Nikolai Gogol

 This passage is adapted from Nikolai Gogol, “The Mysterious

Portrait.” Originally published in 1835.

Young Tchartkoff was an artist of talent, which

promised great things: his work gave evidence of

observation, thought, and a strong inclination to

approach nearer to nature.

“Look here, my friend,” his professor said to him

more than once, “you have talent; it will be a shame if

you waste it: but you are impatient; you have but to

be attracted by anything, to fall in love with it, you

become engrossed with it, and all else goes for

nothing, and you won’t even look at it. See to it that

you do not become a fashionable artist. At present

your colouring begins to assert itself too loudly; and

your drawing is at times quite weak; you are already

striving after the fashionable style, because it strikes

the eye at once. Have a care! society already begins to

have its attraction for you: I have seen you with a

shiny hat, a foppish neckerchief. . . . It is seductive to

paint fashionable little pictures and portraits for

money; but talent is ruined, not developed, by that

means. Be patient; think out every piece of work,

discard your foppishness; let others amass money,

your own will not fail you.”

The professor was partly right. Our artist

sometimes wanted to enjoy himself, to play the fop,

in short, to give vent to his youthful impulses in

some way or other; but he could control himself

withal. At times he would forget everything, when he

had once taken his brush in his hand, and could not

tear himself from it except as from a delightful

dream. His taste perceptibly developed. He did not as

yet understand all the depths of Raphael, but he was

attracted by Guido’s broad and rapid handling, he

paused before Titian’s portraits, he delighted in the

Flemish masters. The dark veil enshrouding the

ancient pictures had not yet wholly passed away from

before them; but he already saw something in them,

though in private he did not agree with the professor

that the secrets of the old masters are irremediably

lost to us. It seemed to him that the nineteenth

century had improved upon them considerably, that

the delineation of nature was more clear, more vivid,

more close. It sometimes vexed him when he saw

how a strange artist, French or German, sometimes

not even a painter by profession, but only a skilful

dauber, produced, by the celerity of his brush and the

vividness of his colouring, a universal commotion,

and amassed in a twinkling a funded capital. This did

not occur to him when fully occupied with his own

work, for then he forgot food and drink and all the

world. But when dire want arrived, when he had no

money wherewith to buy brushes and colours, when

his implacable landlord came ten times a day to

demand the rent for his rooms, then did the luck of

the wealthy artists recur to his hungry imagination;

then did the thought which so often traverses

Russian minds, to give up altogether, and go down

hill, utterly to the bad, traverse his. And now he was

almost in this frame of mind.

“Yes, it is all very well, to be patient, be patient!”

he exclaimed, with vexation; “but there is an end to

patience at last. Be patient! but what money have I to

buy a dinner with to-morrow? No one will lend me

any. If I did bring myself to sell all my pictures and

sketches, they would not give me twenty kopeks for

the whole of them. They are useful; I feel that not one

of them has been undertaken in vain; I have learned

something from each one. Yes, but of what use is it?

Studies, sketches, all will be studies, trial-sketches to

the end. And who will buy, not even knowing me by

name? Who wants drawings from the antique, or the

life class, or my unfinished love of a Psyche, or the

interior of my room, or the portrait of Nikita, though

it is better, to tell the truth, than the portraits by any

of the fashionable artists? Why do I worry, and toil

like a learner over the alphabet, when I might shine

as brightly as the rest, and have money, too, like

them?”