The Russian thought which shall renew humanity finds its ultimate and perfect expression in Dostoievsky. In spite of incoherence and an amazing formlessness, talk and description so unending that it takes us longer to read them than it actually took the characters to live through the events described ... in spite of a million petty artistic mistakes we are yet carried off our feet by him; there have, we feel, been greater artists but very few greater men. "It is not before you I am kneeling," says Raskolnikov to Sonia, "but before all the suffering of mankind," and this might be taken as the text of all his work.

"His friends were exaltations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

IX
TOLSTOY (1828-1910)

Tolstoy was born in the estate of Yàsnaya Polyàna: after the death of his father in Moscow, where they went when he was nine, the novelist returned to his home and graduated at the University of Petrograd in 1848, and shortly afterwards entered the army, and was stationed in the Caucasus, where he began his literary career. He took part in the Crimean War and afterwards settled in Petrograd, where he grew more and more dissatisfied with existing conditions. In 1862 he married and returned once more to Yàsnaya Polyàna. Here he devoted himself to the education of the peasants and edited an educational paper: soon afterwards he assumed a negative attitude to all progress and wrote many novels. Later he urged men to occupy themselves in manual labour, and in the year of his death left his home to put his theories more completely into practice, but died at a wayside railway station. Everything that Tolstoy wrote is autobiographical, so it is unnecessary to dwell further on the bare facts of his life. Like all Russians, he acts upon impulse; unlike Oblòmov, he is first of all the man of action: he asks himself with unwearying persistence, "What is the purpose of my life?" and his answer is: "The purpose of my life is to understand, and as far as possible to do, the will of that Power which has sent me here, and which actuates my reason and conscience." He seeks goodness rather by the head than the heart; he begins with the understanding. As a novelist he keeps closer to actual life than the others, because he has lived his incidents before he writes about them. He is first and foremost a seeker after God: he abjures literature and art through pride, and thinks that truth is to be found only in working like a peasant: he was unable himself to do this because his wife refused to allow him to. "For ourselves we may do what we like, but for the sake of our children we may not," was her contention.

No man ever more truly exemplified the meaning of Bacon's aphorism that "he that is married hath given hostages to fortune."

He had the pride of Lucifer or Lèrmontov's Demon, and yet he spent his life searching for the ideal humility of Dostoievsky's Myshkin, the pure fool, the divine idiot.

He starts by advocating non-resistance to evil, and ends by passionately resisting it.

From the beginning we find in him a supreme love of himself, a man interested only in Russia, an amazing lack of sympathy with culture, an astonishing want of taste (a lover of Dumas in his youth, he later on pins his faith to George Eliot and Uncle Tom's Cabin). He was quite ignorant of life owing to his wealth.