198
PARTISAN REVIEW
worth being lived and even suffered for. Thank you, thank you for
everything.
August 14, 1958
Dear and great friend, where can I find the words
to
tell you my
profound gratitude for the rare help that your existence gives me, it
alone, the order of ideas that are yours alone, your way of seeing things,
your work, your being? Will I bring myself
to
say, without a certain
grain of immodesty, how much I am struck by the affinity of our views?
Your aspiration for the good that is not ethical but the movement of a
soul guided and shaped by a taste for what is great. Before being
surprised and embarrassed by your direct and undeserved mention of
me (and in what terms!), I understood your dear inscription on the
"Speech" about my presence in the book in the figurative sense.
Indeed, I almost forgot that I was reading a book conceived and printed
in French and that it was not I who was thinking and following
everything internally and tacitly in Russian. Such were my delight and
my assent, so many times was I ready to exclaim in pure astonishment
that such a community of ideas could exist! How consoling, how
meaningful for me is everything you say on page fourteen, your
statements on truth and liberty, on solitude and love for mankind, on
the causal connection between sorrow and beauty. All your thoughts
on realism, on the only mature and great style, classical, so
to
speak, in
a continually new sense. That you treat the tragic as something
natural, as what is due and even desirable ("To create today is to create
dangerously!" ) is so close to me! There was a moment when I wanted
to
provide "Dr. Zh." with two epigraphs, a verse from the XC Psalm
7
and a line from Baudelaire ("I know that sorrow is the only nobility.").
(I finally crossed them out.) I like your "The Fall" very much, but
"The Stranger" made a much greater impression on me.
In
it I saw
everythi ng, experienced everything, felt everything. The heat, the
desert of the uninhabited Sunday, the proximity of the sea, the terrible
nearness of animate nature and man without heart. I wrote you a card
(this is the second one), did you receive it?
Translated from the French by Emily Tall
and Linda Orr
7. Psalm 91 in French and English Bibles.
