FATHERS AND SONS
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ness, a truthfulness that is inexorable in relation to one's own feelings;
what one needs is freedom, absolute freedom of opinions and ideas,
and, finally, what one needs is education, what one needs is knowl–
edge! "Oh, we understand ! We can see what you are driving at!"
many will perhaps exclaim at this point. "Potugin's ideas! ci-vi-li-za–
tion,
prenez mon ours!
(It's an old, old story!)" Such exclamations
do not surprise me, but they will not make me take back anything
I have said. Learning is not only light, according to the Russian
proverb, it is also freedom. Nothing makes a man so free as knowl–
edge and nowhere is freedom so needed as in art, in poetry; it is not
for nothing that even in official language arts are called "free." Can
a man "grasp," "catch hold of" what surrounds him if he
is
tied
up inside? Pushkin felt this deeply; it is not for nothing that he said
in
his immortal sonnet, a sonnet every young writer ought to learn
by heart and remember as a commandment-
....
by a
free
road
GO
J where your
free
mind may draw you .
...
The absence of such freedom, incidentally, explains why not a
single one of the Slavophils, in spite of their undoubted gifts, has
ever created anything that is alive; not one of them knew how to
remove-even for a moment-his rose-colored spectacles. But the
saddest example of the absence of true freedom, arising out of the ab–
sence of true knowledge, is provided by the last work of Count
L.
N.
Tolstoy (
War and Peace),
which at the same time exceeds by its
creative force and poetic gifts almost anything that has appeared in
our literature since 1840. No, without education and without freedom
in
the widest sense of the word-in relation to oneself and to one's
preconceived ideas and systems, and, indeed, to one's people and one's
history-a true artist is unthinkable; without that air, it is impossible
to
breathe.
As
for the final result, the final appraisal of a so-called literary
career-here, too, one has to remember the words of Goethe:
SindJs Rosen- nun sie werden blUhJn
-"if
these are roses, they will bloom." There are no unacknowledged
niuses as there are no merits which survive their appointed time.
"Sooner or later everyone finds his niche," the late Belinsky used to
