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