Explore "The Life-Work of Flaubert, from the Russian of Merejowski" by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Flaubert, more than any other man, has experienced in his own life, the destructive power of his over-sharpened, analytical disposition. With the malevolence, which was so strangely mingled in him with the then fashionable Byronism, and with a confused presentiment of an impending and inevitable catastrophe, he embarks at the early age of seventeen upon his work of destruction and internal iconoclasm: "I analyse myself and others," he writes to a friend; "I am always anatomizing, and whenever I at last succeed in finding something, which all men consider pure and beautiful, but which is in reality a putrid spot, a gangrene, I shake my head and smile. I have come to the firm conclusion that vanity is the fundamental basis of all things, and that even that which we call conscience is in fact only a concealed and incipient vanity. You give in charity, partly, may be, out of compassion, out of pity, or from horror of suffering and sordidness, but also out of egotism; for the chief motive of your action is the desire to acquire the right to say to yourself: I have done good; there are very few people like me; I respect myself more than other men." Eight years later he writes to his devoted wife: "I love to analyze; it is an occupation that distracts me.
Although I am not very much inclined to see the humorous side of things, yet I cannot regard my own personality altogether seriously, because I see myself how ridiculous I am, ridiculous not in the sense of being externally comic, but in the inner sense of that inherent irony which, being present in the life of men, shows itself sometimes even in the most obviously natural actions, in the most ordinary gestures. All this one feels in oneself, but it is hard to explain. You do not understand it, because in you it is as simple and genuine as in a beautiful hymn of love and poetry. For I regard myself as a sort of arabesque or marqueterie work; there are within me pieces of ivory and of gold and of iron, some of painted paper, others of brilliants, and others again of lead."