- Project Runeberg -  Impressions of Russia /
304

(1889) [MARC] Author: Georg Brandes Translator: Samuel Coffin Eastman - Tema: Russia
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Byelinski, “the oracle of Russian thought, the critic
whose bare name frightened debutants.” — “A new
Gogol has arisen,” shouted Niekrásof, as he broke in
through the door. “Certainly, they shoot up nowadays
like toadstools,” answered Byelinski, fretfully, and
reluctantly looked into the manuscript. But the effect on
him was the same as on Niekrásof. When the author
visited him, he said to him enthusiastically: “Young as
you are, do you yourself understand how true it is what
you have written? I don’t think so. But true artistic
inspiration is there. Respect the gifts you possess, and
you will become a great author.”

In order to understand this astonishment and this
enthusiasm, we must remember that the Russian
literature even now does not possess a single attempt of this
kind except Gogol’s “Cloak,” and that Turgenief’s
“Recollections of a Huntsman” did not appear till five
years later. When a month or two after Byelinski’s
conversation with Dostoyevski “Poor Folk” (1846) issued
from the press, the author’s literary reputation was at
once established.

The uneasiness and versatility of his nature is
displayed in the circumstance that though he had made his
début in a direction which is like that into which
Dickens struck a little earlier, he continued his career
with worthless and comic novels in Paul de Kock’s
manner.

He was an inordinate reader at an early day. At the
age of twelve he had already ploughed through Karamzin
and Walter Scott, histories and historical novels by the
quantity. Reading exhausted him, nervous, irritable,
timid, emotional, precocious as he was, and with an
unusual gift of placing himself in the imagined situation.
In the School for Engineers, he read Balzac with special

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