While he was writing "Anna
Karenina," my father set great store by his opinion and
valued his critical instinct very highly.
"It is enough for me that that is your opinion," he writes
in a letter of 1872, probably apropos of the "Alphabet."
In 1876, apropos of "Anna Karenina" this time, my
father wrote:
"You ask me whether you have understood my novel aright, and
what I think of your opinion. Of course you understood it aright.
Of course I am overjoyed at your understanding of it; but it does
not follow that everybody will understand it as you do."
But it was not only his critical work that drew my father to
Strakhof. He disliked critics on the whole and used to say that
the only people who took to criticism were those who had no
creative faculty of their own. "The stupid ones judge the clever
ones," he said of professional critics. What he valued most in
Strakhof was the profound and penetrating thinker. He was a "real
friend" of my father's,--my father himself so described him,--and
I recall his memory with deep affection and respect.
At last I have come to the memory of the man who was nearer in
spirit to my father than any other human being, namely,
Nikolai Nikolayevitch Gay. Grandfather Gay, as we
called him, made my father's acquaintance in 1882. While living
on his farm in the Province of Tchernigoff, he chanced to read my
father's pamphlet "On the Census," and finding a solution in it of
the very questions which were troubling him at the time, without
delay he started out and hurried into Moscow.
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