Читать книгу The Autobiographical Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Страница 30

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Dostoyevsky's relations with Tolstoy were very different. These two great Russian writers had a real sympathy and a real admiration for each other. They had a common friend, the philosopher Nicolas Strahoff, who lived at Petersburg in the winter and in the sxmmier spent some months in the Crimea with his comrade Damlevsky, stopping at Moscow or at Yasnaia Poliana 89 to see Tolstoy. My father was very fond of Strahoff, and attached great importance to his criticism. Tolstoy also liked him and corresponded with him. " I have just read the Memoirs of the House of the Dead again," he wrote. " What a magnificent book ! When you see Dostoyevsky tell him that I love him." Strahoff gave my father great pleasure by showing him this letter. Later, when a new book by Tolstoy appeared, Dostoyevsky in his turn said to Strahoff: " Tell Tolstoy I am delighted with his novel." These two great writers complimented each other through Strahoff, and their compliments were sincere. Tolstoy admired Dostoyevsky's works as much as my father admired his. And yet they never met, and never even expressed any desire to meet. Why was this? I believe they were 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 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 German imitation which was nothing to them.

95 In Anna Karinina Tolstoy relates how Levin (his own portrait) is persuaded by his friends to come to a provincial town for the triennial election of a new Marshal of the nobility. While his cousins and his brother-in-law, Stiva Oblonsky, are in great excitement around him, wishing to get rid of the former Marshal and to elect another who will understand the interests of the nobility better, Levin is perfectly indifferent, cannot understand their agitation and thinks only of one thing : how to get out of the town and return as quickly as possible to his vUlage. He had evidently no inkling of his obUgations to the nobles of his province.

The famous Tolstoyism has much in conmaon with the tenets of the German sects which have long existed in Russia. When they settled in Russia, the German colonists at once began to attack the Orthodox Church, which they could not understand. They founded religious sects, the spirit of which was essentially Protestant, tried to propagate their ideas among our peasants, and sometimes made proselytes. The best known of these sects are : " Shtunda," " Dubohore," and " Molokane." Like a true German colonist, Tolstoy also founded a Protestant sect, the " Tolstoyans," and warred against our Church all his life. My compatriots were simple enough to take his religious ideas for Russian ideas, but foreigners were more clear-sighted. In their studies on Russia, many EngUsh and French writers have noted with surprise the affinity between Tolstoy's ideas and those of our different Germanic sects. The ignorance of my compatriots arises probably from the fact that in Russia no one attached any importance to the German origin of the Tolstoy family. Let us hope that there will yet be a biographer of the seer of Yasnaia Poliana, who will study him from the point of view of this origin. Then we shall get a real Tolstoy.