v element predominate, and you get Griboyedov's
Molchalin; let the Mwyshkin element predominate, with a dose of
Hlestyakov, and you get Father Gapon; let it predominate without the
dose of Hlestyakov, and you get Oblomov; mix it with a dose of Peter
the Great, you get Herzen, Chatsky; and so on. Mix all the elements
equally, and you get Onegin, the average man. I do not mean that there
are necessarily all these elements in every Russian, but that you will
meet with no Russian in whom there is not to be found either one or
more than one of them.

Now, in Tolstoy, the Peter the Great element dominates, with a dose of
Mwyshkin, and a vast but unsuccessful aspiration towards the complete
characteristics of Mwyshkin; while in Dostoyevsky the Mwyshkin
predominates, blent with a fiery streak of Peter the Great; but in
neither of them is there a touch of Hlestyakov. In Russia, it
constantly happens that a man in any class, be he a soldier, sailor,
tinker, tailor, rich man, poor man, plough-boy, or thief, will
suddenly leave his profession and avocation and set out on the search
for God and for truth. These men are called _Bogoiskateli_, Seekers
after God. The one fact that the whole world knows about Tolstoy is
that, in the midst of his great and glorious artistic career, he
suddenly abjured literature and art, denounced worldly possessions,
and said that truth was to be found in working like a peasant, and
thus created a sect of Tolstoyists. The world then blamed him for
inconsistency because he went on writing, and lived as before, with
his family and in his own home. But in reality there was no
inconsistency, because there was in reality no break. Tolstoy had been
a _Bogoiskatel_, a seeker after truth and God all his life; it was
only the manner of his search which had changed; but the quest itself
remained unchanged; he was unable, owing to family ties, to push his
premises to their logical conclusion until just before his death; but
push them to their logical conclusion he did at the last, and he died,
as we know, on the road to a monastery.

Tolstoy's manner of search was extraordinary, extraordinary because he
was provided for it with the eyes of an eagle which enabled him to see
through everything; and, as he took nothing for granted from the day
he began his career until the day he died, he was always subjecting
people, objects, ideas, to the searchlight of his vision, and testing
them to see whether they were true o