n Trofimovitch greatly regretted having let his tongue run
away with him, and having revealed such suspicions before me.

II

One morning, on the seventh or eighth day after Stepan Trofimovitch had
consented to become "engaged," about eleven o'clock, when I was hurrying
as usual to my afflicted friend, I had an adventure on the way.

I met Karmazinov, "the great writer," as Liputin called him. I had read
Karmazinov from a child. His novels and tales were well known to the
past and even to the present generation. I revelled in them; they were
the great enjoyment of my childhood and youth. Afterwards I grew rather
less enthusiastic over his work. I did not care so much for the novels
with a purpose which he had been writing of late as for his first,
early works, which were so full of spontaneous poetry, and his latest
publications I had not liked at all. Speaking generally, if I may
venture to express my opinion on so delicate a subject, all these
talented gentlemen of the middling sort who are sometimes in their
lifetime accepted almost as geniuses, pass out of memory quite suddenly
and without a trace when they die, and what's more, it often happens
that even during their lifetime, as soon as a new generation grows up
and takes the place of the one in which they have flourished, they are
forgotten and neglected by every one in an incredibly short time. This
somehow happens among us quite suddenly, like the shifting of the scenes
on the stage. Oh, it's not at all the same as with Pushkin, Gogol,
Moliere, Voltaire, all those great men who really had a new original
word to say! It's true, too, that these talented gentlemen of the
middling sort in the decline of their venerable years usually write
themselves out in the most pitiful way, though they don't observe the
fact themselves. It happens not infrequently that a writer who has been
for a long time credited with extraordinary profundity and expected
to exercise a great and serious influence on the progress of society,
betrays in the end such poverty, such insipidity in his fundamental
ideas that no one regrets that he succeeded in writing himself out so
soon. But the old grey-beards don't notice this, and are angry. Their
vanity sometimes, especially towards the end of their career, reaches
proportions that may well provoke wonder. God knows what they begin
to take themselves for--for gods at least! People used to say about
Karmazinov that his connections with arist