Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [440]
Only in the Northern Beetle,1 in a humorous feuilleton about the singer Drabanti, who had lost his voice, were a few scornful words said in passing about Koznyshev’s book, indicating that it had long since been condemned by all and handed over to general derision.
Finally in the third month a critical article appeared in a serious journal. Sergei Ivanovich knew the author of the article. He had met him once at Golubtsov’s.
The author was a very young and sickly feuilletonist, quite pert as a writer, but with extremely little education and timid in his personal relations.
Despite his complete contempt for the author, Sergei Ivanovich set about with complete respect to read the article. The article was terrible.
The feuilletonist had obviously understood the whole book deliberately in a way in which it could not possibly be understood. But he had selected his quotations so cleverly that for those who had not read the book (and obviously almost no one had read it) it was completely clear that the whole book was nothing but a collection of highflown words, which were also used inappropriately (this was indicated by question marks), and that the author of the book was a completely ignorant man. And it was all so witty that Sergei Ivanovich would not have minded displaying such wit himself. That was the terrible thing.
Despite the complete conscientiousness with which Sergei Ivanovich tested the correctness of the reviewer’s arguments, he did not linger for a moment over the shortcomings and mistakes that were being ridiculed - it was too obvious that it had all been selected on purpose - but at once began involuntarily to recall in the smallest detail his meeting and conversation with the author of the article.
‘Did I offend him in some way?’ Sergei Ivanovich asked himself.
And remembering that, when they had met, he had corrected the young man in the use of a word that showed his ignorance, he found the explanation of the article’s meaning.
After this article came a dead silence, both printed and oral, about the book, and Sergei Ivanovich saw that his work of six years, elaborated with such love and effort, had gone by without leaving a trace.
His situation was the more difficult because, once he finished the book, he no longer had the intellectual work that formerly had taken up the greater part of his time.
Sergei Ivanovich was intelligent, educated, healthy, energetic and did not know where to apply his energy. Conversations in drawing rooms, conferences, meetings, committees, wherever one could talk, took up part of his time; but as an inveterate city-dweller, he did not allow himself to be totally consumed by talking, as his inexperienced brother did when he was in Moscow; he was still left with considerable leisure and mental force.
Fortunately for him, at this most trying time of his book’s failure, the questions of racial minorities, American friends, famine in Samara, the Exposition, and spiritism came to be replaced by the Slavic question,2 previously only smouldering in society, and Sergei Ivanovich, one of those who had previously raised this question, gave himself wholly to it.
In the milieu to which Sergei Ivanovich belonged, nothing else was talked or written about at that time but the Slavic question and the Serbian war. All that an idle crowd usually does to kill time was now done for the benefit of the Slavs. Balls, concerts, dinners, speeches, ladies’ dresses, beer, taverns - all bore witness to a sympathy with the Slavs.
With much of what was said and written on this subject Sergei Ivanovich did not agree in detail. He saw that the Slavic question had become one of those fashionable fads which, supplanting one another, always serve as a subject of concern for society; he also saw that there were many people who concerned themselves with it for vain, self-interested purposes. He recognized that the newspapers printed a great many useless and exaggerated things with one aim - to draw attention to themselves