—it's wonderful. That's real: you sin and I will go and expiate your sin by prayer. And the other, the weary one, the money-loving founder of the family—that's true too. And he's a drunken, profligate beast, and loves everyone, and suddenly commits murder—ah, it's good. It should be written, among thieves and beggars you must not look for heroes, you really mustn't. Heroes—that's a lie and invention; there are simply people, people, and nothing else."
He often pointed out exaggerations in my stories, but once, speaking of Dead Souls, he said, smiling good-naturedly:
"We are all of us terrible inventors. I myself, when I write, suddenly feel pity for some character, and then I give him some good quality or take a good quality away from someone else, so that in comparison with the others he may not appear too black." And then in the stern tones of an inexorable judge: "That's why I say that art is a lie, an arbitrary sham, harmful for people. One writes not what real life is, but simply what one thinks of life oneself. What good is that to anyone, how I see that tower or sea or Tartar—what interest or use is there in it?"
[At times his thoughts and feelings seemed to me capriciously, even deliberately, perverse, but what particularly struck and upset men was just the stern directness of his thought, like Job, the fearless questioner of the cruel God. He said:
"I was walking one day on the road to Kiev,
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