# Russian Novelists (1887)/6

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."
This long delayed confession was quite unnecessary; the man's entire work published it, although the dreadful word is not once expressed by him. Critics have called Turgenef the father of Nihilism because he had given a name to the malady, and described a few cases of it. One might as well affirm the cholera to have been introduced by the first physician who gave the diagnosis of it, instead of by the first person attacked by the scourge. Turgenef discovered the evil, and studied it objectively; Tolstoi suffered from it from the first day of its appearance, without having, at first, a very clear consciousness of his condition; his tortured soul cries out on every page he has written, to express the agony which weighs down so many other souls of his own race. If the most interesting books are those which faithfully picture the existence of a fraction of humanity at a given moment of history, this age has produced nothing more remarkable, in regard to its literary quality, than his work. I do not hesitate in giving my opinion that this writer, when considered merely as a novelist, is one of ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/216 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/217 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/218 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/219 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/220 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/221 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/222 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/223 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/224 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/225 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/226 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/227 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/228 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/229 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/230 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/231 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/232 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/233 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/234 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/235 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/236 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/237 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/238 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/239 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/240 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/241 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/242 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/243 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/244 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/245 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/246 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/247 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/248 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/249 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/250 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/251 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/252 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/253 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/254 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/255 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/256 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/257 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/258 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/259 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/260 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/261 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/262 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/263 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/264 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/265 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/266 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/267 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/268 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/269 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/270 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/271 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/272 ​Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/273