The Autobiographical Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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СКАЧАТЬ as comrades; and the vanquished, touched by this generosity, never forget them. " Where the Russian flag has once flown, it will always fly," we say in Russia. My compatriots are conscious of their charm.

      The Russian peasant, dirty, wild and ragged, is in fact, a great charmer. His heart is gentle, tender, gay and childlike. He has no education, but his mind is broad, clear and penetrating. He observes a great deal and meditates on subjects that would never come into the head of a European bourgeois. He works all his life, but cares nothing for profit. His material wants are few, his moral needs much more extensive. He is a dreamer, his soul seeks for poetry. Very often he will leave his fields and his family to visit monasteries, to pray at the tomb of saints, or to travel to Jerusalem. He belongs to the Oriental race that gave the world a Krishna, a Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Mahommed, The Kussian peasant is always ready to leave the world and go to seek God in the desert. He lives more in the beyond than in this world. He has a strong sense of justice: " Why quarrel and dispute? We should live according to the truth of God." Such phrases may often be heard from Russian peasants. This " truth of God " is much in their minds; they try to live according to the Gospel. They love to caress little children, to comfort weeping women, to help the aged. It is not often one meets a " gentleman " in Russian cities, but there are plenty in our villages.

      Studying his convict companions, Dostoyevsky did justice to the generosity of their hearts and the nobility of their souls, and learned to love his country as she deserves to be loved. Russia conquered Dostoyevsky's Lithuanian soul through the poor convicts of Siberia, and conquered it for ever. My father could do nothing by halves. He gave himself heart and soul to Russia, and served the Russian flag as faithfully as his ancestors had served the flag of the Radwan. Those who wish to understand the change in Dostoyevsky's ideas should read his letter to the poet Maikov, written from Siberia shortly after his release. It is a fervid hymn to Russia. " I am Russian, my heart is Russian, my ideas are Russian," he repeats in every line. When we read this letter it is easy to understand what was taking place in his heart. Every serious and idealistic young man tries to become a patriot, for only patriotism can give him strength to serve his country well. A young Russian is instinctively patriotic, but a Slav, whose paternal family comes from another country and who has been brought up in a different atmosphere, cannot possess this instinctiv patriotism. Before offering his services to Russia, the young Lithuanian wished to know what her aims were. On leaving the School of Engineers, Dostoyevsky sought this explanation in the society of Petersburg, and failed to find it. In the drawing-rooms of Petersburg he found only people who were seeking their material advantage, or intellectuals who hated their fatherland and blushed to acknowledge that they were Russians. These languid and listless people could give my father no idea of the greatness of Russia. In the novel, The Adolescent, Dostoyevsky has drawn a cm-ious type, the student Kraft, a Russian of German origin, who commits suicide because he is persuaded that Russia can play but a secondary part in human civilisation. It is very possible that in his youth Dostoyevsky had himself suffered from Kraft's disease, a disease to which all Russians of foreign extraction are more or less subject. My father often told his friends that he was on the verge of suicide, and that his arrest saved him. But if Petersburg could not teach Dostoyevsky patriotism, the Russian people he met in prison soon taught him the great Russian lesson of Christian fraternity, that magnificent ideal which has gathered so many races under our banners. Dazzled by its beauty, my father wished to follow their example. Was he the first Slavo-Norman who gave himself heart and soul to Russia? No. All the Moscovite Grand Dukes who founded Great Russia, who defended the Orthodox Church and fought valiantly against the Tartars, were also Slavo-Normans, the descendants of Prince Rurik. Thanks to their Norman perspicacity, these first Russian patriots understood our great Idea better even than the Russians themselves in their national infancy. It often happens that young nations serve their national idea instinctively, without understanding it very well, and thus their patriotism is never very profound. It is only when they mature that nations fully reaUse the idea they have been building up, and, understanding at last the services their ancestors have rendered to humanity, become proud of their country. Among races which are growing old, patriotism reaches its apogee, and often dazzles them. It is at this stage that Napoleons and Williams make their appearance; inordinately proud of their national culture, they desire to impose it on others.

      Having at last understood the Russian Idea, Dos-toyevsky eagerly followed the example of the illustrious Slavo-Normans whose history he knew so well, having studied it in his childhood in the works of Karamzin. Like the Moscovite Grand Dukes of old, Dostoyevsky explained the Russian Idea to his compatriots; like them, he cherished all that was original in Russia : our ideas, our beliefs, our customs and our traditions. He inaugurated his patriotic services by renouncing his republicanism. It had seemed very beautiful to him once, when he had expounded it in Petersburg drawing-rooms to an enthusiastic crowd of Poles, Lithuanians, Swedes from Finland, Germans from the Baltic Provinces, and young Russians. In Siberia, where he was in daily contact with representatives of the Russian people from every point of our huge country, the thought of introducing the institutions of modern Europe into Holy Russia struck him as absurd. He saw that the Russian people were still in the stage of Byzantine culture, which had been arrested in its development by the Turkish conquest of Byzantium. The Orthodox clergy, who had propagated this culture among the peasants, had been unable to develop it, and the Russian people continue to Mve in the fifteenth century, retaining all the ingenuous mystical ideas of that period. It is obvious that the introduction of the European ideas of the nineteenth century among persons so ill-prepared to receive them could only produce a terrible anarchy, in which all the European civilisation introduced at immense cost by the descendants of Peter the Great would be submerged. When he took part in Petrachevsky's conspiracy, my father dreamed of substituting a republic of intellectuals for the monarchy. He now saw that this would be impossible, because the people hated the bare (nobles or intellectual bourgeois) with a fierce and implacable hatred. The peasants could not forget the cruelty of their masters, and they distrusted all nobles and all educated persons. Dostoyevsky realised that the only republic possible in Russia would be a peasant republic, that is to say, a reign of ignorance and brutality which would cut off our country from Europe more than ever. The Russians dislike Europeans, and reserve all their sympathies for Slavs and the Mongolian tribes of Asia, to which they are akin. The introduction of a republican regime would tend to transform Russia into a Mongolian country, and all the work of our Tsars and nobles would perish. At this period of his hfe Dostoyevsky loved Europe too much to wish to separate Russia from European influences. Rather than drag down his country into a gulf of ignorance and violence, he renounced his political ideas. This did not happen all at once. This is what Dostoyevsky says himself in the Journal of the Writer : " Neither imprisonment nor suffering broke us.40 Something else changed o\ir hearts and our ideas : union with the people, fraternity in misery. This change was not sudden; on the contrary, it came about very gradually. Of all my political comrades, I was the one to whom it was easiest to embrace the Russian Idea, for I came of a patriotic and deeply religious stock. In our family we had been familiar with the Gospel from childhood. By the time that I was ten years old, I knew all the principal episodes of Karamzin's Russian history, which my father read aloud to us every night. Visits to the Kremlin and to the cathedrals of Moscow were always solemn events to me."

      40 When he says " us " my father refers to comrades of the Petrachevsky circle, some of whom also changed their political opinions after their imprisonment.

      Recognising that the European institutions of the nineteenth century were unsuitable to the Russian people, my father considered other means of ameliorating the civilisation of our country. He thought it would be well to work for the development of the Byzantine culture, which had taken root in the hearts and minds of our peasants. In its day, Byzantine culture had been of a higher order than the average culture of Europe. It was only when the Greek men of learning, fleeing from the Turks, had sought asylum in the great European towns, that the culture of Europe began to emerge from the mists of the Middle Ages. If Byzantine civilisation had helped to develop European culture, it might well do the same for Russia. Dostoyevsky accordingly began to study our Church, which had guarded this civilisation, and preserved it as it had been received from Byzantium. The last of the Moscovite patriarchs, more learned than their forerunners, were already beginning to develop this civilisation on Russian lines, when СКАЧАТЬ