#merezhkovski

Lev Tolstoy is the antipode, the complete opposite and negation of Pushkin in Russian literature. And, as often happens, opposites deceive the superficial observers by their external resemblances. Both in Pushkin and in our Lev Tolstoy there is oneness, equilibrium, peace. But Pushkin's oneness is based on the harmonious union of two worlds; the oneness of Tolstoy is based on the complete disunion, disruption, and violence, committed against one of the two equally great, equally divine elements. Pushkin's calm and tranquillity witness to a fullness of life; Lev Tolstoy's calm and tranquillity witness to a petrified immobility, to a deadening of the whole world. In Pushkin the thinker and artist are welded into one being; in Lev Tolstoy the thinker despises the artist, and the artist does not care for the thinker. Pushkin's chastity presupposes passion subject to the feeling of divine moderation; Lev Tolstoy's chastity flows from a desperate ascetic negation of love for a woman. Pushkin's hope, like Peter the Great's, was Russia's participation in the universal life of the spirit, in universal civilisation; but for that participation neither Pushkin nor Peter denied the native element, the peculiarities of the Russian spirit. Lev Tolstoy, an anarchist without violence, preaches the amalgamation of the warring nations into a universal brotherhood; but for that brotherhood he renounces love of country, — that jealous tenderness that filled the hearts of Pushkin and Peter; and with unsparing haughtiness despises those peculiar, for him too impassioned, pagan features of the separate nations, which he would like to weld like the living colours of the rainbow into one white, dead colour — into a cosmopolitan abstraction.

We have become accustomed to all monstrosity and dissonance, or else we certainly should have felt the barbarity and unseemliness of the artist who, in killing himself and blasphemously treading on God's gift within himself, publicly recants the best of his productions as a crime: "What is it you admire in Anna Karenina?" says he to the people: "do you not know it is a debauch, a pagan nastiness of my soul?" The weakness of the great artist lies in his unconsciousness, because he is a pagan not of the bright, heroic type, but of the dark, elementary, barbarous type, the son of ancient Chaos, a blind Titan. The small meek one came and placed a cunning trap for the great one, — the terror of death, the terror of pain, — and the blind Titan was caught; the meek one enmeshed him with the finest nets of moral sophisms and Galilean wretchedness, and he overcame and vanquished him. A few more agonising convulsions, desperate struggles and outbursts, — and everything was for ever silenced and dead, — there began the tranquillity of The Kingdom of God. Only rarely, amidst monkish hymns and prayers, among icy, Puritanic discourses about the use of tobacco, about the brotherhood of the nations, about corporal punishment and chastity, are heard in the depth of depths a subterranean din and hollow thunderclaps: it is the voice of the blind Titan, of indomitable Chaos, — of the pagan love of physical life and pleasures, of the pagan terror of physical pain and death.