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Oh, may my profession be cursed for all eternity-the profession of a feuilletonist!"
Don't worry, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not the one exclaiming this! I confess that such a beginning would be too eccentric for my feuilleton. No, I won't carry on like that, but before my arrival in Petersburg I was absolutely certain that every Petersburg feuilletonist, picking up a pen to dash off his weekly or monthly feuilleton, must certainly say something like that as he sits down at his desk. Look, judge for yourself: what is there to write about? For example, Ristori's1 come to town, and right awayevery feuilletonist on the planet immediately starts scribbling in every feuilleton in every one of our newspapers and journals, both those with a particular point of view and those without, one and the same thing: Ristori, Ristori-Ristori's arrived, Ristori's performing; she's in "Gamma"-"Gamma," "Gamma," wherever you look, it's "Gamma"; she's in "Maria Stuart"-and right away it's "Stuart," "Stuart," and on and on. The newspapers practically swipe news from one another! The most vexing thing of all is that they really imagine it to be news. You pick up a newspaper and you don't even feel like reading it: it's the same thing everywhere you look; dejection settles upon you; you merely agree that one must have a great deal of cunning, assertiveness, and routine habits of hand and mind in order to say one and the same thing about one and the same thing, yet somehow or other not in exactly the very same words. These unfortunate people wrack their brains and curse their own fate. And how many dramas unfold-perhaps even something tragic, somewhere in a damp corner on the fifth floor, where an entire family lives in one room, hungry and cold, while in another sits a feuilletonist, trembling in his worn robe, writing a feuilleton a la the New Poet2 about "Camellias," 3 oysters, and friends, pulling out his hair, chewing on his pen, and in a setting not at all appropriate to a feuilleton. But I've become distracted; perhaps in all of Petersburg there doesn't exist even one such feuilletonist. Perhaps they all travel in carriages and eat Strasbourg pies? So what? Is a feuilleton merely a catalogue of topical...