Russian Novelists (1887)/6

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V. The Religion of Endurance.—Dostoyevski

The Russian Novelists (1887)
by Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, translated by Jane Loring Edmands

VI. Nihilism and Mysticism.—Tolstoï

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Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé1974171The Russian Novelists — VI. Nihilism and Mysticism.—Tolstoï1887Jane Loring Edmands

CHAPTER VI.

NIHILISM AND MYSTICISM. — TOLSTOÏ.

In Turgenef's artistic work, illustrative of the national characteristics, we have witnessed the birth of the Russian romance, and how it has naturally tended toward the psychological classification of a few general types; or, perhaps, more justly, toward the contemplation of them, when we consider with what serenity this artist's moral investigations were conducted. Dostoyevski has shown a spirit quite contrary to this, uncultured and yet subtile, sympathetic, tortured by tragic visions, morbidly preoccupied by exceptional and perverted types. The first of these two writers was constantly coquetting, so to speak, with liberal doctrines: the second was a Slavophile of the most extreme type.

In Tolstoï, other surprises are reserved for us. Younger by ten years than his predecessors, he hardly felt the influences of 1848. Attached to no particular school, totally indifferent to all political parties, despising them in fact, this solitary, meditative nobleman acknowledges no master and no sect; he is himself a spontaneous phenomenon. 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:—

"I have lived in this world fifty-five ears; with the exception of the fourteen or fifteen ears of childhood, I have lived thirty-five years a Nihilist in the true sense of the word, — not a socialist or a revolutionist according to the perverted sense acquired by usage, but a true Nihilist — that is, subject to no faith or creed whatever."