Tolstoi As Man and Artist; with an Essay on Dostoïevski

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIV If in the literature of all ages and nations we wished to find the artist most contrary to Tolstoi we should have to point to Dostoievski. I say contrary, but not remote, not alien; for often they come in contact, like extremes that meet. The "heroes" of Tolstoi, as we have seen, are not so much heroes as victims. In them the human individuality, without being perfected to the full, is swallowed up in the elements. And as there is not a single heroic will ruling over all, so there is not one uniting tragic action: there are only separate tragic nodi and situations--the separate waves which rise and fall in purposeless motion, not guided by a current within, but only by external forces. The fabric of the work, like the fabric of humanity itself, apparently begins nowhere and ends nowhere. With Dostoievski there is throughout a human personality carried to the extremes of individuality, drawing and developing from the dark animal roots to the last radiant summits of spirituality. Throughout there is the conflict of heroic will with the element of moral duty and conscience, as in Raskolnikov; with that of passion, refined, deliberate, as in Svidrigailov and Versilov; in conflict with the will of the people, the State, the polity, as in Peter Verkhovenski, Stavrogine, and Shatov; and lastly in conflict with metaphysical and religious mystery, as in Ivan Karamazov,1 Prince Myshkine, and Kirillov. Passing through the furnace of these conflicts, the fire of enflaming passions and still more enflaming will, the kernel of human individuality, the inward ego, remains undissolved and is laid bare. "I am bound to display self-will," says Kirillov in the Damons, to whom suicide, which seems the limit of self-abnegation, is in fact the...