Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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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