Читать книгу The Autobiographical Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Страница 33

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In June 1880 the inauguration of Pushkin's monument at Moscow took place. This great national festival brought all political parties together: Slavophils and Occidentals alike laid flowers at the base of the monument and celebrated the greatest of Russian poets in their speeches. Pushkin satisfied every one. The Occidentals admired his European culture and his poems, the subjects of which were of English, German and Spanish origin; the Slavophils exalted his patriotism and his magnificent Slav poems. All the Russian writers and intellectuals hastened to do him homage. Turgenev came from Paris and was given a great reception by his admirers. He had a most brilliant success at the literary soirSes and eclipsed Dostoyevsky, but the balance was redressed on the following day at the meeting of the Society of Letters, which took place in the Assembly Room of the Moscow nobility. Here Dostoyevsky's success was so great that Pushkin's fete was transformed into a triumph for Dostoyevsky. The leader of the Slavophils, Aksakov, declared from the tribune that my father's speech was " an event." Senator Coni, who was present, gave me an account of it later. This distinguished jurist is also a writer of talent and a briUiant lecturer. His sympathies were perhaps with the Occidentals rather than with the Slavophils, so his enthusiasm for Dostoyevsky's speech is the more significant. " We were completely hypnotised as we listened to him," he said to me. "I believe that if a wall of the building had fallen away at that moment, if a huge pyre had been discovered in the square and your father had said to us, ' Now let us go and die in that fire to save Russia,' we should have followed him to a man, happy to die for our country." Extraordinary scenes took place at the close of the speech. People stormed the platform to embrace him and clasp his hand. Young men fainted with emotion at his feet. Two old men approached him, hand in hand, and said: " We have been enemies for twenty years; many attempts have been made to reconcile us, but we have always resisted. To-day, after your speech, we looked at each other and we realised that henceforth we must live as brothers." Turgenev, who had hitherto vouchsafed only a chiUy bow when he met Dostoyevsky, was deeply moved, and, going up to my father, pressed his hand warmly. This action of Tur-genev's, and the reconciliation of the two old enemies, were the two incidents of the day which impressed Dostoyevsky most. He liked to talk of them at Staraja Russa on his return from Moscow.

What magic words were there in this famous speech, which was looked upon as a great event by the whole of literary Russia, those who had been unable to be present at the festival having read it in the newspapers ? I give a resumi of what Dostoyevsky said to the intellectuals of his country : 100

100 The speech, which is rather long, contains a very subtle analysis of Pushkin's poetry. The reader would do well to read the complete text. I only give my father's conception of the Russian people and its future. It was this new conception which had so fired the imaginations of our intellectuals.

" You are discontented, you suffer, and you ascribe your unhappiness to the system under which you live. You think you will become happy and contented if you introduce European institutions into Russia. You are mistaken. Your sufferings are due to another cause. Thanks to your cosmopolitan education, you are estranged from your people, you no longer understand them; you form a little clan, utterly foreign and antipathetic to the rest of the country, in the midst of a vast empire. You despise your people for their ignorance, and you forget that it is they who have paid for your European education, they who support by the sweat of their brows your universities and higher schools. Instead of despising them, try to study the sacred ideas of your people. Humble yourselves before them, work shoulder to shoulder with them at their great task; for this illiterate people from whom you turn in disgust bears within it the Christian word which it will proclaim to the old world when it is bathed in blood. Not by servile repetition of the Utopias of the Europeans, which lead them to their own destruction, will you serve humanity, but by preparing together with your people the new Orthodox idea."

These golden words went to the hearts of my compatriots, who were tired of despising their country. They were glad to think that Russia was no mere copy, no servile caricature of Europe, but that she in her turn might have a message for the world. Alas ! their joy was short-lived I The curtain which hides the future, lifted by the hand of a man of genius, fell ag9,in, and our intellectuals returned to their fallacies. They worked obstinately for the introduction of the European republic into Russia, despising the people too much to ask their opinion, and believing ingenuously that eleven million intellectuals had a right to impose their will on a hundred and eighty million inhabitants. Taking advantage of the weariness produced by an interminable war, our intellectuals at last succeeded in introducing their long-desired republic into Russia. They soon realised how difficult it is to govern in Russia without the Tsar. The people at once showed their moral strength, which Dostoyevsky had long ago divined, and which his political adversaries persisted in ignoring. The pride of this people of great genius and of a great future was deeply wounded by the idea that a handful of dreamers and ambitious mediocrities proposed to reign over them, and impose their Utopias upon them. They struggled against them as they continue to struggle against the Bolsheviks. The people defend their ideal, their great Christian treasure which they are keeping for the future and which they will proclaim to the world later, when the old aristocratic feudal society finally disintegrates. Have our intellectuals understood the lesson the Russian people have just given them? Not in the least. They continue to take their dream for a reality; they believe the Bolsheviks have succeeded in demonstrating to the recalcitrant moujiks the excellence of the European regime brought by them from Zurich in their sealed railway carriage. For my part, I believe that the Bolsheviks have given the death-blow to the republican idea in Russia. Our peasants have long memories, and for centuries to come the word " Republic " will be to them the synonym of disorder, robbery and murder. They will come back to the monarchic idea, by virtue of which they founded their immense empire, but the new monarchy will be much more democratic than the old. The people have realised that their hare are feeble folks, easily intoxicated by Utopias, incapable of weighing their actions, and they will not confide the government of the country to them again. They will, no doubt, take them into their service, because they will have need of their knowledge; but at the same time they will send to the new Duma many more of their own representatives than before. These new deputies will have no European culture; but, possessed of the good sense and knowledge of life characteristic of the Russian people, they will vote laws which would have seemed cruel and barbarous to our former government.

Russia has turned over a new page in her history. Dostoyevsky, who understood and foresaw the future so clearly, will become her favourite author. Hitherto, my compatriots had been content to admire him; now they are beginning to study him.

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It is curious enough that not one of the writers who gathered round Pushkin's monument and celebrated in prose and verse the great man's Russian poetry, his Russian heart, his Russian ideas and his Russian sympathies, made the slightest allusion to his negro origin, which is nevertheless of great interest.

In the seventeenth century one of the small negro principalities of Africa, on the Mediterranean coast, was conquered by its neighbours. The king was killed, his harem and his sons were sold to pirates. One of the little princes, bought by the Russian ambassador, was sent to Peter the Great as a present. The Emperor gave the little blackamoor to his young daughters, who played with him as with a doll. Noticing the intelligence of the child, Peter the Great sent him to Paris, where the young Hannibal, as the Emperor called him, received a brilliant education. Later he returned to Petersburg and served the Emperor with much devotion. Anxious to keep him in Russia, Peter the Great married him to the daughter of a hoyard, and ennobled him. His descendants remained in our country, married Russians, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century repaid Russia's hospitality by giving her a great poet.101

101 Pushkin's mother was a Hannibal.

Although he was a good deal fairer than his maternal ancestors, Pushkin had many characteristics of the negro type : black frizzly hair, thick lips, and the vivacity, the passion and the ardour of the natives of Africa. This did not prevent him from being Russian in heart and mind. He formed our literary language, and gave us perfect models of prose, poetry, and dramatic art. He is the true father of Russian Hterature. Still, there are many things in Pushkin's life and works which are explicable by the fact of his African origin. Why, then, did none of his admirers refer to it ?

Probably, because at this time the idea of race-heredity was unknown to the Russians. I do not know if it even existed at all in Europe. It was introduced later by Count Gobineau, who, I beUeve, discovered it in Persia. Certain French writers assimilated it, and, exaggerating it a little, made it very fashionable. It is such a basic truth that it is impossible to write a good biography without taking it into account, and we ask ourselves in astonishment how it was that it was not discovered earlier.

It was thanks to this ignorance of the idea of heredity that Dostoyevsky never attached much importance to his Lithuanian origin. Although he and his brothers habitually said, "We Dostoyevsky are Lithuanians," he sincerely considered himself a true Russian. This was also due to the fact that the former empire of Russia was much more united than is generally supposed. All those emigrants who at present demand the separation of their country from Russia have, as a fact, no solid following. The majority of the Lithuanians established in the large Russian towns were sincerely attached to Russia. They were even more patriotic than the Russians, because they had inherited the idea of fidelity to their country from their civilised parents, whereas the sentiment has never been very strongly developed among the Russians. Our education tended to kill patriotism instead of stimulating it; its ideal was a pale and shadowy cosmopolitanism. On the other hand, the Lithuanians, with characteristic modesty, spoke so Uttle of themselves and of their country, that Russians came to believe Lithuania had been long dead. It is only since the war that Lithuanians have begun to raise their heads timidly; but when we read the books they have published recently, we see very plainly that they know little of the history of their own country. Their intellectuals leave them year by year, migrating to Russia, Poland and Ukrania, and the Lithuanians who have remained in the country have gradually become a rustic society of peasants and small tradespeople, who have but a dim recollection of their ancient glory and do not understand its causes. They forget their Norman culture, declare they have nothing in common with the Slavs, and pride themselves on belonging to the tribe of Finno-Turks. The Finno-Turks are a fine race; it would ill become us to disparage them, for they are the ancestors of the Russians, the Poles and the Lithuanians. But intellectually they are inferior and have never produced a single man of genius. It was not until they were crossed with superior races that they emerged from their obscurity and began to count in history. The fusion of the Finno-Turks established on the banks of the Niemen with the Slavs who came down from the Carpathians produced the Lithuanian people, who later assimilated the genius of the Normans. As long as this Norman fire continued to burn in the race, Lithuania was a brilliant and civilised state; when it began to die down, Lithuania gradually fell into oblivion, though it retained the Norman character which distinguished it from its Polish, Ukrainian and Russian neighbours. It was natural that Dostoyevsky should have felt little interest in his obscure and forgotten nation, and should have attributed greater importance to his Russian antecedents. And yet those who read his letters will see that all his life he was haunted by the idea that he was unlike his Russian comrades and had nothing in cotomon with them. " I have a strange character ! I have an evil character! " he often says in writing to his friends. He did not realise that his character was neither strange nor evil, but simply Lithuanian. " I have the vitality of a cat. I always feel as if I were only just beginning to live! " he says, affirming that strength of character in himself which is natural to the Norman, but which he could not find in the Russians. " I happened to see Dostoyevsky in the most terrible moments of his life," says his friend Strahoff. " His courage never failed, and I do not think that anything could have crushed him." 102 If Dostoyevsky was surprised at his own strength, the childish weakness of his Russian friends was still more surprising to him. He was obliged to bring down all his own ideas to the level of their comprehension, and even so, they were often at cross-purposes. Their puerile conceptions of honour astounded him. Thus one of his best friends, A. Miliukov, anxious to save him from the trap set for him by the publisher Stellovsky, proposed that all his literary friends should help him to complete the novel The Gambler by writing each one chapter, and that my father should sign the whole. Miliukov, in short, proposed that Dostoyevsky should commit a fraud, and was quite unconscious that he had done so. Later, when he described this incident to the public, he gloried in having tried to save his illustrious friend. " I will never put my name to another man's work," my father replied indignantly.

102 Dostoyevsky's biographers have laid too much stress on the eternal complaints in his letters to relations and intimate friends. These should not be taken too seriously, for neurotic people love to complain and to be consoled. I speak feelingly, for I have inherited this little weakness. My will is very strong; I think nothing could break my spirit or crush me, and yet any one reading my letters to my mother and my intimate Mends would get the impression of a person in despair and on the verge of suicide. Doctors who speciaUse in nervous disorders coidd no doubt explain this anomaly. For my part, I think that persons may have both very strong wills and feeble nerves. In their actions they are guided by their strong wills, but from time to time they soothe their unhealthy nerves by cries and tears, and complaints to those of their friends who are indulgent to them.

Another of Dostoyevsky's most characteristic ideas, his passionate interest in the Catholic Church, is also only to be explained by atavism. The Russians have never shown any interest in the affairs of the Vatican. The Pope is hardly known in Russia, no one ever thinks or speaks of him, hardly any writer has mentioned him. But Dostoyevsky has something to say about the Vatican in almost every number of The Writer's Journal, and discusses the future of the Catholic Church with fervour. He calls it a dead Church, declares that Catholicism has long ceased to be anything but idolatry, and yet we see plainly that this Church is still living in his heart. His Catholic ancestors must have been fervid believers; Rome must have played an immense part in their lives. Dostoyevsky's fidelity to the Orthodox Church is merely the logical sequence of the fidelity of his ancestors to the Catholic Church. " I could never understand why your father took such an interest in that old fool the Pope," said a Russian writer and friend of my father's to me one day. Now to Dostoyevsky " that old fool" was the most interesting figure in Europe.

The spiritual and moral isolation in which my father lived all his life was no unique phenomenon in our country. Nearly all our great writers have been of foreign descent, and have felt ill at ease in Russia. Pushkin was of African origin, the poet Lermontov was the descendant of a Scotch bard, Lermont, who came to Russia for some reason unknown to me; the poet Yukovsky was the son of a Turk, Nekrassov's mother was a Pole; Dostoyevsky was a Lithuanian, Alexis Tolstoy an Ukrainian, Leo Tolstoy of German blood. Only Turgenev and Gontsharov were true Russians. It is probable that young Russia is still incapable of producing great talents unaided. She can kindle them with the spark of her genius, but the pyre must be prepared by older or more highly civilised peoples. All these semi-Russians were never at home in Russia. Their lives were a series of struggles against the Mongolian society which surrounded and suffocated them. " The devil caused me to be born in Russia ! " cried Pushkin. "It is a dirty country of slaves and tjTants," said the Scottish Lermontov. " I am thinking of expatriating myself, of escaping from the ocean of odious baseness, of depraved indolence which threatens on all sides to engulf the little island of honest and laborious life I have created," wrote the German colonist Leo Tolstoy. In fact, the more prudent of the great Russian writers left the country : the poet Yukovsky preferred to live in Germany; Alexis Tolstoy was attracted by the artistic treasures of Italy. Those who remained waged war on Russian ignorance and brutality and died young, vanquished by them, like Pushkin and Lermontov, who were killed in duels. Nekrassov lived among the Russians and died a most unhappy man; Dostoyevsky himself records this in his obituary notice of Nekrassov. Tolstoy isolated himself as much as he could in his Yasnaia Poliana, but it is difficult to isolate oneself in Russia. His disciples, stupid Mongols, ended by taking advantage of the old man's enfeebled will and estranging him from his wife, the one person who really loved and understood him; they dragged him from his home to die by the wayside. . . . Poor great men, sacrificed by God for the civilisation of our country!

All these writers of foreign origin shared my father's ideas about Russia. They loathed our so-called cultivated society, and were only at their ease among the people. Their best types are drawn from the peasants, who in their eyes represented the future of our country. Dostoyevsky acts as interpreter to all these great men when he says to the Russian intellectuals : "You think yourselves true Europeans, and at bottom you have no culture. The people, whom you propose to civilise by means of your European Utopias, is much more civilised than you, through Christ, before whom it kneels and Who has saved it from despair."