“He evoked a Russia which was long dead and gone, lacked the range and urgency of his successors and, unlike these preachers, he was thought of – quite wrongly – as a painter of miniatures and, unfashionably, the pure artist. Yet like Dostoyevsky he believed that ‘art must not be burdened with all kinds of aims’, that ‘without art men might not wish to live on earth’, and that ‘art will always live man’s real life with him’.”
