“Well, God help him, Batushka,” Lisaweta said, washing her hands in a tin basin. “You don’t need to follow him.”
“No, Lisaweta, I am not following him; and for the simple reason that I am now and then in a position where the springtime of my craft can shame me a little. You see, sometimes I receive letters from abroad, testimonials of praise and gratitude from my public, wonderful letters from people who have been moved. I read these letters, and am touched by the warm and helpless human emotions which my art has brought out; I am seized with a kind of pity for the enthusiastic naivete which speaks out of these lives; and I redden at the thought of how much these upright folks would be abashed if they got one look behind the scenes, if their innocence could ever conceive that a righteous, healthy, and respectable person simply does not write, mimic, compose. … None of which hinders me from using their admiration for my genius, for elevating and stimulating me; I take it tremendously in earnest, then make a face like an ape who is playing the great man. … Ah, don’t argue with me about that, Lisaweta! I tell you that I have often been tired to death of representing the human without participating in the human. … Is the artist a man at all? Let us ask ‘woman’ about that! It seems to me, we artists all share somewhat in the fate of those prepared papal singers … We sing with touching beauty, yet—”
“You should be a bit ashamed, Tonio Kröger. Come to tea now. The water will be boiling immediately, and here are the cigarettes. You stopped at soprano-singing, and now go on. But you should be ashamed. If I didn’t know with what proud passionateness you are devoted to your calling …”
“Don’t speak of a ‘calling,’ Lisaweta Iwanowna! Literature is not a calling at all, but a curse, and that ends it. When does it begin to show itself, this curse? Early, frightfully early. At a time when one by rights should still be living in peace and accord with God and the world. You begin by feeling yourself set apart, in some mysterious antagonism to others, to the usual, the ordinary. The abyss of irony, disbelief, opposition, knowledge, feeling which separates you from people yawns deeper and deeper. You are alone, and henceforth there is no intercommunication. What a fate! Provided that your heart is sufficiently alive, sufficiently loving, to feel it as frightful! … Your self-consciousness takes fire, because you among thousands detect the mark on your brow and feel that it escapes no one. I knew an actor of genius who as a man had to fight against a sickly timidity and unsteadiness. His overly excited sense of his ego, together with his lack of a role, of something to perform, produced such an effect on this consummate artist and impoverished man. An artist, a real one, not one whose bourgeois calling is art, but one predestined and damned to art—it takes little keenness to pick him out from a group of people. The sense of separateness, of not fitting in, of being known and looked at, something at once commanding and embarrassed, shows in his face. In the features of a prince who is walking in civilian dress among a crowd, you can observe something similar. But here no civilian clothes help, Lisaweta! Disguise yourself, mask yourself, dress like an attaché or like a lieutenant of the guard on furlough—you hardly need to raise your eyes and speak a word, and everyone will know that you are not a human being, but something strange, something estranging, something different …
“But what is the artist? No question has demonstrated more acutely than this, humanity’s smugness and laziness of perception. ‘It is a gift,’ good people say humbly, when they are under the effects of an artist; and since, from their good-natured standpoint, pleasant and elevated effects must also have totally pleasant and elevated origins, no one suspects that perhaps here the most wretchedly conditioned, most utterly questionable ‘gift’ is involved. … It is well known that artists are very touchy—now, it is also well known that this is not usually the case with people of good consciences and soundly established self-reliance. … You see, Lisaweta, in a more refined form I hold essentially to all the suspicions against the typical artist which any of my stoutly respectable forefathers up there in the narrow city would have brought against any mountebank and adventurous artist who might have entered his house. Listen to this. I know a banker, a grey-haired business man, who has a gift for writing stories. He makes use of this gift in his leisure hours, and his works are often quite distinguished. In spite of—I say ‘in spite of’—this sublime talent, this man is not entirely irreproachable. On the contrary, he has already had to serve a heavy sentence, and for very good reason at that. Yes, it happened very strangely that he became conscious of this gift for the first time while in the penitentiary, and his experiences as a convict form the central theme in all his productions. With a little boldness, one could deduce from this that in order to become a poet it is necessary to be at home in some kind of penitentiary. But doesn’t the suspicion arise that his experiences in the prison were less intimately connected with the
