Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/214

His first great novel was contemporary with "Fathers and Sons", but between the two great novelists there is a deep abyss. The one still made use of the traditions of the past, while he acknowledged the supremacy of Western Europe, and appropriated to himself and his work what he learned of us; the other broke off wholly with the past and with foreign bondage; he is a personification of the New Russia, feeling its way out of the darkness, impatient of any tendency toward the adoption of our tastes and ideas, and often incomprehensible to us. Let us not expect Russia to do what she is incapable of, to restrict herself within certain limits, to concentrate her attention upon one point, or bring her conception of life down to one doctrine. Her literary productions must reflect the moral chaos which she is passing through. Tolstoï comes to her aid. More truly than any other man, and more completely than any other, he is the translator and propagator of that condition of the Russian mind which is called Nihilism. To seek to know how far he has accomplished this, would be to turn around constantly in the same circle. This writer fills the double function of the mirror which reflects the light and sends it back increased tenfold in intensity, producing fire. In the religious confessions which he has lately written, the novelist, changed into a theologian, gives us, in a few lines, the whole history of his soul's experience:—