Turgenieff's appeal to Tolstoy is become historic, and all the more pathetic because written on the eve of his death.
Dear and beloved Leo Nikolaievitch: I have not written to you for a long time, for I lie on my deathbed. I cannot get well; that is not to be thought of. But I write in order to tell you how glad I am to have been your contemporary, and to make my last earnest request. My friend, return to literary work. This talent of yours has come from where all else comes. Oh, how happy I should be could I believe that my entreaty would prevail with you. My friend, our great national writer, grant my request.
This may be found, if we remember aright, in the Halperine-Kaminsky memoir.
Turgenieff, who was the greater artist of the pair, knew that Tolstoy was on the wrong path with his crack-brained religious and social notions; knew that in his becoming the writer of illogical tracts and pamphlets, Russia was losing a great artist. What would he have said if he had lived to read the sad recantation and artistic suicide of Tolstoy: "I consign my own artistic productions to the category of bad art, except the story, God Sees the Truth, which seeks a place in the first class, and The Prisoner of the Caucasus, which belongs to the second." Also sprach Tolstoy in that madman's book called What is Art? a work wherein he tried to outvie Nordau's abuse of beautiful art.
The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, Hamlet, Macbeth, Dante, and Goethe, are all consigned to the limbo of bad art; bad because not "understanded of the people." The peasant, the moujik, is to be the criterion of art, an art which, in that case, ought to be a cross between fireworks and the sign-writing of the Aztecs. Vogüé declared that Tolstoy had, like an intrepid explorer, leaped into an abysm of philosophical contradictions. Even the moderate French critic Faguet becomes enraged at the puerilities of the Russian. He wrote: "Tolstoy, comme créateur, comme romancier, comme poète épique, pour mieux dire, est un des quatre ou cinq plus grands génies de notre siècle. Comme penseur, il est un des plus faibles esprits de l'Europe."
Not all that, replies Remy de Gourmont; Tolstoy may be wildly mistaken, but he is never weak-minded. We think it is his strength, his intensity that sends him caracoling on a dozen different roads in search of salvation.