A Russian Romantic

"The characteristics of our romantic are to understand everything, to see everything and to see it incomparably more clearly than the most positive of our thinkers; to refuse to take anyone or anything for granted, but at the same time not to despise anything; to go round and round everything and to yield to everything out of policy; never to lose sight of the useful and the practical (rent-free quarters for civil servants, pensions of a sort, decorations)-and to discern this aim through all the enthusiasms and volumes of lyrical verses, and at the same time to preserve to his dying day a profound, and indestructible respect for "the sublime and the beautiful," and, incidentally, also to preserve himself like some precious jewel wrapt in cottonwool for the benefit, for instance, of the same "sublime and beautiful." Our romantic is a man of great breadth of vision and the most consummate rascal of all our rascals, I assure you-from experience. That, of course, is all true if our romantic is intelligent. Good Lord, what am I saying? The romantic is always intelligent." -"Notes from the Underground, Part II - Chapter 1." Written by Fyodor Dostoevsky