[1]A hero from Fon-Vizin's playThe Minor.Starodoum is araisonneur,a 'positive' type, always uttering truisms.
[1]A hero from Fon-Vizin's playThe Minor.Starodoum is araisonneur,a 'positive' type, always uttering truisms.
Thus the real, the only hero of Tchekhov, is the hopeless man. He has absolutely noactionleft for him in life, save to beat his head against the stones. It is not surprising that such a man should be intolerable to his neighbours. Everywhere he brings death and destruction with him. He himself is aware of it, but he has not the power to go apart from men. With all his soul he endeavours to tear himself out of his horrible condition. Above all he is attracted to fresh, young, untouched beings; with their help he hopes to recover his right to life which he has lost. The hope is vain. The beginning of decay always appears, all-conquering, and at the end Tchekhov's hero is left to himself alone. He has nothing, he must create everything for himself. And this 'creation out of the void,' or more truly the possibility of this creation, is the only problem which can occupy and inspire Tchekhov. When he has stripped his hero of the last shred, when nothing is left for him but to beat his head against the wall, Tchekhov begins to feel something like satisfaction, a strange fire lights in his burnt-out eyes, a fire which Mihailovsky did not call 'evil' in vain.
Creation out of the void! Is not this task beyond the limit of human powers, of humanrights? Mihailovsky obviously had one straight answer to the question.... As for Tchekhov himself, if the question were put to him in such a deliberately definite form, he would probably be unable to answer, although he was continually engaged in the activity, or more properly, because he was continually so engaged. Without fear of mistake, one may say that the people who answer the question without hesitation in either sense have never come near to it, or to any of the so-called ultimate questions of life. Hesitation is a necessary and integral element in the judgment of those men whom Fate has brought near to false problems. How Tchekhov's hand trembled while he wrote the concluding lines of hisTedious Story! The professor's pupil—the being nearest and dearest to him, but like himself, for all her youth, overstrained and bereft of all hope—has come to Kharkov to seek his advice. The following conversation takes place:
"Nicolai Stepanich!" she says, growing pale and pressing her hands to her breast. "Nicolai Stepanich! I can't go on like this any longer. For God's sake tell me now, immediately. What shall I do? Tell me, what shall I do?"
"What can I say? I am beaten. I can say nothing."
"But tell me, I implore you," she continues, out of breath and trembling all over her body. "I swear to you, I can't go on like this any longer. I haven't the strength."
She drops into a chair and begins to sob. She throws her head back, wrings her hands, stamps with her feet; her hat falls from her head and dangles by its string, her hair is loosened.
"Help me, help," she implores. "I can't bear it any more."
"There's nothing that I can say to you, Katy," I say.
"Help me," she sobs, seizing my hand and kissing it. "You 're my father, my only friend. You're wise and learned, and you've lived long I You were a teacher. Tell me what to do."
'"Upon my conscience, Katy, I do not know."
'I am bewildered and surprised, stirred by her sobbing, and I can hardly stand upright.
'"Let's have some breakfast, Katy," I say with a constrained smile.
'Instantly I add in a sinking voice: "I shall be dead soon, Katy...."
'"Only one word, only one word," she weeps and stretches out her hands to me. "What shall I do?..."'
But the professor has not the word to give. He turns the conversation to the weather, Kharkov and other indifferent matters. Katy gets up and holds out her hand to him, without looking at him. 'I want to ask her,' he concludes his story, '"So it means you won't be at my funeral?" But she does not look at me; her hand is cold and like a stranger's ... I escort her to the door in silence.... She goes out of my room and walks down the long passage, without looking back. She knows that my eyes are following her, and probably on the landing she will look back. No, she did not look back. The black dress showed for the last time, her steps were stilled.... Good-bye, my treasure!...'
The only answer which the wise, educated, long-lived Nicolai Stepanovich, a teacher all his life, can give to Katy's question is, 'I don't know.' There is not, in all his great experience of the past, a single method, rule, or suggestion, which might apply, even in the smallest degree, to the wild incongruity of the new conditions of Katy's life and his own. Katy can live thus no longer; neither can he himself continue to endure his disgusting and shameful helplessness. They both, old and young, with their whole hearts desire to support each other; they can between them find no way. To her question: 'What shall I do?' he replied: 'I shall soon be dead.' To his 'I shall soon be dead' she answers with wild sobbing, wringing her hands, and absurdly repeating the same words over and over again. It would have been better to have asked no question, not to have begun that frank conversation of souls. But they do not yet understand that. In their old life talk would bring them relief and frank confession, intimacy. But now, after such a meeting they can suffer each other no longer. Katy leaves the old professor, her foster-father, her true father and friend, in the knowledge that he has become a stranger to her. She did not even turn round towards him as she went away. Both felt that nothing remained save to beat their heads against the wall. Therein each acts at his own peril, and there can be no dreaming of a consoling union of souls.
Tchekhov knew what conclusions he had reached inThe Tedious StoryandIvanov.Some of his critics also knew, and told him so. I cannot venture to say what was the cause—whether fear of public opinion, or his horror at his own discoveries, or both together—but evidently there came a moment to Tchekhov when he decided at all costs to surrender his position and retreat. The fruit of this decision wasWard No. 6.In this story the hero of the drama is the same familiar Tchekhov character, the doctor. The setting, too, is quite the usual one, though changed to a slight extent. Nothing in particular has occurred in the doctor's life. He happened to come to an out-of-the-way place in the provinces, and gradually, by continually avoiding life and people, he reached a condition of utter will-lessness, which he represented to himself as the ideal of human happiness. He is indifferent to everything, beginning with his hospital, where he can hardly ever be found, where under the reign of the drunken brute of an assistant the patients are swindled and neglected.
In the mental ward reigns a porter who is a discharged soldier: he punches his restless patients into shape. The doctor does not care, as though he were living in some distant other world, and does not understand what is going on before his very eyes. He happens to enter his ward and to have a conversation with one of his patients. He listens quietly to him; but his answer is words instead of deeds. He tries to show his lunatic acquaintance that external influences cannot affect us in any way at all. The lunatic does not agree, becomes impertinent, presents objections, in which, as in the thoughts of many lunatics, nonsensical assertions are mixed with very profound remarks. Indeed, there is so little nonsense that from the conversation you would hardly imagine that you have to do with a lunatic. The doctor is delighted with his new friend, but does nothing whatsoever to make him more comfortable. The patient is still under the porter's thumb as he used to be, and the porter gives him a thrashing on the least provocation. The patient, the doctor, the people round, the whole setting of the hospital and the doctor's rooms, are described with wonderful talent. Everything induces you to make absolutely no resistance and to become fatalistically indifferent:—let them get drunk, let them fight, let them thieve, let them be brutal—what does it matter! Evidently it is so predestined by the supreme council of nature. The philosophy of inactivity which the doctor professes is as it were prompted and whispered by the immutable laws of human existence. Apparently there is no force which may tear one from its power. So far everything is more or less in the Tchekhov style. But the end is completely different. By the intrigues of his colleague, the doctor himself is taken as a patient into the mental ward. He is deprived of freedom, shut up in a wing of the hospital, and even thrashed, thrashed by the same porter whose behaviour he had taught his lunatic acquaintance to accept, thrashed before his acquaintance's very eyes. The doctor instantly awakens as though out of a dream. A fierce desire to struggle and to protest manifests itself in him. True, at this moment he dies; but the idea is triumphant, still. The critics could consider themselves quite satisfied. Tchekhov had openly repented and renounced the theory of non-resistance; and, I believe,Ward No. 6met with a sympathetic reception at the time. In passing I would say that the doctor dies very beautifully: in his last moments he sees a herd of deer....
Indeed, the construction of this story leaves no doubt in the mind. Tchekhov wished to compromise, and he compromised. He had come to feel how intolerable was hopelessness, how impossible the creation from a void. To beat one's head against the stones, eternally to beat one's head against the stones, is so horrible that it were better to return to idealism. Then the truth of the wonderful Russian saying was proved: 'Don't forswear the beggar's wallet nor the prison.' Tchekhov joined the choir of Russian writers, and began to praise the idea. But not for long. His very next story,The Duel,has a different character. Its conclusion is also apparently idealistic, but only in appearance. The principal hero Layevsky is a parasite like all Tchekhov's heroes. He does nothing, can do nothing, does not even wish to do anything, lives chiefly at others' expense, runs up debts, seduces women.... His condition is intolerable. He is living with another man's wife, whom he had come to loathe as he loathes himself, yet he cannot get rid of her. He is always in straitened circumstances and in debt everywhere: his friends dislike and despise him. His state of mind is always such that he is ready to run no matter where, never looking backwards, only away from the place where he is living now. His illegal wife is in roughly the same position, unless it be even more horrible. Without knowing why, without love, without even being attracted, she gives herself to the first, commonplace man she meets; and then she feels as though she had been covered from head to foot in filth, and the filth had stuck so close to her that not ocean itself could wash her clean. This couple lives in the world, in a remote little place in the Caucasus, and naturally attracts Tchekhov's attention. There is no denying the interest of the subject: two persons befouled, who can neither tolerate others nor themselves....
For contrast's sake Tchekhov brings Layevsky into collision with the zoologist, Von Koren, who has come to the seaside town on important business—every one recognises its importance—to study the embryology of the medusa. Von Koren, as one may see from his name, is of German origin, and therefore deliberately represented as a healthy, normal, clean man, the grandchild of Goncharov's Stolz, the direct opposite of Layevsky, who on his side is nearly related to our old friend Oblomov. But in Goncharov the contrast between Stolz and Oblomov is quite different in nature and meaning to the contrast in Tchekhov. The novelist of the 'forties hoped that arapprochementwith Western culture would renew and resuscitate Russia. And Oblomov himself is not represented as an utterly hopeless person. He is only lazy, inactive, unenterprising. You have the feeling that were he to awaken he would be a match for a dozen Stolzs. Layevsky is a different affair. He is awake already, he was awakened years ago, but his awakening did him no good.... 'He does not love nature; he has no God; he or his companions had ruined every trustful girl he had known; all his life long he had not planted one single little tree, nor grown one blade of grass in his own garden, nor while he lived among the living, had he saved the life of one single fly; but only ruined and destroyed, and lied, and lied....' The good-natured sluggard Oblomov degenerated into a disgusting, terrible animal, while the clean Stolz lived and remained clean in his posterity! But to the new Oblomov he speaks differently. Von Koren calls Layevsky a scoundrel and a rogue, and demands that he should be punished with the utmost severity. To reconcile them is impossible. The more they meet, the deeper, the more merciless, the more implacable is their hatred for each other. It is impossible that they should live together on the earth. It must be one or the other: either the normal Von Koren, or the degenerate decadent Layevsky. Of course, all the external, material force is on Von Koren's side in the struggle. He is always in the right, always victorious, always triumphant—in act no less than in theory. It is curious that Tchekhov, the irreconcilable enemy of all kinds of philosophy—not one of his heroes philosophises, or if he does, his philosophising is unsuccessful, ridiculous, weak and unconvincing—makes an exception for Von Koren, a typical representative of the positive, materialistic school. His words breathe vigour and conviction. They have in them even pathos and a maximum of logical sequence. There are many materialist heroes in Tchekhov's stories, but in their materialism there is a tinge of veiled idealism, according to the stereotyped prescription of the 'sixties. Such heroes Tchekhov ridicules and derides. Idealism of every kind, whether open or concealed, roused feelings of intolerable bitterness in Tchekhov. He found it more pleasant to listen to the merciless menaces of a downright materialist than to accept the dry-as-dust consolations of humanising idealism. An invincible power is in the world, crushing and crippling man—this is clear and even palpable. The least indiscretion, and the mightiest and the most insignificant alike fall victims to it. One can only deceive oneself about it so long as one knows of it only by hearsay. But the man who had once been in the iron claws of necessity loses for ever his taste for idealistic self-delusion. No more does he diminish the enemy's power, he will rather exaggerate it. And the pure logical materialism which Von Koren professes gives the most complete expression of our dependence upon the elemental powers of nature. Von Koren's speech has the stroke of a hammer, and each blow strikes not Layevsky but Tchekhov himself on his wounds. He gives more and more strength to Von Koren's arm, he puts himself in the way of his blows. For what reason? Decide as you may. Perhaps Tchekhov cherished a secret hope that self-inflicted torment might be the one road to a new life? He has not told us so. Perhaps he did not know the reason himself, and perhaps he was afraid to offend the positive idealism which held such undisputed sway over contemporary literature. As yet he dared not lift up his voice against the public opinion of Europe—for we do not ourselves invent our philosophical conceptions; they drift down on the wind from Europe! And, to avoid quarrelling with people, he devised a commonplace, happy ending for his terrible story. At the end of the story Layevsky 'reforms': he marries his mistress; gives up his dissolute life; and begins to devote himself to transcribing documents, in order to pay his debts. Normal people can be perfectly satisfied, since normal people read only the last lines of the fable,—the moral; and the moral ofThe Duelis most wholesome: Layevsky reforms and begins transcribing documents. Of course it may seem that such an ending is more like a gibe at morality; but normal people are not too penetrating psychologists. They are scared of double meanings and, with the 'sincerity' peculiar to themselves, they take every word of the writer for good coin. Good luck to them!
The only philosophy which Tchekhov took seriously, and therefore seriously fought, was positivist materialism—just the positivist materialism, the limited materialism which does not pretend to theoretical completeness. With all his soul Tchekhov felt the awful dependence of a living being upon the invisible but invincible and ostentatiously soulless laws of nature. And materialism, above all scientific materialism, which is reserved and does not hasten in pursuit of the final word, and eschews logical completeness, wholly reduces to the definition of the external conditions of our existence. The experience of every day, every hour, every minute, convinces us that lonely and weak man brought to face with the laws of nature, must always adapt himself and give way, give way, give way. The old professor could not regain his youth; the overstrained Ivanov could not recover his strength; Layevsky could not wash away the filth with which he was covered—interminable series of implacable, purely materialisticnon possumus,against which human genius can set nothing but submission or forgetfulness.Résigne-toi, mon cœur, dors ton sommeil de brute—we shall find no other words before the pictures which are unfolded in Tchekhov's books. The submission is but an outward show; under it lies concealed a hard, malignant hatred of the unknown enemy. Sleep and oblivion are only seeming. Does a man sleep, does he forget, when he calls his sleep,sommeil de brute? But how can he change? The tempestuous protests with whichThe Tedious Storyis filled, the need to pour forth the pent-up indignation, soon begin to appear useless, and even insulting to human dignity. Tchekhov's last rebellious work isUncle Vanya.Like the old professor and like Ivanov, Uncle Vanya raises the alarm and makes an incredible pother about his ruined life. He, too, in a voice not his own, fills the stage with his cries: 'Life is over, life is over,'—as though indeed any of these about him, any one in the whole world, could be responsible for his misfortune. But wailing and lamentation is not sufficient for him. He covers his own mother with insults. Aimlessly, like a lunatic, without need or purpose, he begins shooting at his imaginary enemy, Sonya's pitiable and unhappy father. His voice is not enough, he turns to the revolver. He is ready to fire all the cannon on earth, to beat every drum, to ring every bell. To him it seems that the whole of mankind, the whole of the universe, is sleeping, that the neighbours must be awakened. He is prepared for any extravagance, having no rational way of escape; for to confess at once that there is no escape is beyond the capacity of any man. Then begins a Tchekhov history: 'He cannot reconcile himself, neither can he refuse so to reconcile himself. He can only weep and beat his head against the wall.' Uncle Vanya does it openly, before men's eyes; but how painful to him is the memory of this frank unreserve! When every one has departed after a stupid and painful scene, Uncle Vanya realises that he should have kept silence, that it is no use to confess certain things to any one, not even to one's nearest friend. A stranger's eye cannot endure the sight of hopelessness. 'Your life is over—you have yourself to thank for it: you are a human being no more, all human things are ah en to you. Your neighbours are no more neighbours to you, but strangers. You have no right either to help others or to expect help from them. Your destiny is—absolute loneliness.' Little by little Tchekhov becomes convinced of this truth:Uncle Vanyais the last trial of loud public protest, of a vigorous 'declaration of rights.' And even in this drama Uncle Vanya is the only one to rage, although there are among the characters Doctor Astrov and poor Sonya, who might also avail themselves of their right to rage, and even to fire the cannon. But they are silent. They even repeat certain comfortable and angelic words concerning the happy future of mankind; which is to say that their silence is doubly deep, seeing that 'comfortable words' upon the lips of such people are the evidence of their final severance from life: they have left the whole world, and now they admit no one to their presence. They have fenced themselves with comfortable words, as with the Great Wall of China, from the curiosity and attention of their neighbours. Outwardly they resemble all men, therefore no man dares to touch their inward life.
What is the meaning and significance of this straining inward labour in those whose lives are over? Probably Tchekhov would answer this question as Nicolai Stepanovich answered Katy's, with 'I do not know.' He would add nothing. But this life alone, more like to death than life, attracted and engaged him. Therefore his utterance grew softer and slower with every year. Of all our writers Tchekhov has the softest voice. All the energy of his heroes is turned inwards. They create nothing visible; worse, they destroy all things visible by their outward passivity and inertia. A 'positive thinker' like Von Koren brands them with terrible words, and the more content is he with himself and his justice, the more energy he puts into his anathemas. 'Scoundrels, villains, degenerates, degraded animals!'—what did Von Koren not devise to fit the Layevskys? The manifestly positive thinker wants to force Layevsky to transcribe documents. The surreptitiously positive thinkers—idealists and metaphysicians—do not use abusive words. Instead they bury Tchekhov's nerves alive in their idealistic cemeteries, which are called conceptions of the world. Tchekhov himself abstains from the 'solution of the question' with a persistency to which most of the critics probably wished a better fate, and he continues his long stories of men and the life of men, who have nothing to lose, as though the only interest in life were this nightmare suspension between life and death. What does it teach us of life or death? Again we must answer: 'I do not know,'—those words which arouse the greatest aversion in positive thinkers, but appear in some mysterious way to be the permanent elements in the ideas of Tchekhov's people. This is the reason why the philosophy of materialism, though so hostile, is yet so near to them. It contains no answer which can compel man to cheerful submission. It bruises and destroys him, but it does not call itself rational; it does not demand gratitude; it does not demand anything, since it has neither soul nor speech. A man may acknowledge it and hate it. If he manages to get square with it—he is right; if he fails—vae victis.How comfortably sounds the voice of the unconcealed ruthlessness of inanimate, impersonal, indifferent nature, compared with the hypocritical and cloying melodies of idealistic, humanistic conceptions of the world! Then again—and this is the chiefest thing of all—men can struggle with nature still! And in the struggle with nature every weapon is lawful. In the struggle with nature man always remains man, and, therefore, right, whatever means he tries for his salvation, even if he were to refuse to accept the fundamental principle of the world's being—the indestructibility of matter and energy, the law of inertia and the rest—since who will dispute that the most colossal dead force must be subservient to man? But a conception of the world is an utterly different affair! Before uttering a word it puts forward an irreducible demand: man must serve the idea. And this demand is considered not merely as something understood, but as of extraordinary sublimity. Is it strange then that in the choice between idealism and materialism Tchekhov inclined to the latter—the strong but honest adversary? With idealism a man can struggle only by contempt, and Tchekhov's works leave nothing to be desired in this respect.... But how shall a man struggle with materialism? And can it be overcome? Perhaps Tchekhov's method may seem strange to my reader, nevertheless it is clear that he came to the conclusion that there was only one way to struggle, to which the prophets of old turned themselves: to beat one's head against the wall. Without thunder or cannon or alarm, in loneliness and silence, remote from their fellows and their fellows' fellows, to gather all the forces of despair for an absurd attempt long since condemned by science. Have you any right to expect from Tchekhov an approval of scientific methods? Science has robbed him of everything: he is condemned to create from the void, to an activity of which a normal man, using normal means, is utterly incapable. To achieve the impossible one must first leave the road of routine. However obstinately we may pursue our scientific quests, they will not lead us to the elixir of life. Science began with casting away the longing for human omnipotence as in principle unattainable: her methods are such that success along certain of her paths preclude even seeking along others. In other words, scientific method is defined by the character of the problems which she puts to herself. Indeed, not one of her problems can be solved by beating one's head against the wall. But this method, old-fashioned though it is—I repeat, it was known to the prophets and used by them—promised more to Tchekhov and his nerves than all inductions and deductions (which were not invented by science, but have existed since the beginning of the world). This prompts a man with some mysterious instinct, and appears upon the scene whenever the need of it arises. Science condemns it. But that is nothing strange: it condemns science.
Now perhaps the further development and direction of Tchekhov's creation will be intelligible, and that peculiar and unique blend in him of sober materialism and fanatical stubbornness in seeking new paths, always round about and hazardous. Like Hamlet, he would dig beneath his opponent a mine one yard deeper, so that he may at one moment blow engineer and engine into the air. His patience and fortitude in this hard, underground toil are amazing and to many intolerable. Everywhere is darkness, not a ray, not a spark, but Tchekhov goes forward, slowly, hardly, hardly moving.... An inexperienced or impatient eye will perhaps observe no movement at all. It may be Tchekhov himself does not know for certain whether he is moving forward or marking time. To calculate beforehand is impossible. Impossible even to hope. Man has entered that stage of his existence wherein the cheerful and foreseeing mind refuses its service. It is impossible for him to present to himself a clear and distinct notion of what is going on. Everything takes on a tinge of fantastical absurdity. One believes and disbelieves—everything. InThe Black MonkTchekhov tells of a new reality, and in a tone which suggests that he is himself at a loss to say where the reality ends and the phantasmagoria begins. The black monk leads the young scholar into some mysterious remoteness, where the best dreams of mankind shall be realised. The people about call the monk a hallucination and fight him with medicines—drugs, better foods and milk. Kovrin himself does not know who is right. When he is speaking to the monk, it seems to him that the monk is right; when he sees before him his weeping wife and the serious, anxious faces of the doctors, he confesses that he is under the influence of fixed ideas, which lead him straight to lunacy. Finally the black monk is victorious. Kovrin has not the power to support the banality which surrounds him; he breaks with his wife and her relations, who appear like inquisitors in his eyes, and goes away somewhere—but in our sight he arrives nowhere. At the end of the story he dies in order to give the author the right to make an end. This is always the case: when the author does not know what to do with his hero he kills him. Sooner or later in all probability this habit will be abandoned. In the future, probably, writers will convince themselves and the public that any kind of artificial completion is absolutely superfluous. The matter is exhausted—stop the tale short, even though it be on a half-word. Tchekhov did so sometimes, but only sometimes. In most cases he preferred to satisfy the traditional demands and to supply his readers with an end. This habit is not so unimportant as at first sight it may seem. Consider evenThe Black Monk.The death of the hero is as it were an indication that abnormality must, in Tchekhov's opinion, necessarily lead through an absurd life to an absurd death: but this was hardly Tchekhov's firm conviction. It is clear that he expected something from abnormality, and therefore gave no deep attention to men who had left the common track. True, he came to no firm or definite conclusions, for all the tense effort of his creation. He became so firmly convinced that there was no issue from the entangled labyrinth, that the labyrinth with its infinite wanderings, its perpetual hesitations and strayings, its uncaused griefs and joys uncaused—in brief, all things which normal men so fear and shun—became the very essence of his life. Of this and this alone must a man tell. Not of our invention is normal life, nor abnormal. Why then should the first alone be considered as the real reality?
The Sea-Gullmust be considered one of the most characteristic, and therefore one of the most remarkable of Tchekhov's works. Therein the artist's true attitude to life received its most complete expression. Here all the characters are either blind, and afraid to move from their seats in case they lose the way home, or half-mad, struggling and tossing about to no end nor purpose. Arkadzina the famous actress clings with her teeth to her seventy thousand roubles, her fame, and her last lover. Tregovin the famous writer writes day in, day out; he writes and writes, knowing neither end nor aim. People read his works and praise them, but he is not his own master; like Marko, the ferryman in the tale, he labours on without taking his hand from the oar, carrying passengers from one bank to the other. The boat, the passengers, and the river too, bore him to death. But how can he get rid of them? He might give the oars over to the first-comer: the solution is simple, but after it, as in the tale, he must go to heaven. Not Tregovin alone, but all the people in Tchekhov's books who are no longer young remind one of Marko the ferryman. It is plain that they dislike their work, but, exactly as though they were hypnotised, they cannot break away from the influence of the alien power. The monotonous, even dismal, rhythm of life has lulled their consciousness and will to sleep. Everywhere Tchekhov underlines this strange and mysterious trait of human life. His people always speak, always think, always do one and the same thing. One builds houses according to a plan made once for all (My Life); another goes on his round of visits from morn to night, collecting roubles (Yonitch); a third is always buying up houses (Three Years). Even the language of his characters is deliberately monotonous. They are all monotonous, to the point of stupidity, and they are all afraid to break the monotony, as though it were the source of extraordinary joys. Read Tregovin's monologue:
'... Let us talk.... Let us talk of my beautiful life.... What shall I begin with? [Musing a little.] ... There are such things as fixed ideas, when a person thinks day and night, for instance, of the moon, always of the moon. I too have my moon. Day and night I am at the mercy of one besetting idea: "I must write, I must write, I must." I have hardly finished one story than, for some reason or other, I must write a second, then a third, and after the third, a fourth. I write incessantly, post-haste. I cannot do otherwise. Where then, I ask you, is beauty and serenity? What a monstrous life it is! I am sitting with you now, I am excited, but meanwhile every second I remember that an unfinished story is waiting for me. I see a cloud, like a grand piano. It smells of heliotrope. I say to myself: a sickly smell, a half-mourning colour.... I must not forget to use these words when describing a summer evening. I catch up myself and you on every phrase, on every word, and hurry to lock all these words and phrases into my literary storehouse. Perhaps they will be useful. When I finish work I run to the theatre, or go off fishing: at last I shall rest, forget myself. But no! a heavy ball of iron is dragging on my fetters,—a new subject, which draws me to the desk, and I must make haste to write and write again. And so on for ever, for ever. I have no rest from myself, and I feel that I am eating away my own life. I feel that the honey which I give to others has been made of the pollen of my most precious flowers, that I have plucked the flowers themselves and trampled them down to the roots. Surely, I am mad. Do my neighbours and friends treat me as a sane person? "What are you writing? What have you got ready for us?" The same thing, the same thing eternally, and it seems to me that the attention, the praise, the enthusiasm of my friends is all a fraud. I am being robbed like a sick man, and sometimes I am afraid that they will creep up to me and seize me, and put me away in an asylum.'
But why these torments? Throw up the oars and begin a new life.Impossible.While no answer comes down from heaven, Tregovin will not throw up the oars, will not begin a new life. In Tchekhov's work, only young, very young and inexperienced people speak of a new life. They are always dreaming of happiness, regeneration, light, joy. They fly head-long into the flame, and are burned like silly butterflies. InThe Sea-Gull,Nina Zaryechnaya and Trepliev, in other works other heroes, men and women alike—all are seeking for something, yearning for something, but not one of them does that which he desires. Each one lives in isolation; each is wholly absorbed in his life, and is indifferent to the lives of others. And the strange fate of Tchekhov's heroes is that they strain to the last limit of their inward powers, but there are no visible results at all. They are all pitiable. The woman takes snuff, dresses slovenly, wears her hair loose, is uninteresting. The man is irritable, grumbling, takes to drink, bores every one about him. They act, they speak—always out of season. They cannot, I would even say they do not want to, adapt the outer world to themselves. Matter and energy unite according to their own laws;—people live according to their own, as though matter and energy had no existence at all. In this Tchekhov's intellectuals do not differ from illiterate peasants and the half-educated bourgeois. Life in the manor is the same as in the valley farm, the same as in the village. Not one believes that by changing his outward conditions he would change his fate as well. Everywhere reigns an unconscious but deep and ineradicable conviction that our will must be directed towards ends which have nothing in common with the organised life of mankind. Worse still, the organisation appears to be the enemy of the will and of man. One must spoil, devour, destroy, ruin. To think out things quietly, to anticipate the future—that is impossible. One must beat one's head, beat one's head eternally against the wall. And to what purpose? Is there any purpose at all? Is it a beginning or an end? Is it possible to see in it the warrant of a new and inhuman creation, a creation out of the void? 'I do not know' was the old professor's answer to Katy. 'I do not know' was Tchekhov's answer to the sobs of those tormented unto death. With these words, and only these, can an essay upon Tchekhov end.Résigne-toi, mon cœur, dors ton sommeil de brute.
Vladimir Soloviev used to call Dostoevsky 'the prophet,' and even 'the prophet of God.' Immediately after Soloviev, though often in complete independence of him, very many people looked upon Dostoevsky as the man to whom the books of human destiny were opened; and this happened not only after his death, but even while he was yet alive. Apparently Dostoevsky himself too, if he did not regard himself as a prophet—he was too eagle-eyed for that—at least thought it right that all people should see a prophet in him. To this bears witness the tone ofThe Journal of an Author,no less than the questions upon which he generally touches therein.The Journal of an Authorbegan to appear in 1873, that is on Dostoevsky's return from abroad, and therefore coincides with what his biographers call 'the highest period of his life.' Dostoevsky was then the happy father of a family, a man of secure position, a famous writer, the author of a whole series of novels known to all:The House of the Dead, The Idiot, The Possessed.He has everything which can be requiredfromlife, or, more truly, he has taken everything which can be taken from life. You remember Tolstoi's deliberations in hisConfession? 'Finally, I shall be as famous as Pushkin, Gogol, Goethe and Shakespeare—and what shall come after?' Indeed, it is difficult to become a more famous writer than Shakespeare; and even if one succeeded, the inevitable question, 'And what shall come after?' would by no means be removed. Sooner or later in the activity of a great writer a moment comes when further perfection seems impossible. How shall a man be greater than himself in the world of literature? If he would move, then by his own will or in spite of it he must step on to another plane. And this is plainly the beginning of prophecy in a writer. In the general view the prophet is greater than the writer; and even the possession of genius is not always a guarantee against the general view. Even men so sceptical as Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, men always ready to doubt everything, more than once were the victims of prejudices. Prophetic words were expected of them, and they went out to meet men's desires, Dostoevsky even more readily than Tolstoi. Moreover both prophesied clumsily: they promised one thing, and something wholly different happened. So Tolstoi promised long ago that men would awake to their error soon and would put away from them fratricidal war, and would begin to live as true Christians should, fulfilling the Gospel commandment of love. Tolstoi prophesied and preached; people read him, as, it seems, they read no other writer: but they have not changed their habits nor their tastes. For the last ten years Tolstoi has perforce been a witness of a whole series of horrible and most savage wars. And now there is our present revolution[1]—armed mobs rioting, the gallows set up, men shot down, bombs—the revolution which came to replace the bloody war in the Far East!
And this is in Russia, where Tolstoi was born, lived, taught and prophesied, where millions of people sincerely hold him to be the greatest genius of all! Even in his own family Tolstoi could not effect the change that he desired. One of his sons is an officer in the army; the other writes in theNovoïe Vremya,as though he were Souvorin's[2]son, not Tolstoi's.... Where, then, is the gift of prophecy? Why is it that a man so great as Tolstoi can foresee nothing, and seems to peer his way through life? 'What will to-morrow bring forth?' 'To-morrow I'll work miracles,' said the magician to the Russian prince of old. For reply the prince drew his sword and struck off the magician's head; and the excited mob, which believed in the magician-prophet, became calm and departed home. History is ever striking off the heads of prophetic predictions, and yet the crowd still runs after the prophets. Of little faith, the crowd looks for a sign, because it desires a miracle. But can the ability to predict be accounted as evidence of the power to work miracles? It is possible to predict an eclipse of the sun or the appearance of a comet, but this surely means a miracle only to the ignorant. An enlightened mind is secure in the knowledge that where prediction is possible, there is no miracle, since the possibility of prediction and of foreseeing presupposes a strict uniformity. Therefore not he will appear a prophet who has great spiritual gifts, nor he who desires to dominate the world and to command the very laws, neither the magician, nor the sorcerer, nor the artist, but he who, having yielded himself beforehand to the actual and its laws, has devoted himself to the mechanical labour of record and calculation. Bismarck could foretell the greatness of Russia and Germany; and not only Bismarck, but an ordinary German politician, for whom everything is reduced toDeutschland, Deutschland über alles,could read the future for many years ahead; yet Dostoevsky and Tolstoi could foresee nothing. In Dostoevsky the failure is still more remarkable than in Tolstoi, because he more often attempted prediction: more than half of hisJournalconsists in unfulfilled prophecies. So often did he commit his prophetic genius.
[1]This essay was written during the revolution of 1905.
[1]This essay was written during the revolution of 1905.
[2]The famous editor of theNovoïe Vremya.
[2]The famous editor of theNovoïe Vremya.
To some it may perhaps seem out of place that in an article devoted to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the writer's death, I call to mind his mistakes and errors. The reproach is hardly just. A certain kind of defect in a great man is at least as characteristic and important as his qualities.
Dostoevsky was not a Bismarck. But is that so terrible that we must lament it? Moreover, for writers of the type of Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, their social and political ideas are without any value. They know well that no one obeys them. Whatever they may say, history and political life will go on in the same way, since it is not their books and articles which guide events. And, probably, here is the explanation of the amazing boldness of their opinions. If Tolstoi really imagined that it would be enough for him to write an article demanding that all 'soldiers, policemen, judges, ministers' and the rest, all those guardians of the public peace, whom he detested—and, by the way, who loves them?—should be dismissed, for all prison-doors to be flung wide before the murderers and robbers—who can tell whether he would have shown himself sufficiently firm and resolute in his opinions, to take upon himself the responsibility for the effects of the measures which he proposed? But he knows beyond all doubt that he will not be obeyed, and therefore he calmly preaches anarchy. Dostoevsky's part as a preacher was quite different; but it too was, so to speak, platonic. Probably it came as a surprise even to himself, that he became the prophet, not of 'ideal' politics, but of those most realistic tasks which governments always set themselves in countries where a few men direct the destinies of peoples. Listening to Dostoevsky, one may imagine that he is discovering ideas which the government must take for its guidance and set itself to realise. But you will soon convince yourself that Dostoevsky did not discover one single original political idea. Everything of the kind that he possessed he had borrowed without examination from the Slavophiles, who in their turn appeared original only to the extent to which they were able without outside assistance to translate from the German and the French:Russland, Russland über alles.(Even the rhythm of the verse is not affected by the substitution of the one word.) But what is most important is, that the Slavophiles with their Russo-German glorification of nationality, and with them Dostoevsky who joined the chorus, have neither taught nor educated one single man among the ruling classes. Our government knew all that it needed to know by itself, without the Slavophiles and without Dostoevsky. From time immemorial it had gone its way by the road which the theorists so passionately praised: so that nothing was left to them but to eulogise those in power and to defend the policy of the Russian government against the public opinion which was hostile to it. Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality—all these were held so firmly in Russia that in the 'seventies when Dostoevsky began to preach they needed no support whatever. And surely every one knows that power never seriously reckons upon the help of literature. Certainly it requires that the Muses should pay tribute to it with the others, nobly formulating its demands in the words:Blessed be the union of the sword and the lyre.It used to happen that the Muses did not refuse the request, sometimes sincerely, sometimes because, as Heine said, it is particularly disagreeable to wear iron chains in Russia, on account of the heavy frosts. In any case the Muses were only allowed to sing the praises of the sword, but by no means to wield it. There are all kinds of unions. And here again Dostoevsky, for all his independent nature, still appeared in the rôle of a prophet of the Russian government: that is, he divined the secret devices of the powers that were, and in this connection then recalled all the 'high and beautiful' words which he had managed to hoard up in the course of his long wanderings. For instance, the government began to cast covetous glances towards the East (at that time the Near East still); Dostoevsky begins to argue that we must have Constantinople, and to prophesy that Constantinople will soon be ours. His 'argument' is, of course, of a purely 'moral character,' and, sure enough, he is a writer. Only from Constantinople, he says, can we make avail the purely Russian ideal of embracing all humanity. Of course our government, though indeed we had no Bismarcks, perfectly well understood the value of moral argument and of prophecy based upon them, and would have preferred a few well-equipped divisions and improved guns. To realist politicians one single soldier, armed not with a gun but with a blunderbuss, is of more importance than the sublimest conception of moral philosophy. But still they do not drive away the humble prophet, if the prophet knows his place. Dostoevsky accepted the rôle, since it gave him still the opportunity of displaying his refractory nature in the struggle with Liberal literature. He sang paeans, made protests, uttered absurdities—and worse than absurdities. For instance, he counselled all the Slav peoples to unite under the aegis of Russia, assuring them that only thus would full independence be guaranteed them, and the right of shaping themselves by their own culture, and so on—and that in the face of the millions of Polish Slavs living in Russia. Or again, theMoscow Gazettegives its opinion that it would be well for the Crimean Tartars to emigrate to Turkey, since it would then be possible for Russians to settle in the peninsula. Dostoevsky catches up this original idea with enthusiasm. 'Indeed,' he says, 'on political and state and similar considerations'—I do not know how it is with other people, but when I hear such words as 'state' and 'political' on Dostoevsky's lips, I cannot help smiling' it is necessary to expel the Tartars and to settle Russians on their lands.' When theMoscow Gazetteprojects such a measure, it is intelligible. But Dostoevsky! Dostoevsky who called himself a Christian, who so passionately preaches love to one's neighbour, self-abasement, self-renunciation, who taught that Russia must 'serve the nations'—how could he be taken with an idea so rapacious? And indeed almost all his political ideas have the mark of rapacity upon them: to grab and grab, and still to grab.... As the occasion demands, he now expresses the hope that we may have Germany's friendship, and again threatens her; now he argues that we have need of England, and again he asserts that we could do without her,—just like a leader-writer in abien-pensantprovincial paper. One thing alone makes itself felt among all these ludicrous and eternally contradictory assertions,—Dostoevsky understands nothing, absolutely nothing, about politics, and moreover, he has nothing at all to do with politics. He is forced to go in tow of others who, compared with him, are utter nonentities, and he goes. Even his ambition—and he had a colossal ambition, an ambition unique in its kind, as befitted a universal man—suffers not one whit: chiefly because men expected prophecy from him, because the next title to that of a great writer is that of a prophet, and because a ring of conviction and a loud voice are the signs of the prophetic gift. Dostoevsky could speak aloud: he could also speak with the tone of one who knows secrets, and of one with authority. One learns much in the underworld. All these things served him. Men took the poet-laureate of the existing order for the inspirer of thoughts and the governor of Russia's remotest destinies. It was enough for Dostoevsky. It was even necessary for Dostoevsky. He knew of course that he was no prophet; but he knew that there had never been one on earth, and that those who were prophets had no better right to the title than he.
I will permit myself to remind the reader of Tolstoi's letter to his son, lately published by the latter in the newspapers. It is very interesting. Once more, not from the standpoint of the practical man who has to decide the questions of the day—from this standpoint Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and their similars are quite useless—but man does not live by bread alone.
Even now in the terrible days through which we have to live, now, if you will, more than ever before, one cannot read newspapers alone, nor think only of the awful surprises which to-morrow prepares for us. To every one is left an hour of leisure between the reading of newspapers and party programmes, if it be not an hour in the day when the noise of events and the pressure of immediate work distracts, then an hour in the deep night, when everything that was possible has been already done, and everything that was required has been said. Then come flying in the old thoughts and questions, frightened away by business, and for the thousandth time one returns to the mystery of human genius and human greatness. Where and how far can genius know and accomplish more than ordinary men?
Then Tolstoi's letter, which during the day aroused only anger and indignation,—is it not outrageous and revolting, think some, that in the great collision of forces which contend with one another in Russia, Tolstoi cannot distinguish the right force from the wrong, but stigmatises all the struggling combatants by the one name of ungodly? During the day, I say, it is surely outrageous: in the daytime we would like Tolstoi to be with us and for us, because we are convinced that we and we alone are seeking the truth,—nay, that we know the truth, while our enemies are defending evil and falsehood, whether in malice or in ignorance. But this is during the day. In the night-time, things are changed. One remembers that Goethe also overlooked, simply did not notice, the great French Revolution. True, he was a German who lived far from Paris, while Tolstoi lives close to Moscow, where men, women, and children have been shot, cut down, and burnt alive. Moreover, there is no doubt that Tolstoi has overlooked not merely Moscow, but everything that went before Moscow. What is happening now does not seem to him important or extraordinary. For him only that is important to which he, Tolstoi, has set his hand: all that occurs outside and beside him, for him has no existence. This is the great prerogative of great men. And sometimes it seems to me—perhaps it is only that I would have it seem so—as though there were in that prerogative a deep and hidden meaning.
When we have no more strength in us to listen to the endless tales of horrible atrocities which have already been committed, and to anticipate in imagination all that the future holds in store for us, then we recall Tolstoi and his indifference. It is not in our human power to return the murdered fathers and mothers to the children nor the children to their fathers and mothers. Nor stands it even in our power to revenge ourselves upon the murderers, nor will vengeance reconcile every one to his loss. And we try no longer to think with logic, and to seek a justification of the horrors there where there is and can be none. What if we ask ourselves whether Tolstoi and Goethe did not sec the Revolution and did not suffer its pain, only because they saw something else, something, it may even be, more necessary and important? Maybe there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.
Now we may return to Dostoevsky and his 'ideas'; we may call them fearlessly by the names which they deserve, for though Dostoevsky is a writer of genius, this does not mean that we must forget our daily needs. The night and the day have each their rights. Dostoevsky wanted to be a prophet, he wanted people to listen to him and cry 'Hosanna!' because, I say again, he thought that if men had ever cried 'Hosanna!' to any one, then there was no reason why he, Dostoevsky, should be denied the honour. That is the reason why in the 'seventies he made his appearance in the new rôle of a preacher of Christianity, and not of Christianity merely, but of orthodoxy.
Again, I would draw attention to the far from accidental circumstances that his preaching coincided with the 'serenest' period of his life. He who had in time past been a homeless wanderer, a poor man who had not where to lay his head, had provided himself with a family and a house of his own, even with money (for his wife was saving). The failure had become a celebrity; the convict a full citizen. The underworld, where-into his fate had but lately driven him, it might seem for ever, now appeared to him a phantasmagoria which never had been real. In the galleys and the underworld had been born within him a great hunger for God which lived long; there he fought a great fight, the fight of life against death; there for the first time were made the new and awful experiments which allied Dostoevsky with everything that is rebellious and restless on earth. What Dostoevsky wrote during the closing years of his life (not merelyThe Journal of an Author,butThe Brothers Karamazovas well) has value only in so far as Dostoevsky'spastis reflected therein. He made no new step onwards. As he was, so he remained, on the eve of a great truth. But in the old days that did not suffice him, he hungered for something beyond; but now he does not want to struggle, and he cannot explain to himself or to others what is really happening within him. He pretends to be struggling still, nay, more, he behaves as though he had won the final victory, and demands that his triumph should be acknowledged by public opinion. He loves to think that the night is already past and the actual day begun: and the galleys and the underworld, reminding him that the day is not yet, are no more. All the evidences of a complete illusion of victory seem to be there—let him only choose the text and preach! Dostoevsky clutched at orthodoxy. Why not Christianity? Because Christianity is not for him who has a house, a family, money, fame, and a father-land. Christ said: 'Let him leave all that he hath and follow me.' But Dostoevsky was afraid of solitude, he desired to be the prophet of modern, settled men to whom pure Christianity, unadapted to the needs of civilised existence in a governed state, is unfitted. How should a Christian seize Constantinople, drive out the Tartars from the Crimea, reduce all Slavs to the condition of the Poles, and the rest—for all the projects of Dostoevsky and theMoscow Gazettedefy enumeration? So, before accepting the Gospel, he must explain it....
However strange it may appear, it must be confessed that one cannot find in the whole of literature a single man who is prepared to accept the Gospel as a whole, without interpretation. One man wants to seize Constantinople according to the Gospel, another to justify the existing order, a third to exalt himself or to thrust down his enemy; and each considers it as his right to diminish from, or even to supplement, the text of Holy Writ. I have, of course, only those in view who acknowledge, at least in word, the divine origin of the New Testament; since he who sees in the Gospel only one of the more or less remarkable books of his library, naturally has the right to subject it to whatever critical operations he may choose.
But here we have Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Soloviev. It is generally believed, and the belief is particularly supported and developed by the most recent criticism, that Tolstoi alone rationalised Christianity, while Dostoevsky and Soloviev accepted it in all the fullness of its mysticism, denying reason the right to separate truth from falsehood in the Gospel. I consider this belief mistaken: for Dostoevsky and Soloviev were afraid to accept the Gospel as the fountain of knowledge, and relied much more upon their own reason and their experience of life than upon the words of Christ. But, if there was a man among us who, though but in part, took the risk of accepting the mysterious and obviously dangerous words of the Gospel precepts, that man was Leo Tolstoi. I will explain myself.
We are told that Tolstoi made the attempt, in his works published abroad, to explain the miracles of the Gospel in a way intelligible to human reason. Dostoevsky and Soloviev, on the other hand, readily accepted the inexplicable. But generally the miracles of the Gospel attract the people who believe least, for it is impossible to repeat the miracles, and this being so, then it follows that a merely external faith is sufficient, a mere verbal assertion. A man says that he believes in miracles: 'his reputation as a religious man is made, both in his own mind and in others', and as for the rest of the Gospel, there remains 'interpretation.' Consider, for instance, the doctrine of non-resistance to evil. It need not be said that the doctrine of non-resistance is the most terrible, and the most irrational, and mysterious thing that we read in the Gospel. All our reasoning soul is indignant at the thought that full material freedom should be given to the murderer to accomplish his murderous acts. How can you allow a murderer to kill an innocent child before your very eyes, and yet not draw the sword? Who has the right to give that abominable precept? Soloviev[3]and Dostoevsky alike repeat that question, the one in a disguised, the other in an open attack on Tolstoi. Yet since the Gospel plainly declares 'Resist not evil,' both of our believers in miracles have suddenly remembered reason and turned to its testimony, knowing that reason will naturally destroy any meaning whatever that may be in the precept. In other words, they repeat the question of the doubting Jews concerning Christ: 'Who is He that speaketh as one having authority?' God commanded Abraham that he should offer up his son. By his reason, his human reason, Abraham refused to acknowledge any intelligible meaning in the cruel command, but yet made ready to act according to the word of God and made no attempt to rid himself of the hard and inhuman obligation by cunning interpretation. But Dostoevsky and Soloviev refuse to fulfil Christ's demands so soon as they find no justification in the human reason. Yet they say that they believe that Lazarus was raised from the dead and that the man who was sick of a palsy was cured, and all the other miracles which are related by the Apostles. Why then does their belief end just at the point where it begins to place obligations upon them? Why the sudden recourse to reason, when we know exactly that Dostoevsky came to the Gospels only to be rid of the power of reason? But that was in the days of the underworld. Now the 'serene' period of his life has begun. But Soloviev, evidently, had never even known the underworld. Only Tolstoi boldly and resolutely tries to test the truth of the Christian teaching, not in his thoughts alone, but in part in his life also. From the human point of view it is mad to make no resistance to evil. He knows that every whit as well as Dostoevsky, Soloviev and the rest of his many opponents. But he is really seeking in the Gospels that divine madness, since human reason does not satisfy him. Tolstoi began to follow the Gospel in that clouded period of his life when he was haunted by the phantoms of Ivan Ilyich and Pozdnyshiev. Here belief in miracles, belief in the abstract, divorced from life, avails nothing. For belief's sake one must surrender all that is dearest—even a son—to the sacrifice. Who is He that spake as one having authority? We cannot now verify whether He did in truth raise Lazarus from the dead, or satisfy thousands with a few handfuls of loaves. But if we unhesitatingly perform His precepts, then we may discover whether He has given us the truth.... So it was with Tolstoi; and he turned to the Gospel which is the sole and original source of Christianity. But Dostoevsky turned to the Slavophiles and the teachings of their state-religion. Orthodoxy infallible, not Catholicism nor Protestantism nor even simple Christianity; and then, the original idea:Russland, Russland über alles.Tolstoi could prophesy nothing in history, but then, as if deliberately, he does not interfere with the historical life. For him our present reality does not exist: he concentrates himself wholly upon the riddle which God set Abraham. But Dostoevsky desired at all costs to prophesy, prophesied constantly and was constantly mistaken. We have not taken Constantinople, we have not united the Slavs, and even the Tartars still live in the Crimea. He terrified us by prophesying that Europe would be drenched in rivers of blood because of the warfare between the classes, while in Russia, thanks to our Russian ideal of universal humanity, not only would our internal problems be peacefully solved, but a new unheard-of word would still be found whereby we should save hapless Europe. A quarter of a century has passed. So far nothing has happened in Europe. But we are drowning ourselves, literally drowning ourselves, with blood. Not only is our alien population oppressed, Slav and non-Slav alike, but our own brother is tortured, the miserable starving Russian peasant who understands nothing at all. In Moscow, in the heart of Russia, women, children, and old men have been shot down. Where now is the Russian universal soul of which Dostoevsky prophesied in his speech on Pushkin? Where is love, where are the Christian precepts? We see only 'Governmentalism,' over which the Western nations also fought; but they fought with means less cruel and less hostile to civilisation. Russia will again have to learn from the West as she had to learn more than once before. And Dostoevsky would have done far better had he never attempted to prophesy.
But there is no great harm done even if he did prophesy. I am glad with all my heart even now that he rested a little while from the galleys at the end of his life. I am deeply convinced that even had he remained in the underworld until the day of his death, yet he would have found no solution of the questions which tormented him. However much energy of soul a man puts into his work, he will still remain 'on the eve' of truth, and will not find the solution he desires. That is the law of human kind. And Dostoevsky's preaching has done no harm. Those listened to him who, even without his voice, would have marched on Constantinople, oppressed the Poles, and made ready the sufferings which are necessary to the soul of the peasant. Though Dostoevsky gave them his sanction, on the whole he adds nothing to them. They had no need of literary sanction, quite correctly judging that in practical matters not the printed page, but bayonets and artillery are of deciding value.
All that he had to tell, Dostoevsky told us in his novels, which even now, twenty-five years after his death, attract all those who would wrest from life her secrets. And the title of prophet, which he sought so diligently, considering that it was his by right, did not suit him at all. Prophets are Bismarcks, but they are Chancellors too. The first in the village is the first in Rome.... Is a Dostoevsky doomed eternally to be 'on the eve'? Let us once more try to reject logic, this time perhaps not logic alone, and say: 'So let it be.'