PARTISAN REVIEW
IV.
To V.
I.
Ivanov:
Our correspondence from corner to corner, accidentally begun,
is beginning to absorb me. You remember: in my absence you wrote
your first letter to me .and as you went out, left it on my table; and
I answered it while you were out. Now I am writing in your presence,
while you, in silent contemplation, are trying in your mind to smooth
out the century-old and rigid wrinkles of Dante's tertets, in order to
mold their likeness in Russian verse. I am writing because in this
way my thoughts will be expressed more fully and heard more
articulately, like a sound that breaks a long silence. And after din–
ner we shall lie each on his bed, you with .a sheet of paper, and I
with a little leather-bound book, and you will begin reading to me
your translation of
Purgatory,
the fruit of a morning's labors, and I,
comparing it with the original, will offer my criticisms. And once
again, as on previous days, I shall drink my fill of the riches of your
verse, again experiencing the familiar catch in my throat.
0 my friend, swan of Apollo! Why was feeling so vital, why
was thought so fresh and the word so full of substance then, in the
fourteenth century, and why are our thoughts and feelings today so
pale, and our speech .as though laden with cobwebs? You spoke well
about metaphysics as a system of hardly perceptible compulsions; but
.after all I am speaking ·of something else-of our culture as a whole
and of the very subtle distillations with which it has suffused all the
texture of existence; not of compulsions, but of temptations that have
disintegrated, weakened, distorted our minds. And not even of this
do I speak, not of the consequences and the harmfulness of culture,
because the evaluation of usefulness and harm is the business of
reason, and every argument that wields the sword will perish by the
sword. Can we in this matter trust our intellect when we know with
certainty that it has in itself grown out of culture and naturally wor–
ships it just as an untalented slave worships the master who has elev–
ated him?
It is another judge, a judge who cannot be bribed, who has
raised his voice in me. Whether I grew tired from bearing a burden
beyond my strength, or · whether the light of my original mind
broke through the weight of learning and habit- in any event, it is
from within that a simple feeling lias risen and formed itself in me,
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