But in foreign parts he misses from the very first the air of Russia and contact with the Russian people. For him, Sparta, Toledo and Venice might as well not exist, he cannot become acclimatized, nor can he content himself anywhere for a moment. “I have no words to tell you how unbearable living abroad is to me,” he writes to his friend Strakhov. Not a letter written in exile but breathes the same lament: “I _must_ go back to Russia; the monotony of life here is crushing.” And as though in Russia were hidden the source of nourishment for his work, and the sap failed as soon as he was torn from his native soil, he wrote: “I have no taste for writing, or else, when I do write, it is with much suffering. I cannot think what this means, except it be that I have need of Russia, to work and to create.... I was only too clearly conscious that whether we lived at Dresden or elsewhere was a matter of indifference, for I should always be a foreigner in a foreign land.” Again: “If only you knew how good-for-nothing and alien I feel here. I am growing stupid and dull, and am losing touch with Russia. No breath of Russian air, no Russian spirit. I don’t understand the Russian exiles: madmen all!” And yet at Geneva, at Vevey, he wrote _The Idiot_, at Dresden _The Eternal Husband_ and _The Possessed_. “You have spoken golden words about my work here. Right enough, I shall fall behind, not behind the times, but I shall lose touch with what is happening at home (I know it better than you do, because every day in life I read three Russian newspapers, every line of them, and I take out a couple of reviews), I shall become deaf to the living pulse of life, and how that tells on artistic creation!”