Tourgeniev, on the other hand, is full to the brim of the power of admiration and appreciation which Tolstoy lacks; but then he also lacks Tolstoy’s strength and power. Dostoievsky has a power different from Tolstoy’s, but equal in scale, and titanic. He has a power of admiration, an appreciation wider and deeper than Tourgeniev’s, and the humility of a man who has descended into hell, who has been face to face with the sufferings and the agonies of humanity and the vilest aspects of human nature; who, far from losing his faith in the divine, has detected it in every human being, however vile, and in every circumstance, however hideous; and who in dust and ashes has felt himself face to face with God. Yet, in spite of all this, Dostoievsky is far from being the complete expression of the Russian genius, or a complete man. His limitations are as great as Tolstoy’s; and no one was ever more conscious of them than himself. They do not concern us here. What does concern us is that in modern Russian literature, in the literature of this century, leaving the poets out of the question, the two great figures, the two great columns which support the temple of Russian literature, are Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. Tourgeniev’s place is inside that temple; there he has a shrine and an altar which are his own, which no one can dispute with him, and which are bathed in serene radiance and visited by shy visions and voices of haunting loveliness. But neither as a writer nor as a man can he be called the great representative of even half the Russian genius; for he complements the genius of neither Tolstoy nor Dostoievsky. He possesses in a minor degree qualities which they both possessed; and the qualities which are his and his only, exquisite as they are, are not of the kind which belong to the greatest representatives of a nation or of a race.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Life of Tolstoy, p. 38.
[8] Matthew Arnold is a notable exception.
[9] Tolstoy as Man and Artist, pp. 93, 95. This passage is translated from the Russian edition.
[10] It should be said that this portrait is so unfair, and yet contains elements of truth so acutely observed, that for some people it spoils the whole book.
[11] With the exception of Marianna, one of his most beautiful and noble characters.
[12] Life, p. 189.
[13] Life, p. 312.
[14] The popular edition of Paradise Lost in Russian prose, with rough coloured pictures, is published by the Tipografia, T. D. Sitin, Piatnitzkaia Oolitza, Moscow.