Note 25 — Chapter VIII · POLITICAL LITERATURE: SATIRE: ART CRITICISM: CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS

The speech of Homyakóff is reproduced in Skabitchévskiy’s History (l. c.). I was very anxious to get Tolstóy’s speech, because I think that the ideas he expressed about “the permanent in Art, the universal” hardly did exclude the denunciation of the ills from which a society suffers at a given moment. Perhaps he meant what Nekrásoff also meant when he described the literature to which Schédrin’s Provincial Sketches had given origin as “a flagellation of the petty thieves for the pleasure of the big ones.” Unfortunately, this speech was not printed, and the manuscript of it could not be found.