Whatever ax, and whomsoever with, people of this sort want to grind, the real point is that religions humanism is indeed a legacy. But it is a legacy not so much of the nineteenth cenhiry in particular as of the general spirit of consolation, of justifying the existential order on the highest, preferably ecclesiastical, plane, pertinent to the Russian sensibility and to the Russian cultural endeavor as such. To say the least, no writer in Russian history is exempt from this attitude, ascribing to Divine Providence the most dismal occurrences and making them automatically subject to human forgiveness. The trouble with this otherwise appealing attitude is that it's fully shared by the secret police as well, and could be cited by its employees on Judgment Day as a sound excuse for their practices.
Practical aspects aside, one thing is clear: this sort of ecclesiastical relativism (which is what the grounded flight of religious humanism boils down to on paper) naturally results in a heightened attention to detail, elsewhere called realism. Guided by this world view, a writer and a policeman rival each other in precision, and, depending on who is gaining the upper hand in a society, supply this realism with its eventual epithet. Which goes to show that the transition of Russian fiction from Dostoevsky to its present state hasn't occurred overnight, and that it wasn't exactly a transition either, because, even for his owri time, Dostoevsky was an isolated, autonomous phenomenon. The sad truth about the whole matter is that Russian prose has been in a metaphysical slump for quite some time, ever since it produced Tolstoy, who took the idea of art reflecting reality a bit too literally and in whose shadow the subordinate clauses of Russian prose are writhing indolently till this day.
This may sound like a gross simplification, for indeed, by itself, Tolstoy's mimetic avalanche would be of a limited stylistic significance were it not for its timing: it hit the Russian readership almost simultaneously with Dostoevsky. Surely for an average Western reader, this sort of distinction between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is of limited or exotic consequence, if any. Reading both of them in translation, he regards them as one great Russian writer, and the fact that they both were translated by the same hand, Constance Garnett's, is of no help. (Even today, it must be noted, the same translator can be assigned to do Notes from the Home of the Dead and The Death of Ivan Ilyich—pre- sumably because the Dead and Death are perceived as enough of a common denominator.) Hence, the pundits' speculation about the traditional values of Russian literature; hence, too, the popular belief in the coherent unity of Russian prose in the nineteenth century and the subsequent expectations of its similar show in the twentieth century. All that is quite far from reality; and, frankly, the proximity of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in time was the unhappiest coincidence in the history of Russian literature. The consequences of it were such that perhaps the only way Providence can defend itself against charges of playing tricks with the spiritual makeup of a great nation is by saying that this way it prevented the Russians from getting too close to its secrets. Because who knows better than Providence that whoever follows a great writer is bound to pick things up precisely where the great man left them. And Dostoevsky went perhaps too high for Providence's liking. So it sends in a Tolstoy as if to ensure that Dostoevsky in Russia gets no continuum.
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It worked; there was none. Save for Lev Shestov, a literary critic and philosopher, Russian prose went with Tolstoy, only too glad to spare itself climbing the heights of Dostoevsky's spiritual pitch. It went down the winding, well-trodden path of mimetic writing, and at several removes—via Chekhov, Korolenko, Kuprin, Bunin, Gorky, Leonid Andreev, Gladkov—has reached the pits of socialist realism. The Tolstoy mountain cast a long shadow, to emerge from which one had to either outdo Tolstoy in precision or offer a qualitatively new linguistic content. Even those who took the second route and fought that engulfing shadow of descriptive fiction most valiantly—authors like Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Babel, and a few others—were paralyzed by it into a telegraph-style tongue-twitching that, for a while, would pass for an avant-garde art. Still, however generously these men were endowed with talent, spiritually they were but products of the aforementioned ecclesiastical relativism; the pressures of the new social order easily reduced them to outright cynicism, and their works to tantalizing hors d'oeuvres on the empty table of a lean nation.
The reason Russian prose went with Tolstoy lies of course in his stylistic idiom, with its open invitation to imitate it. Hence, an impression that one can beat him; hence, too, a promise of security, since even by losing to him one winds up with a substantial—recognizable!—product. Nothing of the sort emanated from Dostoevsky. Quite apart from the nonexistent chances of beating him in the game, the pure aping of his style was out of the question. In a sense, Tolstoy was inevitable because Dostoevsky was unique. Neither his spiritual quest nor his "means of transportation" offered any possibility of repetition. The latter especially, with its plots evolving according to the immanent logic of scandal, with its feverishly accelerating sentences conglomerating in their rapid progress, bureaucrat- ese, ecclesiastical terminology, lumpen argot, French uto- pists' mumbo-jumbo, the classical cadences of gentry prose —anything! all the layers of contemporary diction—the latter especially constituted an unthinkable act to follow.
In many ways, he was our first writer to tmst the intuition of language more than his o^—and more than intimations of his system of belief or those of his personal philosophy. And language repaid him a hundredfold. Its subordinate clauses often carried him much farther than his original intentions or insights would have allowed him to travel. In other words, he treated the language not so much as a novelist but as a poet—or as a biblical prophet demanding from his audience not imitation but conversion. A born metaphysician, he instinctively realized that for probing infinity, whether an ecclesiastical one or that of the human psyche, there was no tool more far-reaching than his highly inflected mother tongue, with its convoluted syntax. His art was anything but mimetic: it wasn't imitating reality; it was creating, or better still, reaching for one. In this vector of his he was effectively straying from Orthodoxy (or for that matter from any creed). He simply felt that art is not about life, if only because life is not about life. For Dostoevsky, art, like life, is about what man exists for. Like biblical parables, his novels are vehicles to obtain the answer and not goals unto themselves.
There are, roughly, two kinds of men and, correspondingly, two kinds of writers. The first kind, undoubtedly a majority, regards life as the one and only available reality. Turned writer, such a person will reproduce this reality in its minutest detail; he'll give you a conversation in the bedroom, a battlefield scene, the texture of upholstery, scents and tangs, with a precision rivaling your senses and the lenses of your camera; rivaling perhaps reality itself. Closing his book is like the end of a movie: the lights go up and you walk out into the street admiring Technicolor and the performance of this or that star whom you may even try to imitate subsequently in accent or deportment. The second kind, a minority, perceives his, and anyone else's, life as a test tube for certain human qualities, the retention of which under extreme duress is crucial for either an ecclesiastical or an anthropological version of the species' arrival. As a writer, such a man won't give you much in the way of detail; instead, he'll describe his characters' states and twists of psyche with such thoroughness that you feel grateful for not having met him in person. Closing his book is like waking up with a changed face.