Dostoyevsky on TolstoyIn one of his novels Dostoyvsky – the city dweller without sank or title and the genius with an incurably pincered soul – this voluptuous poet of cruelty and commiseration, counterposes himself orofoundly and pointedly, as the artist, the new and “accidental Russian families,” to Count Tolstoy, the singer of the perfected forms of the landlord past.
“If I were a Russian novelist and a talented one,” says Dostoyevsky, speaking through the lips of one of his characters, “I would unfailingly take my heroes from the well-born Russian nobility, because this is the only type of Russian capable of at least a semblance of beautiful order and beautiful sensations ... Saying this, I am not at all joking, although I am not at all a noble myself, which besides, you yourself know ... Believe me, it is here that we have everything truly beautiful among us up till now. At any rate, here is everything among us that is in the least perfected. I do not say it because I unreservedly agree with either the correctness or the truth of this beauty; but here, for example, we have already perfected terms of honor and duty which apart from the nobility are not to be found anywhere in Russia let alone perfected but even started ... The position of our novelist,” continues Dostoyevsky without naming Tolstoy but unquestionably having him in mind, “in such a case would be quite definitive. He would not be able to write in any other way except historically, for the beautiful type no longer exists in our own day, and if there are remnants abroad, then according to the prevailing consensus of opinion, they hae not retained any beauties for themselves.”
When the “beautiful type” disappeared, there came tumbling down not only the immediate object of artistic creativeness but also the foundations of Tolstoyan moral fatalism and his esthetic pantheism. The sanctified Karatayevism of the Tolstoyan soul was perishing. Everything that had been previously taken for granted as part of an unchallenged whole now became chipped into a sliver and by this token into a problem What was rational had become the irrational. And, as always happens, precisely at the moment when being had lost its old meaning, Tolstoy started asking himself about the meaning of being in general. In the life not of a youth but of a man 50 years of age there ensued a great spiritual crisis (toward the latter part of the Seventies). Tolstoy returns to God, accepts the teachings of Christ, rejects division of labor and along with it, culture and the state; he becomes the preacher of agricultural labor, of the simple life and of non-resistance to evil by force.
- excerpt taken from ''Leon Trotsky:
Tolstoy, Poet and Rebel
(September 1908)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1908/09/tolstoy.htm
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