Think of his letter "The Intelligenzia, the State, the People," written in 1905--what a pernicious, malignant thing it is! You can hear in it the sectarian's "I told you so." At the time I wrote an answer to him, based on his own words to me that he had long since forfeited the right to speak of and on behalf of the Russian people, for I am a witness of his lack of desire to listen to and understand the people who came to talk to him soul to soul. My letter was bitter, and in the end I did not send it to him.
Well, now he is probably making his last assault in order to give to his ideas the highest possible significance. Like Vassily Buslayev, he usually loved these assaults, but always so that he might assert his holiness and obtain a halo. That is dictatorial, although his teaching is justified by the ancient history of Russia and by his own sufferings of genius. Holiness is attained by flirting with sin, by subduing the will to live. People do desire to live, but he tries to persuade them: "That's all nonsense, our earthly life." It is very easy to persuade a Russian of this; he is a lazy creature who loves beyond anything else to find an excuse for his own inactivity. On the whole, of course, a Russian is not a Platon Karatayev, nor an Akim, nor a Bezonkhy, nor a Neklyudov; all these men were created by history and nature, not exactly on Tolstoi's pattern, he only improved on them in order more thoroughly to support his teaching. But, undeniably, Russia as a whole is--Tiulin above and Oblomov below. For the Tiulin above look at the year 1905, and for the Oblomov below look at Count A. N. Tolstoi, I. Bunin, look at everything round about you. Beasts and swindlers--we can leave them out of consideration, though our beast is exceedingly national--what a filthy coward he is for all his cruelty. Swindlers, of course, are international.
In Leo Nicolayevitch there is much which at times roused in me a feeling very like hatred, and this hatred fell upon my soul with crushing weight. His disproportionately overgrown individuality is a monstrous phenomenon, almost ugly, and there is in him something of Sviatogor, the bogatir, whom the earth can't hold. Yes, he _is_ great. I am deeply convinced that, beyond all that he speaks of, there is much which he is silent about, even in his diary--he is silent, and, probably, will never tell it to anyone. That "something" only occasionally and in hints slipped through into his conversation, and hints of it are also to be found in the two note-books of his diary which he gave me and L. A. Sulerzhizky to read; it seems to me a kind of "negation of all affirmations," the deepest and most evil nihilism which has sprung from the soil of an infinite and unrelieved despair, from a loneliness which, probably, no one but he has experienced with such terrifying clearness. I often thought him to be a man who in the depths of his soul is stubbornly indifferent to people: he is so much above and beyond them that they seem to him like midges and their activities ridiculous and miserable. He has gone too far away from them into some desert, and there solitary, with the highest effort of all the force of his spirit, he closely examines into "the most essential," into death.