But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. All truths are erroneous. The weak-nerved lack the strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism.
Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks.
The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder. The myth about the angel who rebelled against his Lord is the most beautiful of all myths, the proudest, the most revolutionary, the most immortal of them all. Sologub has preserved the stormy, reckless Russian soul. Happily, because a country where there are no longer any intransigent, eternally dissatisfied, forever restless romantics, where only the healthy remain, only the Sancho Panzas and the Chichikovs, such a country is doomed sooner or later to snore under the quilt of philistinism. By complex ways, by looking deep into the dark well of the human soul, full of filth, somewhere at the very bottom of it Chekhov at last found his faith.