cannot find something to do now has no one to blame—he is in fact an empty person, a piece of wood or a lazybones. And that is why Onegins and Pechorins naturally become Oblomovs.
Public opinion, pampering the Onegins and Pechorins because it sensed in them its own suffering, turns away from Oblomovs.
It is complete nonsense to say that we have no public opinion, as a learned commentator recently said, thus demonstrating that we had no need of open discussion because we had no public opinion, and we had no public opinion because we had no bourgeoisie!8
Public opinion has shown its tact, its sympathies, and its implacable severity, even during times of public silence. Where did all that uproar come from over Chaadaev's letter, over The Inspector General and Dead Souls, the Tales of a Hunter, Belinsky's articles, and Granovsky's lectures? And, on the other hand, how viciously it fell upon its idols for civic treachery or lack of firmness. Gogol died from its sentence, and Pushkin himself experienced what it means to strike a chord in praise of Nicholas.9 Our men of letters were more likely than the public to forgive praises sung to an inhuman, barracks despot, as their conscience had been dulled by a refinement of the aesthetic palate!
The example of Senkovsky is even more striking. What did he do with all his wit, his Semitic languages, his seven literatures, his lively memory, and his sharp exposition?. At first the rockets, flashes, crackling, sparklers, whistles, noise, merry atmosphere, and free-and-easy laughter attracted everyone to his journal—they looked and looked and laughed and then, little by little, they went away to their homes. Senkovsky was forgotten, like St. Thomas week when they forget about some bespangled acrobat, who the previous week had interested the whole town, as people packed his booth and hung about him in crowds...10
What did he lack? It was the quality that Belinsky and Granovsky had in such abundance—that eternally troubling demon of love and indignation, visible in tears and laughter. He lacked the kind of conviction that would have been his life's work, a map on which everything would have been laid out with passion and pain. In the words that come from such conviction there remains a trace of the magnetic demonism under which the speaker worked, which explains why his speeches disturb, alarm, and awaken. becoming a force and a power that sometimes moves entire generations.
But we are far from judging Senkovsky unconditionally; he is vindicated by the leaden era in which he lived. He might have become a cold skeptic, an indifferent blase, laughing at good and evil and believing in nothing— the same way that others shaved the top of their head, became Jesuit priests, and believe everything in the world.11 It was all an escape from Nicholas— and how could one not try to escape at that time? The only people we do not forgive are those who ran to the Third Department.