Читать книгу The Autobiographical Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Страница 12

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DOSTOYEVSKY had some reason to declare that the convicts had been his teachers. As a fact, they taught him what it was above all things important for him to learn; they taught him to know and to love our beautiful and generous Russia. When he foimd himself for the first time in his life in a truly national centre, he felt his mother's blood speaking more and more loudly in his heart. My father began to recognise that Russian charm which is indeed the strength of om* country. It is not by fire and sword that Russia has conquered her enemies; it is the heart of Russia that has formed the vast Russian Empire. Our army is weak, our poor soldiers are often beaten, but wherever they pass they leave imperishable memories. They fraternise with the vanquished instead of oppressing them; open their hearts to them; treat them 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 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 European novelists; he had only to draw his subjects from Russian life, and to recall the confessions of the convicts, the ideas and beliefs of our moujiks. This Lithuanian at last understood the Russian ideal, revered the Russian Church, and forgetting Europe, gave himself up wholeheartedly to painting the Slavo-Mongolian manners of our great country.