“The devil take the great pictures. I shall hardly be able to devote my whole energy to painting now. One must put one’s whole being into a great picture, and then to give effect to one hundredth part of what one has put in a representation of a fleeting, irrecoverable impression. Sometimes I paint portraits....” “What art are you following now?” “There is but one Art that can satisfy the artist of to-day, the art of words, of poetry, which is limitless in its possibilities.” “You write verses then?” “Verses are children’s food. In verse you celebrate a love affair, a festival, flowers, a nightingale.” “And satire. Remember the use made of it by the Romans.” With these words he would have gone to the bookshelf, but Raisky held him back. “You may,” he said, “be able now and then to hit a diseased spot with satire. Satire is a rod, whose stroke stings but has no further consequences; but she does not show you figures brimming with life, she does not reveal the depths of life with its secret mainsprings of action, she holds no mirror before your eyes. It is only the novel that comprehends and mirrors the life of man.” “So you are writing a novel? On what subject?” “I have not yet quite decided.” “Don’t at all events describe this pettifogging, miserable existence which stares us in the face without the medium of art. Our contemporary literature squeezes every worm, every peasant-girl, and I don’t know what else, into the novel. Choose a historical subject, worthy of your vivacious imagination and your clean-cut style. Do you remember how you used to write of old Russia? Now it is the fashion to choose material from the ant-heap, the talking shop of everyday life. This is to be the stuff of which literature is made. Bah! it is the merest journalism.” “There we are again on the old controversy. If you once mount that horse, there will be no calling you back. Let us leave this question for the moment, and go back to my question. Are you satisfied to spend your life here, as you are now doing, with no desires for anything further?” Leonti looked at him in astonishment, with wide opened eyes. “You do nothing for your generation,” Raisky went on, “but creep backwards like a crab. Why are you for ever talking of the Greeks and Romans? Their work is done, and ours is to bring life into these cemeteries, to shake the slumbering ghosts out of their twilight dreams.” “And how is the task to be begun?” “I mean to draw a picture of this existence, to reflect it as in a mirror. And you....”