Having established this difference in principle, Merezhkovsky, by constant deduction, concludes, in consonance with his favorite idea, that Tolstoy personifies "the pagan spirit" at its height, while Dostoyevsky represents "the Christian spirit." There is a great deal of fine drawn reasoning in all of this, some very original ideas, but a great many paradoxes. Even the very personality of Tolstoy, the analysis of which occupies a large part of the book, is belittled in the hands of Merezhkovsky. Instead of a noble character, one sees a very vain person, preoccupied only with himself. It is in this simple way that Merezhkovsky explains the moral evolution which led Tolstoy to make those long and sad studies of a kind of life compatible with the true good of humanity, and forced him to them by "the anguish of the black mystery of death" which, having got possession of the author of "Anna Karenina" in his sixtieth year, in the midst of a life of prosperity, made him hate his fortune and his comfort, which formerly had been so dear to him. In the refusal of Tolstoy to "bow to the great authorities of the literary world, such as AEschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare," a refusal which is only the logical consequence of his ideas on the principle and purpose of art, Merezhkovsky can only see a lack of general culture. Finally, the sort of life he led toward the end of his days came only "from the desire to know and taste the pleasure of simplicity in all its subtleties." "The admirable Epicurus," says Merezhkovsky, "that joyous sage, who, in the very center of Athens, cultivated with his own hands a tiny garden, and taught men not to believe in any human or divine chimeras, but to be contented with the simple happiness that can be given by a single sunbeam, a flower, a sup of water from an earthen cup, or the summer time, would recognize in Tolstoy his faithful disciple, the only one, perhaps, who survives in this barbaric silence, where American comfort, a mixture of effeminacy and indigence, has made one forget the real purpose of life...." In writing these lines, Merezhkovsky must have forgotten that Tolstoy, in proclaiming his ideas on religion and humanity, prepared himself, not for Epicurean pleasures, but for seclusion in one of the terrible dungeons of a Russian monastery (now in disuse) under the persecutions of a temporal and secular authority, and it was not his fault that, by a sort of miracle, he escaped this fate. Dostoyevsky's life is the exact opposite of Tolstoy's. The story of Dostoyevsky's terrible existence is probably known. Born in an alms-house, he never ceased to suffer, and to love.... It is hard to think of two people more absolutely different than Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. But Merezhkovsky loves violent contrasts; in the sharp difference between these two writers, he sees the permanent union of two controlling ideas of the Russian Renaissance and the imminence of a final sympathy, symbolic of a concluding harmony.