With regard to Dostoyevsky you can’t say: ‘I don’t care about him’. Everyone cares about Dostoyevsky, because no one can be indifferent to one’s soul

“No one, not even a ‘friend,’ can make us better. But it is a great happiness in life to meet a person of quite different construction, different bent, completely dissimilar views who, while always remaining himself and in no wise echoing us nor currying favor with us (as sometimes happens) and not trying to insinuate his soul (and an insincere soul at that!) into our psyche, into our muddle, into our tangle, would stand as a firm wall, as a check to our follies and our irrationalities, which every human being has. Friendship lies in contradiction and not in agreement! Verily, God granted me Strakhov as a teacher and my friendship with him, my feelings for him were ever a kind of firm wall on which I felt I could always lean, or rather rest. And it won’t let you fall, and it gives warmth.”

I choke in thinking. And how good it is to live in this suffocation. Because of this my life, through all thorns and tears, is still a pleasure.

Vasily Rozanov died of starvation in the early days of the Revolution at the Sergieva monastery near Moscow. In his last fragmentary publications he expressed the current feeling of apocalypse: 'Do you know, Europeans,' he asked, 'that the Universe is already transfigured? Your cut-and-dried categories don't exist anymore. Where is jurisprudence? Where are the laws? There's nothing left of them. Where is pride? Europe is quite made of pride, Europe is proud, everything it has created comes from pride. It's not necessary! It's needed no longer. Heaven! Give us heaven! But heaven ...'