Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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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."
XXIX
THE LAST YEAR OF DOSTOYEVSKY'S LIFE
DOSTOYEVSKY Came back in the guise of a conqueror to Staraja Russa, where we were settled for the summer. " What a pity you were not at the Assembly ! "