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

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СКАЧАТЬ class of society his visitors belonged. Tolstoy had no love for the aristocrats. He shows his antipathy to them very plainly in War and Peace, Anna Karinina and Resurrection. He contrasts their opulent, luxurious and artificial existence with the simple, hospitable life of the Moscow nobility. Tolstoy was right, for indeed the latter were very sympathetic. Their houses were not rich, but they were always open to their friends. The rooms were small and low, but there was always a corner for some old relative or invalid friend; they had a great many children, but they always managed to find a place among them for some poor orphan, who received the same education and treatment as the children of the house. It was in this hospitable, cheerful, kindly and simple atmosphere that Tolstoy was brought up, and it is this world that he describes in his novels. " Tolstoy is the historian and the poet of the lesser Moscow nobility," wrote Dostoyevsky in his Journal of the Writer.

      Tolstoy's European biographers, who have blamed his aristocratic luxury, are strangely ill-informed; they can never have been either to Moscow or to Yasnaia Poliana. I remember one day going with my mother when we were in Moscow to call on Countess Tolstoy. I was struck by the poverty of her house; not only was there no single good piece of furniture, no single artistic object, such as one might find in any Petersburg home, but there was absolutely nothing of the smallest value of any sort. The Tolstoys Uved in one of those small houses between courtyard and garden which are so common in Moscow. Rich people build them of stone, poor people are content with wood. The Tolstoy house was of wood, and was built without any architectural pretensions. The rooms of these little houses are generally small, low, and ill-Ughted. The furniture is bought in cheap shops, as was the case in the Tolstoys' home, or it is made by old workmen who were formerly serfs, as was that I saw in other houses in Moscow. The hangings are faded, the carpets threadbare, the walls are hung with family portraits, painted by some poor artist, to whom a commission was given to save him from starvation. The only luxury of these houses consists of a pack of dirty, ill-tempered old servants, who show their fidelity by meddling in the affairs of their masters and speaking impertinently to them, and in a couple of clumsy ill-matched horses, brought from the country in the autumn, and harnessed to some old-fashioned carriage. Tolstoy's " luxury " was indeed far from dazzling; any prosperous European who has a pretty villa and a smart motor-car lives more sumptuously than he. I do not even know whether it would have been possible for Tolstoy to surround himself with luxuries. He owned a great deal of land, but the land of central Russia does not represent much wealth. It yields little income, and absorbs a great deal of money. He could not sell it, for by Russian law, land inherited from a father must be transmitted to a son. Tolstoy had five sons; as they grew up and married, he was obliged to divide his estates between them, and it is probable that during the last years of his life he lived on the proceeds of his literary works. When Countess Tolstoy came to ask my mother's advice in the matter of pubUshing editions of her husband's books, it was in no rapacious spirit. She was probably in pressing need of money, and, like the honest woman she was, she wanted to work herself to increase her income.

      Not only were the Tolstoys never great Russian aristocrats, they are not even of Russian origin. The founder of the Tolstoy family was a German merchant named Dick, who came to Russia in the seventeenth century, and opened a store in Moscow. His business prospered, and he decided to settle in Russia. When he became a Russian subject he changed his name of Dick, which in German means " fat," to the Russian equivalent, Tolstoy. At that period this was obligatory, for the inhabitants of Moscow distrusted foreigners; it was not until the time of Peter the Great that immigrants found it possible to keep their European names when they established themselves in Russia. Thanks to their knowledge of the German language, the descendants of Dick-Tolstoy obtained employment in our Foreign Office. One of them found favour with Peter the Great, who liked to surround himself with foreigners; he placed Peter Tolstoy at the head of his secret police. Later, the Emperor, in recognition of his services, bestowed on him the title of Count, a title Peter the Great had lately introduced in Russia, but which the Russian boyards hesitated to accept, thinking that it meant nothing.92

      92 In Russia the title Count has the same value as the titles Marquis and Viscount in Japan.

      Like all Germans, the descendants of Dick-Tolstoy were very prolific, and two centuries after his arrival in Moscow there were Tolstoys in all our Government offices, in the army and in the navy. They married the young daughters of our hereditary nobihty, generally choosing such as were well dowered. They did not squander the fortunes of their wives, and in many cases increased them. They were good husbands and good fathers, with a certain weakness of character which often brought them under the domination of their wives or mothers. They were industrious and useful in their various offices, and generally made good positions for themselves. I have known several Tolstoy families who were not even acquainted, and said their relationship was so distant that it was practically non-existent. Nevertheless, I recognised in all these families the same characteristic traits; this shows how little the Dick-Tolstoys had been affected by the Russian blood of their marriages. With the exception of Count Fyodor Tolstoy, a talented painter, they never rose above mediocrity, and Leo Tolstoy was the first star of the family.93 Tolstoy's Germanic origin would explain many strange traits in his character, otherwise incomprehensible; his Protestant reflections upon the Orthodox Christ, his love for a simple and laborious life, which is very unusual in a Russian of his class, and his extraordinary insensibility to the sufferings of the Slavs under the Turks, which had so astonished my father.94 This Germanic origin also explains Tolstoy's curious incapacity to bow to an ideal accepted by the whole civilised world. He denies all the science, all the culture, all the literature of Europe. My Faith, My Confession, he headed his reUgious rodomontades, evidently with the hope of creating a distinct culture, a Yasnaia Pohana Kultur. Dostoyevsky, when he speaks of Germany, always calls it " Protestant Germany," and declares that it has ever protested against that Latin culture bequeathed to us by the Romans and accepted by the whole world.

      93 The poet Alexis Tolstoy was, it is said, a Tolstoy only in name.

      94 The American writers who were in Germany at the beginning of the recent war, speak of the insensibiUty of the Germans, not only to the sufferings of the Belgians and French, but also to those of their own compatriots. They describe the cruelty with which operations were performed on the wounded Germans, and the callousness with which the latter endured these. It is possible that the notorious brutalities of the Germans, of which so much was said during the war, were the result of a contempt for suffering produced by the severe discipline practised in Germany for centuries.

      Tolstoy's Germanic origin may explain another pecu-Uarity of his character, common to all the descendants of the numerous German famihes established in Russia. These famihes remain in our country for centuries, become Orthodox, speak Russian, and even sometimes forget the German language; and at the same time they always retain their German souls, souls incapable of understanding and sharing our Russian ideas. Tolstoy is a typical example of this curious incapacity. Orthodox, he attacked and despised our Church. A Slav, he remained indifferent to the sufferings of other Slavs, sufferings which stirred the heart of every moujik. An hereditary noble, he never understood this institution, which has had such an immense importance in our culture.95 A writer, he did not share the admiration of all his confreres for Pushkin, that father of Russian literature. Dostoyevsky gave up his "cure" at Ems in order to be present at the inauguration of the monument to Pushkin at Moscow; Turgenev hiuried home from Paris; all the other writers, whatever their parties —Slavophils, or Occidentals—gathered fraternally round the monmnent to the great poet; Tolstoy alone quitted Moscow almost on the eve of the inauguration. This departiure created a sensation in Russia; the indignant public asserted that Tolstoy was jealous, and that the glorification of Pushkin annoyed him. I think this was all nonsense. Tolstoy was a gentleman, and the base sentiment of envy was unknown to him. All his life he was very sincere and very honest. Pushkin's patriotic verse touched no chord in his Germanic soul, and he would not pay lying compliments to his memory. In all our vast Russia Tolstoy could only love and understand the peasants; but alas ! his moujiks did not love and understand him! While our intellectuals were hurrying to Yasnaia Poliana to ask the prophet for guidance, the moujiks of that village distrusted him and his religion. Their grandiose instinct told them, perhaps, that the good old God of Yasnaia Poliana was only a wretched СКАЧАТЬ