Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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СКАЧАТЬ lines, when their work was interrupted by Peter the Great. At first my father had taken little interest in the Orthodox Church. There is no mention of it in any of the novels he wrote before his imprisonment. But after this the Church figures in every new book; Dostoyevsky's heroes speak of it more and more, and in his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the Orthodox monastery dominates the whole scene. My father now saw what an important part religion plays in Russia, and he began to study it with passion. Later, he visited the monasteries and talked with the monks; he sought to be initiated into the traditions of the Orthodox religion; he became its champion and was the first who dared to say that our Church had been paralysed since the time of Peter the Great, to demand its independence, and to desire to see a Patriarch at its head. The Russian clergy hastened to meet his advances. Accustomed to being treated with scorn by Russian intellectuals, as a senile and senseless institution, they were touched by Dostoyevsky's sympathy, called him the true son of the Orthodox Church, and remain faithful to his memory.

      My father also studied the Russian monarchy, and at last realised that the Tsar, the so-called Oriental despot, was in the eyes of the Russian people simply the head of their great community, the only man in the whole country who is inspired by God. According to Orthodox belief, the coronation is a sacrament; the Holy Spirit descends on the Tsar, and guides him in all his acts. Formerly all Europe shared such convictions; but as atheistical opinions gained ground they gradually disappeared, and now Europeans smile at them. The Russians, who are yet in the fifteenth century, still hold this faith religiously. Profoundly mystical, they need divine help and cannot live without it. The Russians will only obey a man crowned in a cathedral of Moscow by an Archbishop or a Patriarch. However intelligent a President of the Russian Republic might be, in the sight of our peasants he would be simply a ridiculous chatterer; the halo of the coronation would always be lacking to him. The people would distrust him; they are, unhappily, well aware how easy it is to buy a Russian official. It would be useless for our Presidents to sign treaties and promise the aid of Russian troops to Europeans; they would never be able to honour their own drafts. It would only be necessary to spread a rumour that the President had been bought by Europe to provoke an epidemic of difaitisme.

      Realising the immense part played by the Tsar in Russia, and his moral power among the peasantry, thanks to his coronation, seeing that he alone could keep them united and preserve them from the anarchy which is always lying in wait for Mongolian races, my father became a monarchist. Great was the indignation of all our writers, of all the intellectual society of Petersburg which was hostile to Tsarism when they learned that Dostoyevsky had abjured his revolutionary creed. While my father had been studying the Russian people in prison, these gentlemen had been talking in drawing-rooms, drawing their knowledge of Russia from European books, and looking upon our peasants as idiots, who could be made to accept all laws and all institutions without discussion or question. The intellectuals could never understand the reasons for Dostoyevsky's change of mind, and could never forgive what they called " his betrayal of the holy cause of liberty." They hated my father throughout his life and continued to hate him after his death. Each new novel of Dostoyevsky's was greeted, not with the impartial criticism which analyses a work and gives its author the wise counsels eagerly looked for by a writer, but by attacks like those of a pack of mad dogs, throwing themselves on my father's masterpieces, and, under pretence of criticising, biting, tearing their prey, insulting and offending him cruelly. The moral influence exercised by my father on the students of Petersburg, which grew ever greater as his talents matured, infuriated the Russian writers. When Tretiakov 41 wished to include a portrait of my father in his collection of "Great Russian Writers," and commissioned a famous artist to paint it, the rage of Dostoyevsky's political enemies knew no bounds. " Go to the exhibition and look at the face of this madman," they shrieked to the readers of their newspapers, " and you will realise at last who it is you love and listen to and read."

      41 A rich merchant of Moscow, who bequeathed a fine gallery of national pictures to his native town.

      This ferocious and implacable hatred wounded my father deeply. He wished to live in peace with other writers, and to work in concert with them, for the glory of his country. He could not retract opinions based on his profound study of the Russian people, begun in prison and continued throughout his life. He felt that he had no right to hide the truth from Russia; he was constrained to show them the abyss to which the Socialists and anarchists of Petersburg drawing-rooms were leading them. The sense of duty accomplished gave him strength to struggle, but his life was very hard. Dostoyevsky died without having been able to demonstrate that he was right. It is we, the hapless victims of the Russian Revolution, who now see all his predictions fulfilled, and have to expiate the irresponsible chatter of our Liberals.

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       It was not only the Russian soul that my father studied in prison. He also made an earnest study of the Bible. We all profess to be Christians, but how many of us are familiar with the Gospels ? Most of us are content to hear them in church, and to retain some vague idea of their preparation for their first commimion. Possibly my father in his youth knew the Bible after the fashion of the young men of his world—that is to say, very superficially. He says as much in the autobiography of Zossima,42 which is to some extent his own: " I did not read the Bible," says Zossima, speaking of his youthful years, " but I never parted with it. I had a presentiment that I should want it some day." According to his letters to his brother Mihail, Dostoyevsky began the study of the Bible at the Peter-Paul fortress. He continued it in Siberia, where for four years it was his only book. He studied the precious volume the wives of the Dekabrists had presented to him, pondered every word, learned it by heart and never forgot it. No writer of his time had had so profound a Christian culture as Dostoyevsky. All his works are saturated with it, and it is this which gives them their power. " What a strange chance that your father should have had only the Gospels to read during the four most important years of a man's life, when his character is forming definitively," many of his admirers have said to me. But was it a chance ? Is there such a thing as chance in our lives? Is not everything foreseen? The work of Jesus is not finished; in each generation He chooses His disciples, signs to them to follow Him, and gives them the same power over the human heart that He gave of old to the poor fishermen of Galilee.

      42 The Brothers Kamarazov.

      Dostoyevsky would never be without his old prison Testament, the faithful friend that had consoled him in the darkest hours of his life. He always took it with him on his travels and kept it in a drawer of his writing-table,, within reach of his hand. He acquired a habit of consulting it in important moments of his life. He would open the Testament, read the first lines he saw, and take them as an answer to his doubts.

      Dostoyevsky wrote nothing while in his Siberian prison.43 And yet he left Omsk a much greater writer than he had been when he arrived. The young Lithuanian, who certainly loved Russia but understood very little about her, was transformed into a real Russian in prison. It all his life he retained the Lithuanian characteristics and culture of his forefathers, he only loved Russia the more deeply for this. He judged her from the standpoint of a benevolent Slav, conquered by the charm of Russia. Our faults did not alarm him; he saw that they arose from the youthfulness of the nation, and believed they would disappear in time. A son of little Lithuania, which has had her hour of glory, but will probably have no more, Dostoyevsky wished to devote his talents to the service of Great Russia. Perhaps he felt that it was his mother's blood that had given them, and that therefore Russia had more right to them than Lithuania or Ukrainia. Moreover, the idea of breaking Russia up into a number of little countries, which finds so much favour at present, was non-existent then, and in working for Russia Dostoyevsky thought he would also be working for Lithuania and Ukrainia.

      43 All he did was to make a few notes of curious words and expressions used by the convicts, which were introduced by him later in The House of the Dead. He wrote them in a little book he made himself, which is now in the Dostoyevsky Museum at Moscow.

      A reverent admirer and passionate disciple of Christ, with a beloved country to serve, Dostoyevsky was better equipped for his lofty work than before his imprisonment. It was no longer necessary for him to imitate the СКАЧАТЬ