March 1876
Dissociation
...I keep thinking that we have begun the epoch of universal 'dissociation.' All are dissociating themselves, isolating themselves from everyone else, everyone wants to invent something of his own, something new and unheard of. Everybody sets aside all those things that used to be common to our thoughts and feelings and begins with his own thoughts and feelings. Everybody wants to begin from the beginning. The links that once united us are broken without regret, and everyone acts on his own accord and finds his only consolation in that. If he doesn't act, then he would like to. Granted, a great many people don't undertake anything and never will, yet they still have torn themselves away and stand apart, looking at the torn place and waiting idly for something to happen. Everyone in Russia is waiting for something to happen. Meanwhile, there is scarcely anything about which we can agree morally; everything has been or is being broken up, not even into clusters but into single fragments. And the main thing is that sometimes this is done with the simplest and most satisfied manner. Take, for instance, our contemporary man of letters - one of the few 'new people,' I mean. He begins his career and will have nothing to do with anything that came before; what he has comes from himself, and he acts by himself. He preaches new things and flatly sets as his ideal a new word and a new man. He knows neither European literature nor his own; he has read nothing, nor will he take up reading. Not only has he not read Pushkin and Turgenev, he has scarcely even read his own people, that is Belinsky and Dobroliubov. He depicts new heroes and new women, and their whole novelty consists in the fact that they confidently take their tenth step having forgotten about the nine preceding ones, and so they suddenly find themselves in the most false situation one can conceive; and they perish so that the reader may be edified and enticed. The falseness of the situation comprises the entire edification. There is very little new in all this; to the contrary, there is an extraordinary lot of worn-out old castoffs...
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