Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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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.
XXVI
DOSTOYEVSKY THE SLAVOPHIL
The Writer's Journal had an immense success; nevertheless, my father ceased its publication at the end of the second year, and began to write The Brothers Kara-mazov. Art claimed him, telling him that he was a novelist and not a pubUcist. The Brothers Karamazov, which many critics consider the best of Dostoyevsky's novels, is one of those works which every writer bears in his heart and ponders for years, putting off the actual writing of it till the time when he shall have achieved perfection in his craft. My father did not believe he had reached this goal; he was too severe a judge to have thought so. But something told him that he had not much longer to live. " This will be my last book," he said to his friends when he told them he was going to write The Brothers Karamazov.
Such novels, analysed, meditated upon, caressed,