Essays on Russian Novelists/Dostoevski
IV
DOSTOEVSKI
The life of Dostoevski contrasts harshly with the luxurious ease and steady level seen in the outward existence of his two great contemporaries, Turgenev and Tolstoi. From beginning to end he lived in the very heart of storms, in the midst of mortal coil. He was often as poor as a rat; he suffered from a horrible disease; he was sick and in prison, and no one visited him; he knew the bitterness of death. Such a man's testimony as to the value of life is worth attention; he was a faithful witness, and we know that his testimony is true.
Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevski was born on the 30 October 1821, at Moscow. His father was a poor surgeon, and his mother the daughter of a mercantile man. He was acquainted with grief from the start, being born in a hospital. There were five children, and they very soon discovered the exact meaning of such words as hunger and cold. Poverty in early years sometimes makes men rather close and miserly in middle age, as it certainly did in the case of Ibsen, who seemed to think that charity began and ended at home. Not so Dostoevski: he was often victimised, he gave freely and impulsively, and was chronically in debt. He had about as much business instinct as a prize-fighter or an opera singer. As Merezhkovski puts it : "This victim of poverty dealt with money as if he held it not an evil, but utter rubbish. Dostoevski thinks he loves money, but money flees him. Tolstoi thinks he hatesmoney, but money loves him, and accumulates about him. The one, dreaming all his life of wealth, lived, and but for his wife's business qualities would have died, a beggar. The other, all his life dreaming and preaching of poverty, not only has not given away, but has greatly multiplied his very substantial possessions." In order to make an impressive contrast, the Russian critic is here unfair to Tolstoi, but there is perhaps some truth in the Tolstoi paradox. No wonder Dostoevski loved children, for he was himself a great child.
He was brought up on the Bible and the Christian religion. The teachings of the New Testament were with him almost innate ideas. Thus, although his parents could not give him wealth, or ease, or comfort, or health, they gave him something better than all four put together.
When he was twenty-seven years old, having impulsively expressed revolutionary opinions at a Radical Club to which he belonged, he was arrested with a number of his mates, and after an imprisonment of some months, he was led out on the 22 December 1849, with twenty-one companions, to the scaffold. He passed through all the horror of dying, for visible preparations had been made for the execution, and he was certain that in a moment he would cease to live. Then came the news that the Tsar had commuted the sentence to hard labour; this saved their lives, but one of the sufferers had become insane.
Then came four years in the Siberian prison, followed by a few years of enforced military service. His health actually grew better under the cruel régime of the prison, which is not difficult to understand, for even a cruel régime is better than none at all, and Dostoevski never had the slightest notion of how to take care of himself . At what time his epilepsy began is obscure, but this dreadful disease faithfully and frequently visited him during his whole adult life. From a curious hint that he once let fall, reenforced by the manner in which the poor epileptic in The Karamazov Brothers acquired the falling sickness, we cannot help thinking that its origin came from a blow given in anger by his father.
Dostoevski was enormously interested in his disease, studied its symptoms carefully, one might say eagerly, and gave to his friends minute accounts of exactly how he felt before and after the convulsions, which tally precisely with the vivid descriptions written out his his novels. This illness coloured his whole life, profoundly affected his character, and gave a feverish and hysterical tone to his books.
Dostoevski had a tremendous capacity for enthusiasm. As a boy, he was terribly shaken by the death of Pushkin, and he never lost his admiration for the founder of Russian literature. He read the great classics of antiquity and of modern Europe with wild excitement, and wrote burning eulogies in letters to his friends. The flame of his literary ambition was not quenched by the most abject poverty, nor by the death of those whom he loved most intensely. After his first wife died, he suffered agonies of grief, accentuated by wretched health, public neglect, and total lack of financial resources. But chill penury could not repress his noble rage. He was always planning and writing new novels, even when he had no place to lay his head. And the bodily distress of poverty did not cut him nearly so sharply as its shame. His letters prove clearly that at times he suffered in the same way as the pitiable hero of Poor Folk. That book was indeed a prophecy of the author's own life. It is impossible to exaggerate the difficulties under which he wrote his greatest novels. His wife and children were literally starving. He could not get money, and was continually harassed by creditors. During part of the time, while writing in the midst of hunger and freezing cold, he had an epileptic attack every ten days. His comment in all this is, "I am only preparing to live," which is as heroic as Paul Jones's shout, "I have not yet begun to fight."
In 1880 a monument to Pushkin was unveiled, and the greatest Russian authors were invited to speak at the ceremony. This was the occasion where Turgenev vainly tried to persuade Tolstoi to appear and participate. Dostoevski paid his youthful debt to the ever living poet in a magnificent manner. He made a wonderful oration on Russian literature and the future of the Russian people, an address that thrilled the hearts of his hearers, and inspired his countrymen everywhere. On the 28 January 1881, he died, and forty thousand mourners saw his body committed to the earth.
Much as I admire the brilliant Russian critic, Merezhkovski, I cannot understand his statement that Dostoevski "drew little on his personal experiences, had little self-consciousness, complained of no one." His novels are filled with his personal experiences, he had an almost abnormal self-consciousness, and he bitterly complained that Turgenev, who did not need the money, received much more for his work than he.
Dostoevski's inequalities as a writer are so great that it is no wonder he has been condemned by some critics as a mere journalistic maker of melodrama, while others have exhausted their entire stock of adjectives in his exaltation. His most ardent admirer at this moment is Mr. Baring, who is at the same time animated by a strange jealousy of Turgenev's fame, and seems to think it necessary to belittle the author of Fathers and Children in order to magnify the author of Crime and Punishment. This seems idle; Turgenev and Dostoevski were geniuses of a totally different order, and we ought to rejoice in the greatness of each man, just as we do in the greatness of those two entirely dissimilar poets, Tennyson and Browning. Much of Mr. Baring's language is an echo of Merezhkovski; but this Russian critic, while loving Dostoevski more than Turgenev, was not at all blind to the latter's supreme qualities. Listen to Mr. Baring: —
"He possesses a certain quality which is different in kind from those of any other writer, a power of seeming to get nearer to the unknown, to what lies beyond the flesh, which is perhaps the secret of his amazing strength; and, besides this, he has certain great qualities which other writers, and notably other Russian writers, possess also; but he has them in so far higher a degree that when seen with other writers he annihilates them. The combination of this difference in kind and difference in degree makes something so and so tremendous, that it is not to be at when we find many critics saying that Dostoevski is not only the greatest of all Russian writers, but one of the greatest writers that the world has ever seen. I am not exaggerating when I say that such views are held; for instance, Professor Bruckner, a most level-headed critic, in his learned and exhaustive survey of Russian literature, says that it is not in Faust, but rather in Crime and Punishment, that the whole grief of mankind takes hold of us.
"Even making allowance for the enthusiasm of his admirers, it is true to say that almost any Russian judge of literature at the present day would place Dostoevski as being equal to Tolstoi and immeasurably above Turgenev; in fact, the ordinary Russian critic at the present day no more dreams of comparing Turgenev with Dostoevski, than it would occur to an Englishman to compare Charlotte Yonge with Charlotte Brontë."
This last sentence shows the real animus against Turgenev that obsesses Mr. Baring's mind; once more the reader queries, Suppose Dostoevski be all that Mr. Baring claims for him, why is it necessary to attack Turgenev? Is there not room in Russian literature for both men? But as Mr. Baring has appealed to Russian criticism, it is only fair to quote one Russian critic of good standing, Kropotkin. He says:—
"Dostoevski is still very much read in Russia; and when, some twenty years ago, his novels were first translated into French, German, and English, they were received as a revelation. He was praised as one of the greatest writers of our own time, and as undoubtedly the one who 'had best expressed the mystic Slavonic soul'—whatever that expression may mean! Turgenev was eclipsed by Dostoevski, and Tolstoi was forgotten for a time. There was, of course, a great deal of hysterical exaggeration in all this, and at the present time sound literary critics do not venture to indulge in such praises. The fact is, that there is certainly a great deal of power in whatever Dostoevski wrote: his powers of creation suggest those of Hoffmann; and his sympathy with the most down-trodden and down-cast products of the civilisation of our large towns is so deep that it carries away the most indifferent reader and exercises a most powerful impression in the right direction upon young readers. His analysis of the most varied specimens of incipient psychical disease is said to be thoroughly correct. But with all that, the artistic qualities of his novels are incomparably below those of any one of the great Russian masters: Tolstoi, Turgenev, or Goncharov. Pages of consummate realism are interwoven with the most fantastical incidents worthy only of the most incorrigible romantics. Scenes of a thrilling interest are interrupted in order to introduce a score of pages of the most unnatural theoretical discussions. Besides, the author is in such a hurry that he seems never to have had the time himself to read over his novels before sending them to the printer. And, worst of all, every one of the heroes of Dostoevski, especially in his novels of the later period, is a person suffering from some psychical disease or from moral perversion. As a result, while one may read some of the novels of Dostoevski with the greatest interest, one is never tempted to re-read them, as one re-reads the novels of Tolstoi and Turgenev, and even those of many secondary novel writers; and the present writer must confess that he had the greatest pain lately in reading through, for instance, The Brothers Karamazov, and never could pull himself through such a novel as The Idiot. However, one pardons Dostoevski everything, because when he speaks of the ill-treated and the forgotten children of our town civilisation he becomes truly great through his wide, infinite love of mankind—of man, even in his worst manifestations."
Mr. Baring's book was published in 1910, Kropotkin's in 1905, which seems to make Mr. Baring's attitude point to the past, rather than to the future. Kropotkin seems to imply that the wave of enthusiasm for Dostoevski is a phase that has already passed, rather than a new and increasing demonstration, as Mr. Baring would have us believe.
Dostoevski's first book, Poor Folk, appeared when he was only twenty-five years old: it made an instant success, and gave the young author an enviable reputation. The manuscript was given by a friend to the poet Nekrassov. Kropotkin says that Dostoevski "had inwardly doubted whether the novel would even be read by the editor. He was living then in a poor, miserable room, and was fast asleep when at four o'clock in the morning Nekrassov and Grigorovich knocked at his door. They threw themselves on Dostoevski's neck, congratulating him with tears in their eyes. Nekrassov and his friend had begun to read the novel late in the evening; they could not stop reading till they came to the end, and they were both so deeply impressed by it that they could not help going on this nocturnal expedition to see the author and tell him what they felt. A few days later, Dostoevski was introduced to the great critic of the time, Bielinski, and from him he received the same warm reception. As to the reading public, the novel produced quite a sensation."
The story Poor Folk is told in the highly artificial form of letters, but is redeemed by its simplicity and deep tenderness. Probably no man ever lived who had a bigger or warmer heart than Dostoevski, and out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. All the great qualities of the mature man are in this slender volume: the wideness of his mercy, the great deeps of his pity, the boundlessness of his sympathy, and his amazing spiritual force. If ever there was a person who would forgive any human being anything seventy times seven, that individual was Dostoevski. He never had to learn the lesson of brotherly love by long years of experience: the mystery of the Gospel, hidden from the wise and prudent, was revealed to him as a babe. The language of these letters is so simple that a child could understand every word; but the secrets of the human heart are laid bare. The lover is a grey-haired old man, with the true Slavonic genius for failure, and a hopeless drunkard; the young girl is a veritable flower of the slums, shedding abroad the radiance and perfume of her soul in a sullen and sodden environment. She has a purity of soul that will not take pollution.
"See how this mere chance-sown cleft-nursed seed
That sprang up by the wayside 'neath the foot
Of the enemy, this breaks all into blaze,
Spreads itself, one wide glory of desire
To incorporate the whole great sun it loves
From the inch-height whence it looks and longs ! "
No one can read a book like this without being better for it, and without loving its author.
It is unfortunate that Dostoevski did not learn from his first little masterpiece the great virtue of compression. This story is short, but it is long enough; the whole history of two lives, so far as their spiritual aspect is concerned, is fully given in these few pages. The besetting sin of Dostoevski is endless garrulity with its accompanying demon of incoherence: in later years he yielded to that, as he did to other temptations, and it finally mastered him. He was never to write again a work of art that had organic unity.
Like all the great Russian novelists, Dostoevski went to school to Gogol. The influence of his teacher is evident throughout Poor Folk. The hero is almost an imitation of the man in Gogol's short story, The Cloak, affording another striking example of the germinal power of that immortal work. Dostoevski seemed fully to realise his debt to Gogol, and in particular to The Cloak; for in Poor Folk, one entire letter is taken up with a description of Makar's emotions after reading that extraordinary tale. Makar assumes that it is a description of himself. "Why, I hardly dare show myself in the streets! Everything is so accurately described that one's very gait is recognisable."
Dostoevski's consuming ambition for literary fame is well indicated in his first book. "If anything be well written, Varinka, it is literature. I learned this the day before yesterday. What a wonderful thing literature is, which, consisting but of printed words, is able to invigorate, to instruct, the hearts of men!"
So many writers have made false starts in literature that Dostoevski's instinct for the right path at the very outset is something notable. His entire literary career was to be spent in portraying the despised and rejected. Never has a great author's first book more clearly revealed the peculiar qualities of his mind and heart.
But although he struck the right path, it was a long time before he found again the right vein. He followed up his first success with a row of failures, whose cold reception by the public nearly broke his heart. He was extremely busy, extremely productive, and extremely careless, as is shown by the fact that during the short period from 1846 to 1849, he launched thirteen original publications, not a single one of which added anything to his fame. It was not until after the cruel years of Siberia that the great books began to appear.
Nor did they appear at once. In 1859 he published The Uncle's Dream, a society novel, showing both in its humour and in its ruthless satire the influence of Gogol. This is an exceedingly entertaining book, and, a strange thing in Dostoevski, it is, in many places, hilariously funny. The satire is so enormously exaggerated that it completely overshoots the mark, but perhaps this very exaggeration adds to the reader's merriment. The conversation in this story is often brilliant, full of unexpected quips and retorts delivered in a manner far more French than Russian. The intention of the author seems to have been to write a scathing and terrible satire on provincial society, where every one almost without exception is represented as absolutely selfish, absolutely conceited, and absolutely heartless. It is a study of village gossip, a favourite subject for satirists in all languages. In the middle of the book Dostoevski remarks: "Everybody in the provinces lives as though he were under a bell of glass. It is impossible for him to conceal anything whatever from his honourable fellow-citizens. They know things about him of which he himself is ignorant. The provincial, by his very nature, ought to be a very profound psychologist. That is why I am sometimes honestly amazed to meet in the provinces so few psychologists and so many imbeciles."
Never again did Dostoevski write a book containing so little of himself, and so little of the native Russian element. Leaving out the exaggeration, it might apply to almost any village in any country, and instead of sympathy, it shows only scorn. The scheming mother, who attempts to marry her beautiful daughter to a Prince rotten with diseases, is a stock figure on the stage and in novels. The only truly Russian personage is the young lover, weak-willed and irresolute, who lives a coward in his own esteem.
This novel was immediately followed by another within the same year, Stepanchikovo Village, translated into English with the title The Friend of the Family. This has for its hero one of the most remarkable of Dostoevski's characters, and yet one who infallibly reminds us of Dickens's Pecksniff. The story is told in the first person, and while it cannot by any stretch of language be called a great book, it has one advantage over its author's works of genius, in being interesting from the first page to the last. Both the uncle and the nephew, who narrate the tale, are true Russian characters: they suffer long, and are kind; they hope all things, and believe all things. The household is such a menagerie that it is no wonder that the German translation of this novel is called Tollhaus oder Herrenhaus? Some of the inmates are merely abnormal; others are downright mad. There is not a natural or a normal character in the entire book, and not one of the persons holds the reader's sympathy, though frequent drafts are made on his pity. The hero is a colossal hypocrite, hopelessly exaggerated. If one finds Dickens's characters to be caricatures, what shall be said of this collection? This is the very apotheosis of the unctuous gasbag, from whose mouth, eternally ajar, pours a viscous stream of religious and moral exhortation. Compared with this Friend of the Family, Tartuffe was unselfish and noble: Joseph Surface modest and retiring; Pecksniff a humble and loyal man. The best scene in the story, and one that arouses outrageous mirth, is the scene where the uncle, who is a kind of Tom Pinch, suddenly revolts, and for a moment shakes off his bondage. He seizes the fat hypocrite by the shoulder, lifts him from the floor, and hurls his carcass through a glass door. All of which is in the exact manner of Dickens.
One of the most characteristic of Dostoevski's novels, characteristic in its occasional passages of wonderful beauty and pathos, characteristic in its utter formlessness and long stretches of uninspired dulness, is Downtrodden and Oppressed. Here the author gives us the life he knew best by actual ex- perience and the life best suited to his natural gifts of sympathetic interpretation. Stevenson's comment on this story has attracted much attention. Writing to John Addington Symonds in 1886, he said: "Another has been translated Humiliés et Offensés. It is even more incoherent than Le Crime et le Châtiment, but breathes much of the same lovely goodness, and has passages of power. Dostoevski is a devil of a swell, to be sure." There is no scorn and no satire in this book; it was written from an overflowing heart. One of the speeches of the spineless young Russian, Alosha, might be taken as illustrative of the life-purpose of our novelist : "I am on fire for high and noble ideals ; they may be false, but the basis on which they rest is holy."
Downtrodden and Oppressed is full of melodrama and full of tears ; it is four times too long, being stuffed out with interminable discussions and vain repetitions. It has no beauty of construction, no evolution, and irritates the reader beyond all en- durance. The young hero is a blazing ass, who is in love with two girls at the same time, and whose fluency of speech is in inverse proportion to his power of will. The real problem of the book is how either of the girls could have tolerated his presence for five minutes. The hero's father is a melodramatic villain, who ought to have worn patent-leather boots and a Spanish cloak. And yet, with all its glaring faults, it is a story the pages of which ought not to be skipped. So far as the narrative goes, one may skip a score of leaves at will ; but in the midst of aimless and weary gabble, pas- sages of extraordinary beauty and uncanny insight strike out with the force of a sudden blow. The influence of Dickens is once more clearly seen in the sickly little girl Nelly, whose strange caprices and flashes of passion are like Goethe's Mignon, but whose bad health and lingering death recall irresistibly Little Nell. They are similar in much more than in name.
Dostoevski told the secrets of his prison-house in his great book Memoirs of a House of the Dead — translated into English with the title Buried Alive. Of the many works that have come from prison- walls to enrich literature, and their number is legion, this is one of the most powerful, because one of the most truthful and sincere. It is not nearly so well written as Oscar Wilde's De Profundis; but one cannot escape the suspicion that this latter masterpiece was a brilliant pose. Dostoevski's House of the Dead is marked by that naïve Russian simplicity that goes not to the reader's head but to his heart. It is at the farthest remove from a well- constructed novel ; it is indeed simply an irregular, incoherent notebook. But if the shop-worn phrase "human document" can ever be fittingly applied, no better instance can be found than this. It is a revelation of Dostoevski's all-embracing sympathy. He shows no bitterness, no spirit of revenge, toward the government that sent him into penal servitude ; he merely describes what happened there. Nor does he attempt to arouse our sympathy for his fellow-convicts by depicting them as heroes, or in showing their innate nobleness. They are indeed a bad lot, and one is forced to the conviction that they ought not to be at large. Confinement and hard labour is what most of them need ; for the majority of them in this particular Siberian prison are not revolutionists, offenders against the government, sent there for some petty or trumped-up charge, but cold-blooded murderers, fiendishly cruel assassins, wife-beaters, dull, degraded brutes. But the regime, as our novelist describes it, does not improve them ; the officers are as brutal as the men, and the flog- gings do not make for spiritual culture. One can- not wish, after reading the book, that such prisoners were free, but one cannot help thinking that some- thing is rotten in the state of their imprisonment. Dostoevski brings out with great clearness the utter childishness of the prisoners; mentally, they are just bad little boys ; they seem never to have de- veloped, except in an increased capacity for sin. They spend what time they have in silly talk, in purposeless discussions, in endeavours to get drink, in practical jokes, and in thefts from one another. The cruel pathos of the story is not in the fact that such men are in prison, but that a Dostoevski should be among them. Here is a delicate, sensitive man of genius, in bad health, with a highly organised nervous system, with a wonderful imagination, condemned to live for years in slimy misery, with creatures far worse than the beasts of the field. Indeed, some of the most beautiful parts of the story are where Dostoevski turns from the men to the prison dog and the prison horse, and there finds true friendship. His kindness to the neglected dog and the latter's surprise and subsequent devotion make a deep impression. The greatness of Dostoevski's heart is shown in the fact that although his comrades were detestable characters, he did not hate them. His calm account of their unblushing knavery is entirely free from either vindictive malice or superior contempt. He loved them because they were buried alive, he loved them because of their wretchedness, with a love as far removed from condescension as it was from secret admiration of their bold wickedness. There was about these men no charm of personality and no glamour of desperate crime. The delightful thing about Dostoevski's attitude is that it was so perfect an exemplification Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/166 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/167 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/168 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/169 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/170 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/171 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/172 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/173 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/174 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/175 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/176 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/177 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/178 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/179 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/180 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/181 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/182 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/183 Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/184 capable, seemed only to deepen and strengthen his love of this world, his love of all the creatures on it, and his intense religious passion. For the religion of Dostoevski is thrilling in its clairvoyance and in its fervour. That so experienced and unprejudiced a man, gifted with such a power of subtle and profound reflection, should have found in the Christian religion the only solution of the riddle of existence, and the best rule for daily conduct, is in itself valuable evidence that the Christian religion is true.
Dostoevski has been surpassed in many things by other novelists. The deficiencies and the excrescences of his art are glaring. But of all the masters of fiction, both in Russia and elsewhere, he is the most truly spiritual.