28. “The World View of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy”

By R. Saitschik Neuwied 1893, August Schupp

I recently reported in this journal on Saitschik's pamphlet "Zur Psychologie der Gegenwart". I described the author as a man who has a keen sense of observation for the socio-psychological forces that dominate our present day. In this book, which I have just read, I also get to know a subtle observer of the individual soul. Two personalities, who in their dispositions and in their creations present themselves as perfect opposites, are characterized in a way that teaches us that in an age that is unable to produce any guiding work on psychology, there are nevertheless genuine psychologists. Only such a person can say about Dostoyevsky: "Dostoyevsky is the true Christian barbarian. He hates the Hellenic view of life with its harmonious superficiality at the bottom of his heart; to him it is a point of view that has long been overcome, a childish behavior, an unconscious game of youth." "Dostoyevsky does not love the surface of the human mind, on which the light of thought shimmers in dazzling colors; he descends into the depths, where no ray of bright sunlight penetrates, there he forms his views on nature and life, there he believes he has found the center of his world of thought, from there he comes to proclaim to man that he is born to suffer." Saitschick aptly demonstrates that Dostoyevsky's talent is not rooted in the laws of logic, but in the demonic regions of emotion, that the light of his descriptions bursts forth from a dark chaos of the soul. "Knowledge is the product of thought, that is, the embodied shadow of the absolute; Dostoyevsky is not content with the shadow, he wants the whole truth wrapped in flesh and blood." The nature of the mysticism that Dostoyevsky formed from this nature of his is and had to be developed in Saitschick's writing, which is as profound as it is convincing. No less is Dostoyevsky's political fantasy made comprehensible to us.

The true art of scientific observation does not lie in the formulation of general propositions, nor in the mindless collection of individual observational facts. It lies in the ability to immerse oneself in the individual with the help of the ideas that a deeper education provides, and thus to find the general, the spirit, in the individual. How to grasp the individual without losing oneself in everyday trivialities can be learned from Saitschick's explanations. He succeeds in exploiting Tolstoy's personal idiosyncrasies just as well as Dostoyevsky's. Saitschick never leaves the standpoint of the big perspective, but what he sees are not fogless, unclear entities, but living natural beings. He says of Tolstoy: "He sees deep into the heart of our sick society, he knows its every feverish pulse. Tolstoy is not a cold social physiologist like Balzac and Flaubert, a deeply living man speaks from Tolstoy's works, who does not shrink from the truth, who knows how to castigate, but also how to love sincerely." "Tolstoy's mysticism is not as tempestuous as Dostoyevsky's. Tolstoy's mysticism is a plastic mysticism. Dostoyevsky's mysticism is a heavy dream of Platonic ideas; beyond time and space, a beautiful, blissful dream is Tolstoy's view of the world. Dostoyevsky loves suffering so much that he suffers even in his sleep, whereas Tolstoy has suffered enough during the day and now wants to rest. The world he builds is a calm one; holy seriousness reigns in it, and deep love for humanity is the mystical foundation on which Tolstoy raises his worldview." Tolstoy's entire characterization is expressed in equally succinct sentences, which always get to the heart of the matter, and which absolutely justify the assertion that in Saitschick we see one of the best essayists developing.