Lyubov Dostoevskaya is best known for the book Dostoyevsky as Portrayed by His Daughter, originally published in Munich in 1920. The quotes below are from the 1922 translation and publication by Yale University Press. The title of the book is ‘Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Study‘ and the author is Aimee Dostoyevsky, which was the literary name of Lyubov.
“The spiritual and moral isolation in which my father lived all his life was no unique phenomenon in our country. Nearly all our great writers have been of foreign descent, and have felt ill at ease in Russia. Pushkin was of African origin, the poet Lermontov was the descendant of a Scotch bard, Lermont, who came to Russia for some reason unknown to me; the poet Yukovsky was the son of a Turk, Nekrassov’s mother was a Pole; Dostoyevsky was a Lithuanian, Alexis Tolstoy an Ukrainian, Leo Tolstoy of German blood. Only Turgenev and Gontsharov [Ivan Goncharov] were true Russians.
It is probable that young Russia is still incapable of producing great talents unaided. She can kindle them with the spark of her genius, but the pyre must be prepared by older or more highly civilised peoples. All these semi-Russians were never at home in Russia. Their lives were a series of struggles against the Mongolian society which surrounded and suffocated them.
“The devil caused me to be born in Russia! ” cried Pushkin.
“It is a dirty country of slaves and tyrants,” said the Scottish Lermontov.
“I am thinking of expatriating myself, of escaping from the ocean of odious baseness, of depraved indolence which threatens on all sides to engulf the little island of honest and laborious life I have created,” wrote the German colonist Leo Tolstoy.
In fact, the more prudent of the great Russian writers left the country: the poet Yukovsky preferred to live in Germany; Alexis Tolstoy was attracted by the artistic treasures of Italy.
Those who remained waged war on Russian ignorance and brutality and died young, vanquished by them, like Pushkin and Lermontov, who were killed in duels. Nekrassov lived among the Russians and died a most unhappy man; Dostoyevsky himself records this in his obituary notice of Nekrassov. Tolstoy isolated himself as much as he could in his Yasnaia Poliana, but it is difficult to isolate oneself in Russia. His disciples, stupid Mongols, ended by taking advantage of the old man’s enfeebled will and estranging him from his wife, the one person who really loved and understood him; they dragged him from his home to die by the wayside, . . . Poor great men, sacrificed by God for the civilisation of our country! All these writers of foreign origin shared my father’s ideas about Russia. They loathed our so-called cultivated society, and were only at their ease among the people. Their best types are drawn from the peasants, who in their eyes represented the future of our country. Dostoyevsky acts as interpreter to all these great men when he says to the Russian intellectuals: “You think yourselves true Europeans, and at bottom you have no culture. The people, whom you propose to civilise by means of your European Utopias, is much more civilised than you, through Christ, before whom it kneels and Who has saved it from despair.”
The Lithuanians, the Ukrainians, the Georgians and the natives of the Baltic Provinces have always hated and despised the Mongolian blood of the Russians, and have done all they could to turn us away from Asia. More highly civilised than the Russians, they have had an immense influence on my compatriots, and have constituted the chief barrier to our fusion with the Asiatics. When there are no longer any Slavo-Norman and Georgian deputies in the Duma, the Russian deputies will agree better, and their Mongolian blood will draw them to the East.”
