of the peasants; I punished them, fornicated, and cheated. Lying, stealing, acts of lust of every description, drunkenness, violence, murder— There was not a crime which I did not commit, and for all that I was praised, and my contemporaries have regarded me as a comparatively moral man.
Thus I lived for ten years.
At that time I began to write through vanity, avarice, and pride. In my writings I did the same as in life. In order to have glory and money, for which I wrote, I had to conceal what was good and speak what was bad. And so I did. How often I managed to conceal in my writings, under the aspect of indifference and even light ridicule, those strivings of mine after the good, which formed the meaning of my life. I was successful in that, and I was praised.
When I was twenty-six years old, I arrived in St. Petersburg after the war, and there came in contact with authors. I was received like one of their own, and was flattered. Before I had time to look around, the conventional literary views of life, which these persons whom I met held, were appropriated by me and completely wiped out all my former attempts to become better. These views furnished the looseness of my morals with a theory which justified it.
The view of life which these people, my literary fellows, held, consisted in stating that life was all the time developing, and that in this development the chief part was taken by us, the men of ideas, and that among these men of ideas the greatest influence was exerted by us, artists and poets. Our calling was to teach people. In order that the natural question, “What do I know, and what shall I teach?” might not present itself to one, this theory explained that it was not necessary to know that, and that an artist and poet taught unconsciously. I was considered a marvellous artist and poet, and so it was quite
