will loudly lament on his deathbed, and for these reasons my lament is as perfect as can be, nor does it suddenly break off, as is likely to be the case with a real lament,
but dies beautifully and purely away. It is the same thing as my perpetual lamenting to my mother over pains that were not nearly so great as my laments would lead
one to believe. With my mother, of course, I did not need to make so great a display of art as with the reader.
14 December. My work goes forward at a miserable crawl, in what is perhaps its most important part, where a good night would stand me in such stead.
At Baum’s in the afternoon. He was giving a pale little girl with glasses a piano lesson. The boy sat quietly in the gloom of the kitchen, carelessly playing with some
unrecognizable object. Impression of great ease. Especially in contrast to the bustling about of the tall housemaid, who was washing dishes in a tub.
15 December. Didn’t work at all. For two hours now have been looking through new company applications for the office. The afternoon at B.’s. He was somewhat
offensive and rude. Empty talk in consequence of my debility, blankness, and stupidity almost; was inferior to him in every respect; it is a long time now since I have had
a purely private conversation with him, was happy to be alone again. The joy of lying on the sofa in the silent room without a headache, calmly breathing in a manner
befitting a human being.
The defeats in Serbia, the stupid leadership.
19 December. Yesterday wrote “The Village Schoolmaster” almost without knowing it, but was afraid to go on writing later than a quarter to two; the fear was well
founded, I slept hardly at all, merely suffered through perhaps three short dreams and was then in the office in the condition one would expect. Yesterday Father’s
reproaches on account of the factory: “You talked me into it.” Then went home and calmly wrote for three hours in the consciousness that my guilt is beyond question,
though not so great as Father pictures it. Today, Saturday, did not come to dinner, partly in fear of Father, partly in order to use the whole night for working; yet I wrote
only one page that wasn’t very good.
The beginning of every story is ridiculous at first. There seems no hope that this newborn thing, still incomplete and tender in every joint, will be able to keep alive in the
completed organization of the world, which, like every completed organization, strives to close itself off. However, one should not forget that the story, if it has any
justification to exist, bears its complete organization within itself even before it has been fully formed; for this reason despair over the beginning of a story is
unwarranted; in a like case parents should have to despair of their suckling infant, for they had no intention of bringing this pathetic and ridiculous being into the world.
Of course, one never knows whether the despair one feels is warranted or unwarranted. But reflecting on it can give one a certain support; in the past I have suffered
from the lack of this knowledge.
20 December. Max’s objection to Dostoyevsky, that he allows too many mentally ill persons to enter. Completely wrong. They aren’t ill. Their illness is merely a way
to characterize them, and moreover a very delicate and fruitful one. One need only stubbornly keep repeating of a person that he is simple-minded and idiotic, and he
will, if he has the Dostoyevskian core inside him, be spurred on, as it were, to do his very best. His characterizations have in this respect about the same significance as
insults among friends. If they say to one another, “You are a blockhead,” they don’t mean that the other is really a blockhead who has disgraced them by his friendship;
rather there is generally mixed in it an infinite number of intentions, if the insult isn’t merely a joke, or even if it is. Thus, the father of the Karamazovs, though a wicked
creature, is by no means a fool but rather a very clever man, almost the equal of Ivan, and in any case much cleverer than his cousin, for example, whom the novelist