The Autobiographical Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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СКАЧАТЬ afraid they would quarrel violently if they ever came together. They had a sincere admiration for each other's gifts, but their respective ideas and outlook upon life were radically opposed.

      89 The name of an estate belonging to Tolstoy, in the government of Tula.

      Dostoyevsky loved Russia passionately, but this passion did not blind him. He saw his compatriots' faults clearly and did not share their conceptions of life. Centuries of European culture separated my father from the Russians. A Lithuanian, he loved them as a man loves his younger brothers, but he realised how yoimg they still were, and how much they needed to study and to work. European critics often make the mistake of identifying Dostoyevsky with the heroes of his works.90

      90 Russian critics never make this mistake.

      My father was a great writer, who painted his compatriots from Nature. A moral chaos reigns in his novels, because such a chaos reigned in our Russia, a state still youthful and anarchical; but this chaos had no counterpart in Dostoyevsky's private life. His heroines forsake their husbands and run after their lovers ; but he wept like a child on hearing of the dishonour of his niece, and refused to receive her thenceforth. His heroes lead lives of debauchery and throw their money about recklessly; he himself worked like a slave for years in order to pay the debts of his brother, which he accepted as debts of honour of his own. His heroes are bad husbands and bad fathers; he was a faithful husband, conscientiously doing his duty towards his children, and superintending their education as very few Russian parents do. His heroes are unmindful of their civic duties; he was a fervent patriot, a reverent son of the Church, a Slav devoted to the cause of the people of his race. Dostoyevsky lived like a European, looked upon Europe as his second country, and advised all those who consulted him to study and acquire the culture which most of my compatriots lack.

      Tolstoy's attitude was altogether different. He loved Russia as did Dostoyevsky, but he did not criticise her. On the contrary I He despised European culture and considered the ignorance of the moujiks a supreme wisdom. He advised all the intellectuals who visited him to leave their studies, science and arts, and to return to the state of peasants. He gave the same advice to his own children. " I tell my sons that they must study, learn foreign languages, and become distinguished men, and their father tells them to leave their schools and go and work in the fields with the moujiks," said Countess Tolstoy to my mother. The prophet of Yasnaia Poliana admired the faults of his compatriots and shared their absurd puerilities, their childish dreams of primitive communism. His ideal is the Oriental ideal of the Russian masses : to do nothing, to cross one's arms, and lie on one's back, yawning and dreaming. An apostle of pacifism, he advised his disciples to lay down their armS before the enemy, and not to struggle against wrong but to let it invade the world, leaving its overthrow in the hands of God. He prepared the triumph of the Bolsheviks, and asserted ingenuously that he was preaching Christian ideas. He forgot that Jesus did not remain in a Yasnaia Poliana, but that He went from place to place, eating as He journeyed, sleeping little, appealing to all hearts, awaking all consciences, sowing the seeds of truth in every town He entered, training disciples and sending them to preach His doctrine in other lands, fighting against evil to His last breath.

      The difference between my father's ideas and those of Tolstoy manifested itself very clearly during the Russo-Turkish War. Dostoyevsky in his newspaper. The Journal of the Writer, demanded the hberation of the Slav nationalities, their independence, and the free development of their national ideal. He was indignant when he read how the Turks tortured the hapless Serbs and Bulgarians, and he incited the Russians to deliver these persecuted peoples by force of arms. He reiterated passionately that this was the duty of Russia, that she could not abandon people of her own race and religion. Tolstoy, on the other hand, thought Russia had nothing to do with Balkan affairs, and that she ought to leave the Slavs to their fate. He even asserted that the indignation of Russians at the Turkish atrocities was merely a pose, and that a Russian was not and could not be moved by descriptions of these cruelties. He confessed himself that he felt no pity. " How is it possible that he should feel no pity? It is incomprehensible to me ! " wrote Dostoyevsky in The Journal of the Writer. Tolstoy's hostile attitude in the midst of the general enthusiasm for the Slav cause seemed so scandalous to his publisher, Katkov, that he refused to allow the epilogue to Anna Karinina, in which Tolstoy expounded his anti-Slav ideas, to appear in his paper. The epilogue was published as a separate pamphlet. As a leading Slavophil, Dostoyevsky thought it his duty to protest in his own journal against Tolstoy's strange attitude towards the unhappy victims of the Turks. In combating Tolstoy, he did not adopt the same method as in his conflict with Turgenev. He had despised the cruel comrade of his youth, and had not spared him. But he loved Tolstoy and did not wish to give him pain. To take the sting out of his criticism, he exalted Tolstoy to a giddy height, proclaiming him the greatest of Russian writers, and declaring that all the rest, himself included, were merely his pupils.91

      91 Dostoyevsky specially admired Tolstoy's powers of description and his style, but he never looked upon him as a prophet. He thought indeed that Tolstoy did not imderstand our people. Often in talking to his friends my father said that Tolstoy and Turgenev could only paint truthfully the life of the hereditary nobUity, which, according to him, was in its decline, and would soon be extinguished. This surprised his friends very much, but Dostoyevsky was right, for the Revolution has changed all the conditions of Russian life. He looked upon Tolstoy and Turgenev as gifted historical novelists.

      Such reverent criticism could not anger Tolstoy, and did not affect his admiration for Dostoyevsky. When my father died Tolstoy wrote to Strahoff: " When I heard of Dostoyevsky's death I felt that I had lost a kinsman, the closest and the dearest, and the one of whom I had most need."

      Tolstoy's European biographers generally describe him as a great aristocrat, and contrast him with Dostoyevsky, whom, I know not why, they believe to be a plebeian. The better informed Russian biographers know that both belonged to the same union of hereditary nobles. I suppose it was Tolstoy's title of Count which misled European writers. In Russia the title was nothing; it was possible there to meet titled people, bearing historic names, who belonged to the middle classes, and others, who had no titles, but were members of the aristocracy. European biographers of Tolstoy who wish to understand his position in Russia should read the history of the Counts Rostov in War and Peace. In this family Tolstoy describes that of his paternal grandfather. Count Ilia Rostov lives in Moscow, and receives every one; but when he goes to Petersburg with his family he knows no one save an old Court lady, who is only able to procure them a single invitation to a ball in the great world, and even on this occasion cannot introduce any partners to the charming Natalia, because she knows no one herself. Count Rostov is very popular with the nobles of his own province who chose him as their Marshal; but when he goes to invite a travelling aristocrat, Prince Volkonsky, to dinner, the Prince receives him insolently, and refuses his invitation. When Countess Bezuhov insists that Natalia should come to her party, all the Rostov family is much flattered by the graciousness of the great lady. And yet the Countess only invites her to please her brother, Prince Kouragin, who is in love with the fair Natasha and wants to carry her off. He is already secretly married, so he cannot marry her; but he does not hesitate to compromise the girl, a villainy he would never have committed if she had belonged to his own world, for it would have ruined his career. Evidently, in the eyes of a Russian aristocrat the Counts Rostov were hereditary nobles of no importance, whom they could treat cavalierly. In contemporary times, the relations between the Russian aristocrats and the hereditary nobles were greatly modified, but in 1812 they were very cruel. In War and Peace Tolstoy carefully explained the position occupied by his grandfather and his father in Russia. But his mother was a Princess Volkonsky, a very ugly old maid, who, unable to find a husband in her own world, had married Count Nicolai Tolstoy for love. She was a provincial, but she must have had relations in Petersburg, through whom Tolstoy could have gained admittance to the great world of the capital much more easily than Turgenev had been able to do. But he made no bid for such recognition. He was no snob, and had all that dignity and independence of spirit which have always characterised our Moscow nobility. He made an unambitious marriage with the daughter of Dr. Bers, and spent all his life in Moscow, receiving every one who was congenial to him without asking to what class of СКАЧАТЬ