one, and we look up to their teachings to help us in our national needs and in the inner battles of every individual conscience. In the life-time of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky both of them had been approached by more men and women in Russia with the question: "How ought I to live?" than any priest had ever been asked the question by his flock: "What must I do to save my soul?"
Now the prophets are dead, but the prophetic value of their work still remains. The mystic genius of Dostoyevsky is even more closely linked with the national problems than that of Tolstoy. He has taken up the revelations of national character from some of the earlier Russian writers and has carried them on to deeper truths and to vaster issues.
Two writers must be taken into consideration if we want to get at the roots of the problems evolved by Dostoyevsky—Pushkin and Gogol. The poet Pushkin died in 1837, slain in a duel. He is the head of modern Russian literature and has created our literary language and style, both in poetry and in prose. His greatest achievement was to have raised Russian literature to the level of universal art, and, on the other hand, to have gone deep into the source of Russian genius, to have discovered the creative power of the Russian peasantry. He found in the Russian folklore, in the fairy tales, the songs, the habits of the peasants, an inexhaustible source for his art.
Dostoyevsky did not only admire these qualities of Pushkin; he saw in them the revelation of the national ideal—a revelation and a prophecy. The prophetic spirit hovers over all Russian literature, or, at least, is perceptible in it to the Russian mind. In 1881, a few months before his death, Dostoyevsky delivered a speech on Pushkin, in connection with a celebration of the poet's memory. The speech is famous and is generally considered one of the deepest manifestations of Dostoyevsky's genius. It is an extraordinarily lucid and inspired expression of what Dostoyevsky calls the national ideal of Russia and of his own intimate relation to it. Speaking of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky points to the universality, to what he calls the "all-humanity" of the great poet, meaning Pushkin's wonderful gift of assimilation with the genius and the emotions of other nations. Dostoyevsky considers this quality of Pushkin as deeply characteristic of the Russian mind.
Pushkin was the masterful singer of Don Juan, of the glowing Spanish south and the distinctly catholic tragedy of passion in revolt against the rule of the Church. He found inspired melodies to express the ecstasy of a mediaeval knight who fights in the name of the Madonna and remains true to his vow of chastity and poverty. This stands in the eyes of Dostoyevsky for the all-embracing humanitarian spirit of Russia. And the other side of Pushkin's art appealed to Dostoyevsky even more than his "all-humanity." Dostoyevsky inherited Pushkin's deep faith in the "Russian truth" of our peasants and developed it into a prophetic vision of the "Russian Christ" of a new Christianity based on the redeeming power of endurance and self-sac-
