Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/318

284 Tolstoy was a spoiled child of Fortune; in addition to his genius he had all the advantages of a high social standing and a happy, independent life. But in accordance with his deep national aspirations he longed for sacrifice, for his personal share of universal suffering. He did everything to get it; he was ready to give up his advantages, but all the anguish he could secure for himself was that of not having been able to sacrifice enough. This has become his intense tragedy which hastened his death. He suffered to see his followers persecuted for his own ideas whilst he himself seemed exempt from all responsibility, and in an impressive article, speaking of the frequent executions of political offenders in Russia, he exclaimed, "Oh, for a rope, a well-soaped rope, to have it put round my own neck to make me share the fate of those who suffer and are put to death in my country!"

All that was so ardently desired by Tolstoy in his longing for self-sacrifice was freely given to Dostoyevsky by fate. Tolstoy wanted to suffer, Dostoyevsky did suffer. Even the "well-soaped rope"—the supreme wish of Tolstoy—was not spared to the prophet of the "Russian Christ," who had been brought up for execution (not exactly to be hanged, but to be shot) to the Semenovsky Square in St. Petersburg. The Western mind might feel more keenly the opposition—the contrast in the lives of the two great writers, but Russians are more aware of what unites them in the essence of their different fates. The inner law of Russia is endurance, her moral impulses are rooted in the spirit of sacrifice, and Dostoyevsky, who had suffered in body and mind, as well as Tolstoy who felt the agonizing desire to suffer, represent to us the same national truth.

Dostoyevsky, Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, to call him by his full Russian name, was born in Moscow, in 1821, as the son of a hospital doctor. He received his primary and secondary education in his native town and came to the Engineering School in St. Petersburg when he was eighteen. He did not acquire much scientific knowledge at the school. The training there was too formalistic to be thorough, and he loathed the militaristic system of the place. Yet an important side of Dostoyevsky's genius is connected with his education at this particular school. In order to enter it he came to St. Petersburg and lived there all his life with the exception of the time of his exile and the years he spent abroad. This means that he left as a boy the more rationalistic and business-like atmosphere of Moscow, and that his self-consciousness developed in the intensely nervous and imaginative surroundings of Peter the Great's city. Dostoyevsky was attracted by all that is strange and exclusive in the town created out of a Finnish swamp by the imperative will of a genius. He found the reflection of his own soul in the atmosphere of the town, then called St. Petersburg, with its white nights and cruel frosts and the severe beauty of its magnificent river. All the heroes of Dostoyevsky seem to come out of the November fogs that envelop St. Petersburg described by Dostoyevsky as "the most abstract and most artificial town, a town