Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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the thought that honour and dignity are a man's best friends, and can take the place of all others. But it is very difficult for a young man to turn hermit; the youthful mind requires the interchange of ideas for its development. Having renounced literary society, Dostoyevsky sought that of other intellectuals, and unfortunately became involved with Petrachevsky.
87 " The Lithuanian is very reticent, one may indeed say modest. But when he encounters insolence, he becomes extremely haughty," says Vidunas.
The aggressive tone of the conversational cock-fights I have described have disappeared now, at least in good society. My compatriots travelled much in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, observed the politeness that reigned there, and introduced it into Russia. Yet in 1878, in the Journal of the Writer, my father confessed to his readers that when he was going on a journey he always took plenty of books and newspapers, in order to avoid conversation with his travelling companions. He declared that such conversations always ended in gratuitous insults, uttered merely to wound the interlocutor.
My father's uncompromising attitude made a great impression on the Russian writers. They realised that his sense of honour was more highly developed than that of his contemporaries, and that consequently they could not talk to him in the disrespectful manner usually adopted by writers to each other at that period. When he returned from Siberia, his new friends, the collaborators of the Vremya, treated him with consideration. My father, who asked nothing better than to live on friendly terms with his colleagues, but who would not sacrifice his dignity on the altar of friendship, became their sincere friend, and remained faithful to them until his death. Turgenev imitated the other writers, and was polite, and even amiable with my father. 88 They met very rarely. While my father was undergoing his sentence in Siberia, Turgenev had the misfortune to fall in love with a celebrated European singer. He followed her abroad and was at her feet all his life. He settled in Paris, and only came to Russia for the sporting season. His unhappy passion prevented him from marrying and having a family. In his novels he is fond of depicting the type of the weak-minded Slav, who becomes the slave of an evil woman and suffers, but is unable to throw off her yoke. Turgenev's character became embittered; misfortune developed his faults instead of correcting them. Seeing that the Russian aristocracy would not recognise him as the great noble he imagined himself to be, Turgenev changed his pose, and adopted the role of the European. He exaggerated the Paris fashions, took up all the manias of the French old beaus, and became more ridiculous than ever. He spoke disdainfully of Russia, and declared that if she were to disappear altogether, civilisation would not suffer in any appreciable degree. This new pose disgusted my father; he thought that if the first was ridiculous, the second was dangerous. Turgenev had, by adopting these opinions, become the leader of the Zapadniki (Occidentals), who had hitherto only had mediocrities in their ranks, and his incontestable talents gave them a certain prestige. Every time my father met Turgenev abroad, he tried to make him realise the wrong he was doing to Russia by his unjust contempt. Turgenev would not listen to reason, and their discussions generally ended in quarrels. When Dostoyevsky returned to Russia, after spending four years in Europe, he became one of the leaders of the Slavophils, the party opposed to the Occidentals. Seeing the disastrous influence the Occidentals were exercising upon the infant society of Russia, Dostoyevsky began to wage war upon them in his novel. The Possessed. In order to discredit them in the eyes of the Russian public, he caricatured their chief in his description of the celebrated writer Karmazinov, and his stay In a little Russian town. The Occidentals were indignant, and made a great outcry. They thought it quite legitimate for Turgenev to ridicule my father and caricature the heroes of his novels, but they declared it to be odious when Dostoyevsky adopted the same attitude to Turgenev. Such is justice, as understood by the Russian intellectuals.
88 Turgenev was particularly agreeable to my father at the time when the brothers Dostoyevsky were pubUshing their paper. During one of his sojourns in Petersburg he gave a grand dinner to all the staff of the Vremya. Turgenev always managed his money affairs well, made friends with the rich pubhshers and insisted on good terms for himself, whereas Dostoyevsky, who was obliged to ask his publishers for sums in advance, had all his life to take what they chose to give him.
Although he opposed Turgenev and his political ideas, my father was all his life a passionate admirer of his contemporary's works. When he speaks of them in the Journal of the Writer, it is in terms of the warmest appreciation. Turgenev, on the other hand, would never admit that Dostoyevsky had any talent, and all his life ridiculed him and his works. He acted like a true Mongol, maliciously and vindictively.
XXV
DOSTOYEVSKY AND TOLSTOY
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