Portrait of Dostoevsky in 1872 by Vasily Perov
“Take the instance of Count Cavour,—wasn’t his a great mind? Wasn’t he a diplomat?—I am citing him because his genius is generally recognized and also because he is dead. Yet what did he do, look: Oh, he did achieve his aim, he did unite Italy, but what was the result?—For 2,000 years Italy bore in herself a universal unifying idea—not some abstract idea, not a speculation of some theoretical mind, but a realistic, organic idea; the fruit of the national and universal life. This was the unification of the whole world—first, the ancient Roman and later—the papal unification. The peoples who have been growing and disappearing in Italy in the course of these two and one-half millennia, understood that they were the bearers of a universal idea, while those who did not understand it felt and divined it. Science, art—everything was invested and permeated with this universal significance. Oh, let us admit that, at length, this universal idea became worn out and wasted there (although hardly so!). But what—in the long run—has come in its stead? Upon what can Italy be congratulated? What advantage has she achieved after Count Cavour’s diplomacy? —There rose a united second-rate little kingdom which had lost every kind of a universal aspiration; which exchanged it for the most worn-out, bourgeois principle—the thirtieth repetition of this principle since the French revolution a kingdom fully content with its unity which means nothing, a mechanical, and not a spiritual unity (i.e., not the former universal unity), and on top of that—a kingdom burdened with insolvent indebtedness, and, in addition,—one specifically content with its own second-rateness. This is what came of it; such was Count Cavour’s creation!”
Reprinted from The Diary of a Writer (1877, May-June, Chapter II: Former Agriculturists—Future Diplomats) by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, translated and annotated by Boris Brasol, George Braziller, Inc., 1954, P.718-719
