Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Study

Excerpt from Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Study

Russia was preparing to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Fyodor Dostoyevsky on October 30, 1921. Our writers and poets hoped to do honour in prose and verse to the great Russian novelist; the Slav peoples had arranged to send deputations to Petrograd, to pay their homage in Czech, Serbian and Bulgarian to the great Slavophil, who was ever faithful to the idea of our future Slav confederation. The Dostoyevsky family, in its turn, proposed to mark the occasion by publishing the documents preserved in the Historical Museum of Moscow. My mother was to have given the world her memories of her illustrious husband, and I was to have written a new biography of my father, and to have recorded my childish impressions of him.

It is unlikely that any such festival will take place. A terrible storm has passed over Russia, destroying the whole fabric of our European civilisation. The Revolution, long ago predicted by Dostoyevsky, burst upon us after a disastrous war. The gulf which for two centuries had been widening between our peasants and our intellectuals, became an abyss. Our intellectuals, intoxicated by European Utopias, were advancing towards the West, while our people, faithful to the tradition of their ancestors, had set their faces to the East. The Russian Nihilists and Anarchists desired to introduce European atheism into our country, whereas our deeply religious peasantry remained faithful to Christ.

The result of this conflict is now before us.

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