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Title: Dostoevsky
Author: André Gide
Author of introduction, etc.: Arnold Bennett
Release date: September 28, 2025 [eBook #76944]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926
Credits: Sean/IB@DP, Terry Jeffress, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOSTOEVSKY ***
DOSTOEVSKY
DOSTOEVSKY
By André Gide
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
With an Introduction by
ARNOLD BENNETT
“Dostoevsky
was the only psychologist
from whom I had anything to learn:
he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life,
happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.”
NIETZSCHE
[Illustration Publisher’s Colophon]
ALFRED A. KNOPF
1926
D O S T O E V S K Y
By André Gide, was first
published in Paris by
PLON-NOURRIT et CIE.
in 1923
Made and Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and
London
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
André Gide is now one of the leaders of French literature. The
first book of his to attract wide attention among the lettered was
_L’Immoraliste_. Since then, in some twenty years of productiveness, he
has gradually consolidated his position until at the present day his
admirers are entitled to say that no other living French author stands
so firm and so passionately acknowledged as an influence. His authority
over the schools of young writers who contribute to or are published
by _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ (with which he has been intimately
connected from its foundation) is quite unrivalled. And it must be
stated, as a final proof of mastership, that he has powerful and not
despicable opponents.
To my mind his outstanding characteristic is that he is equally
interested in the æsthetic and in the moral aspect of literature.
Few imaginative writers have his broad and vivacious curiosity about
moral problems, and scarcely any moralists exhibit even half his
preoccupation with the æsthetic. He is a distinguished, if somewhat
fragmentary, literary critic--not merely of French but of Russian,
English and classical literatures. I shall not forget his excitement
when he first read _Tom Jones_. “Ce livre m’attendait,” said he, with
grave delight. His practical interest in the technique of fiction never
fades; indeed it grows. So much so that his latest novel, now appearing
serially in _La Nouvelle Revue Française_, really amounts to an essay
in a new form; and with startling modesty he has labelled it, in the
dedication, “my first novel.”
Of course no novelist can achieve anything permanent without a moral
basis or background. Balzac had it. De Maupassant had it to the point
of savagery. Zola had it, in his degree. Paul Bourget--a writer whom
highbrows French and English have still to reckon with--has it. But
André Gide writes in the very midst of morals. They are not only his
background, but frequently his foreground. Scarcely one of his books
(the exception may be _Les Caves du Vatican_) but poses and attempts to
resolve a moral problem.
It was natural and even necessary that such a writer as Gide should
deal with such a writer as Dostoevsky. They were made for each
other--or rather Dostoevsky was made for Gide. I first met Gide in the
immense field of Dostoevsky. He said, and I agreed, that _The Brothers
Karamazov_ was the greatest novel ever written. This was ages ago, and
years have only confirmed us in the opinion.
“But,” said Gide, “everything that Dostoevsky ever wrote is worth
reading and must be read. Nothing can safely be omitted.”
At that period there was none but a mutilated French translation of
_The Brothers Karamazov_, and Gide had to read Dostoevsky in German. A
complete translation, I fear, still lacks in French, but André Gide can
now read him in full in English: which is to our credit and his. Let
us, however, not be too much uplifted. Dostoevsky’s important _Journal
d’un Ecrivain_ exists in French but not in English.
Those who read Gide’s _Dostoevsky_ will receive light, some of it
dazzling, on both Dostoevsky and Gide. I can recall no other critical
work which more cogently justifies and more securely establishes its
subject. If anyone wants to appreciate the progress made by Western
Europe in the appreciation of Russian psychology, let him compare the
late Count Melchior de Voguë’s _Le Roman Russe_ with the present work.
It is impossible to read this _Dostoevsky_ without enlarging one’s idea
of Dostoevsky and of the functions of the novel. All the conventional
charges against the greatest of the Russians--morbidity, etc., etc.,
fall to pieces during perusal. They are not killed; they merely
expire. And Dostoevsky in the end stands out not simply as a supreme
psychologist and narrator, but also as a publicist of genius endowed
with a prophetic view over the future of the nations as astounding as
his insight into the individual. “There never was,” says Gide, “an
author more Russian in the strictest sense of the word and withal so
universally European.”
Dostoevsky had various and distressing personal defects, but his
humanity and his wisdom, doubtless derived from the man Jesus who
delivered the Sermon on the Mount, are unique; and André Gide’s
demonstration of their worth is his invaluable contribution to
Dostoevsky literature.
ARNOLD BENNETT.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
In the early months of 1922, M. André Gide delivered before M. Jacques
Copeau’s School of Dramatic Art at the _Vieux-Colombier_ a series of
six addresses on DOSTOEVSKY, first published from shorthand notes--with
but slender emendation, lest the style should lose in spontaneity--in
the _Revue Hebdomâdaire_, Nos. 2-8, 1923, then later in the same year
in book form, together with selected essays. These addresses form the
basis of the present translation from which two short chapters, _Les
Frères Karamazov_ and an _Allocution lue au Vieux-Colombier pour la
Célébration du Centenaire de Dostoïevsky_, have been omitted by desire
of the Author, who adapted his original preface specially for this
English edition.
By courtesy of Messrs. William Heinemann, we are permitted to quote
extensively from Mrs. Constance Garnett’s translations of _Dostoevsky’s
Novels_ (12 vols., 1912-1920). We have utilized as far as possible Miss
Ethel Colburn Mayne’s _Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to
his Family and Friends_ (Messrs. Chatto and Windus, 1917): elsewhere we
have cited J. W. Bienstock’s _Correspondance et Voyage à l’Étranger_
(Paris, 1908). Quotations are further made from Bienstock and Nau’s
version of the _Journal_ (Paris, 1904), and from _Th. M. Dostoevsky:
eine biographische Studie_, by N. Hoffmann (Berlin, 1899).
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY NOTE v
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE ix
AUTHOR’S PREFACE 1
DOSTOEVSKY IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE (1908) 8
ADDRESSES ON DOSTOEVSKY (1922)
I 45
II 76
III 99
IV 118
V 144
VI 170
APPENDIX 199
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
Tolstoy in his immensity still overshadows our horizon; but as a
traveller in a land of mountains sees, with each receding step, appear
above the nearest peak one loftier yet, screened hitherto by the
surrounding heights, some eager spirits herald perchance the rise of
Dostoevsky behind Tolstoy’s giant figure. This cloud-capped summit is
the secret heart of the chain and source of many a generous stream in
whose waters the Europe of to-day may slake her strange new thirsts.
Dostoevsky, not Tolstoy, merits rank beside Ibsen and Nietzsche: great
as they, mayhap the mightiest of the three.
In Germany translations of Dostoevsky are multiplying, each an
advance on its predecessor as regards vigour and scrupulous accuracy.
England, stubborn and slow to move, yet makes it her concern not to be
outstripped. When he introduced Mrs. Constance Garnett’s translation in
the _New Age_, Arnold Bennett wished all English novelists and short
story writers could come under the influence of these “most powerful
works of the imagination ever produced.” Speaking more particularly
of _The Brothers Karamazov_, he declared this book, in which human
passion reaches its maximum intensity, contains about a dozen figures
that are simply colossal. Who can tell if these colossal figures have
ever made, even in Russia, so direct appeal as to us, whether their
call sounded ever before so pressing?
Dostoevsky’s admirers were recently rare enough, but as invariably
happens when the earliest enthusiasts are recruited from the élite,
their number goes on increasing steadily. First of all, I should like
to inquire how it is that certain minds are still obdurately prejudiced
against his work, admirable though it be. Because the best way to
overcome a lack of comprehension is to accept it as sincere and try to
understand it.
The principal charge brought against Dostoevsky in the name of our
Western-European logic has been, I think, the irrational, irresolute,
and often irresponsible nature of his characters, everything in their
appearance that could seem grotesque and wild. It is not, so people
aver, real life that he unfolds, but nightmares. In my belief this
is utterly mistaken; but let us grant the truth of it for argument’s
sake, and refrain from answering after the manner of Freud that there
is more sincerity in our dream-life than in the actions of our real
existence. Hear rather what Dostoevsky has to say for himself on the
subject of dreams: “These obvious absurdities and impossibilities with
which your dream was overflowing ... you accepted all at once, almost
without the slightest surprise, at the very time when, on another
side, your reason was at its highest tension and showed extraordinary
power, cunning, sagacity, and logic. And why, too, on waking and fully
returning to reality, do you feel almost every time, and sometimes
with extraordinary intensity, that you have left something unexplained
behind with the dream, and at the same time you feel that interwoven
with these absurdities some thought lies hidden, and a thought that is
real, something belonging to your actual life, something that exists
and always has existed in your heart. It’s as though something new,
prophetic, that you were awaiting, has been told you in your dream.”[1]
What Dostoevsky says here about dreams we shall apply to his own books,
not for a moment that I would consider assimilating these stories to
the absurdities of certain dreams, because we feel when we leave one of
his books, even should our reason refuse complete agreement with it,
that he has laid his finger on some obscure spot “which is part of our
actual life.” In this, I think, we shall find explained the refusal of
certain minds, in the name of Western-European civilization, to admit
Dostoevsky’s genius, because I readily observe that in all our Western
literature (and I do not limit myself to French alone) the novel, with
but rare exceptions, concerns itself solely with relations between
man and man, passion and intellect, with family, social, and class
relations, but never, practically never with the relations between
the individual and his self or his God, which are to Dostoevsky all
important. I fancy nothing could better illustrate my idea than the
reflection made by a Russian and quoted in Mme. Hoffmann’s biography,
the best by far I know, but which unfortunately has not yet been
translated. His reflection, she holds, will enable us to discern one
of the peculiarities of the Russian soul. Once reproached with his
unpunctuality this Russian gravely retorted: “Yes, life is difficult!
There are moments that must be lived well, and this is more important
than the keeping of any engagement.”[2] The inner life is thus
more highly prized than relations with one’s fellow-man. Here lies
Dostoevsky’s secret, the thing which makes him for some so great, for
many others so insufferable!
Not for a moment do I suggest that in Western Europe, in France, for
example, man is wholly a social being, ever dressed for a part. We
have Pascal’s _Thoughts_ and the _Fleurs du Mal_, strangely solitary
and profound, yet as French as any other works in our literature.
But a certain category of problems, heart-searchings, passions,
and associations seem to be the province of the moralist and the
theologian, and a novelist has no call to burden himself with them.
The miracle Dostoevsky accomplished consists in this: each of his
characters--and he created a world of them--lives by virtue of his
own personality, and these intimately personal beings, each with his
peculiar secret, are introduced to us in all their puzzling complexity.
The wonder of it is that the problems are lived over by each of his
characters, or rather let us say the problems exist at the expense of
his characters: problems which conflict, struggle, and assume human
guise to perish or triumph before our eyes.
No question too transcendent for Dostoevsky to handle in one of his
novels; but, having said this, I am bound at once to add that he
never approaches a question from the abstract, ideas never exist for
him but as functions of his characters, wherein lies their perpetual
relativity and source of power. One individual evolves a certain theory
concerning God, providence, and life eternal because he knows he must
die in a few days’ time, in a few hours maybe (Ippolit in _The Idiot_):
another (in _The Possessed_) builds up an entire system of metaphysics,
containing Nietzsche in embryo, on the premise of self-destruction, for
in a quarter of an hour he is going to take his own life, and hearing
him speak, it is impossible to distinguish whether his philosophy
postulates his suicide or his suicide his philosophy. Prince Myshkin
owes his most wonderful, most heavenly raptures to the imminence of an
epileptic fit. In conclusion I have only one comment to offer: though
pregnant with thought, Dostoevsky’s novels are never abstract, indeed,
of all the books I know, they are the most palpitating with life.
Representative as Dostoevsky’s characters are, they never seem to
forsake their humanity to become mere symbols or the types familiar in
our classical drama. They keep their individuality which is as specific
as in Dickens’s most peculiar creations, and as powerfully drawn and
painted as any portrait in any literature.
Listen to this: “There are people whom it is difficult to describe
correctly in their typical and characteristic aspect. These are the
people who are usually called ‘the mass,’ ‘the majority,’ and who
do actually make up the vast majority of mankind. To this class of
‘commonplace’ or ‘ordinary’ people belong certain persons of my tale,
such as Gavril Ardalionovitch.”[3]
Now, this is a character particularly difficult to delineate. What will
he succeed in telling us about him?
“A profound and continual consciousness of his own lack of talent,
and at the same time the overwhelming desire to prove to himself
that he was a man of great independence, had rankled in his heart
from boyhood up. He was a young man of violent and envious cravings,
who seemed to have been positively born with his nerves overwrought.
The violence of his desires he took for strength. This passionate
craving to distinguish himself sometimes led him to the brink of most
ill-considered actions, but our hero was always at the last moment too
sensible to take the final plunge. That drove him to despair.”[4] And
this for one of the least important characters in the book! I must add
that the others, the chief protagonists, he does not portray, leaving
them to limn in their own portrait, never finished, ever changing, in
the course of the narrative. His principal characters are always in
course of formation, never quite emerging from the shadows. In passing,
note how profoundly different he is from Balzac, whose chief care
seems ever to be the perfect consistency of his characters. Balzac
paints like David; Dostoevsky like Rembrandt, and his portraits are
artistically so powerful and often so perfect that even if they lacked
the depths of thought that lie behind them, and around them, I believe
that Dostoevsky would still be the greatest of all novelists.
FOOTNOTES
[1] _The Idiot_, p. 455.
[2] Hoffmann, p. 7, “Es gibt Augenblicke, die richtig gelebt sein
wollen.” (_Translator’s note._)
[3] _The Idiot_, pp. 461-462.
[4] _The Idiot_, p. 464.
DOSTOEVSKY IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE
(1908)
I
You are prepared to find a super-man: you lay hold on a fellow
mortal, sick, poor, toiling without respite, and strangely lacking
in that pseudo-quality he himself criticized so strongly in the
French--eloquence. In dealing with a book so bare of all pretension, I
shall hold remote every consideration save one, straightforwardness.
If some there be who seek in these pages fine writing or intellectual
entertainment, I warn them now, it were well to read no further.
The text of the letters is often confused, inaccurate, unskilfully put
together, and we are grateful to Dostoevsky’s translator for having
renounced all idea of introducing a certain artificial elegance or
attempting to remedy their characteristic awkwardness.[5]
The first contact is indeed discouraging. Mme. Hoffmann, Dostoevsky’s
German biographer, leads us to understand that the selection of
letters issued by the Russian editors might have been better made; but
she entirely fails to convince me that its keynote could have been
different. As it stands, the volume is bulky, and the reader gasps
in astonishment less at the number of the letters than at the vast
formlessness of each one of them. Perhaps we have never yet had an
example of a literary man’s letters so badly written, by that I mean
written with so little regard for style. Ideas seem to come from his
pen not in ordered sequence, but in a rich confusion, which, once it
is brought under control, contributes powerfully to the complexity of
his novels. The same man who is so uncompromising and so tenacious
where his own work is concerned, correcting, destroying, modifying
his stories, page by page, until each becomes “the expression of his
very being,” writes his correspondence anyhow: never crossing a phrase
out, but constantly catching himself up, hurrying on as fast as he
can, and never able to bring his letter to a satisfactory close; and
nothing helps us better to estimate the distance between a work and its
creator. Inspiration? romantic and flattering convenience! The muse is
not so readily wooed. And if ever Buffon’s modest saying--“_A patience
that knows no weariness_”--were applicable, ’tis here.
“What theory is this you’ve got hold of?” he writes to his brother, on
the very threshold of his career.[6] “A picture ought to be painted
at one sitting, you say? When did you acquire this conviction? Believe
me, in all things, labour, yes, prolonged labour, is indispensable.
A few lines of Pushkin’s verse, light and polished, truly seem the
fruit of one effort, thanks to the hours Pushkin spent arranging and
revising them. It needs more than a happy knack to produce mature work.
We are told that Shakespeare’s work bears no trace of correction:
that is exactly why we find in it so many imperfections and so much
that is contrary to good taste. If he had spent more time over it,
the result would have been better.” Such is the keynote of the whole
correspondence. The best of his life and spirit Dostoevsky devotes to
his work. None of his letters was written from pleasure. He constantly
reverts to his “terrible, unmasterable, incredible distaste for
letter-writing.”--“Letters,” he declares, “have neither rhyme nor
reason: it is impossible to unburden oneself in them.” He goes even
further: “I write to you at great length, and I see that of the very
essence of my moral or spiritual life I have given you not a notion,
and so it will remain as long as we continue to correspond; I _cannot_
write letters: I cannot write about myself and be just.”[7] Elsewhere
he says that “in a letter it’s impossible to write anything. There’s
the secret of my dislike to Madame de Sévigné: the woman wrote her
letters too well!” Or with a touch of humour: “If ever I go to the
lower regions, I shall beyond a doubt be sentenced to write for my sins
some ten letters a day”--and I think this is the one flicker of humour
you can discern throughout the whole gloomy book.
So only direst compulsion will drive him to write a letter. His
correspondence (save during the last ten years of his life, when
the tone is altered--and of this period I shall speak apart) is one
prolonged cry of distress: he is penniless, desperate, and he seeks
help. A cry, did I say? It is one unending, monotonous lament. He is a
beggar, and does not know how to beg: he is all awkwardness, without
pride, and innocent of irony. He reminds me of the angel of whom we
read in the _Little Flowers of St. Francis_. This angel, in the form
of a traveller who had lost his way, came to the Val de Spolete and
knocked at the door of the infant settlement. His knocking was so
loud, long, and precipitate that the brethren grew indignant, and
Brother Masseo (M. de Vogüé, I presume!) at last opened the door,
asking, “Whence comest thou to knock in so unseemly wise?” And the
angel inquired, “How then must I knock?” Brother Masseo replied, “Knock
thrice with deliberation, then pause. Leave the porter time to say
a pater-noster. Then if he comes not, knock again.” “But I am sore
pressed,” continued the angel.
“I am in such poverty that I am fit to hang myself,” writes Dostoevsky,
“I can neither pay my debts nor leave, lacking funds for the journey,
and I am in black despair.”--“What is to become of me between now and
the close of the year? Dear knows. My head is bursting. I have not a
soul left from whom I can borrow.”--(“Do you realize what it means, to
have nowhere to go?” says one of his characters.) “I’ve written to a
relative to ask him for six hundred roubles. If he doesn’t send them,
then all is lost.” His correspondence is so full of such laments and
others in like strain that I make my selection at random. Sometimes
there is, every six months or so, a note of greater insistence: “It is
only once in a lifetime that money can possibly be so cruelly needed.”
Towards the end--drunk with the humility he used to intoxicate the
heroes of his novels, that uncanny humility of the Russian, which may
be Christ-like, but, according to Mme. Hoffmann, is still found in the
depths of the Russian soul even when Christian faith is lacking, and
which the Western mind will never fully understand since it reckons
self-respect a virtue--towards the end, he asks, “Why should they deny
me? I make no demands. I am but a humble petitioner!”
But perhaps these letters furnish, wrongly, the impression of a human
creature ever deep in despair, seeing that they were written only when
despair was greatest. No: incoming moneys were immediately swallowed
up by debts, and thus, at the age of fifty, he could truthfully say
of himself, “My life long I have toiled for money, and my life long I
have been in need, more sorely now than ever.”[8] Debts, or gambling,
lack of restraint, and that instinctive, prodigal generosity which made
Riesenkampf, the companion of his youth, say, “Dostoevsky is one of
these people in whose company a man lives well, but who himself will
remain a needy creature till the very end of his days.”
When fifty, he wrote: “This plan of a novel (i.e. _The Brothers
Karamazov_, not written till nine years later) has been tormenting me
now for more than three years; but I have not made a start with it,
because I should like to write it in my own good time, like Tolstoy,
Turgeniev, and Gontcharov. Let me write at least one of my works
unhampered and without the preoccupation of being ready at a fixed
date.”[9] But it is in vain that he repeats, “I don’t understand
hurriedly done work, written for money”: this money question invariably
obtrudes itself, together with the fear of not being ready in time.
“I dread not being ready in time, being late. I should hate to spoil
things by my haste. I admit the plan has been well conceived and
thought over; but haste can ruin all.”[10]
The result of this is terrible overstrain, for he stakes his honour on
an ideal of faithfulness that is beset with difficulties, and he would
die in harness sooner than furnish imperfect work. Towards the close
of his life he can say: “Throughout my literary career, I have kept my
agreements with scrupulous exactness, not once have I broken my word;
and what is more, I have never written for money’s sake alone, nor
in order to deliver myself from accepted obligations,” and a little
before, in the same letter: “I have never invented a theme for money’s
sake, to meet the obligation of writing up to a previously agreed
time-limit. I always made an agreement ... and sold myself into bondage
beforehand ... only when I already had my theme in mind prepared for
writing, and when it was one that I felt it necessary to develop.”[11]
So if in one of his early letters (written at the age of twenty-four)
he makes protest: “Whatever befall me, my resolution will remain
unshaken; even if driven to the extreme limit of privation, I shall
stand firm and never compose to order. Constraint is pernicious and
soul-destroying. I want each of my works to be good in itself”[12] ...
we can, without cavilling, admit that he did not break his vow.
But he cherished throughout his life the belief that with more time and
freedom he could have given better expression to his thought. “There
is one consideration that troubles one greatly: if I spent a year
writing the novel beforehand, and then two or three months in copying
and revising it, I guarantee the result would be very different.”
Self-delusion, maybe? Who can tell? With greater leisure, to what could
he have attained? After what was he still striving? Greater simplicity,
no doubt, and a more complete subordination of detail. As they are,
his best works rise, almost throughout, to a degree of precision and
clarity that it is not easy to imagine excelled.
And to reach this, what expenditure of effort! It is only now and
again that sudden inspiration is vouchsafed; everything else means
painful toil. To his brother, who doubtless had reproached him with not
writing “simply” enough, meaning to say “quickly” enough, and with not
“surrendering himself to inspiration,” he replied, young as he was: “It
is clear that you are confusing, as often happens, inspiration, that
is, the first momentary creation of the picture, or the stirring of the
soul, with work. Thus, for instance, I make note at once of a scene
just as it appeared to me, and I am delighted: then, for months, for
a year even, I work at it ... and believe me, the finished article is
much superior. Provided, of course, that the inspiration is vouchsafed!
Naturally without inspiration nothing can be accomplished....” Must I
crave pardon for this prodigality of quotation, or will you not rather
be grateful to me for allowing Dostoevsky to be his own spokesman as
much as possible? “At the beginning, that is at the end of last year,
I thought the novel (he refers to _The Possessed_) very _made_ and
artificial and rather scorned it. But later I was overtaken by real
enthusiasm. I fell in love with my work of a sudden, and made a big
effort to get all that I had written into good trim....”[13] “The whole
year,” he goes on to say (1870), “I have done nothing but destroy.... I
have altered my plan at least ten times, and I’ve re-written the first
part entirely. Two or three months ago I was in despair. Now everything
has fallen into place together and cannot be changed.” And again the
ever-present obsession: “If I had had time to write without hurrying
myself, without a time-limit in view, it is possible that something
good might have developed out of it.”[14]
This anguish and this dissatisfaction with himself were gone through
for every work that he wrote. “It is a long novel, in six parts (_Crime
and Punishment_). At the end of November a large part of it was written
and ready; I burned the lot! Now, I can frankly admit that it did not
please me. A new form, a new plan hurried me along. I have made a
fresh start. I am working night and day; still, progress is slow.”--“I
am working hard and little comes of it,” he says elsewhere: “I am
constantly tearing my work up. I am terribly discouraged.” And again:
“I have done so much work that I’ve become stupid, and my head is
dazed.”--“I am working here (Staraia Roussa) like a convict in spite of
the fine weather to be taken advantage of; I am tied night and day to
my task.”
Sometimes a mere article gives him as much trouble as a book, because
his conscientiousness is as rigid in little things as in great.
“I have let it drag on till now” (i.e. a memoir on Bielinsky, which
has not been traced), “and at last I’ve finished it, gnashing my teeth
the while. Ten pages of a novel are more easily written than these two
sheets. Consequently I’ve written, all in all, this confounded article
five times at least, and even then I’ve scored everything out and
changed what I’d written. Finally I’ve completed the article after a
fashion, but it is so bad that I am full of disgust.”[15] For while he
clings to the profound belief in his worth, in the worth of his ideas
at least, he is always exacting while the work is in progress, and
never pleased when it is completed.
“I’ve seldom happened to have anything newer, more complete or more
original. I can say this without being accused of pride, because I am
speaking of the subject only, of the idea that has sprung up in my
head, and not of its realization; as for the latter, it lies with God.
I can make a complete mess of it--which has happened before to-day.”
“However wretched and abominable what I’ve written may be,” he says in
another passage, “the idea of the novel and the labour I expend on it
are to me, its unhappy author, my most precious possession in life.”
“My dissatisfaction with my novel amounts to disgust,” so he writes
when working at _The Idiot_. “I have made a terrible effort to work,
but simply could not; my heart is bad. Just now I am making a last
effort for the third part. If I succeed in polishing off this book,
I’ll get better: if not, it is all over with me.”
Having already written not only the three books M. de Vogüé reckons
his masterpieces, but _Notes from Underground_, _The Idiot_, and _The
Eternal Husband_, he concentrates all his efforts on a new theme (_The
Possessed_), exclaiming, “It’s high time I wrote something serious.”
And the year of his death, writing to Mlle. N----, he says: “I am
conscious that, as a writer, I have many defects, because I am the
first to be dissatisfied with my own efforts. You can just picture
the times when I cross-examine myself, to find that I have literally
not expressed the twentieth part of what was in my mind, and could,
perhaps, have been expressed! My salvation lies in the sure hope that
one day God may grant me such strength and inspiration that I shall
find perfect self-expression and be able to make plain all that I carry
in my heart and imagination.”[16]
How remote from Balzac with his self-assurance and rich imperfection!
Can even Flaubert have known what it is to make such demands upon
oneself, to struggle so hard and toil in such mad frenzies? I think
not. His exigencies are more purely literary, and if his uncompromising
uprightness as a writer and the tale of his prodigious labours are
prominently displayed in his letters, it is simply because he becomes
attached to this very labour, and without exactly vaunting it, he is at
least uncommonly proud of it. Besides, he suppressed all else, holding
life so “loathsome a thing, that the only way to bear it is to avoid
it,” and compared himself to the “Amazons who cut off their breasts,
the better to bend the bow.” Dostoevsky suppressed nothing; he had a
wife and children, whom he adored, and life he did not scorn. After
his release from prison, he wrote: “At least, I have lived; I have
suffered, but I have lived!” His sacrifices for love of his art are
the nobler and the more tragic because less arrogant, less conscious,
less deliberate. He frequently quotes Terence, refusing to concede
that anything human should be foreign to himself either. “Man has not
the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world
around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.
Homo sum, et nihil humanum....” He does not despise his suffering, but
assumes the burden in all its fullness. Losing wife and brother within
the space of a few months, he writes: “And then I was suddenly left
alone, and I knew fear! It has become terrible. My life broken in two!
On one hand, the past, with all that I had to live for, on the other,
the unknown, with not one loving heart to comfort me in my loss. There
was literally no reason why I should go on living. Forge new links,
start a fresh existence? The very thought revolted me! I realized then
for the first time that I could not replace my lost ones, they were all
I held dear, and new loves could not, ought not to exist.”[17] But a
fortnight later, this is what he wrote: “Of all my reserves of strength
and energy, there is nothing left save a vague uneasiness of soul, a
state bordering on despair. Bitterness and indecision--a mood foreign
to me. And then I’m utterly alone. Yet I always have the feeling that I
am going to begin to live! Ridiculous, isn’t it? The cat and its nine
lives?”[18] He was at this moment forty-four years of age, and less
than a year later, he married a second time.
At twenty-eight years of age, confined in a fortress pending transfer
to Siberia, he cried, “I see I have within me resources of vitality
that it will be hard to exhaust.” And in 1856, still in Siberia,
but released from prison, and not long married to a widow, Marie
Dimitrievna Issaïev by name, he wrote: “Now things are different from
what they used to be! So much more reflection, effort and energy
enters into my work. Can it be that after struggling so resolutely and
courageously for six long years I am incapable of earning enough money
to support my wife and myself? Impossible! Nobody knows yet the worth
of my powers or the extent of my talent, and this is what I chiefly
count on!”
But, alas! he has to struggle against other ills than poverty.
“My work is done in care and suffering, and I am always at high nervous
tension. When I do too much, I become physically ill.”--“Of late I’ve
been working literally day and night, in spite of my attacks.” And
again: “These attacks will make an end of me: after one, it takes me
four days to straighten out my thoughts.”
Dostoevsky was never reticent concerning his epilepsy; his attacks of
the _falling sickness_ were, alas! all too frequent not to have been
witnessed at times by some of his intimates, aye, and by strangers
too. Strakhov describes one of these fits in his _Reminiscences_,
unconscious, as the sufferer himself was, that there could be the
slightest shame attached to the epileptic condition, or that it implied
any moral or intellectual “inferiority” apart from the resultant
hindrances to work. Even to correspondents of the other sex who were
personally unknown to him and whom he was addressing for the first
time, he would apologize for his delay in writing, with the naïve and
simple remark: “I have just had three of my epileptic fits, uncommonly
violent and in rapid succession. But after the attacks, for two or
three days I was unable to work, write, or even read, because I am a
wreck, body and soul. So now I’ve told you, and I ask your forgiveness
for leaving you so long without a reply.”
This disease, from which he suffered even before Siberia, grew worse
during his imprisonment; it abated but very little during an occasional
stay abroad, renewing its force as soon as he returned home. Sometimes
the interval between the attacks is longer, but this only augments
their violence. “When the fits are infrequent and one suddenly comes
over me, I am subject to blackest melancholy. I am reduced to despair.
Formerly (he was fifty when he wrote this) this mood lasted three days
after the attack, nowadays, a week or more.”
Braving his attacks, he holds fast to his work, making huge efforts
to implement his promises: “The next instalment (of _The Idiot_) is
announced for April, and I’ve nothing ready, except one unimportant
chapter. What am I to send? I have no idea. The day before yesterday I
did some writing all the same, in a state bordering on madness.”
If the sole consequence were pain and discomfort! But, alas! “I
notice to my despair that I am no longer fit to work as quickly as of
old, indeed, as up till quite recently.” Again and again he laments
the weakening of his memory and his imagination, and at the age of
fifty-eight, two years before his death, he said: “For a long time
I’ve been conscious that where work is concerned, the longer, the more
difficult, and so my thoughts are gloomy, and there is nowhere solace
for me.” And yet, he could write _The Karamazovs_.
When Baudelaire’s _Letters_ were published last year, M. Mendès was
shocked and protested, in no measured terms, either, invoking the
poet’s right to have his intimate concerns respected.
No doubt there will always be ultra-sensitive, easily shocked readers
who prefer to see only the heads and shoulders of great men, who rise
up in revolt at the publication of personal documents and private
correspondence, discerning in these only what can agreeably flatter a
mediocre intelligence which delights to find a hero bound by the same
infirmities as itself. So they talk of “indiscretion”; or if they are
of a romantic turn of mind, of “ghouls”; at the mildest, of “unhealthy
curiosity.” “Leave the man in peace,” they say, “his work alone is of
account.” Agreed! but the wonder of it, and, to me, the profound lesson
of it, is, that the “work” should have been written in spite of the
“man.”
I am not writing Dostoevsky’s biography, I am merely drawing his
likeness from the elements of his _Correspondence_, so I have discussed
only the difficulties engendered by his very constitution. I think I am
justified in including amongst them his chronic poverty, so intimately
connected with him and which would seem to have met some secret need
of his being.... But everything goes against him; at the outset of his
career, in spite of his delicacy in childhood, he is pronounced fit
for military service, whereas his brother, Michael, more robust in
health, is rejected. Straying into a group of political suspects, he
is arrested, condemned to death, then respited and sent to Siberia to
expiate his offence. He spends ten years there: four in prison, six
at Semipalatinsk in a regiment of the line. While there he married;
perhaps not very much “in love” according to our usual interpretation
of the phrase, but out of a kind of burning compassion, out of pity or
softened feeling, out of a need for sacrificing himself and a natural
propensity for assuming burdens and shirking no issue. His wife was
the widow of a prisoner, Issaïev, and the mother of a growing boy (a
good-for-nothing, almost mentally defective), who there and then became
dependent upon Dostoevsky. In a letter to his friend Wrangel, after his
wife’s death, he wrote: “Ah, dear friend, she loved me deeply, and I
returned her love; yet, we did not live happily together. I shall tell
you all about it when I see you. Let me say just this, although we were
unhappy (by reason of her difficult character--she was hypochondriac,
and full of a sick woman’s whims), we could not cease to love each
other. Indeed, the unhappier we became, the more closely we drew
together. Strange though it may seem, it’s true!”--“If you question
me about myself, what can I say? I have family cares, and they press
heavily. But I believe my day is not done, and I am determined not to
die,” he says elsewhere. After his brother Michael’s death, he has to
support his family too. As soon as he puts some money aside--which
means the possibility of some respite--he starts newspapers and
reviews,[19] at once financing and editing the publications. “Energetic
measures were imperative. I started publications with three different
presses, and I have spared neither money, health, nor efforts. I ran
everything single-handed. I revised proofs, kept in touch with the
authors and with the Censorship, found the necessary money. I was up
till six in the morning, and took only five hours sleep. I at last
managed to put the review on its feet, but too late.” As a matter of
fact, this review _did_ collapse. “But the worst of it,” he continues,
“was, that working like a galley-slave at these concerns, I could
not write anything for the review: not a line from _my_ pen. My name
was never in the public’s eye, and not only in the provinces, but in
Petersburg even, it was not known that I was the editor.”
He persists in spite of everything, and makes a fresh start; nothing
can discourage him or bring him down. In the last year of his life,
however, he is still struggling, not against public opinion which he
has at length won over, but against opposition papers. “For what I said
in Moscow (his speech on ‘Pushkin’), just look how I’ve been treated
by almost the whole of the press: it is as if I were a thief or had
embezzled from some bank or other. Ukhantsev (a notorious swindler of
the time) is less foully abused than I.”
But it is not a reward that he is seeking, any more than it is
amour-propre or an author’s vanity that inspires his conduct. Nothing
could be more significant than his manner of accepting his first
success: “I’ve been writing for three years already, and it dazes me; I
am not living. I haven’t time to think.... A precarious reputation has
been built up round me, and I don’t know how long the damnable thing
will last.”
He is so persuaded of the worth of his ideas that personal values are
absorbed and lost. “What have I done”, he wrote to his friend, Baron
Wrangel, “that you should bestow such affection upon me?” And near
the close of his life, writing to an anonymous correspondent: “Do you
think I am one of those who mend hearts, deliver the soul, and drive
out suffering? Many people write to tell me this, but I am certain I am
more capable of provoking disillusion and disgust. I have little skill
in healing, although I have sometimes tried it.” Such love in this
tormented soul! “I dream of you every night,” he writes from Siberia to
his brother, “and I am terribly worried. I do not want you to die; I
must see you and kiss you again. Calm my apprehensions for God’s sake.
And for dear Christ’s sake, if you are well, forget your business and
your worries, and do write to me immediately, else I shall go mad.”[20]
Is there any help for him, this time, at least? “Write to me at once
and in detail how you found my brother,” he writes from Semipalatinsk,
on March 23, 1856, to Baron Wrangel: “What does he think about me? He
used to love me passionately. He wept when he bade me good-bye. Has his
feeling towards me grown cold? Has his character changed? That would be
a grief. Has he forgotten all the past? I cannot believe it, but how
else am I to explain his not writing for seven or eight months? And
I seem to see so little warmth in him to remind one of days gone by!
I shall never forget what he said to K---- who delivered my message
entreating him to exert himself on my behalf: ‘The best thing for _him_
to do is to remain in Siberia.’” He actually wrote these words, but he
would give anything to forget his brother’s cruelty. The affectionate
letter to Michael from which I quoted a moment ago, is subsequent to
this one.
During his four years in prison, Dostoevsky was left without news of
his family. On February 22, 1854, he wrote to his brother the first
of the Siberian letters preserved to us--and an admirable letter it
was: “At last I can talk with you somewhat more explicitly, and, I
believe, in a more reasonable manner. But before I write another line
I _must_ ask you: tell me, for God’s sake, why you have never written
me a single syllable till now? Could I have expected this from you?
Believe me, in my lonely and isolated state, I sometimes fell into
utter despair, for I believed that you were no longer alive; through
whole nights I would brood upon what was to become of your children,
and I cursed my fate because I could not help them....”[21]--“Can you
possibly have been forbidden to write to me? Because writing _is_
actually permitted! All the political prisoners have several letters
each year.... But I think I have guessed the true cause of your
silence: it is your natural apathy.”
“Tell my brother”, he wrote later to Wrangel, “that I fold him in my
arms, that I ask his forgiveness for all the pain I’ve caused him,
and kneel at his feet”;[22] and to his brother himself, on August 21,
1855: “Dear brother, when in my letter of last October, I repeated
my complaints at your silence, you answered that these had made very
painful reading for you. Oh, Mysha! for the love of God, bear me no
ill-will: remember my loneliness. I am like a pebble cast aside. I’ve
always been of a gloomy, sickly, susceptible disposition: remember
all that, and forgive me if my reproaches were unjust and my fancies
absurd. I am myself thoroughly convinced I was in the wrong.”
Mme. Hoffmann was right, no doubt, and Western readers will protest in
face of such humility and contrition. Our literature, too often tinged
with Castillian pride, has so thoroughly taught us to see nobility of
character in the non-forgiveness of injury and insult!
But what will he have to say, the Western-European reader when he reads
this: “You write that everybody loves the Tsar. I venerate him.”? And
Dostoevsky was still in Siberia when he wrote these words. Irony,
perchance? No. In letter after letter he takes up the theme: “The
Emperor is infinitely generous and kind.” And this is what he says
when, after ten years’ imprisonment, he solicits permission to return
to Petersburg and a place for his stepson, Paul, at the Gymnasium: “I
have been thinking if one request is refused, maybe the other will be
granted, and if the Emperor does not think fit to allow me to live in
Petersburg, perhaps he will agree to find an opening for Paul, so that
his refusal will not be absolute.”
Decidedly, submissiveness, to this degree, is disconcerting! Nothing
here for nihilists, anarchists, or even socialists, to use for their
own ends. What! not a cry of revolt? Perhaps it was prudent to show
respect for the Tsar, but why no revolt against society, or against
the prison-cell from which he emerged an aged man? Just listen to what
he says about his prison, in a letter to Michael dated February 22,
1856: “What has happened to my soul and my beliefs, my intellect and
my affections in the space of these four years, I shall not tell you!
The tale would be too long. The unbroken meditation, wherein I found
refuge from the bitterness of reality, has surely not been vain. I now
have hopes and desires which in bygone days I did not even anticipate.”
And in another passage: “Do not imagine, I pray you, that I am still
as moody and suspicious as I was in my last years in Petersburg. All
that has gone for ever. God, too, is leading us.” And not long after,
in another letter to S. D. Janovsky in 1872,[23] we come across this
extraordinary confession (the italics are Dostoevsky’s!): “You loved
me, cared for me, and I was then _sick in mind_ (I realize it now)
_before my journey to Siberia_, where I was cured.”
Not a word of protest; only gratitude. An unrepaying martyr, indeed!
In what faith does he live and move? What are the convictions that
lend him strength? Perhaps an examination of his opinions, so far as
his letters make them plain, will help us to understand the secret
causes, already faintly indicated, of his disfavour and lack of success
with the public, and explain why Dostoevsky still lingers on, as if in
purgatory, in a middle state between obscurity and fame.
II
Dostoevsky was no partisan. Dreading party feeling and the dissensions
it creates, he wrote: “My thoughts are chiefly concerned with what
constitutes our community of ideas, the common ground whereon we all
might meet, irrespective of tendency.” Profoundly convinced that “in
Russian thought lay reconciliation for Europe’s antagonisms”, “veteran
European Russian” as he termed himself, he devoted the whole strength
of his being to the Russian unity which was to confound party and
faction in one great love of country and of humanity. “Yes, I, too,
hold your opinion that in Russia, by the very nature of her mission,
Europe will be consummated. This has long been plain to me,” so he
wrote from Siberia. Elsewhere he describes Russia as “a nation awaiting
her mission,” “fit to lead the common interests of entire humanity.”
And if, by virtue of a conviction which, perchance, was no more than
premature, he deceived himself as to the importance of the Russian
people (which is by no means _my_ opinion), it was not infatuated
jingoism, but his intuition and the deep understanding he had, simply
because he himself was a Russian, of the beliefs and party passions
dividing Europe. Speaking of Pushkin, he credits himself with the
poet’s “gift of world-wide sympathy,” adding, “It is this very faculty,
his in common with all our people, which makes him truly national.” He
considers the Russian soul as “a meeting-ground whereon all European
aims may be reconciled,” exclaiming, “Where is the true Russian who
does not first and foremost think of Europe?” and uttering even these
strange words, “the Russian wanderer has need of world-wide happiness
in order to find peace himself.”
Persuaded that “Russia’s future activity must be in the highest degree
pan-human,” and that “maybe the Russian idea will be the synthesis
of all the ideas developed with such courage and persistence in the
various European nationalities,” his gaze is constantly directed
outside Russia. His political and social judgments of France and of
Germany are, to us, perhaps the most interesting passages of his
correspondence. He travelled abroad, lingering in Italy, Switzerland,
and Germany, attracted in the first instance by his desire to know
them, detained ultimately for months on end by the eternal question of
money, either having an insufficiency of funds to continue his journey
or fearing debts he has left behind in Russia, and the possibility
of tasting imprisonment again. “With my health in the state it is,”
he wrote when he was forty-nine, “I could not stand even six months’
confinement, nor, what is more, could I work.”
But in foreign parts he misses from the very first the air of Russia
and contact with the Russian people. For him, Sparta, Toledo and Venice
might as well not exist, he cannot become acclimatized, nor can he
content himself anywhere for a moment. “I have no words to tell you how
unbearable living abroad is to me,” he writes to his friend Strakhov.
Not a letter written in exile but breathes the same lament: “I _must_
go back to Russia; the monotony of life here is crushing.” And as
though in Russia were hidden the source of nourishment for his work,
and the sap failed as soon as he was torn from his native soil, he
wrote: “I have no taste for writing, or else, when I do write, it is
with much suffering. I cannot think what this means, except it be that
I have need of Russia, to work and to create.... I was only too clearly
conscious that whether we lived at Dresden or elsewhere was a matter of
indifference, for I should always be a foreigner in a foreign land.”
Again: “If only you knew how good-for-nothing and alien I feel here. I
am growing stupid and dull, and am losing touch with Russia. No breath
of Russian air, no Russian spirit. I don’t understand the Russian
exiles: madmen all!”
And yet at Geneva, at Vevey, he wrote _The Idiot_, at Dresden _The
Eternal Husband_ and _The Possessed_. “You have spoken golden words
about my work here. Right enough, I shall fall behind, not behind the
times, but I shall lose touch with what is happening at home (I know
it better than you do, because every day in life I read three Russian
newspapers, every line of them, and I take out a couple of reviews), I
shall become deaf to the living pulse of life, and how that tells on
artistic creation!”
So this “world sympathy” exists together with and is strengthened by
an ardent nationalism--its natural complement in Dostoevsky’s mind.
He never wearies or flags in his protest against those that were
at that time called the “Progressists,” that is to say (I borrow
this definition from Strakhov), “the generation of politicians
which expected the advancement of Russian civilization to proceed
not from an organic development of the national character, but from
an overhasty assimilation of Western teachings.” “The Frenchman is
first and foremost a Frenchman, and an Englishman, an Englishman, and
their highest aim is to remain true to themselves. Therein lies their
strength.” He takes his stand against the “men who seek to uproot the
Russians,” and does not wait for Barrès to warn the young intellectual
“who tears himself away from society and disowns it, and does not ‘go
to the people,’ but loses himself in foreign parts, in ‘Europeanism,’
in the kingdom of the universal man who has never existed, and in
so doing breaks with the people, scorns it and misjudges it.” Like
Barrès dealing with “sickly Kantism,” he writes in the preface to
the review[24] he edits: “No matter how fertile an idea imported
from abroad, it can only strike root here, become acclimatized, and
prove of genuine use to us if our national life, spontaneously and
without pressure from without, made the idea grow up, naturally and
practically, to meet its own needs--needs which have been recognized
by practical experience. No nation on earth, no society with a certain
measure of stability has been developed to order, on the lines of a
programme imported from abroad.”
Here follows a remark I regret not to have found in Barrès: “The
capacity for separating oneself temporarily from one’s mother-earth
for the purposes of self-contemplation, all prejudices apart, is the
mark of a very strong personality, just as the power to look on the
foreigner with kindly eyes is one of nature’s highest and noblest
gifts.” And did Dostoevsky not seem to foresee how this doctrine was
to lead and blind us?--“It is impossible to undeceive a Frenchman and
prevent his believing himself the most important being in the wide
world. Besides, of the wide world he is pretty ignorant. And what is
more, he is not keen to be enlightened. This is a characteristic common
to the whole nation, and very typical.”
Dostoevsky’s individualism, too, differentiates him more sharply--and
more happily--from Barrès. And, set against Nietzsche, he becomes for
us a shining example of how little infatuation and self-sufficiency may
at times accompany belief in the value of the personality. “The hardest
thing on earth,” he writes, “is to remain yourself,” and “no high aim
is worth a life wrecked,” because for him, without individualism as
without patriotism, there exists no way of serving humanity. If some
Barrès enthusiasts were won over to him by the declarations I quoted a
moment ago, is there one of them who would not be alienated by these
fresh statements?
So, too, on reading these words: “In the new humanity, the æsthetic
idea lacks clarity. The moral basis of society, held fast by
positivism, not only gives no results, but cannot define itself, for
it is lost in cloudy aspirations and ideals. Are there yet not enough
facts to prove that society is not established thus, that these are
not the paths leading to happiness, and that this is not, as has been
believed till now, the source of happiness? But what _is_ its source
then? So many volumes are written, and the essential point is ever
missed: the Western World has lost Christ Jesus--and for this, and this
alone, the Western World must perish.” Not a French Catholic but would
applaud--were he not drawn up sharply by the phrase I dropped at the
beginning: “Christ has been lost, by the error of Catholicism.”
What French Catholic will now dare let himself be touched by the tears
of devotion that are shed throughout these letters of Dostoevsky’s?
Vain hope, “to desire to reveal to the world a Russian Christ, unknown
to the wider world, and whose very being is contained in our orthodoxy.”
The French Catholic, by virtue of his own personal orthodoxy, will
refuse to listen, and for the moment, at least, Dostoevsky’s further
remark is made in vain: “In my opinion, here is found the principle of
our future civilizing force and of Europe’s resurrection at our hands,
the very essence of our future strength.”
Although Dostoevsky gives M. de Vogüé grounds for discerning in him a
“bitter animosity against thought and against life in its fullness,” a
“sanctification of the mindless, colourless, and invertebrate,” and so
on, we read in another passage from a letter to his brother: “Simple
folk, you will say. Aye, but I dread simple men more than complex
ones.”[25] This was his reply to a girl who “was anxious to make
herself useful,” and had expressed her desire to become a midwife or
hospital nurse: “By giving regular attention to your general education
you will fit yourself for an activity more useful a hundred times.
Would it not be better to give thought to the higher branches of your
general education?... The majority of our specialists are fundamentally
ignorant--and most of our students, of both sexes, are absolutely
uneducated. What good can _they_ do to humanity?”[26] Frankly I did not
need these words to realize M. de Vogüé’s mistake; but, all the same,
this mistake _was_ possible.
Dostoevsky is not any more easily enrolled “for” or “against”
Socialism; for, if Mme. Hoffmann is justified in saying, “A Socialist,
in the most human acceptation of the word, Dostoevsky never for a
moment ceased to be!” do we not read in his letters, “Socialism has
already undermined Europe: if we delay too long, it will bring it to
complete ruin”?
Conservative, but not hide-bound by tradition: monarchist, but of
democratic opinions: Christian, but not a Roman Catholic: liberal, but
not a progressive: Dostoevsky remains ever the man of whom there is
no way to make use! He is of the stuff which displeases every party.
Why? Because he never persuaded himself that less than the whole of
his intelligence was necessary to the part he chose to play, or that
for the sake of immediate issues he would be justified in forcing
so delicate an instrument or upsetting its balance. “À propos of
all _these possible tendencies_,” he wrote (and the italics are his
own), “which were united in an expression of welcome to me (April 9,
1876),[27] I should gladly have written an article on the impression
made by the letters, but, on reflection, I realized that it would be
impossible to write it in all sincerity: now, lacking sincerity, could
it be worth while?” What does he mean? Doubtless this: to write a
reasonable article so as to please everybody and make a success of it,
he would have to strain his ideas, simplify them to excess, in short,
force his convictions beyond natural limits. And that is just what he
cannot concede.
His individualism, while not harsh, and in reality one with his
honesty of thought, does not allow him to submit his idea unless in
its integrity, complex though this may be. And there is no stronger or
subtler reason for his unpopularity amongst us.
I do not mean to insinuate that strong convictions ordinarily involve
a certain dishonesty in reasoning; but they _do_ willingly dispense
with intelligence. And yet, M. Barrès is too clever not to have quickly
grasped the fact that not by impartial illumination of all its aspects
can we ensure the speedy dissemination of an idea, but by giving it a
definite bias.
If you want ideas to succeed, you must submit them one at a time; or,
better, to succeed, submit one idea and no more. It is not enough
to invent a good medium of expression; it is a question of never
outgrowing it. The public likes to know exactly where it stands when
a great name is mentioned. And tolerates ill what would congest its
brain! At the mention of Pasteur, it likes to be able to say to itself,
without hesitation: Yes, hydrophobia. Nietzsche? the _superman_.
Curie? radium. Barrès? France and her dead. Quinton? plasma. Just as
if you were to say. Lazenby? pickles. And Parmentier, if so be it that
he did “invent” the potato, is better known, thanks to this solitary
vegetable, than if we had to thank him for the entire produce of our
kitchen gardens.
Dostoevsky all but reached success in France, when M. de Vogüé had
the bright idea of calling, and thus stereotyping in this handy
phrase--_the religion of suffering_--the doctrine he found worked into
the closing chapters of _Crime and Punishment_.
That it is there, I am willing to concede; also that the phrase was a
happy invention.... Unfortunately it did not contain the whole being
of the man: he was too great in every way to be compressed into such
small bulk. For if he was of these for whom “only one thing is needful:
to know God,” at least this knowledge of God he tried to diffuse
throughout his works in all its human and anxious complexity.
Ibsen was not easy to pin down either; like any other writer whose
work is interrogative rather than affirmative. The relative success
of the two plays, _A Doll’s House_ and _An Enemy of the People_, is
due, certainly not to their outstanding excellence, but to the shadow
of a conclusion which escaped Ibsen in them both. The public is but
ill-pacified by the author who does not come to a strikingly evident
solution. In its eyes, it is the sin of uncertainty, indolence of mind,
lukewarmness of convictions. And most often, having little liking for
intelligence, the public gauges the strength of a conviction by naught
but the violence, persistence, and uniformity of the affirmation.
Anxious not to extend a field already so vast, I shall not attempt to
define his doctrine here. I merely wanted to indicate its wealth of
contradictions to the Western mind, unused to this need of reconciling
extremes. Dostoevsky remains steadfast in the belief that between
nationalism and europeanism, individualism and self-abnegation,
the contradiction is apparent only. He holds that because each
understands but one aspect of this vital question, the opposing
parties remain uniformly remote from the truth. One more quotation:
it will, I am sure, throw more light on Dostoevsky’s position than
any commentary. “To be happy must one be impersonal? Does salvation
lie in self-effacement? Far from it, I should say. Not only must
there be no self-effacement, but one must become a personality,
even in a degree beyond what is possible in the West. Be clear as
to my meaning: voluntary sacrifice, offered consciously and without
constraint, sacrifice of the individual for the good of mankind,
is, to my mind, the mark of personality in its noblest and highest
development, of perfect self-control ... the absolute expression of the
will. A strongly developed personality, conscious of its right to be
such, having cast out fear, cannot use itself, cannot be used, except
in sacrifice for others, that these may become, like unto itself,
self-determining and happy personalities. It is Nature’s law, and
mankind tends to reach it.”[28] This solution is taught him by Christ:
“_For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall
lose his life for My sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it._”
Back in Petersburg in the winter of 1871-2, being then fifty years of
age, he writes to Janovsky:[29] “There is no use hiding the fact that
old age is coming near, and yet one doesn’t think of it, and makes
preparation for a new work (_The Karamazovs_), for at last publishing
something that will please; one still hopes for something out of life,
and yet it is possible that everything has already been received.
I am speaking of myself! Well, I am thoroughly happy!” This is the
happiness, the joy beyond suffering latent in all Dostoevsky’s life and
work, a joy that Nietzsche had rightly sensed, and which I charge M. de
Vogüé with having missed entirely.
The tone of the letters changes brusquely at this period. His usual
correspondents being, like himself, in Petersburg, he is no longer
writing to them but to strangers, chance correspondents who turn to him
for edification, comfort, guidance. I should require to quote almost
all the letters; my better plan is to refer you to the book; I am
writing this article solely to bring my reader into touch with it.
At last, freed from his horrible financial worries, he busies himself
during the closing years of his life with editing the _Journal of an
Author_, published only at irregular intervals. “I confess,” he wrote
to the well-known Aksakov in November, 1880 (that is, three months
before his death), “I confess, in all friendship, that intending to
undertake next year the publication of the _Journal_, I have besought
God often and long to make me pure in heart and pure of lips; without
sin or envy, and incapable of wounding.”[30]
In this _Journal_ wherein M. de Vogüé could see only “obscure pæans,
evading alike analysis and discussion,” the Russian people happily
discovered something different, and Dostoevsky was able to feel that
round about his work his dream of spiritual harmony was almost being
realized, without any arbitrary unification.
When his death was announced, this communion and blending of spirits
was shiningly manifested, and if, at first, “subversive elements
planned to monopolize his dead body,” very soon, “by the miracle of
one of these unexpected fusions that are Russia’s secret, when a
national conviction rouses her, all parties, all antagonists, all
scattered fragments of the empire were seen to be joined in a fresh
bond of enthusiasm by this death.” The sentence is M. de Vogüé’s, and I
rejoice after all the strictures I have made concerning his study, to
be able to quote such noble words. “As it was said of the Tsars of old,
that they gathered together the land of Russia,” he says later, “this
spiritual King had ‘gathered together’ the heart of Russia.”
The same rallying of individual energies is at work now throughout
Europe, slowly, mysteriously, almost--chiefly in Germany, where the
editions of his works are multiplying, in France, too, where the rising
generation recognizes and appreciates, better than that of M. de Vogüé,
his strength. The hidden reasons which delayed his success will be the
builders of a more enduring fame.
FOOTNOTES
[5] M. Gide refers to J. W. Bienstock’s translation, _Correspondance et
Voyage à l’Étranger_, Paris, 1908. (_Translator’s note._)
[6] Letter to his brother Michael, Semipalatinsk, May 31, 1858.
[7] Bienstock, p. 122. Letter to A. N. Maïkov, Semipalatinsk, January
18, 1856.
[8] Bienstock, p. 364. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, February 26,
1870.
[9] Bienstock, p. 387-388. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, December
2, 1870.
[10] Bienstock, p. 415. Letter to A. N. Maïkov, Dresden, March 2, 1871.
[11] Bienstock, pp. 364-365. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden,
February 26, 1870.
[12] Bienstock, p. 55. Letter to his brother Michael, March 24, 1845.
[13] Mayne, p. 198. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, October 9, 1870.
[14] Bienstock, pp. 386-387. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden,
December 2, 1870.
[15] Bienstock, p. 267. Letter to A. N. Maïkov, Geneva, September 15,
1867.
[16] Bienstock, pp. 470-471. Letter to Mlle. N. N----, Petersburg,
April 11, 1880.
[17] Bienstock, p. 235. Letter to Baron Alexander Wrangel, Petersburg,
March 31, 1865.
[18] Bienstock, p. 239. Letter to Baron Alexander Wrangel, Petersburg,
April 9, 1865.
[19] “To defend the theories he fancies are his,” says M. de Vogüé.
[20] Bienstock, p. 159. Letter to his brother Michael, Semipalatinsk,
July 19, 1858.
[21] Mayne, p. 51.
[22] Bienstock, p. 135. Letter to Baron Alexander Wrangel,
Semipalatinsk, May 23, 1856.
[23] Bienstock, p. 438.
[24] See Bienstock, pp. 592-598: Preface to _The Epoch_, 1865.
[25] Mayne, p. 62.
[26] Bienstock, pp. 447-448. Letter to Mlle. Guérassimov, Petersburg,
March 7, 1877.
[27] Bienstock, p. 442. Letter to Mme. C. D. Altschevsky, Petersburg,
April 9, 1876.
[28] Bienstock, p. 540.
[29] Bienstock, p. 437. Letter to S. D. Janovsky, Petersburg, February
4, 1872.
[30] Bienstock, p. 479. Letter to I. S. Aksakov, Petersburg, November
4, 1880.
ADDRESSES
(1922)
I
Some time before the war I was preparing for Charles Péguy’s _Cahiers
de la Quinzaine_, a _Life of Dostoevsky_ after the manner of Romain
Rolland’s fine monographs on Beethoven and Michelangelo. War came, and
I was forced to lay aside the notes I had taken. For long other cares
and duties absorbed me and my project was to all intents and purposes
abandoned, when recently at the celebration of Dostoevsky’s Centenary,
Jacques Copeau asked me to address a meeting in his theatre, the _Vieux
Colombier_. I brought my packet of notes out into the light of day
again, and re-reading them after the lapse of time, I found the ideas
I had jotted down seemed worth our attention, but that chronological
order, though necessary for biographical purposes, was perhaps not
the most advisable on this occasion. It is often a difficult task to
separate the ideas Dostoevsky weaves, as it were, into a fine web in
each of his novels, but we never lose track of them. In my eyes these
ideas are all that is most precious in Dostoevsky and I have made them
my own. If I took up each of his works in turn, I could not possibly
avoid repeating myself. There is, however, another--and better--way:
pursuing his ideas from one novel to another, I shall try to lay hold
of them and set them forth as plainly as is possible despite their
apparent confusion. Psychologist, sociologist, moralist--Dostoevsky
is all three, and novelist as well. Whereas in his works ideas are
never presented in their crude state, but always through the medium
of the character expressing them (which accounts for their confusion
and relativity), I, for my part, will try to avoid abstractions and
outline the ideas as sharply as possible. I should like first of all to
introduce you to Dostoevsky in person, and speak of some incidents in
his life that reveal his character and help us to draw a clear likeness
of him.
My pre-war plan of the biography comprised an introduction in which
I proposed to discuss the commonly accepted idea of him. To throw
light on the subject, I should have drawn a parallel between him and
Rousseau--and no arbitrary one, I can assure you. Their natures reveal
such deep-laid analogies that Rousseau’s _Confessions_ were able to
exert an extraordinary influence on Dostoevsky. But in my opinion
Rousseau, from the very beginning of his life, was poisoned, as it
were, by Plutarch, through whom he fashioned for himself a somewhat
rhetorical and pompous notion of a “great man.” He set up before
himself the image of a fancied hero, and his life was one prolonged
effort to be like it. He tried hard to _be_ what he wanted to _seem_.
I allow that his painting of his own character may be sincere, but he
is ever thinking of his pose, which pride alone dictates.
“False greatness,” in the admirable words of La Bruyère, “is shy and
inaccessible. Conscious of its foible, it hides away, or at least
never shows an open face, letting be seen only as much as will make
an impression and save it from being revealed for what it really is,
something mean and small.”
And if I do not go so far as to recognize Rousseau in this description,
I _do_ think of Dostoevsky when a little farther on I read:
“True greatness is free, gentle, familiar, unaffected; it can be
touched and handled, and loses nothing when seen at close quarters.
The better you are acquainted with it, the more you admire it. It
bends out of goodness of heart to its inferiors, and returns to its
own level without effort. Sometimes it lets itself go, neglecting and
surrendering its natural advantages, but ever ready to recover them and
put them to use.”
With Dostoevsky there is this complete absence of pose or
stage-management. He never considers himself a _superman_. He is most
humbly human, and I do not think that pride of intellect could ever
properly understand him.
The word _humility_ comes up again and again in his letters and
works. “Why should they deny me? I make no demands. I am but a humble
petitioner.” (November 23, 1869.)--“I do not demand, I only seek in
all humility.” (December 7, 1869.)--“I have made the humblest of
requests.” (February 12, 1870.)
“He often astonished me by a kind of humility,” says the _Raw Youth_ in
speaking of his father, and in his effort to understand the possible
relations between his father and mother, and the quality of their love,
he recollects his father’s phrase, “She married me out of humility.”
I read lately in an interview with M. Henry Bordeaux a sentence which
surprised me somewhat: “Seek first to know yourself.” The literary
creator who seeks himself runs a great risk--the risk of finding
himself. From then onwards he writes coldly, deliberately, in keeping
with the self he has found. He imitates himself. If he knows his path
and his limitations, it is only to keep strictly to them. His great
dread is no longer insincerity, but inconsistency. The true artist is
never but half-conscious of himself when creating. He does not know
exactly who he is. He learns to know himself only through his creation,
in it, and after it. Dostoevsky never set out to find himself; he gave
himself without stint in his works. He lost himself in each of the
characters of his books, and, for this reason, it is in them that he
can be found again. Presently we shall see how painfully awkward he
is when speaking in his own name, how eloquent, on the other hand,
when his own ideas are expressed by those whom he inspires. It is
in endowing them with life that he finds himself. He lives in each
of them, and the most obvious result of merging himself in their
diversity is the masking of his own inconsistencies.
I know no writer richer in contradictions and inconsistencies than
Dostoevsky: Nietzsche would describe them as _antagonisms_. Had he been
philosopher instead of novelist, he would certainly have attempted
to bring his ideas into line, whereby we should have lost the most
precious of them.
The happenings in Dostoevsky’s life, however tragic, are but surface
disturbances. The passions overwhelming him seem to shake him to the
depths; but beyond, there remains an inner chamber, unreached by
outside happenings or by passion. In this connection a few of his own
words will seem a revelation, if read in conjunction with another
passage:
“Without some goal and some effort to reach it, no man can live. When
he has lost all hope, all object in life, man often becomes a monster
in his misery.”[31]
But then he seems still in error where his real goal is concerned, for
he adds immediately after: “The one object of the prisoners was freedom
and to get out of prison.”
These words were written in 1861. Such then was his idea of an aim in
life. Of course he was suffering in that dread captivity! (He spent
ten years in Siberia: four in prison, then six more in forced military
service.) He was suffering; but once more a free man, he could realize
that the real goal, the freedom he really longed for, was something
deeper and had no connection with the throwing wide of prison gates.
In 1874 he could write this extraordinary sentence, which I like to
compare with what I read to you a moment ago:
“No aim can possibly be worth a wrecked existence.”[32]
So, according to Dostoevsky, we have each our reason for living,
superior, hidden--hidden often from ourselves--certainly far different
from the ostensible goal assigned by most of us to our existence.
Let us first of all try to picture Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky. His
friend Riesenkampf delineates him as he was at twenty years of age, in
1841:
“The face was rounded and full; the nose slightly retroussé; the hair
light brown, worn short. A broad forehead, and beneath thin eyebrows,
little grey eyes, set deep in the head. Pale cheeks, covered with
freckles. A sickly, almost livid complexion, and very thick lips.”
It is sometimes asserted that his first epileptic attacks occurred
in Siberia; but he was a sick man even before sentence was passed on
him, and the disease certainly made progress in Siberia. “A sickly
complexion.” Dostoevsky had always had poor health. And yet he, weak
and complaining, was singled out for military service while his robust
brother was exempted.
In 1841, that is, at twenty years of age, he was promoted
non-commissioned officer, and then, in 1843, he took the examinations
and was commissioned ensign. We learn that his officer’s pay amounted
to 3,000 roubles, and although he had come into his share of the
father’s fortune after the latter’s death, he led a free life, and had
to take a younger brother in charge, consequently he was always falling
into debt. This money question turns up again and again in his letters,
much more urgently than in Balzac’s. It plays an extremely important
part almost to the very end of his life, and it was not until the
closing years that he was really freed from his financial worries.
In his young days Dostoevsky indulged in every dissipation. He was
assiduous at the play, at concerts, at the ballet. Not a care in the
world! He chooses to rent a flat simply because he has taken a fancy
to the landlord’s appearance. His servant robs him, and he finds
entertainment in watching the pilfering continue. His mood changes
abruptly, according as fortune smiles or frowns. Faced with his utter
inability to steer a course in life, his family and friends are anxious
to see him share quarters with Riesenkampf. “Take this real methodical
German as your model,” they tell him. Riesenkampf, slightly older than
Dostoevsky, was a physician, and came to settle down in Petersburg
in the year 1843. At this moment, Dostoevsky has not a penny to his
name. He is living on bread and milk--both unpaid for. “Fyodor is one
of these people in whose company a man lives well, but who himself
will remain a needy creature till the very end of his days.” They set
up quarters together, but Dostoevsky proves himself impossible as a
companion. He receives Riesenkampf’s patients in the waiting-room,
and each time one of them appears needy, Dostoevsky succours him with
Riesenkampf’s funds or with his own, when he _has_ any. One fine day
he receives a thousand roubles from Moscow, the bulk of which sum
is immediately employed in settling some debts; then, the very same
evening, Dostoevsky gambles away the rest, at billiards, by his own
account, and the following morning is obliged to borrow five roubles
from his friend. I forgot to tell you that the last fifty roubles had
been stolen by a patient of Riesenkampf’s, whom Dostoevsky, in a sudden
manifestation of friendliness, had shown into his room. Riesenkampf and
Dostoevsky parted in March, 1844, without much apparent improvement in
the latter’s ways.
In 1846, he published _Poor Folk_. This book had sudden and
considerable success. Dostoevsky’s manner of speaking about his success
is significant of the man. We read in a contemporary letter:
“It dazes me: I am not living. I haven’t time to think.... A precarious
reputation has been built up around me, and I don’t know how long the
damnable thing will last.”[33]
In 1849, along with a group of suspects, he is taken by the police.
This is the affair known as the Petrachevsky Plot.
It is difficult to say what exactly were at this time Dostoevsky’s
political and social opinions. From this frequenting of suspected
individuals we are to infer a great measure of intellectual curiosity
and a certain generous warm-heartedness which ran him into unconsidered
risks. But we have no authority for believing that Dostoevsky ever was
what can be termed an anarchist, a being threatening the safety of the
state.
Numerous passages in his letters and in the _Journal of an Author_
show him as entertaining quite the opposite ideas, and the whole of
_The Possessed_ is, as it were, a speech for the prosecution against
anarchism. At any rate, taken he was amongst these suspects meeting
round Petrachevsky. He was thrown into prison, sent to trial, and heard
himself condemned to death. It was only at the eleventh hour that the
death sentence was commuted and he was exiled to Siberia. All this is
already familiar to you. In these causeries I should like to speak only
of what you could not find elsewhere; but, for the sake of such as
are unfamiliar with them, I shall read to you some passages from his
letters dealing with his sentence and his life in the penal settlement.
I consider them very self-revealing. In them we shall see, through the
portrayal of his sufferings, appear again and again the optimism that
supported him all his days. This is what he wrote, on July 18, 1849,
from the fortress where he lay awaiting the verdict.
“Human beings have an incredible amount of endurance and will to live;
I should never have expected to find so much in myself; now I know from
experience that it is there.”[34]
Then in August, weighed down by ill-health:
“To lose courage is to sin ... work, ever more work, _con amore_,
therein lies real happiness.”[35]
And again, on September 14, 1849:
“I had expected worse. And I know now that I have in me such reserves
of vitality that it would be difficult to exhaust.”[36]
I shall read almost the whole of his short letter dated December 22.
“To-day, December 22, we were led out to Semionovsky Square. There
the death warrant was read over to us all, we were given the cross to
kiss, swords were snapped above our heads, and our last toilet was
performed (white shirts). Then, three of us were placed against posts
for execution. I was the sixth; we were called up in threes, so I came
in the second group, and I had a few moments left to live. I thought of
you, brother, and of yours; at that last moment you alone were in my
thoughts, and then I realized how much I loved you, beloved brother!
I had time to kiss Plestcheyev and Dourov, who were beside me, and bid
them farewell. At last the retreat was sounded, those tied to the posts
were fetched back, and it was read out to us that His Imperial Majesty
was pleased to spare our lives.”[37]
In Dostoevsky’s novels we shall come across again and again more or
less direct allusions to the death sentence and to the condemned man’s
last hours. I cannot dwell on this for the moment.
Before starting out for Semipalatinsk, he was granted half an hour to
take leave of his brother Michael. Of the two, he was the calmer, a
friend relates, and said:
“In the settlement, dear brother, the convicts are not wild beasts,
just men, better men than I perhaps, more deserving, too, maybe. Yes,
we shall meet again, I hope: I am sure we shall see each other again.
Only do write to me and send me books. I shall soon let you know which
to send: surely reading is permitted there.” (This, says the narrator,
was a white lie to comfort his brother.) “As soon as I am released, I
shall begin to write. I have _lived_ during these last months, and in
the days before me, what shall I not see and live through? After all
that I shall not lack material for writing.”[38]
During the four years of Siberia which followed, Dostoevsky was not
permitted to write to his family. At any rate the existing volume
of correspondence contains no letters from this period, nor do Orest
Müller’s _Documents_ (_Materialen_), published in 1883, indicate any.
But since the issue of these _Documents_ numerous Dostoevsky letters
have been found and published; doubtless still more will yet be
discovered.
According to Müller, Dostoevsky left the penal settlement on March
2, 1854: according to official records, on January 23. These same
archives mention nineteen letters written by Fyodor Dostoevsky between
March 16, 1854 and September 11, 1856 to his brother, relatives, and
friends during the years of military service at Semipalatinsk, where
his sentence was completed. The French translation gives only twelve of
these letters, omitting (and why I cannot tell) that admirable letter
dated February 22, 1854, which, originally translated and printed
in Numbers 12 and 13 of _La Vogue_, 1886, now only with difficulty
accessible, was reprinted in the February issue of the _Nouvelle Revue
Française_, 1922.
Seeing this letter is not to be found in the published volume of
Dostoevsky’s correspondence, allow me to read some lengthy extracts
from it:[39]
(February 22, 1854.) “At last I can talk with you somewhat more
explicitly, and, I believe, in a more reasonable manner. But before
I write another line I _must_ ask you: tell me, for God’s sake, why
you have never written me a single syllable till now? Could I have
expected this from you? Believe me, in my lonely and isolated state,
I sometimes fell into utter despair, for I believed that you were no
longer alive; through whole nights I would brood upon what was to
become of your children, and I cursed my fate because I could not help
them....”
You see his keenest suffering is not in the consciousness of his own
abandonment, but in the realization of his powerlessness to help.
“How can I impart to you what is now in my mind--the things I thought,
the things I did, the convictions I acquired, the conclusions I came
to? I cannot even attempt the task. It is absolutely impossible. I
don’t like to leave a piece of work half done; to say only a part is
to say nothing. At any rate, you now have my detailed report in your
hands: read it, and get from it what you will. It is my duty to tell
you all, and so I will begin with my recollections. Do you remember how
we parted from each other, dear beloved fellow? You had scarcely left
me when we three, Dourov, Yastrembsky, and I, were led out to have the
irons put on. Precisely at midnight on that Christmas Eve (1849) did
chains touch me for the first time. They weigh about ten pounds, and
make walking extraordinarily difficult. Then we were sent into open
sledges, each with a gendarme; and so, in four sledges, the orderly
opening the procession, we left Petersburg. I was heavy-hearted, and
the many different impressions filled me with confused and uncertain
sensations. My heart beat with a peculiar flutter, and that numbed
its pain. Still, the fresh air was reviving in its effect, and,
since it is usual before all new experiences to be aware of a curious
vivacity and eagerness, so I was at the bottom quite tranquil. I looked
attentively at all the festively-lit houses of Petersburg, and said
good-bye to each. They drove us past your abode, and at Krayevsky’s the
windows were brilliantly lit. You had told me he was giving a Christmas
party and tree, and that your children were going to it, with Emilie
Fyodorovna; I did feel dreadfully sad as we passed that house. I took
leave, as it were, of the little ones. I felt so lonely for them, and
even years afterwards I often thought of them with tears in my eyes. We
were driven beyond Yaroslavl; after three or four stations we stopped,
in the first grey of morning, at Schlüsselburg, and went into an inn.
There we drank tea with as much avidity as if we had not touched
anything for a week. After the eight months’ captivity, sixty versts in
a sledge gave us appetites of which, even to-day, I think with pleasure.
“I was in a good temper. Dourov chattered incessantly, and Yastryembsky
expressed unwonted apprehensions for the future. We all laid ourselves
out to become better acquainted with our orderly. He was a good old
man, very friendly inclined towards us: a man who had seen a lot of
life; he had travelled all over Europe with dispatches. On the way he
showed us many kindnesses. His name was Kusma Prokofyevitch Prokofyev.
Among other things he let us have a covered sledge, which was very
welcome, for the frost was fearful.
“The second day was a holiday; the drivers, who were changed at the
various stations, wore cloaks of grey German cloth and bright red
belts; in the village streets there was not a soul to be seen. It was
a splendid winter day. They drove us through the remote parts of the
Petersburg, Novgorod, and Yaroslavl Governments. There were quite
insignificant little towns, at great distances from one another. But
as we were passing through on a holiday, there was always plenty to
eat and drink; we drove--drove terribly. We were warmly dressed, it is
true, but we had to sit for ten hours at a time in the sledges, halting
at only five or six stations; it was almost unendurable. I froze to
the marrow, and could scarcely thaw myself in the warm rooms at the
stations. Strange to say, the journey completely restored me to health.
Near Perm, we had a frost of 40 degrees during some of the nights. I
don’t recommend that to you. It was highly disagreeable.
“Mournful was the moment when we crossed the Ural. The horses and
sledges sank deep in the snow; a snowstorm was raging. We got out
of the sledge--it was night--and waited, standing, till they were
extricated. All about us whirled the snowstorm. We were standing on the
confines of Europe and Asia; before us lay Siberia and the mysterious
future--behind us, our whole past; it was very melancholy. Tears came
to my eyes. On the way, the peasants would stream out of all the
villages to see us; and although we were fettered, prices were trebled
to us at all the stations. Kusma Prokofyevitch took half our expenses
on himself, though we tried hard to prevent him; in this way each of
us, during the whole journey, spent only fifteen roubles.
“On January 12, 1850, we came to Tobolsk. After we had been paraded
before the authorities, and searched, in which proceeding all our money
was taken from us, myself, Dourov and Yastryembsky were taken into one
cell; the others, Spejechynov, etc., who had arrived before us, were
in another section, and during the whole time we hardly once saw each
other. I should like to tell you more of our six days’ stay in Tobolsk,
and of the impression it made upon me. But I haven’t room here. I will
only tell you that the great compassion and sympathy which was shown to
us there, made up to us, like a big piece of happiness, for all that
had gone before. The prisoners of former days[40] (and still more their
wives) cared for us as if they had been our kith and kin. Those noble
souls, tested by five-and-twenty years of suffering and self-sacrifice!
We saw them but seldom, for we were very rigidly guarded; still they
sent us clothes and provisions, they comforted and encouraged us. I had
brought far too few clothes, and had bitterly repented it; but they
sent me clothes. Finally we left Tobolsk, and reached Omsk in three
days.
“While I was in Tobolsk, I gathered information about my future
superiors. They told me that the Commandant was a very decent
fellow, but that the Major, Krivzov, was an uncommon brute, a petty
tyrant, a drunkard, a trickster--in short, the greatest horror that
can be imagined. From the very beginning, he called both Dourov
and me blockhead, and vowed to chastise us bodily at the first
transgression. He had already held his position for two years, and
done the most hideous and unsanctioned things; two years later he
was court-martialled for them. So God protected me from him! He used
to come to us mad drunk (I never once saw him sober), and would
seek out some inoffensive person and flog him on the pretext that
he--the prisoner--was drunk. Often he came at night and punished at
random--say, because such and such a one was sleeping on his left side
instead of his right, or because he talked or moaned in his sleep--in
fact, anything that occurred to his drunken mind. I should have had to
break out in the long run against such a man as that, and it was he who
wrote the monthly reports of us to Petersburg.
“I spent the whole four years behind dungeon walls, and only left the
prison when I was taken on ‘hard labour.’ The work was hard, though
not always; sometimes in bad weather, in rain, or in winter during
the unendurable frosts, my strength would forsake me. Once I had to
spend four hours at a piece of extra work, and in such frost that
the quicksilver froze; it was perhaps 40 degrees below zero. One of
my feet was frost-bitten. We all lived together in one barrack-room.
Imagine an old, crazy, wooden building, that should long ago have been
broken up as useless. In the summer it is unbearably hot, in the winter
unbearably cold. All the boards are rotten; on the ground filth lies an
inch thick; every instant one is in danger of slipping and coming down.
The small windows are so frozen over that even by day one can hardly
read. The ice on the panes is three inches thick. The ceilings drip,
there are draughts everywhere. We are packed like herrings in a barrel.
The stove is heated with six logs of wood, but the room is so cold that
the ice never thaws; the atmosphere is unbearable--and so through all
the winter long.
“In the same room, the prisoners wash their linen, and thus make the
place so wet that one scarcely dares to move. From twilight till
morning we are forbidden to leave the barrack-room; the doors are
barricaded; in the ante-room a great wooden trough for the calls of
nature is placed; this makes one almost unable to breathe. All the
prisoners stink like pigs; they say that they can’t help it, for they
must live, and are but men. We sleep upon bare boards; each man was
allowed one pillow only. We covered ourselves with short sheepskins,
and our feet were outside the covering all the time. It was thus that
we froze night after night. Fleas, lice, and other vermin by the
bushel. In the winter we got thin sheepskins to wear, which didn’t keep
us warm at all, and boots with short legs; thus equipped, we had to go
out into the frost.
“To eat we got bread and cabbage soup; the soup should, by the
regulations, have contained a quarter pound of meat per head; but they
put in sausage-meat, and so I never came across a piece of genuine
flesh. On feast days we got porridge, but with scarcely any butter. On
fast days, cabbage and nothing else. My stomach went utterly to pieces,
and I suffered tortures from indigestion.
“From all this you can see yourself that one couldn’t live there at
all without money; if I had had none, I should most assuredly have
perished; no one could endure such a life. But every convict does some
sort of work and sells it, thus earning, every single one of them, a
few pence. I often drank tea and bought myself a piece of meat; it
was my salvation. It was quite impossible to do without smoking, for
otherwise the stench would have choked one. All these things were done
behind the backs of the officials.
“I was often in hospital. My nerves were so shattered that I had some
epileptic fits--however, that was not often. I have rheumatism in my
legs now, too. But except for that, I feel right well. Add to all these
discomforts the fact that it was almost impossible to get one’s self a
book, and that when I did get one, I had to read it on the sly; that
all around me was incessant malignity, turbulence, and quarrelling;
then perpetual espionage, and the impossibility of ever being alone,
even for an instant--and so without variation for four long years.
You’ll believe me when I tell you I was not happy! And imagine, in
addition, the ever-present dread of drawing down some punishment on
myself, the irons, and the utter oppression of spirits--and you have
the picture of my life.
“I won’t even try to tell you what transformations were undergone by my
soul, my faith, my mind, and my heart, in those four years. It would be
a long story. Still, the eternal concentration, the escape into myself
from bitter reality, did bear its fruit. I now have many new needs and
hopes of which I never thought in other days. But all this will be pure
enigma for you, and so I’ll pass to other things. I will say only one
word: do not forget me, and do help me! I need books and money. Send
them me, for Christ’s sake.
“Omsk is a hateful hole. There is hardly a tree there. In summer, heat
and winds that bring sandstorms; in winter, snowstorms. I have scarcely
seen anything of the country around. The place is dirty, almost
exclusively inhabited by military, and dissolute to the last degree. I
mean the common people. If I hadn’t discovered some human beings here,
I should have gone utterly to the dogs.
“Constantine Ivanovitch Ivanov is like a brother to me. He has done
everything that he in any way could for me. I owe him money. If he ever
goes to Petersburg, show him some recognition. I owe him twenty-five
roubles. But how can I repay his kindness, his constant willingness to
carry out all my requests, his attention and care for me, just like a
brother’s? And he is not the only one I have to thank in that way.
Brother, there are very many noble natures in the world.
“I have already said that your silence often tortures me. I thank you
for the money you sent. In your next letter (even if it’s ‘_official_,’
for I don’t know yet whether it is possible for me to correspond with
you)--in your next, write as fully as you can of all your affairs, of
Emilie Fyodorovna, the children, all relations and acquaintances; also
of those in Moscow--who is alive and who is dead; and of your business;
tell me what capital you started with, whether it is lucrative, whether
you are in funds, finally, whether you will help me financially, and
how much you will send me a year. But send no money with the official
letter--particularly if I don’t find a covering address. For the
present, give Michael Petrovitch as the consignor of all packets (you
understand, don’t you?). For the time, I have some money, but I have no
books. If you can, send me the magazines for this year, or at any rate
the _O.Z._
“But what I urgently need are the following: I need (very necessary!)
ancient historians (in French translation), modern historians: Guizot,
Thierry, Thiers, Ranke, and so forth; national studies, and the Fathers
of the Church. Choose the cheapest and most compact editions. Send them
by return.
“People try to console me: ‘They’re quite simple sort of fellows
there.’ But I dread simple men more than complex ones. For that matter,
men everywhere are just--men. Even among the robber-murderers in
the prison, I came to know some men in those four years. Believe me,
there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often
gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior. And not in a
single case, or even two, but in several cases. Some inspired respect,
others were downright fine. I taught the Russian language to a young
Circassian--he had been transported to Siberia for robbery with murder.
How grateful he was to me! Another convict wept when I said good-bye to
him. Certainly I had often given him money, but it was so little, and
his gratitude so boundless! My character, though, was deteriorating;
in my relations with others I was ill-tempered and impatient. They
accounted for it by my mental condition, and bore all without
grumbling. Apropos, what a number of national types and characters I
became familiar with in prison! I lived _into_ their lives, and so I
believe I know them really well. Many tramps’ and thieves’ careers
were laid bare to me, and above all, the whole wretched existence of
the common people. Decidedly I have not spent my time there in vain. I
have learnt to know the Russian people as only a few know them. I am a
little vain of it. I hope that such vanity is pardonable....
“Send me the Koran, and Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_, and if you
have the chance of sending me anything not officially, then be sure
to send Hegel, but particularly Hegel’s _History of Philosophy_. Upon
that depends my whole future. For God’s sake, exert yourself to get
me transferred to the Caucasus; try to find out from well-informed
sources whether I shall be permitted to print my works, and in what way
I should seek this sanction. I intend to try for permission in two or
three years. I beg you to sustain me so long. Without money I shall be
destroyed by military life. So please!...
“Now I mean to write novels and plays. But I must still read a great
deal. Don’t forget me.
“Once again farewell.
“F. D.”[41]
This letter, like so many others, remained unanswered. It is evident
that Dostoevsky was left without news from his family during his
whole term of imprisonment. Are we to suppose, on his brother’s part,
prudence, fear of compromising himself, or maybe indifference? I cannot
tell. Mme. Hoffmann, in her biography, inclines to the last-mentioned
supposition.
The first we know of Dostoevsky’s letters subsequent to his release and
enlistment in the 7th Siberian Line Regiment is dated March 27, 1854.
It does not appear in the French edition of his correspondence. In this
letter we read as follows:
“Send me--not newspapers, but European histories. Economists--Church
Fathers--as many of the classics as possible. Herodotus, Thucydides,
Tacitus, Pliny, Flavius, Plutarch, Diodorus, etc., in French
translations. And the Koran and a German Dictionary. Not all at once,
of course, but as much as you can. Send me Pissaren’s _Physics_
too, and a manual of physiology, any one, in French if better than
in Russian. All in the cheapest editions. Not in one consignment,
but slowly, one book after another. I shall be grateful for every
little thing you can do for me. Do realize how urgently I need this
intellectual food!...”
“Now you know my chief occupations,” he writes a little later. “Really
I have none but these connected with my duty. No outside events, no
disturbances in my life, no mishaps. But what is happening in soul,
heart, and mind, what has sprung up, ripened or been blighted, what
has been cast aside with the tares, _that_ cannot be told and written
down on a scrap of paper. Here I live in isolation; I shrink out of
sight, as usual. Moreover, for five years I lived with an escort,
and there are times when it is pure bliss for me to be alone. On
the whole, prison has destroyed many things in me and created new.
For example, I’ve already spoken about my illness: strange attacks
resembling epilepsy. And yet not epilepsy. Some day I shall give you
particulars.”[42]
In the last of these causeries we shall come back to this terrible
question of his illness.
In a letter dated November 6 of the same year we find:
“It will soon be ten months since I took up my new life. As for the
other four years, I look upon them as a period when I was buried alive
and closed in a coffin. What terrible years! I cannot, my friend, tell
you how terrible. Unspeakable suffering without end, for every hour,
every minute lay heavy on my soul. During the whole of these four
years, not a moment but what I was conscious of my prison walls.”[43]
But, immediately after, watch how far his optimism rises above it all:
“I was so busy all summer that I had scarcely time for sleep. But now
I have grown used to things. My health too has improved slightly.
And, hope not wholly lost, I can look at the future with moderate
fortitude.”[44]
Three letters from the same period were given in the _Niva_, April,
1898. Of these the French edition of Dostoevsky’s _Correspondence_
includes the first only. In one (August 21, 1855) there is reference to
a letter of the previous October, which has not been traced.
“When, in my letter of last October, I repeated my complaints at your
silence, you answered that these had made very painful reading for
you. Oh, Mysha! for the love of God, bear me no ill-will; remember
my loneliness. I am like a pebble cast aside. I’ve always been of
a gloomy, sickly, susceptible disposition. I am myself thoroughly
convinced I was in the wrong.”
Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg on November 29, 1859. At
Semipalatinsk he had married the widow of a deportee, mother of a
growing son whose intelligence seemingly was less than mediocre.
Dostoevsky adopted the boy, for whom he made himself answerable. He had
a perfect mania for assuming burdens.
“He was but little altered,” his friend Miliukov tells us. “His mien
is more confident than of yore, and his features have lost none of the
energy they used to express.”
In 1861 he published _Insulted and Injured_; in 1861-2 his _Memories of
the House of the Dead_. _Crime and Punishment_, the first of his great
novels, did not appear till 1866.
During the years 1863-1865, he busied himself actively with a review.
One of his letters speaks so eloquently of the years between that I
must read further passages: this is, I think, the last time I shall
quote to you from his correspondence! This particular letter is dated
March 31, 1865.
“I am going to recount my life during this time. Not the whole of it,
though. That is impossible, for in such a case one never tells in
letters the essential facts. There are things I cannot narrate simply.
That’s why I shall confine myself to a summary account of the past year
of my life.
“You probably know that four years ago my brother Michael undertook
the publication of a review, wherein I collaborated. Everything was
going well. My _House of the Dead_ had met with considerable success
and given a fresh lease of life to my literary reputation. When my
brother began publication, he owed a lot of money; his debts were
being paid off when suddenly, in May, 1863, the review was suspended
on account of a strong and patriotic article, which, misinterpreted,
was read as a protest against the conduct of the Government and public
opinion. The blow killed him; debt after debt accumulated, and his
health became impaired. At the moment, I was far away, in Moscow, at
the bedside of my dying wife. Yes, dear friend, you wrote to sympathize
in my cruel loss, the death of my beloved brother, but you did not know
how heavy the hand of fate was upon me. Another creature who loved me,
and whom I loved infinitely--my wife--died of consumption in Moscow,
where she had been settled for a twelvemonth. The whole winter of 1864
I never left her bedside....
“... Ah, dear friend, she loved me deeply, and I returned her love;
yet, we did not live happily together. I shall tell you all about it
when I see you. Let me say just this. Although we were unhappy (by
reason of her difficult character--she was hypochondriac, and full of a
sick woman’s whims), we could not cease to love each other. Indeed, the
unhappier we grew, the closer we were drawn together. Strange though
it may seem, it is true. She was the best, the noblest, the most
generous-hearted woman I have ever known. After she was gone (despite
all my anxieties during the twelvemonth I watched her dying), although
I felt and painfully realized what I was burying with her, I could not
picture the emptiness and misery of my life. That is a year ago now,
and the feeling is still the same.
“Immediately after the funeral, I hastened to Petersburg to my brother.
He alone was left me! Three months later he, too, was no more. His
illness lasted only a month. It did not appear serious and the attack
which carried him off in three days was practically unforeseen.
“Then I was suddenly left alone; and I knew fear! It has become
terrible! My life is broken in two. On one hand, the past, with all
that I had to live for; on the other, the unknown, with not one loving
heart to comfort me in my loss. There was literally no reason why I
should go on living. Forge new links, start a fresh existence? The very
thought revolted me! Then I realized for the first time that I could
not replace my loved ones; they were all I held dear, and new loves
could not, ought not to exist.”[45]
This letter was continued in April, and a fortnight after this cry
of despair, we read, under the date April 14: “Of all my reserves of
strength and energy, there is nothing left save a vague uneasiness of
soul, a state bordering on despair. Bitterness and indecision--a mood
foreign to me. And then I’m utterly alone. I’ve lost the friend of a
lifetime. Yet I always have the feeling that I am going to begin to
live! Ridiculous, isn’t it? The cat and its nine lives?”[46]
He adds these words: “I write to you at great length, and I see that
of the very essence of my moral or spiritual life I have given you not
a notion,” which passage I should like to set side by side with an
extraordinary paragraph I find in _Crime and Punishment_.
In this novel Dostoevsky tells us the story of Raskolnikov, who commits
a crime and is sent to Siberia. In the last pages he speaks of the
strange feeling that takes possession of his hero’s being, the feeling
that at last he is going to live. “And what were all, all the agonies
of the past! Everything, even his crime, sentence, and imprisonment,
seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external, strange
fact, with which he had no concern. But he could not think for long
together of anything that evening, and he could not have analysed
consciously, he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of
theory.”[47]
These sentences I have read to you in justification of my opening
remarks. The great external events of Dostoevsky’s life, tragic though
they were, are less important than this one small fact which it is
now time to consider. During his years in Siberia, Dostoevsky made the
acquaintance of a woman who put the New Testament into his hand--this,
by the way, being the only officially sanctioned reading matter in
gaol. This reading and meditating the Gospels was of vital importance
to Dostoevsky. All his subsequently written works are steeped in the
teaching of the Gospels, and we shall be obliged again and again to
revert to the truths he discovered in reading them.
I find it highly interesting to observe and compare in two natures
akin in so many respects, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the very different
reactions to contact with the Gospels. With Nietzsche the reaction,
immediate and marked, was, we may as well admit, jealousy. It does not
seem to me possible to understand Nietzsche’s works without taking
account of this feeling. Nietzsche was jealous of Jesus Christ, jealous
to the point of madness. In writing his _Zarathustra_, Nietzsche is
ever harassed by his desire to write a counterpart to the Gospels. He
even adopts at times the form of the Beatitudes the better to make
mockery of them. He wrote the _Anti-Christ_, and in his last work,
_Ecce Homo_, he poses as the adversary triumphant of Him he sought to
oust.
With Dostoevsky the reaction is far different. He felt at once that
he was face to face with something superior, not only to himself,
but to entire mankind, something divine.... The humility of which
I spoke earlier in the day, and to which I shall time and again
return, predisposed him to making submission before what was avowedly
better and higher than himself. He bowed his head humbly before Jesus
Christ, and the first, the greatest consequence of his submission
and self-surrender was the safeguarding intact his nature’s rich
complexity. No artist ever more truly practised the teaching of the
Gospel: “_For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever
will lose his life for My sake, the same shall save it._”
By reason of this sacrifice and renunciation the most discordant
elements are able to live side by side in Dostoevsky’s soul, and the
extraordinary wealth of antagonisms is preserved.
At our next meeting we shall inquire whether several of Dostoevsky’s
characteristics, which to us Westerners seem perchance more than
strange, are not common to all Russians, and by so inquiring we may
be enabled to discern such features as are more purely individual and
personal.
II
The few psychological and moral truths Dostoevsky’s works will permit
us to touch upon are in my estimation so important that I am all
eagerness to reach them. By their very boldness and originality they
would seem paradoxical to you if I approached them directly. I needs
must proceed warily.
In our last talk I spoke to you of the figure of the man himself. The
moment is favourable, I think, for presenting it in its own atmosphere
the better to bring its particular features into relief.
I have been on intimate terms with some Russians, but I have never been
in Russia; hence, without help, my task would be extremely difficult.
I shall first of all submit a few observations on the Russian people
that I found in a German monograph on Dostoevsky. Mme. Hoffmann, in her
excellent biography, insists first and foremost on the solidarity, the
common brotherhood between all classes of Russian society, which end
in sweeping away social barriers and facilitate naturally the freedom
of intercourse we find in all Dostoevsky’s novels. An introduction, a
sudden feeling of sympathetic understanding; and we have at once what
one of his heroes so expressively describes as “chance relationships.”
Homes are transformed into hostelries, the stranger of yesterday
becomes the honoured guest of to-day: a friend’s friend visits you, and
immediately everything between you is on a footing of intimacy.
Another observation of Mme. Hoffmann’s concerning the Russian people.
It is inherently incapable of leading a strict and methodical
existence, of being punctual even. It would seem as if the Russian did
not suffer much in consequence of his own improvidence, for he makes no
great effort to free himself from it. And if I may be permitted to seek
an excuse for the lack of order in my causeries, I shall find it in the
very confusion of Dostoevsky’s ideas, in their extreme entanglement and
in the peculiar difficulties experienced in trying to hold them to a
plan which satisfies our Western logic. This wavering and indecision
Mme. Hoffmann ascribes partly to the weakening of time sense due to the
endless summer days and interminable winter nights, when the rhythm of
the passing hours is lost. In a short address delivered at the _Vieux
Colombier_ I already quoted Mme. Hoffmann’s illustration of the Russian
who met reproaches on account of his unpunctuality with “Yes, life is
difficult! There are moments which must be lived well, and this is more
important than the punctual keeping of any engagement!”--a sentence
full of significance, for it reveals at the same time the strange
consciousness a Russian has of his inner life, more important to him
than all social connections.
I should like to point out, with Mme. Hoffmann, the propensity to pity
and suffering, _Leiden und Mitleiden_, to compassion extending even
to the criminal. In Russia there exists but one word to designate the
poor and the criminal, but one to cover actual crime and ordinary
offences. Add to this an almost religious contrition and we shall
the better understand the Russian’s ineradicable mistrustfulness in
all his relations with strangers, with foreigners in particular.
Westerners often complain of this mistrustfulness, which proceeds,
so Mme. Hoffmann maintains, from the uneasy consciousness of his own
insufficiency and proneness to sin, rather than from any feeling that
other people are of no account: it is a mistrust that springs from
humility of spirit.
Nothing could better throw light on this strange religiosity of the
Russian, which persists even when belief is long since dead, than the
four conversations of Prince Myshkin, the hero of _The Idiot_. These I
shall now read to you.
“‘As to the question of faith,’ he began, smiling, ... ‘I had four
different conversations in two days last week. I came in the morning by
the new railway and talked for four hours with a man in the train. We
made friends on the spot. I had heard a great deal about him beforehand
and had heard he was an atheist, among other things. He really is a
very learned man. What’s more, he’s an unusually well-bred man, so that
he talked to me quite as if I were his equal in ideas and attainments.
He doesn’t believe in God. Only, one thing struck me: that he seemed
not to be talking about that at all the whole time; and it struck me,
just because whenever I have met unbelievers before, or read their
books, it always seemed to me that they were speaking and writing in
their books about something quite different, although it seemed to
me about that on the surface. I said so to him at the time, but I
suppose I didn’t say so clearly, or did not know how to express it,
for he didn’t understand. In the evening, I stopped for the night at a
provincial hotel, and a murder had just been committed there the night
before, so that every one was talking about it when I arrived. Two
peasants, middle-aged men, friends who had known each other for a long
time, and were not drunk, had had tea and were meaning to go to bed
in the same room. But one had noticed during those last two days that
the other was wearing a silver watch on a yellow bead chain, which he
seems not to have seen on him before. The man was not a thief: he was
an honest man, in fact, and by a peasant’s standard by no means poor.
But he was so taken by the watch, and so fascinated by it, that at last
he could not restrain himself. He took a knife, and when his friend
had turned away, he approached him cautiously from behind, and praying
fervently, “God forgive me for Christ’s sake!” he cut his friend’s
throat at one stroke like a sheep and took his watch.’
“Rogozhin went off into peals of laughter; he laughed as though he were
in a sort of fit. It was positively strange to see such laughter after
the gloomy mood that had preceded it.
“‘I do like that! Yes, that beats everything!’ he cried convulsively,
gasping for breath. ‘One man doesn’t believe in God at all, while the
other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!...
You could never have invented that, brother! Ha!--ha!--ha! That beats
everything!’
“‘Next morning I went out to walk about the town,’ Myshkin went on, as
soon as Rogozhin was quiet again, though his lips still quivered with
spasmodic convulsive laughter. ‘I saw a drunken soldier in a terribly
disorderly state staggering about the wooden pavement. He came up to
me. “Buy a silver cross, sir?” said he. “I’ll let you have it for
twenty kopecks. It’s silver.” I saw in his hand a cross--he must have
just taken it off--on a very dirty blue ribbon; but one could see at
once it was only tin. It was a big one with eight corners, of a regular
Byzantine pattern. I took out twenty kopecks and gave them to him, and
at once put the cross round my neck; and I could see from his face how
glad he was that he had cheated a stupid gentleman, and he went off
immediately to drink what he had got for it, there was no doubt about
that. At that time, brother, I was quite carried away by the rush of
impressions that burst upon me in Russia; I had understood nothing
about Russia before. I had grown up, as it were, inarticulate, and my
memories of my country were somehow fantastic during those five years
abroad. Well, I walked on, thinking, “Yes, I’ll put off judging that
man who sold his Christ. God only knows what’s hidden in these weak
drunken beasts.” An hour later, when I was going back to the hotel, I
came upon a peasant woman with a tiny baby in her arms. She was quite a
young woman, and the baby was about six weeks old. The baby smiled at
her for the first time in its life. “What are you doing, my dear?” (I
was always asking questions in those days.) “God has just such gladness
every time He sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to him with all
his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s
face.” That was what the woman said to me almost in those words, this
deep, subtle, and truly religious thought--a thought in which all the
essence of Christianity finds expression; that is the whole conception
of God as our Father and of God’s gladness in man, like a father’s in
his own child--the fundamental idea of Christ! A simple peasant woman!
It’s true she was a mother ... and who knows, very likely that woman
was the wife of that soldier. Listen, Parfyon! You asked me a question
just now; here is my answer. The essence of religious feeling does not
come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do
with any crimes or misdemeanours. There is something else here, and
there will always be something else--something that the atheists will
for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else. But
the chief thing is that you will notice it more clearly and quickly
in the Russian heart than anywhere else. And this is my conclusion.
It’s one of the chief convictions I’ve gathered from our Russia. There
is work to be done, Parfyon! There is work to be done in our Russian
world, believe me.’”[48]
And we see at the end of this story another characteristic reveal
itself: the belief in the special mission of the Russian people.
This belief we find in several Russian writers: in Dostoevsky it
becomes an active and painful conviction, and his chief grievance
against Turgeniev was simply that he could not trace in him this
national feeling, his opinion being that Turgeniev was too westernized.
In his speech at the Pushkin celebrations, Dostoevsky declared that
Pushkin, still in flush of imitating Byron and Chénier, suddenly found
what Dostoevsky calls the “Russian note,” a note “fresh and sincere.”
Replying to the question (which he describes as “accursed”) “What faith
can we have in the Russian people and in its worth?” Pushkin exclaimed,
“Humble thyself, thou son of arrogance, and first conquer thy pride.
Humble thyself and before the people, bend thy neck towards thy mother
earth.”
Never perhaps are ethnic differences more clearly marked than when the
manner of interpreting _honour_ is involved. The hidden mainspring
of civilized man’s conduct seems to me to be less a matter of
amour-propre, as La Rochefoucauld would have said, than a feeling for
what we call the “point of honour.” This feeling for personal honour,
this sensitive spot, is not exactly alike for Frenchman, Englishman,
Italian, and Spaniard. But contrasted with the Russian conception, the
codes of honour of all Western nations seem to fuse practically into
one. When we appreciate the Russian’s idea of honour, we see at once
how often the code of the Western world is opposed to the teaching of
the Gospels. And the Russian idea of honour is as much closer to the
Gospels by virtue of its remoteness from Western nations; in other
words, Christian feeling is predominant in the Russians, and often
takes precedence of “honour” as we Westerners interpret the idea.
Faced with the choice of seeking revenge or asking pardon by admitting
himself in the wrong, the Westerner will often consider the second
alternative lacking in dignity, the attitude of a coward or a
nonentity. The Westerner tends to esteem unwillingness to forgive,
forget, or remit offences a mark of strength of character, and
certainly he tries never to put himself in the wrong; but, should he
have done so, it would appear that the most unpleasant thing that could
befall him would be the necessity for admitting the fact! The Russian,
on the other hand, is ever ready to admit himself in the wrong--and
even before his enemies--equally willing to humble himself and seek
forgiveness.
The Greek Orthodox religion, no doubt, is only encouraging a national
inclination by tolerating, nay, approving, public confession. The
notion of confession, not murmured low into priestly ears, but made
openly, before any and all, comes up again and again, almost with the
quality of an obsession, in Dostoevsky’s novels. When Raskolnikov has
confessed his crime to Sonia, in _Crime and Punishment_, she advises
him, as the one means of unburdening his soul, at once to prostrate
himself in the public street and cry aloud, “I have the blood of a
fellow-being on my hands.” Most of Dostoevsky’s characters are seized
at certain moments--and almost invariably in unexpected and ill-advised
fashion--with the urgent desire to make confession, to ask pardon of
some fellow-creature who often has not a notion what it is all about,
the desire to place themselves in a posture of inferiority to the
person addressed.
You remember, I am sure, the extraordinary scene in _The Idiot_, in
the course of an evening party at Nastasya Filippovna’s house. To pass
the time someone suggested in place of parlour games or charades that
each guest should confess the vilest act he ever committed; and the
wonderful part is that the suggestion was not scouted, and that each
one present commenced his or her confession, with varying degree of
sincerity, no doubt, but almost without a vestige of shame.
And more curious still, an anecdote from Dostoevsky’s own life, which
I have from a Russian in his intimate circle. I was imprudent enough
to tell it to several individuals and already it has been made use
of; but in the form I found it retailed, it was fast approaching
unrecognizability. Hence my anxiety to give the exact facts here.
There are, in Dostoevsky’s life, certain extremely obscure episodes.
One, in particular, already alluded to in _Crime and Punishment_ and
which seems to have served as theme for a certain chapter in _The
Possessed_. This chapter does not figure in the novel, having been
so far withheld in Russia even. It has, I believe, been printed in
Germany, but in an edition for private circulation only.[49] It deals
with the rape of a young girl. The child victim hangs herself, and in
the next room, Stavrogin, the guilty man, knowing that she is hanging
herself, waits until life has left her little body. What measure of
truth is there in this sinister tale? For the moment, it is not for
me to say. The fact remains that Dostoevsky, after an adventure of
this nature, was moved to what one must needs describe as remorse.
This remorse preyed upon him for a while, and doubtless he said to
himself what Sonia said to Raskolnikov. The need for confession became
urgent, but confession not merely to a priest. He sought to find the
person before whom confession would cause him the acutest suffering.
Turgeniev, without the shadow of a doubt! Dostoevsky had not seen him
for long, and was on uncommonly bad terms with him. M. Turgeniev was
a respectable man, rich, famous, and held in wide esteem. Dostoevsky
summoned up all his courage, or rather, he succumbed to a kind of
giddiness, to a mysterious and awful attraction. Picture Turgeniev’s
comfortable study: the author himself at his desk.--The bell rings.--A
manservant announces Fyodor Dostoevsky.--What is his business?--He is
shown in, and at once begins to tell his tale.--Turgeniev listens, dumb
with stupefaction. What business of his is all this? No doubt the other
man is mad!--After the confession, a great silence. Dostoevsky waits
for some word or sign from Turgeniev, believing no doubt that like in
his own novels, Turgeniev will take him in his arms, kiss him and weep
over him, and be reconciled ... but nothing happens:
“Monsieur Turgeniev, I must tell you how deeply I despise myself....”
He pauses again.... The silence remains unbroken until Dostoevsky,
unable to contain himself any longer, bursts out in wrath: “But _you_ I
despise even more! That’s all I wanted to say to you,” and off he goes,
slamming the door behind him.
Here we see how humility is suddenly displaced by a very different
feeling. The man who in his humility was abasing himself, draws up
in revolt at the humiliation. Humility opens the gates of Heaven:
humiliation the gates of Hell. Humility implies a measure of free-will
submission; it is accepted without constraint and proves the truth of
the Gospel teaching: “_For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased:
and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted._” Humiliation, on the
other hand, degrades the soul, warping and deforming it; it irritates,
impoverishes, and blights, inflicting a moral hurt most ill to heal.
There is not, I believe, one single deformation or deviation of
character--these kinks that make so many of Dostoevsky’s characters so
strangely morbid and disturbing--but which has its beginning in some
humiliation.
_Insulted and Injured_ is the title of one of his first books, and
his work as a whole is obsessed without ceasing by the idea that
humiliation damns, whereas humility sanctifies. Heaven, as Alyosha
Karamazov dreams and describes it to us, is a world where there will be
no injured, neither insulted.
The strangest, most disturbing figure of these novels, the terrible
Stavrogin in _The Possessed_, whose character at first is so different
from all others, is explained, and his demoniac nature accounted for,
by certain passages in the book:
“Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin,” says one of the other characters,
“was leading at that time in Petersburg a life, so to say, of mockery.
I can’t find another word to describe it, because he is not a man who
falls into disillusionment, and he disdained to be occupied with work
at that time.”[50]
And Stavrogin’s mother, to whom these remarks were addressed, says a
little farther on:
“No, it was something more than eccentricity, and I assure you,
something sacred even! A proud man who has suffered humiliation early
in life and reached the stage of ‘mockery,’ as you so subtly called
it.”[51]
And later:
“And if Nikolay had always had at his side (Varvara Petrovna almost
shouted) a gentle Horatio, great in his humility--another excellent
expression of yours, Stepan Trofimovitch!--he might long ago have been
saved from the sad and sudden demon of irony, which has tormented him
all his life.”[52]
It happens that some of Dostoevsky’s characters, whose natures have
been profoundly warped by humiliation, find as it were delight and
satisfaction in the resultant degradation, loathsome though it be.
“Was there resentment in my heart?” says the hero of _A Raw Youth_ just
when his amour-propre had been cruelly wounded, “I don’t know. Perhaps
there was. Strange to say, I always had, perhaps from my earliest
childhood, one characteristic; if I were ill-treated, absolutely
wronged and insulted to the last degree, I always showed at once an
irresistible desire to submit passively to the insult, and even to
accept more than my assailant wanted to inflict on me, as though I
would say: ‘All right, you have humiliated me, so I will humiliate
myself even more; look and enjoy it.’”[53]
For if humility be a surrender of pride, humiliation, on the other
hand, but serves to strengthen it.
Listen to the tale told by the wretched hero of the _Notes from
Underground_:
“One night, as I was passing a tavern, I saw through a lighted window
some gentlemen fighting with billiard cues, and saw one of them thrown
out of the window. At other times, I should have felt very much
disgusted, but I was in such a mood at the time, that I actually envied
the gentleman thrown out of the window--and I envied him so much that
I even went into the tavern and into the billiard-room. ‘Perhaps,’
I thought, ‘I’ll have a fight, too, and they’ll throw me out of the
window.’
“I was not drunk--but what is one to do?--depression will drive a man
to such a pitch of hysteria! But nothing happened. It seemed that I
was not even equal to being thrown out of the window, and I went away
without having my fight.
“An officer put me in my place from the first moment. I was standing
by the billiard-room tables and in my ignorance blocking up the way,
and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word,
without warning or explanation, moved me from where I was standing to
another spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me. I could
have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me
without noticing me.
“Devil knows what I would have given for a real, regular quarrel--a
more decent, a more literary one, so to speak. I had been treated like
a fly. This officer was over six foot, while I was a spindly little
fellow. But the quarrel was in my hands. I had only to protest and I
certainly would have been thrown out of the window. But I changed my
mind, and preferred to beat a resentful retreat.”[54]
But if we carry the story further, we shall soon see the excess of
hatred to be nothing other than love inverted.
“... I often met that officer afterwards in the street, and noticed him
very carefully. I am not quite sure whether he recognized me: I imagine
not, I judge from certain signs. But I--I stared at him with spite and
hatred, and so it went on--for several years! My resentment grew even
deeper with years. At first I began making stealthy inquiries about
this officer. It was difficult for me to do so, for I knew no one. But
one day I heard one shout his name in the street as I was following
him at a distance, as though I was tied to him,--and so I learned his
surname. Another time I followed him to his flat, and for ten kopecks
learned from the porter where he lived, on which storey, whether he
lived alone or with others, and so on--in fact, everything one could
learn from a porter. One morning, though I had never tried my hand
with the pen, it suddenly occurred to me to write a satire on this
officer in the form of a novel which would unmask his villainy; I even
exaggerated it: at first I so altered his surname that it could not
easily be recognized, but on second thoughts I changed it, and sent the
story to the _O.Z._
“But at that time such attacks were not the fashion and my story was
not printed. That was a great vexation to me. Sometimes I positively
choked with resentment. At last I determined to challenge my enemy to a
duel. I composed a splendid, charming little letter to him, imploring
him to apologize to me, and hinting rather plainly at a duel in case
of refusal. The letter was so composed that if the officer had had the
least understanding of the good and beautiful, he would certainly have
flung himself on my neck and offered his friendship. And how fine that
would have been! How we should have got on together!”[55]
So often in Dostoevsky one particular feeling is suddenly supplanted in
this way by its direct opposite! We can find example after example of
it. For instance, that unhappy child (in _The Karamazovs_) biting with
hatred into Alyosha’s finger when the latter holds out his hand to him,
just at the time when the child, though he does not recognize it, is
developing for the same Alyosha a shy, wild affection.
And what, in this young child, could have caused such a warping of
affection?
He had seen Dmitri Karamazov, Alyosha’s brother, come drunk out of an
inn, thrash his father, and pull him insolently by the beard: “Papa,
papa, how he humiliated you!” he cried later.
Thus, over against humility--on the same moral plane, if I may be
permitted to say so, but at the other extreme of the scale--there
is pride, which humiliation exaggerates, exasperates, and deforms,
sometimes hideously.
Certainly, psychological axioms appear to Dostoevsky for what they
really are, special definitions of truth. As novelist (for Dostoevsky
is no mere theoretician, he is an explorer) he steers clear of
induction and realizes how imprudent (on his part, at least) any
attempts to formulate general laws.[56] It is for us, if we choose, to
discover these laws in his books, by cutting, as it were, paths through
the thicket. Here is one of the laws we can establish: the man who has
suffered humiliation seeks to inflict humiliation in his turn.[57]
Despite the extraordinarily rich diversity of his _Comédie Humaine_,
Dostoevsky’s characters group and arrange themselves always on one
plane only, that of humility and pride. This system of grouping
discomfits us; indeed, at first, it appears far from clear, for the
very simple reason that we do not usually approach the problem of
making a division at such an angle and that we distribute mankind in
hierarchies. Let me explain my idea: in Dickens’s wonderful novels, for
instance, I am often uneasy at the conventionality, childishness even,
of his _hierarchy_, or to use Nietzsche’s phrase, _scale of values_.
While reading him I have the impression that I am contemplating one
of Fra Angelico’s _Last Judgements_ where you have the redeemed, the
damned, and the indeterminate (not too numerous!) over whom angel and
demon struggle. The balance that weighs them all, like in an Egyptian
bas-relief, reckons only the positive or negative quality of their
virtue. Heaven for the just: for the wicked, Hell. Herein Dickens is
true to the opinion of his countrymen and of his time. It does happen
that the evil prosper, while the just are sacrificed--to the great
shame of this earthly existence and of society as we have organized it.
All his novels endeavour to show us and make us realize the shining
superiority of qualities of heart over qualities of head. I have
selected Dickens as a type because of all the great novelists we know
he uses this classification in its simplest form: which--if I may say
in conclusion--is the secret of his popularity.
Now, after reading in close succession practically all Dostoevsky’s
works, I have the impression that there exists in them, too, a similar
classification: less apparent, no doubt, although almost as simple,
and, in my estimation, much more significant. For it is not according
to the positive or negative quality of their virtue that one can
_hierarchize_ (forgive me this horrible word!) his characters: not
according to their goodness of heart, but by their degree of pride.
Dostoevsky presents on one side the humble (some of these are humble
to an abject degree, and seem to enjoy their abasement); on the other,
the proud (some to the point of crime). The latter are usually the more
intelligent. We shall see them, tormented by the demon of pride, ever
striving after something higher still:
“There, I’ll bet anything--that you’ve been sitting side by side in
the drawing-room all night wasting your precious time discussing
something lofty and elevated,” says Stavrogin to the abominable Pyotr
Stepanovitch in _The Possessed_.[58] Or again:
“In spite of the terror which I detected in her myself, Katerina
Nikolaevna has always from the first cherished a certain reverence and
admiration for the nobility of Andrey Petrovitch’s principles and the
loftiness of his mind.... In his letter he gave her the most solemn
and chivalrous promises that she should have nothing to fear--she
responding with the same heroic feelings. There may have been a sort of
chivalrous rivalry on both sides.”[59]
“There is nothing in it to fret your vanity,” said Elizabeth to
Stavrogin: “The day before yesterday when I ‘insulted’ you before
everyone and you answered me so chivalrously, I went home and guessed
at once that you were running away from me because you were married,
and not from contempt for me, which, as a fashionable young lady, I
dreaded more than anything,” adding by way of conclusion, “Anyhow, it
eases our vanity.”[60]
His women, even more so than his characters of the other sex, are ever
moved and determined by considerations of pride. Look at Raskolnikov’s
sister, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaïa Epantchin in _The Idiot_,
Elizabeth Nikolaïevna in _The Possessed_, and Katerina Ivanovna in _The
Karamazovs_!
But, by an inversion which I make bold to describe as inspired by
the New Testament, the most abject characters are nearer the Kingdom
of Heaven than the noblest. To such a degree is Dostoevsky’s work
dominated by these profound truths. “_God resisteth the proud, but
giveth grace to the humble._”--“_For the Son of man is come to save
that which was lost._”
On the one hand, denial and surrender of the self; on the other,
affirmation of the personality, the _will to power_, an exaggerated
loftiness of sentiment. And take due note of this fact; in Dostoevsky’s
novels, the _will to power_ leads inevitably to ruin.
M. Souday recently accused me of sacrificing, indeed, of immolating
Balzac to Dostoevsky. Need I protest? My admiration of Dostoevsky is
certainly fervent, but I do not think I am blinded by it. I readily
agree that Balzac’s creations surpass the Russian novelist’s in
their diversity, and that his _Comédie Humaine_ is the more varied.
Dostoevsky certainly goes deeper and touches more important points than
any other author, but we can admit that his characters are one and all
cut from the same cloth. Pride and humility! these hidden reagents
never change, although by graduating the doses of them, we obtain
reactions that are infinitely rich and minutely varied in colour.
With Balzac (as invariably in Western society, in French especially,
to which his novels hold a mirror) two factors are active which in
Dostoevsky’s work practically do not exist: first, the intellect,
second, the will. I do not pretend that in Balzac will-power always
urges a man towards what is good, and that his strong-willed
characters are never but virtuous. But at least consider how many of
his characters attain to what is of good repute by effort of will and
open up a glorious career by dint of perseverance, cleverness, and
determination. Think of his David Séchards, his Bianchons, Joseph
Brideaus, and Daniel d’Arthez--and there are twenty such I could name!
In all Dostoevsky we have not a single great man. “But what about
that splendid Father Zossima in _The Karamazovs_?” you may say. Yes,
he is certainly the noblest figure the Russian novelist had drawn;
he far and away dominates the whole tragedy, and once we have entered
into possession of the promised complete version of _The Karamazovs_,
we shall understand still better his importance. At the same time we
shall realize what in Dostoevsky’s eyes constitutes his real greatness.
Father Zossima is not of the great as the world reckons them. He is a
saint--no hero! And he has reached saintliness by surrender of will and
abdication of intellect.
If I examine along with Balzac’s the resolute characters that
Dostoevsky presents, I suddenly realize what terrible creatures they
are, one and all. Look at Raskolnikov, heading the list; in his
beginnings, a miserable worm--with ambitions, who would like to be a
Napoleon, and only attains to being the murderer of an old broker-woman
and of an innocent girl. Look at Stavrogin, Pyotr Stepanovitch, Ivan
Karamazov, the hero of _A Raw Youth_ (the only one of Dostoevsky’s
characters who, from his earliest days, at least since consciousness
dawned, lived with a fixed determination, to wit, in this case, of
becoming a Rothschild, and, by mockery as it were, in all the books
of Dostoevsky nowhere is there a more pithless creature, at the mercy
of his fellow-beings, individually and collectively). His heroes’
determination, every particle of cleverness and will-power they
possess, seem but to hurry them onward to perdition, and if I seek to
know what part mind plays in Dostoevsky’s novels, I realize that its
power is demonic.
His most dangerous characters are the strongest intellectually, and
not only do I maintain that the mind and the will of Dostoevsky’s
characters are active solely for evil, but that, when urged and guided
towards good, the virtue to which they attain is rotten with pride and
leads to destruction. Dostoevsky’s heroes inherit the Kingdom of God
only by the denial of mind and will and the surrender of personality.
We can without hesitation affirm that Balzac, too, is, to a certain
degree, a Christian author. But only by confronting the two ethical
points of view, the French author’s and the Russian’s, can we realize
the chasm between the former’s Catholicism and the latter’s purely
evangelical doctrine, and how widely the Catholic spirit can differ
from the purely Christian. Or, to offend none, let me express myself
thus: Balzac’s _Comédie Humaine_ sprang from the contact between the
Gospels and the Latin mind: Dostoevsky’s from the contact between the
Gospels and Buddhism, the Asiatic mind.
These are merely preliminary considerations which will help us at our
next meeting to probe deeper into the souls of these strange creations.
III
What we have accomplished so far has been a mere clearing of the
ground. Before attacking the problem of Dostoevsky’s philosophy, I
should like to warn you against a grave misconception. During the last
fifteen years of his life, Dostoevsky busied himself considerably with
the editing of a review. The articles he wrote for this periodical
have been collected in what is known as the _Journal of an Author_.
In these articles Dostoevsky sets forth his ideas. It would seem the
simplest and most natural thing in the world to make constant reference
to this book; but I may as well admit at once that it is profoundly
disappointing. In it we find an exposé of his social theories, which,
however, never emerge from the nebulous state and are most awkwardly
expressed. We find, too, political prophecies not one of which has come
true. Dostoevsky tries to foretell the future state of Europe and goes
far astray in practically every instance.
M. Souday, who recently devoted one of his literary reviews in the
_Temps_ to Dostoevsky, takes a delight in pointing out his mistakes. In
these articles of Dostoevsky’s he sees nothing more than journalism
of the most everyday type, which fact I am prepared to concede. But
I do protest when he goes on to say that these same articles are a
wonderful revelation of Dostoevsky’s ideas. As a matter of fact, the
problems Dostoevsky handles in his _Journal of an Author_ are not
the problems that interest him most. Political questions are frankly
less important in his estimation than social problems, these in turn
far less important than moral and individual problems. The rarest and
deepest truths we can expect from him are psychological, and I add
that in this province the ideas he submits are most often left in the
problematic state, in the form of a question. He is seeking not so much
a solution as an exposition of these very questions which, by reason
of their complexity, confusion, and interdependence, are as a rule
left ill-defined. In a word, Dostoevsky is not, strictly speaking, a
thinker but a novelist. His favourite theories, and all that is subtle
and novel in them, must be sought in the speeches of his characters,
and not always of his most important ones even. It often happens that
his most valuable and daring ideas are attributed to subordinate
characters. Dostoevsky is awkwardness itself when speaking in his own
name. To his own case might well be applied the sentence he puts into
Versilov’s mouth. “Explain?” he said. “No, it’s better not to; besides,
I’ve a passion for talking without explanations. That’s really it. And
there’s another strange thing; if it happens that I try to explain an
idea I believe in, it almost always happens that I cease to believe
what I have explained.”[61]
We can even say that it is exceptional for Dostoevsky not to turn
against his own theory as soon as formulated. It seems as if for him it
immediately breathed an odour of decay, like that which emanated from
Father Zossima’s dead body--the body expected to work miracles--and
made the deathwatch so painful for Alyosha Karamazov, his disciple.
It is evident that for a philosopher this feature would be something
of a drawback. His ideas are practically never absolute, remaining
relative always to the characters expressing them. I shall press the
point even further and assert their relativity not merely to these
characters, but to a specific moment in the lives of these characters.
The ideas are, as it were, the product of a special and transitory
state of his _dramatis personæ_, and relative they remain, subservient
to and conditioned by the particular fact or action which determines
them or by which they are determined. As soon as Dostoevsky begins to
theorize, he disappoints us. Thus even in his article, _Of the Nature
of Lying_,[62] despite his prodigious skill in exhibiting falsehood in
all its forms and making us realize thereby what prompts the untruthful
to their falsehoods (and how differently he proceeds from Corneille!),
as soon as he begins to account for it all, as soon as he theorizes on
the strength of his examples, he becomes stale and unprofitable.
This _Journal_ is proof that Dostoevsky’s genius is essentially as a
novelist, for although in theoretical or critical articles he never
rises above mediocrity, he becomes excellent as soon as a character
appears on the scene. It is in this _Journal_ that we come across
these admirable tales of _The Peasant Marey_[63] and _Krotchkaya_,[64]
the latter outstandingly fine and powerful, in its way a novel that
is really but one long monologue, like the _Notes from Underground_,
written about the same period.
Better still, or rather, more significant, are the two instances
in this _Journal_ when Dostoevsky allows us to watch the almost
involuntary, almost subconscious activity of his mind engaged in the
construction of a narrative.
After he tells us his delight in watching people walking in the streets
and occasionally in following them, we see him suddenly attach himself
to a chance passer-by:
“I notice a workman passing; he has no wife leaning on his arm, but he
has a child with him, a little boy. Both are sad and lonely looking.
The man is about thirty years of age: his face is worn and of an
unhealthy tinge. He is wearing his Sunday best, a top-coat, rubbed at
the seams and with buttons worn almost bare of cloth. The collar of the
coat is very soiled, the trousers are cleaner, but look as if they had
come straight from the broker’s. His top-hat is very shabby. I have the
idea he is a printer. His expression is hard, gloomy, almost sullen.
He holds the boy by the hand; the youngster lags behind a little. The
child is two, or not much more, very pale and delicate looking, neatly
dressed in a tunic, little boots with red uppers, and a hat tricked out
with a peacock’s feather. He is weary. The father speaks to him, making
fun maybe of his feeble little legs. The youngster makes no reply, and
a few paces farther on, his father bends down, lifts him up in his arms
and carries him. The child seems pleased, and throws his arms round
his father’s neck. He catches sight of me, and from his perch stares
down at me in astonishment and curiosity. I give him a little nod, but
he frowns and clings closer still to his father’s neck. They must love
each other dearly, these two!
“In the streets I love to watch the passers-by, gaze into their unknown
features, guess their identity, imagine how they exist and what can be
their interest in life. To-day I have eyes for none but this father
and child. I imagine that the wife and mother had died not long since,
that the father is busy working the whole week in the shop, while
the child is left to the care of some elderly woman. They probably
live in a basement where the father rents or even only shares a room,
and to-day, being Sunday, the father is taking the boy to see some
relative, the mother’s sister probably. I’m sure this aunt of whom
they don’t see much must be married to a non-commissioned officer and
live in the basement of the barracks, but in a separate apartment. She
mourns her dead sister, but not for long. The widower does not show
much grief either, during this visit anyway. He remains preoccupied,
has little to say for himself, and replies only to personal questions.
Soon he falls silent altogether. Then the samovar is brought in and
they all take tea. The boy is left sitting on a bench in the corner,
shy and frowning, and he finally drops off to sleep. The aunt and her
husband take scant notice of him, except for passing him a cup of milk
and a piece of bread. The husband, with not a word to say for himself
at first, comes out suddenly with a coarse joke, savouring of the
barrack-room, and makes fun of the youngster whom his father begins to
scold. The child wants to leave at once, and the father fetches him
home from Vyborg to Liteinyi.
“To-morrow the father will be back at his workshop, and the youngster
left once more with the old woman.”[65]
In another passage of the same book,[66] we read an account of his
meeting with a woman a hundred years old. As he passed along the
street, he noticed her sitting on a bench. He spoke to her, then went
on his way. But in the evening, after the day’s work was done, the
old woman came back to his mind. He imagined her home-coming and what
her family said to her. He describes her death: “I take a delight in
inventing the end of the story. Of course I am a novelist and love a
tale.”
Besides, Dostoevsky never invents by chance. In one of the articles in
this same _Journal_, à propos of the Kornilov trial, he reconstitutes
and rebuilds the story in his own way, and after the process of the
law has thrown light on every aspect of the crime, he writes: “I
divined almost everything,” and adds: “Chance enabled me to go and
see Madame Kornilova. I was astonished to see that my suppositions
were almost identical with the true facts. I had, I admit, made a few
errors of detail: for instance, Kornilov, though from the country,
wore the townsman’s dress, etc.,” and Dostoevsky concludes: “All in
all, my errors have been slight; the basis of my suppositions remains
accurate.”[67]
With such gifts as an observer, such powers as a narrator and
reconstructor of actual events, and an added degree of sensitiveness,
you can make a Gogol or a Dickens. Perhaps you remember the beginning
of the _Old Curiosity Shop_ where Dickens, too, is busy following up
the passers-by, and after he has left them, goes on to imagine their
lives? But such gifts, remarkable as they are, do not wholly account
for a Balzac, a Thomas Hardy, a Dostoevsky. They would certainly not
suffice to make Nietzsche write: “Dostoevsky was the only psychologist
from whom I had anything to learn; he belongs to the happiest windfalls
of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.”[68]
Long ago I copied from Nietzsche a page I should like to read to
you. When he wrote it, had Nietzsche not in view what constitutes
the essential value of the great Russian novelist, what opposes him
diametrically to many of our modern novelists, to the Goncourts, for
example, whom Nietzsche seems to indicate in these lines? “_A Moral
for Psychologists._--Do not go in for any notebook psychology! Never
observe for the sake of observing! Such things lead to a false point of
view, to a squint, to something forced and exaggerated! To experience
things on purpose--this is not a bit of good. In the midst of an
experience a man should not turn his eyes upon himself; in such cases
any eye becomes the ‘evil eye.’ A born psychologist instinctively
avoids seeing for the sake of seeing. And the same holds good of the
born painter. Such a man never works ‘from Nature’--he leaves it
to his instinct, to his _camera obscura_ to sift and to define the
‘fact,’ ‘nature,’ the ‘experience.’ The general idea, the conclusion,
the result is the only thing that reaches his consciousness. He knows
nothing of that wilful process of deducing from particular cases. What
is the result when a man sets about the matter differently?--When,
for instance, after the manner of Parisian novelists, he goes in
for notebook psychology on a large and small scale? Such a man is
constantly spying on reality, and every evening he bears home a handful
of fresh curios.... But look at the result!”[69]
Dostoevsky never observes for observation’s sake. His work is not the
result of observations of the real; or at least, not of that alone. Nor
is it the fruit of a preconceived idea, and that is why it is never
mere theorizing, but remains steeped in reality. It is the fruit of
intercourse between fact and idea, a blending, in the proper English
sense of the word, of the one with the other, so perfect that it can
never be said that one element outweighs the other. Hence the most
realistic scenes in his novels are the most pregnant with psychological
and moral import. To be precise, each work of Dostoevsky’s is produced
by the crossing of fact and idea. “The germ of the novel has been
in me for the last three years,” he wrote in 1870,[70] referring to
_The Brothers Karamazov_, not written until nine years later. In
another letter he says: “The chief problem dealt with throughout
this particular work is the very one which has, my whole life long,
tormented my conscious or subconscious being: the question of the
existence of God.”[71]
But the idea is present only cloudily in his mind until it comes
into contact with some fact from real life (in this instance, a
criminal court case, a _cause célèbre_) which will make it fructify.
Then--and not till then--can we speak of the work as conceived. “I
am writing with a purpose,” he says in the same letter, speaking of
_The Possessed_ which reached fruition about the same period as _The
Karamazovs_, another novel with a purpose. Nothing less gratuitous, in
the modern acceptation of the term, than Dostoevsky’s work. Each of his
novels is in its way a demonstration, I might even say a speech for
the defence, or better still, a sermon. And if I dared find in this
wonderful artist any grounds for reproach, I might suggest that he
sought to _prove_ only too well.
Let there be no disagreement on this score: Dostoevsky never tries to
influence our opinion unduly. He seeks to bring light into dark places,
to make plain certain hidden truths, which to him appear already
dazzlingly clear and of paramount importance, the most important, no
doubt, to which the mind of man can attain: not truths of an abstract
nature, beyond human grasp, but truths secret and intimately personal.
On the other hand, what saves his work from the disfigurements
inseparable from all writing with a purpose, is the fact that these
truths are ever subordinated to fact, and his ideas infused with
reality. Towards these realities of human experience, his attitude
is ever humble and obedient; he never applies pressure nor turns a
happening to his own advantage. It would seem that even to his very
thought he applied the Gospel precept: “_For whosoever will save his
life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for My sake, the
same shall save it._”
Before attempting to trace some of Dostoevsky’s ideas in his books, I
should like to speak of his method of working. Strakhov tells us that
Dostoevsky worked almost exclusively at night: “About midnight, when
everything was becoming still, there was Dostoevsky left alone with his
samovar, and he used to go on working till five or six in the morning,
sipping at intervals cold, mild-drawn tea. He rose about two or three
in the afternoon, spent the rest of the day entertaining guests,
walking, or visiting friends.” Dostoevsky was not always able to
content himself with mild-drawn tea; during the last years of his life,
he lost grip of himself, and drank, we are told, a great quantity of
spirits. One day, so the story runs, Dostoevsky came out of his study,
where he was busy writing _The Possessed_, in a state of remarkable
mental exhilaration, obtained in some degree by artificial stimulus.
It was Madame Dostoevsky’s “at home” day. Dostoevsky, wild-eyed, burst
into the drawing-room where several ladies were sitting, one of whom,
cordiality itself, hastened forward to him with a cup of tea. “Devil
take you and your dish-water,” he shouted.
You remember Abbé de Saint-Réal’s words?--and meaningless they might
well appear did not Stendhal make use of them as a cover for his own
æsthetic principles: “A novel is the mirror of one’s walks abroad.”
In France and in England the novels that can be classed under this
rubric are numerous indeed. What of Lesage, Voltaire, Fielding,
Smollett? But nothing could be more remote from this category than a
novel of Dostoevsky’s. Between his novels and those of the authors
quoted above, aye, and Tolstoy’s too, and Stendhal’s, there is all
the difference possible between a picture and a panorama. Dostoevsky
composes a picture in which the most important consideration is the
question of light. The light proceeds from but one source. In one of
Stendhal’s novels, the light is constant, steady, and well-diffused.
Every object is lit up in the same way, and is visible equally well
from all angles; there are no shadow effects. But in Dostoevsky’s
books, as in a Rembrandt portrait, the shadows are the essential.
Dostoevsky groups his characters and happenings, plays a brilliant
light upon them, illuminating one aspect only. Each of his characters
has a deep setting of shadow, reposes on its own shadow almost.
We notice in Dostoevsky a strange impulse to group, concentrate,
centralize: to create between the varied elements of a novel as many
cross-connections as possible. With him, events instead of pursuing
their calm and measured course, as with Stendhal or Tolstoy, mingle and
confuse in turmoil; the elements of the story--moral, psychological,
and material--sink and rise again in a kind of whirlpool. With him
there is no attempt to straighten or simplify lines; he is at his
happiest in the complex; he fosters it. Feelings, thoughts, and
passions are never presented in the pure state. He never isolates
them. And now I come to make an observation on Dostoevsky’s manner
of drawing his characters. But first of all let me read these very
pertinent remarks of Jacques Rivière’s: “Once the idea of a character
has taken shape in his mind, a novelist has to choose between two
ways of materializing it. He can either insist on its complexity, or
emphasize its cohesiveness; in this soul he is about to create, he can
deliberately reproduce its absolute darkness, or for the reader he can
dispel such darkness by his very description of it; he will either
respect the soul’s hidden depths, or lay them open.”
You see what Rivière’s theory is: the French school explores the
unplumbed depths, whereas certain foreign novelists, Dostoevsky in
particular, respect and cherish their gloom.
“In any case,” Rivière continues, “it is these black gulfs that
interest Dostoevsky most, and his whole effort is directed towards
suggesting how utterly unreachable they are.... We, on the other hand,
faced with a soul’s complexity and endeavouring to give a picture of
it, instinctively seek to organize our material.” Serious enough! But
there is more to come. “At need, we force things a trifle; we suppress
a few small divergencies, and interpret certain obscure details in the
sense most useful towards establishing a psychological unity. The ideal
we strive towards is the complete closing up of every gulf.”[72]
I am not so sure that we do not find some gulfs in Balzac, inexplicably
abrupt; nor am I sure either that Dostoevsky’s are as unfathomed as
at first would be imagined. Shall I give you an example of Balzac’s
gulfs? I see one in _La Recherche de l’Absolu_. Balthazar Claès
is seeking the philosopher’s stone: apparently he has completely
forgotten the religious training of his childhood. He is absorbed by
his quest. He neglects his wife, Josephine, whose religious mind is
horror-stricken at her husband’s disbelief. One day she enters the
laboratory without warning. The draught of the opening door causes
an explosion, and Madame Claès falls fainting.... What is the cry
that escapes Balthazar’s lips? One wherein suddenly reappears his
childhood’s belief, long overlaid by the dross of his atheism. “Thank
God you’re still alive! The Saints have preserved you from death!”
Balzac does not press the incident any further, and no doubt nineteen
out of every twenty readers will never even detect the fault. The abyss
of which it gives a glimpse is left unexplained: maybe no explanation
is possible. As a matter of fact, that was of no interest to Balzac.
His one concern was to produce characters free of all inconsequences,
wherein he was in perfect accord with French feeling; for what we
French require most of all is logic.
I can say with respect not only to the _Comédie Humaine_, but also to
the comedy of everyday life as we live it, that the _dramatis personæ_
(for we French delineate ourselves as we see ourselves) are after a
Balzacian ideal. The inconsequences of our nature, should such exist,
seem to us awkward and ridiculous. We deny them. We try to ignore them,
to palliate them. Each of us is conscious of our unity, our continuity
even, and everything we repress and thrust beneath our consciousness,
like the feeling that suddenly reasserts itself in Claès, we try to
suppress completely, and failing this, we cease to hold it of any
account. We consistently behave as the character we are--or fancy we
are--ought to behave. The majority of our actions are dictated, not
by the pleasure we take in doing them, but by the need of imitating
ourselves and projecting our past into the future. We sacrifice truth
(that is to say, sincerity) to purity and continuity of line.
And in face of all this, what does Dostoevsky offer? Characters that,
without any thought for consistency, yield with facility to every
contradiction and negation of which their peculiar constitution is
capable. This seems to be Dostoevsky’s chief interest--inconsequence.
Far from concealing it, he emphasizes and illuminates it without
ceasing.
There is admittedly much that he fails to explain. I do not think
there is much that could not be explained were we prepared to concede,
as Dostoevsky invites us to do, that man is the dwelling place of
conflicting feelings. Such cohabitation is often in Dostoevsky the more
paradoxal that his characters’ feelings are forced to their extremest
intensity and exaggerated to the point of absurdity.
I believe it right to press this point, for you may be thinking that
this is an old story, just the conflict between passion and duty as
we see it in Corneille. The problem is really different. The French
hero, as Corneille depicts him, throws before himself the image of an
ideal: there is not a little of himself in it, himself as he desires
and strives to be, not as Nature made him, or as he would be if he
yielded to his instincts. The inward struggle Corneille pictures is
the fight between the ideal being to which the hero tries to conform,
and the natural being, which he seeks to deny. In short, we are not
so far removed in this instance from what Jules de Gaultier terms
_bovarysm_--a name given, after Flaubert’s heroine, to the tendency of
certain human beings towards complementing their real life by a purely
imaginary existence, in which they cease to be what they are and become
what they would like to be.
Every hero, every man who is not content merely to drift, but struggles
towards some ideal and tries to achieve it, offers us an example of
this _bovarysm_.
What we find in Dostoevsky’s works, the examples of dual existence
submitted to us, how far different! They have no connection, or
at least but little, with the frequently observed pathological
states, where a second personality is grafted upon the original,
the one alternating with the other and two groups of sensations and
associations of ideas being formed, the one unknown to the other,
so that ere long we have two distinct personalities sharing the one
fleshly tenement. They change places, the one succeeding the other
in turn, all the time ignorant of its neighbour. Think how admirably
Stevenson illustrates this condition in his phantastic tale of the
_Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_.
But in Dostoevsky the most disconcerting feature is the simultaneity
of such phenomena, and the fact that each character never relinquishes
consciousness of his dual personality with its inconsistencies.
It so happens that one of his heroes, in great stress of feeling, is
uncertain whether it is love or hate that moves him, for these opposing
emotions are mingled and confounded within him.
“And suddenly a strange surprising sensation of a sort of bitter
hatred for Sonia passed through his (Raskolnikov’s) heart. As it were
wondering and frightened of this sensation, he raised his head and
looked intently at her; but he met her uneasy and painfully anxious
eyes fixed on him: there was love in them; his hatred vanished like a
phantom. It was not the real feeling--he has taken the one feeling for
the other.”[73]
Of this misinterpretation of feeling by the person concerned we should
find examples in Marivaux, and in Racine as well.
At times one of these feelings exhausts itself by its very
exaggeration. It seems as if the expression of the feeling disconcerts
the character expressing it. With this we are not yet come to duality
of feeling; but here is something more definite! Listen to Versilov,
the _Raw Youth’s_ father:
“If only I were a weak-willed nonentity and suffered from the
consciousness of it! But you see that’s not so. I know I am exceedingly
strong, and in what way do you suppose? Why, just in that spontaneous
power of accommodating myself to anything whatever, so characteristic
of all intelligent Russians of our generation. There’s no crushing me,
no destroying me, no surprising me. I’ve as many lives as a cat. I can
with perfect convenience experience two opposite feelings at one and
the same time, and not, of course, through my own will.”[74]
“I do not undertake to account for this co-existence of conflicting
feelings,” deliberately says the narrator in _The Possessed_.
Versilov goes on to say: “I should like to say something nice to
Sonia, and I keep trying to find the right word, though my heart is
full of words which I don’t know how to utter; do you know I feel as
if I were split in two?”--He looked round at us all with a terribly
serious face and with perfectly genuine candour.--“Yes, I am really
split in two mentally, and I’m horridly afraid of it. It’s just as
though one’s second self were standing beside one; one is sensible
and rational oneself, but the other self is impelled to do something
perfectly senseless, and sometimes very funny; and suddenly you notice
that you are longing to do that amusing thing, goodness knows why;
that is, you want to, as it were, against your will; though you fight
against it with all your might, you want to. I once knew a doctor who
suddenly began whistling in church, at his father’s funeral. I really
was afraid to come to the funeral to-day, because, for some reason,
I was possessed by a firm conviction that I should begin to laugh or
whistle in church, like that unfortunate doctor, who came to rather a
bad end....”[75]
Listen now to Stavrogin, the strange hero of _The Possessed_: “I am
still capable, as I always was, of desiring to do something good, and
of feeling pleasure from it; at the same time I desire evil and feel
pleasure from that too.”[76] As Baudelaire says, no man but is ever
entreating God and the Devil at one and the same time.[77]
With the help of some passages from William Blake, I shall try to
throw some light on these apparent contradictions, and especially on
Stavrogin’s strange declaration. But this attempt at explanation I
shall hold over till later.
IV
At our last meeting we noticed the disquieting duality by which most
of Dostoevsky’s characters are racked and driven, and which prompts
Raskolnikov’s friend to say à propos of the hero of _Crime and
Punishment_: “It really looks as if there were in him two opposite
natures showing themselves in turn.”
And were these natures never visible but in turn, all would still be
well, but we have seen how they often come to manifest themselves
simultaneously. We have watched each of these contradictory impulses
exhausted, depreciated, and inhibited by its own expression and
manifestation, giving way to its opposite, and the hero is never nearer
love than when he has just given exaggerated expression to his hatred,
never nearer hatred than in the exaggeration of his love.
In all Dostoevsky’s creations, in his women characters especially, we
detect an uneasy presentiment of their own instability. The dread of
being unable to maintain for long the same mood or resolve drives them
often to disconcertingly abrupt action. For instance, Lizaveta in _The
Possessed_ makes up her mind with great alacrity, because she knows
from long experience that her resolutions never last more than a minute.
To-day I propose to study some of the results of this strange duality;
but first of all let me ask whether this duality really exists, or
whether Dostoevsky only imagines it? Does life provide him with any
examples? Is it observed from Nature, or does he merely obligingly
yield to his imaginative bent?
Nature, according to Oscar Wilde’s _Intentions_, copies the model set
her by Art, and this apparent paradox he delights in illustrating
by several specious insinuations, the gist of his argument being
that Nature--“as you will not have failed to observe”--has taken to
imitating Corot’s landscapes nowadays!
His meaning is undoubtedly that, accustomed to looking at Nature in
a manner that is become conventional, we recognize only what Art has
educated us to discern. When a painter essays to transmute and express
in his work a personal vision, Nature’s new aspect seems at first brush
paradoxal, insincere, freakish even. However, we speedily grow used to
contemplating her with the bias given by this new method, and recognize
only what the artist pointed out to us. Hence, to eyes unprejudiced,
Nature would really seem to _imitate_ Art.
What I have said about painting applies equally to novels and the
intimate landscapes of psychology. We exist on given premises, and
readily acquire the habit of seeing the world, not so much as it
actually is, but as we have been told and persuaded it is. How many
diseases were non-existent, so to speak, until diagnosed and described!
How many strange, pathological, abnormal states we identify round us,
aye, within us, once our eyes have been opened by reading Dostoevsky!
Yes, I firmly believe he opens our eyes to certain phenomena;--I do not
necessarily mean rare ones, but simply phenomena to which we had been
so far blind.
Faced with the complexity almost every human being offers, the eye
tends inevitably, spontaneously, unconsciously almost, to simplify to
some extent.
Such is the French novelist’s instinctive effort. He singles out
the chief elements in a character, tries to discern clear-cut lines
in a figure and reproduce the contours unbroken. Whether Balzac or
another, no matter: the desire, the need, even, for _stylisation_ is
all-important. None the less I believe it would be a gross mistake--one
to which I fear many a foreigner is prone--to scorn and discredit
the psychology of French literature on account of the sharp outlines
it presents, the complete absence of indistinctness, and the lack of
shading.
Remember that Nietzsche with rare perspicacity recognized and
proclaimed the extraordinary superiority of our French psychologists,
judging them--and to an even greater degree perhaps our
moralists--Europe’s most eminent masters. True that in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries we had authors of unrivalled analytical
powers: I have our moralists chiefly in mind. But I am not wholly
satisfied that our present-day novelists are able to compete with them,
for here in France we have an unfortunate habit of keeping to formulæ
which soon become mechanical, and of resting content with them instead
of pressing onwards.
I have already remarked elsewhere that La Rochefoucauld, while
rendering splendid service to psychology, had in a measure arrested
its development by reason of the very perfection of his _Maxims_. I
must apologize for quoting myself, but I should find some difficulty in
improving on these lines I wrote in 1910:
“When La Rochefoucauld bethought himself of reducing and ascribing
every generous impulse of the human heart to the solicitations of
personal vanity, I doubt whether it was not less a proof of rare
insight than a check to further and more pertinent investigation. The
formula, once found, was strictly adhered to, and for two hundred years
people lived content with this interpretation. The most sceptical
of psychologists passed as the most highly enlightened could he but
detect in the noblest, most forgiving actions the hidden promptings
of selfishness--losing sight thereby of all that is contradictory in
the human soul. I do not make bold to criticize La Rochefoucauld’s
impeachment of personal vanity, but I most definitely take exception to
his limiting himself to this one consideration and believing that with
_amour propre_ the final word had been spoken. I blame still more his
successors for carrying the question no further.”[78]
Throughout French literature we find a horror of the formless, a
certain impatience with what is not yet formed. This is how I account
for the very small place taken by the child in French novels as
compared with English or Russian. Scarcely a child is to be met with
in our novels, and such authors as do introduce children--all too
infrequently at that--are conventional, dull, and awkward.
In Dostoevsky’s works children are numerous, and it is worth
noting that the majority of his characters--and of these the most
important--are still young, hardly set. It seems to be the genesis of
feelings that interests him chiefly, for he depicts them as indistinct,
in their larval state, so to speak.
He has a predilection for baffling cases that challenge accepted
psychology and ethics. It is plain that in the midst of everyday
morality and psychology he himself does not feel at his ease.
His temperament clashes painfully with certain rules accepted as
established, which neither please nor satisfy him.
We find a similar uneasiness and lack of satisfaction in Rousseau. We
know that Dostoevsky was an epileptic and that Rousseau went mad. I
shall dwell later on the function of the morbid state in shaping their
thought. Let us rest content to-day with recognizing in this abnormal
physiological condition an invitation, as it were, to rebel against the
psychology and the ethics of the common herd.
In man are many things unexplained, aye, unexplainable maybe, but once
we admit the duality I discussed a moment ago, we cannot but admire
the logic with which Dostoevsky pursues its consequences. In the first
place, note that nearly all Dostoevsky’s characters are polygamists;
I mean that by way of satisfying, doubtless, the complexity of
their natures, they are almost all capable of several attachments
simultaneously. Another consequence, and, if I may use the term,
corollary to this argument, is the practical impossibility of producing
jealousy. These creatures simply do not know what jealousy means!
Consider, first of all, the cases of multiple attachments he puts
before us. Prince Myshkin is divided between Aglaïa Epantchin and
Nastasya Filippovna. “I love her with my whole heart,” he says,
referring to Nastasya.
“And at the same time you have declared your love for Aglaïa Ivanovna?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
“How so? Then you must want to love both of them?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
“Upon my word, Prince, think what you are saying.... Do you know what,
the most likely thing is that you have never loved either of them! And
how can you love two at once? That’s interesting!”[79]
And each of the two heroines is likewise torn between two loves. Think
too of Dmitri Karamazov between Grushenka and Natasya Ivanovna, and do
not forget Versilov. Many another instance I could quote!
You may think one of their loves was of the flesh, the other of the
spirit. Much too obvious a solution, I consider. Besides, on this
score, Dostoevsky is never perfectly straightforward. He leads us on to
numerous suppositions, then leaves us in the lurch. It was not until
I was reading _The Idiot_ for the fourth time that I became conscious
of a fact now plain as daylight: all the whims and moods in Madame
Epantchin’s attitude towards Prince Myshkin, all the hesitancy of
Aglaïa, her daughter and the Prince’s betrothed, might well be due to
the intuition these two women had (the mother in particular, of course)
of some mystery in his character, and to their uncertainty whether he
could prove an effectual husband. Dostoevsky lays stress several times
on Prince Myshkin’s chastity, and doubtless this very chastity filled
Madame Epantchin, his future mother-in-law, with uneasiness.
“There is no doubt that the mere fact he could come and see Aglaïa
without hindrance, that he was allowed to talk to her, sit with her,
walk with her, was the utmost bliss to him; and who knows, perhaps he
would have been satisfied with that for the rest of his life. It was
just this contentment that Lizaveta Prokofyevna (Madame Epantchin)
secretly dreaded. She understood him; she dreaded many a thing in
secret, which she could not have put into words herself.”[80]
And note what to me seems most important: in this instance, as indeed
frequently, the less physical love is the stronger.
I have no wish to force Dostoevsky’s idea. I do not suggest that
divided love and absence of jealousy open up the way to complaisant
community of possession, at least not always, no, nor necessarily: they
lead rather to renunciation. But, as I reminded you, Dostoevsky is not
over frank on this subject....
The question of jealousy preoccupied Dostoevsky unceasingly. In one of
his first books, _Another Man’s Wife_, we find this paradox: Othello
must not be looked upon as a typical example of real jealousy. Perhaps
it behoved us to see in this contention nothing more than an urgent
desire to go against current opinion.
But later on Dostoevsky comes back to the point, and speaks again of
Othello in _A Raw Youth_, one of this last books. “Versilov said once
that Othello did not kill Desdemona and afterwards himself because he
was jealous, but because he had been robbed of his ideal.”[81]
Is this really a paradox? I recently came across a similar assertion in
Coleridge--the similarity is so marked that I wonder if Dostoevsky had
not perchance been familiar with it.
“Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction
forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago.... Othello had
no life but in Desdemona: the belief that she, his angel, had fallen
from the heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his
heart.... But yet the pity of it, Iago. Oh, Iago, the pity of it!”
Constitutionally incapable of jealousy, then, Dostoevsky’s heroes?
Perhaps I am going a little too far, or, at least, it would be seemly
to modify my statement slightly. It may be said that of jealousy these
creatures know only the suffering it brings, a suffering which is not
complicated by any feeling of hatred for their rivals: this point is of
primary importance. If hatred there be, as in the _Eternal Husband_,
which case we shall examine presently, the hatred is counterbalanced
and restrained by a strange, imperious affection for the rival. But
most frequently there is no suspicion of hatred, nor even suffering.
And now we are venturing on a precipitous path where we have every
chance of overtaking Jean-Jacques Rousseau, equably tolerating the
favours shown by Madame de Warens to his rival, Claude Anet, or, his
thoughts full of Madame d’Houdetot, writing in his _Confessions_:
“Anyway, no matter how ardent the passion I had conceived for her,
I found it as sweet to be the confidant as to be the object of her
affections, and never for a moment did I consider her lover as my
rival, I always held him my friend. (He refers to Saint-Lambert.)
People will say this is not love: maybe not, perhaps it is more than
love.”
Similarly, in _The Possessed_, we are told that Stavrogin, far from
feeling jealous, developed a great friendship for his rival.
At this point I propose a short detour to help us probe the question
more deeply and grasp Dostoevsky’s conception. When I recently re-read
most of his novels, I was fascinated by Dostoevsky’s manner of passing
from one book to another. Undoubtedly it was natural that after _The
House of the Dead_ he should write Raskolnikov’s story in _Crime and
Punishment_, the story of the crime that sent the latter to Siberia.
More absorbing still to watch how the last pages of this novel lead
up to _The Idiot_. You remember we left Raskolnikov in Siberia so
completely regenerated in mind that he said the happenings of his past
life had lost all importance for him: his crimes, his repentance, his
martyrdom, even, seemed to him like the life-history of a stranger.
“He was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of
feeling.”[82] This is the frame of mind in which we find Prince Myshkin
at the beginning of _The Idiot_, a frame of mind which could be, and in
Dostoevsky’s eyes doubtless was, the Christian state _par excellence_.
I shall revert to this point.
Dostoevsky seems to establish in the human soul--or simply recognizes
as already existing--a kind of stratification. I can distinguish
in the characters of his novels three strata or regions. First the
intellectual, remote from the soul and whence proceed the worst
temptations. Therein dwells, according to Dostoevsky, the treacherous
demonic element. For the moment I am concerned only with the second
region, the region of passion, ravaged and desolated by storms; but
tragic though the happenings be that these storms determine, the very
soul of Dostoevsky’s characters is scarcely affected. There is a
region deeper still, where passion exists not. This is the region that
resurrection (and I grant the word the full significance bestowed on
it by Tolstoy), re-birth, in Christ’s words, enables us to reach as
Raskolnikov reached it. In this region Myshkin lives and moves.
The transition from _The Idiot_ to the _Eternal Husband_ is more
interesting still. You surely remember that at the close of _The Idiot_
we leave Prince Myshkin at the bedside of Nastasya Filippovna whom her
lover Rogozhin, the prince’s rival, has just murdered. There stand the
rivals, face to face, close to each other. Will they kill each other?
No, indeed! They weep together, and spend a wakeful night stretched out
side by side at the foot of Nastasya’s bed.
“Every time the delirious man (Rogozhin) broke into screaming or
babble, he hastened to pass his trembling hand softly over his hair and
cheeks, as though caressing and soothing him.”[83]
Almost the theme of _The Eternal Husband_! _The Idiot_ dates from 1868,
_The Eternal Husband_ from 1870. Some men of letters--and as clever a
critic as Marcel Schwob was amongst them--consider the latter novel
Dostoevsky’s masterpiece. His masterpiece! Perhaps that is excessive.
But, at any rate, it is _a masterpiece_, and it is interesting to hear
what Dostoevsky himself had to say about the book.
“I have a story,” he wrote to his friend Strakhov on March 18, 1869,
“not a very long one. I had already thought of writing it three or
four years ago, the year my brother died, encouraged by some words of
Apollon Gregoriev who, praising my _Notes from Underground_, said to
me, ‘Just write something in this style.’ But it will be something
quite different, as far as form goes: the foundation, however, will
still be the same. My everlasting theme.... I can write the story very
quickly, because there is not a word or line of it but what is clear to
me. It is already written in my head, although nothing is down on paper
so far.”[84]
And in a letter dated October 27, 1869, he continues:
“Two-thirds of the story are almost completely written and recopied.
I’ve done my best to cut it down, but that was impossible. It is not a
question, though, of quantity, but of quality. Of its quality I cannot
speak, for I have no notion myself: others will decide that point.”[85]
And here is what the others have to say:
“Your short story,” writes Strakhov, “is making a very lively
impression here, and will, in my opinion, have an unchallenged success.
It is one of the best worked-out of your novels, and by reason of
its subject, one of the most interesting you have ever written.
I am speaking of Trusotsky: the majority will have difficulty in
understanding this character, but the book is being read and will be
read eagerly.”
_Notes from Underground_ appeared a short time before this volume. I
believe that with these _Notes_ we reach the height of Dostoevsky’s
career. I consider this book (and I am not alone in my belief) as the
keystone of his entire works. But with it we return to the intellectual
region, so I shall not speak further of it to-day. Let us linger with
_The Eternal Husband_ in the realm of passion. In this short tale there
are but two characters, the husband and the lover. Concentration could
be carried no further. The whole book responds to an ideal we should
nowadays call classical: the action itself, or at least the initial
fact that provokes the drama, had already taken place, like in one of
Ibsen’s plays.
Velchaninov is come to that time of life when the past begins to look
different to his eyes:
“Now that he was verging on the forties, the brightness and good humour
were almost extinguished. These eyes, which were already surrounded by
tiny wrinkles, had begun to betray the cynicism of a worn-out man of
doubtful morals, a duplicity, an ever-increasing irony, and another
shade of feeling, which was new: a shade of sadness and of pain--a sort
of absent-minded sadness as though about nothing in particular, and yet
acute. This sadness was specially marked when he was alone.”[86]
What is happening with Velchaninov? What _does_ happen at this age,
at this turning point in life? So far, we have had the joy out of
life; but suddenly we realize that our actions, the happenings we have
brought about, once separated from us and launched out into the world,
like a skiff on the sea, continue a separate existence often unknown
to us. George Eliot speaks admirably of this in _Adam Bede_. Yes, the
events in his own past no longer appear to Velchaninov in quite the
same light, because he suddenly realizes his _responsibility_. At this
period he meets one whom he knew in bygone days, the husband of a woman
who had been his mistress. This husband appears in rather whimsical
fashion. It is impossible to decide whether he is avoiding Velchaninov
or pursuing him. He seems to spring up without warning from between
the very paving stones in the street. He wanders around mysteriously,
haunting the vicinity of Velchaninov’s house, unrecognized at first.
I shall not attempt to recount the gist of the book, nor how after
a late night visit from Pavel Pavlovitch Trusotsky, the husband,
Velchaninov decides to call upon him. Their standpoints, obscure at
first, become clearer:
“‘Tell me, Pavel Pavlovitch, you are not alone here, then? Whose little
girl is that I found with you just now?’
“Pavel Pavlovitch was positively amazed and raised his eyebrows, but he
looked frankly and pleasantly at Velchaninov.
“‘Whose little girl? Why, it’s Liza!’ he said, with an affable smile.
“‘What Liza?’ muttered Velchaninov, with a sort of inward tremor. The
shock was too sudden. When he came in and saw Liza, just before, he was
surprised, but had absolutely no presentiment of the truth, and thought
nothing particular about her.
“‘Yes, our Liza, our daughter Liza!’ Pavel Pavlovitch smiled.
“‘Your daughter? Do you mean that you and Natalya Vassilyevna had
children?’ Velchaninov asked timidly and mistrustfully in a very low
voice.
“‘Why, of course! But there, upon my word, how should you have heard of
it? What am I thinking about! It was after you went away God blessed us
with her!’
“Pavel Pavlovitch positively jumped up from his chair, in some
agitation, though it seemed agreeable too.
“‘I heard nothing about it,’ said Velchaninov, and he turned pale.
“‘To be sure, to be sure, from whom could you have heard it?’ said
Pavel Pavlovitch, in a voice weak with emotion, ‘My poor wife and I
had lost all hope, as no doubt you remember, and suddenly God sent us
this blessing, and what it meant to me He only knows! Just a year after
you went away, I believe. No, not a year, not nearly a year. Wait a
bit--why, you left us, if my memory does not deceive me, in October or
November, I believe.’
“‘I left T---- at the beginning of September, the twelfth of September,
I remember it very well.’
“‘In September, was it? H’m! what was I thinking
about?’ cried Pavel Pavlovitch, much surprised. ‘Well,
if that’s so, let me see, you went away on the twelfth
of September, and Liza was born on the eighth of May,
so--September--October--November--December--January--February--March--April--a
little over eight months! And if you only knew how my poor wife ...’
“‘Show me--call her,’ Velchaninov faltered in a breaking voice.”[87]
And thus Velchaninov learns that his passing whim, by which he had
set so little store, has left its mark. At once the question presents
itself--does the husband know? Almost to the very end of the book the
reader is left in doubt. Dostoevsky keeps us undecided, and this very
indecision tortures Velchaninov. He does not know where he is. Or
rather, it seems to us early in the day that Pavel Pavlovitch knows,
but feigns ignorance, precisely in order to torture the lover by the
indecision he skilfully maintains in his mind.
Here is one way of considering this strange book. _The Eternal Husband_
depicts the struggle between genuine and sincere feeling on one hand,
and conventional feeling, accepted and current psychology on the other.
“There is but one way out--a duel,” cries Velchaninov. But you realize
what a base issue that is, bringing satisfaction to no existing
feeling, and simply pandering to an artificial conception of honour,
one I touched on lately, a Western conception, for which we have no use
here. We soon realize that, in his heart of hearts, Pavel Pavlovitch
hugs his very jealousy. Yes, he positively loves and welcomes his
suffering. This eagerness to suffer played already an important part in
_Notes from Underground_.
In France, where the Russians are concerned, there has been much
talk, in imitation of De Vogüé, of a _religion of suffering_. We
French love to hear a formula, and to use one! It is one easy way of
naturalizing an author and assigning him to his place in the show-case.
Our mind likes precise data to hold fast by; and once satisfied,
what need for thought or personal contact?--Nietzsche? Oh, yes! “The
_superman_. Be ruthless. Live dangerously.”--Tolstoy? “Non-resistance
to evil.”--Ibsen? “Northern mists.”--Darwin? “Man is descended from the
monkey. The struggle for life.”--D’Annunzio? “The religion of beauty.”
Woe betide the authors whose ideas refuse to be reduced to a formula!
The bulk of the reading public simply cannot tolerate them (and Barrès
realized this when to his merchandise he affixed the label: _La Terre
et Les Morts_).
Yes, in France we tend to deceive ourselves with words, and believe
that everything possible has been achieved and that it is time to apply
the closure and pass on, once the formula has been found. In the same
way we believed victory already in our grasp, thanks to Joffre and his
“wearing down the enemy,” or to Russia and her “steam-roller advance.”
A _religion of suffering_ ... let us eliminate at once the possibility
of misinterpretation. It is not a question, or rather not solely a
question, of vicarious suffering, the world-wide suffering before which
Raskolnikov humbles himself to lie at Sonia the prostitute’s feet, or
Father Zossima at Dmitri Karamazov the predestined parricide’s, but a
theory of personal suffering.
Throughout the whole book, Velchaninov keeps asking himself whether
Trusotsky is jealous or not, whether he knows all or nothing. The
question is absurd: of course Trusotsky knows! Of course he is jealous,
but with the jealousy he fosters and cherishes within himself. It is
the torment of jealousy that Trusotsky desires and enjoys, just as we
saw the attachment of the hero of the _Underground_ to his toothache.
Of the hideous torment of the jealous husband we learn practically
nothing. Dostoevsky reveals it only indirectly, by virtue of the
cruel suffering Trusotsky inflicts on the creatures round about him,
especially on the little girl whom he adores in spite of all. The
child’s anguish helps us to measure the intensity of the father’s
own suffering. Pavel Pavelovitch tortures the child, whom he loves
passionately; he can no more hate her than he can hate his wife’s lover:
“‘Do you know what Liza has been to me?’--he suddenly recalled the
drunkard’s exclamation and felt that that exclamation was sincere,
not a pose, and that there was love in it. How could that monster be
so cruel to a child whom he loved so much? Is it credible? But every
time he made haste to dismiss that question, and, as it were, brush it
aside; there was something awful in that question, something he could
not bear and could not solve.”[88]
We may rest assured that the keenest of his suffering is due to his
inability to become jealous: of jealousy he has only the suffering,
and he cannot hate the man who was preferred to himself. The very
sufferings he inflicts on his rival, those he would fain inflict upon
him, the torments he inflicts on his little daughter, are a kind of
mystic counterpart that he sets to the horror and the anguish in whose
depths he is struggling. None the less, he dreams of revenge: not that
he has any precise desire to avenge himself, but he tells himself that
he must seek revenge, as perhaps the sole means of freeing himself
from such awful torments.
“Habit is everything, even in love,” says Vauvenargues,[89] and you
remember La Rochefoucauld’s maxim? “_How many men would never have
known love if they had never heard of love?_” Are we not justified in
asking: How many would never be jealous, if they did not hear jealousy
spoken about, and had not persuaded themselves that it was imperative
to be jealous?
Yes, convention is the great breeder of falsehood. How many are forced
to play their life long a part strangely foreign to themselves? And
how difficult it is to discern in ourselves a feeling not previously
described, labelled, and present before us as a model! Man finds it
easier to imitate everything than to invent anything. How many are
content to live their lives warped by untruth, and find, none the less,
in the very falsity of convention more comfort and less need for effort
than in straightforward affirmation of their personal feelings! Such
affirmation would require of them an effort of invention utterly beyond
them.
“‘I’ll tell you a killing little anecdote, Alexey Ivanovitch,’ said
Trusotsky. ‘I thought of it this morning in the carriage. I wanted to
tell you of it then. You said just now “hangs on people’s necks.” You
remember perhaps Semyon Petrovitch Livstov, he used to come and see
us when you were in T----: well, his younger brother, who was also a
young Petersburg swell, was in attendance on the Governor at V----,
and he too was distinguished for various qualities. He had a quarrel
with Gobulenko, a colonel, and considered himself insulted, but he
swallowed the affront and concealed it, and meanwhile Gobulenko cut
him out with the lady of his heart and made her an offer. And what do
you think? This Livtsov formed a genuine friendship with Gobulenko, he
quite made it up with him, and, what’s more, insisted on being his best
man: he held the wedding crown and when they came out from under it, he
went up to kiss and congratulate Gobulenko. And in the presence of the
Governor and all the honourable company, with his swallow-tail coat,
and his hair in curl, he sticks the bridegroom in the stomach with a
knife--so that he rolled over! His own best man! What a disgrace! And,
what’s more, when he’d stabbed him like that, he rushed about crying:
“Alas, what have I done! Oh, what is it that I’ve done!” with floods
of tears, trembling all over, flinging himself on people’s necks, even
ladies. “Ah, what have I done!” he kept saying, “what have I done now!”
He--he--he! he was killing. Though one feels sorry for Gobulenko,
perhaps, but after all, he recovered.’
“‘I don’t see why you told me this story,’ observed Velchaninov,
frowning sternly.
“‘Why, all because he stuck the knife in him, you know,’ Pavel
Pavlovitch tittered....”[90]
And in similar fashion, Pavel Pavlovitch’s real spontaneous feeling
expresses itself, when he is unexpectedly obliged to nurse Velchaninov,
down with a liver complaint.
“The sick man fell asleep suddenly, a minute after lying down. The
unnatural strain upon him that day, in the shattered state of his
health, had brought on a sudden crisis, and he was as weak as a child.
But the pain asserted itself again and weariness; and an hour later he
woke up and painfully got up from the sofa. The storm had subsided, the
room was full of tobacco smoke, on the table stood an empty bottle, and
Pavel Pavlovitch was asleep on another sofa. He was lying on his back,
with his head on the sofa cushion, fully dressed and with his boots
on. His lorgnette had slipped out of his pocket, and was hanging down
almost to the floor.”[91]
Strange how Dostoevsky, when leading us through the strangest by-paths
of psychology, ever must needs add the most precise and infinitesimal
of realistic details, in order to make more secure an edifice which
otherwise would appear the extreme expression of phantasy and
imagination.
Velchaninov is in great pain, and immediately Trusotsky applies every
possible means of alleviating it.
“But Pavel Pavlovitch, goodness knows why, seemed beside himself as
though it were a question of saving his own son. Without heeding
Velchaninov’s protests, he insisted on the necessity of compresses
and also of two or three cups of weak tea to be drunk on the spot,
‘and not simply hot, but boiling.’ He ran to Mavra, without waiting
for permission, with her laid a fire in the kitchen, which always
stood empty, and blew up the samovar; at the same time he succeeded in
getting the sick man to bed, took off his clothes, wrapped him up in a
quilt, and within twenty minutes had prepared tea and compresses.
“‘This is a hot plate, scalding hot!’ he said, almost ecstatically,
applying the heated plate, wrapped up in a napkin, on Velchaninov’s
aching chest. ‘There are no other compresses, and plates, I swear on my
honour, will be even better; they were laid on Pyotr Kuzmitch, I saw it
with my own eyes, and did it with my own hands. One may die of it, you
know. Drink your tea, swallow it; never mind about scalding yourself!
Life is too precious for one to be squeamish.’
“He quite flustered Mavra, who was half asleep; the plates were changed
every two or three minutes. After the third plate, and the second cup
of tea, swallowed at a gulp, Velchaninov felt a sudden relief.
“‘If once they’ve shifted the pain, thank God, it’s a good sign!’ said
Pavel Pavlovitch, and he ran joyfully to fetch a fresh plate and a
fresh cup of tea.
“‘If only we can ease the pain, if only we can keep it under!’ he kept
repeating.
“Half an hour later the pain was much less, but the sick man was so
exhausted that, in spite of Pavel Pavlovitch’s entreaties, he refused
to put up with ‘just one more nice little plate.’ He was so weak that
everything was dark before his eyes.
“‘Sleep, sleep!’ he repeated in a faint voice.
“‘To be sure,’ Pavel Pavlovitch assented.
“‘You’ll stay the night--what time is it?’
“‘It’s nearly two o’clock, it’s quarter to.’
“‘You’ll stay the night?’
“‘I will, I will.’
“A minute later the sick man called Pavel Pavlovitch again. ‘You, you,’
he muttered, when the latter had run up and was bending over him: ‘You
are much better than I am! I understand it all--all.... Thank you.’
“‘Sleep, sleep,’ whispered Pavel Pavlovitch, and he hastened on tiptoe
to his sofa.
“As he fell asleep, the invalid heard Pavel Pavlovitch noiselessly
making a bed for himself, and taking off his clothes. Finally, putting
out the candle, and almost holding his breath for fear of waking the
patient, he stretched himself on his sofa.”[92]
And yet, a quarter of an hour later, Velchaninov catches Trusotsky, who
believes him sound asleep, bending over him with intent to murder him.
“Pavel Pavlovitch wanted to kill him, but didn’t know he wanted to kill
him! ‘It’s senseless, but that’s the truth,’ thought Velchaninov.”[93]
And yet he is not satisfied!
“‘And can it be that it was all true?’ he exclaimed again, suddenly
raising his head from the pillow and opening his eyes. ‘All that madman
told me yesterday about his love for me, when his chin quivered and he
thumped himself on the breast with his fist?’
“‘It was the absolute truth,’ he decided, still pondering and
analysing. ‘That quasimodo from T---- was quite sufficiently stupid and
noble to fall in love with the lover of his wife, about whom he noticed
nothing suspicious in twenty years! He had been thinking of me with
respect, cherishing my memory and brooding over my “utterances” for
nine years. Good Heavens! And I had no notion of it! He could not have
been lying yesterday. But did he love me yesterday when he declared his
feeling and said, “Let us settle our account!” Yes, it was from hatred
that he loved me; that’s the strongest of all loves....
“‘... Only he didn’t know then whether he would end by embracing me or
murdering me. Of course, it’s turned out that the best thing was to do
both. A most natural solution’.”[94]
If I have lingered so long over this slender book, it is because it is
more accessible than the rest of Dostoevsky’s novels, and helps us to
win, beyond love and hate, to that wider region I spoke about not long
since: a region where love is not, nor passion, so easily and so simply
reached: the region Schopenhauer spoke of, the meeting-place of human
brotherhood, where the limits of existence fade away, where the notion
of the individual and of time is lost, the place wherein Dostoevsky
sought--and found--the secret of happiness.
V
At our last meeting I spoke of the three strata or regions Dostoevsky
seems to discern in the human personality: first, the province of
intellectual speculation, then the domain of the passions, midway
between the former and the third region, a vast realm remote from the
play of passion.
It is plain that these three strata are not isolated or even strictly
limited, but interpenetrate.
The intermediate region, the domain of passion, I have already
discussed. Here, and on this plane, the play is staged, not merely the
play Dostoevsky presents in each of his works, but the drama of entire
mankind. We observed, too, what at first wore the air of a paradox: no
matter how restless and powerful, the passions after all are of but
slender importance, or at least do not stir the soul’s utmost depths.
Events have no hold on the soul--they are simply outwith its province.
To support my assertion, what instance could I more aptly adduce than
war? Investigations have been carried out in regard to the terrible
struggle through which we have but lately passed. Literary men were
asked to estimate its real or apparent moment, its moral after-effects,
its influence on literature. The answer is simple: to all intents and
purposes its influence has been nil.
Consider for a moment the Napoleonic wars: endeavour to trace their
repercussion in literature and determine in what way they have modified
the soul of humanity. I admit there exist poems inspired by the
imperial epic as there exist only all too many with the Great War for
theme. But where is there a deeper note, a spiritual transformation?
No exterior event, whatever its tragedy or magnitude, can effect such
a change. On the other hand, the French Revolution is different, but
here we are concerned with a disturbance that is more than physical, a
traumatism, if I may use the word. This time the convulsion proceeds
from the very soul of the nation. The influence of the French
Revolution on the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau is
enormous, although their works date from before the event for which
they prepared the way. And we shall observe the same order of things
in Dostoevsky’s novels: the idea is not consecutive to the event, but
precedes it. In most cases passion has to serve as intermediary between
thought and action.
At any rate, in Dostoevsky’s novels we shall see the intellectual
element comes at times into touch with that deeper region, which is not
the soul’s hell, but its heaven.
In Dostoevsky we find the mysterious inversion of values already
noticed in William Blake, the great mystic amongst English poets. Hell,
according to Dostoevsky, is the first region, the realm of mind and
reason. Throughout his works, if our attention be at all alert, we
shall become conscious of a depreciation of mental powers which is not
so much systematic as involuntary and inspired by the spirit of the
Gospel.
Dostoevsky never deliberately states, although he often insinuates,
that the antithesis of love is less hate than the steady activity of
the mind. In his eyes it is intellect which individualizes, which is
the enemy of the Kingdom of Heaven, life eternal, and that bliss where
time is not, reached only by renouncing the individual self and sinking
deep in a solidarity that knows no distinctions.
This passage from Schopenhauer will prove illuminating: “He sees
that the difference between him who inflicts suffering and him who
must bear it is only the phenomenon; and does not concern the thing
in itself, for this is the will living in both, which here deceived
by the knowledge which is bound to its service, does not recognize
itself, and seeking an increased happiness in _one_ of its phenomena,
produces great suffering in _another_, and thus, in the presence
of excitement, buries its teeth in its own flesh, not knowing that
it always injures only itself, revealing in this form, through the
medium of individuality, the conflict with itself, which it bears in
its inner nature. The inflicter of suffering and the sufferer are
one. The former errs in believing that he is not a partaker in the
guilt. If the eyes of both were opened, the inflicter of suffering
would see that he lives in all that suffers pain in the wide world,
and which if endowed with reason, in vain asks why it was called into
existence for such great suffering, its desert of which it does not
understand, and the sufferer would see that all the wickedness which
is, or ever was, committed in this world, proceeds from that will which
constitutes _his_ nature also, appears also in _him_, and that through
this phenomenon and its assertion he has taken upon himself all the
sufferings which proceed from such a will, and bears them as his due,
so long as he _is_ this will.”[95]
But this pessimism (which in Schopenhauer can at times virtually have
the air of a disguise) yields place in Dostoevsky to a boundless
optimism.
“If you were to give me three lives, it wouldn’t be enough for me,”[96]
says one of his characters in _A Raw Youth_. In another passage of the
same book:
“You so want to live and are so thirsting for life that I do believe
three lives would not be enough for you.”[97]
I should like to investigate further this blissful state Dostoevsky
depicts, or of which he gives us a glimpse, in each of his works, a
state wherein we lose all sense of personal limitation and of the
flight of time.
“At that moment,” said Prince Myshkin to Rogozhin, “I seem somehow
to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be no more
time.”[98]
And compare this eloquent passage from _The Possessed_:
“‘Are you fond of children?’ asked Stavrogin.--‘I am,’ answered
Kirillov, though rather indifferently.--‘Then you are fond of
life?’--‘Yes, I’m fond of life. What of it?’--‘Though you’ve made up
your mind to shoot yourself?’--‘What of it? Why connect it? Life’s
one thing, and that’s another. Life exists, but death doesn’t at
all.’--‘You’ve begun to believe in future eternal life?’--‘No, not in
a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are moments,
you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still and it will become
eternal.’”[99]
I could multiply my quotations, but these doubtless will suffice.
I am struck, every time I read the Gospels, by the insistence with
which the words, “_Et nunc_,” “_And now_,” are repeated over and over
again. And certainly Dostoevsky too was struck by it. Everlasting
bliss, the bliss promised by Jesus Christ, can be attained here and
now, if only the human soul will forswear and deny itself. _Et nunc._...
Eternal life is not, or rather is more than, a thing of the future, and
if we do not reach it in this world, there is little hope of our ever
attaining to it. Listen to these admirable pages from Mark Rutherford’s
_Autobiography_:
“As I got older, I became aware of the folly of this perpetual reaching
after the future, and of drawing from to-morrow--and from to-morrow
only--a reason for the joyfulness of to-day. I learned, when, alas!
it was almost too late, to live in each moment as it passed over my
head, believing that the sun as it is now rising is as good as it ever
will be, and blinding myself as much as possible to what may follow.
But when I was young I was the victim of that illusion, implanted for
some purpose or other in us by Nature, which causes me on the brightest
morning in June to think immediately of a brighter morning which is
to come in July. I say nothing now for or against the doctrine of
immortality. All I say is, that men have been happy without it, even
under the pressure of disaster, and that to make immortality a sole
spring of action here is an exaggeration of the folly which deludes
us all through life with endless expectation, and leaves us at death
without the thorough enjoyment of a single hour.”
Cheerfully would I cry: “What betides life eternal, without
ever-present consciousness of that eternity even now? Eternal life can
be present in us here below. We are partakers in it from the moment we
are resigned to die to ourselves and accomplish the surrender which
enables us to resurrect straightway into eternity!”
Neither behest nor ruling: simply the secret of the supreme felicity
revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospels. “_If ye know these things,
happy are ye if ye do them_” (John xiii. 17). Not “_happy shall ye
be_” but “_happy are ye_.” Here and now we can share in that perfect
bliss.
What serenity! Time indeed ceases to exist: eternity lives, we inherit
the Kingdom of God.
Yes, here is the mysterious essence of Dostoevsky’s philosophy and of
Christian ethics too; the divine secret of happiness. The individual
triumphs by renunciation of his individuality. He who lives his life,
cherishing personality, shall lose it: but he who surrenders it shall
gain the fullness of life eternal, not in the future, but in the
present made one with eternity. Resurrection in the fullness of life,
forgetful of all individual happiness.--Oh! perfect restoration!
Such glorification of feeling and inhibition of thought is nowhere
better indicated than in the following passage from _The Possessed_
which complements the one I read a few moments since:
“‘You seem to be very happy, Kirillov,’ said Stavrogin.
“‘Yes, very happy,’ he answered, as though making the most ordinary
reply.
“‘But you were distressed so lately, angry with Liputin?’
“‘H’m!... I’m not scolding now, I didn’t know then I was happy. Have
you seen a leaf, a leaf from a tree?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘I saw one lately, a little green. It was decayed at the edges. It was
blown by the wind. When I was ten years old I used to shut my eyes in
the winter on purpose and fancy a green leaf, bright, with veins on
it, and the sun shining. I used to open my eyes and not believe them,
because it was very nice, and I used to shut them again.’
“‘What’s that? An allegory?’
“‘N-no.... Why? I’m not speaking of an allegory, but of a leaf, only a
leaf. The leaf is good: everything’s good.’
“‘When did you find out you were so happy?’
“‘Last week, on Tuesday--no, Wednesday, for it was Wednesday by that
time, in the night.’
“‘By what reasoning?’
“‘I don’t remember. I was walking about the room ... never mind. I
stopped my clock. It was thirty-seven minutes past two.’”[100]
But, you may well contend, if feeling is to overcome thought, and the
soul know no state but this vague expectancy susceptible to every
outside influence, what can result except complete anarchy? It has been
said, and of late more frequently, that anarchy is the consummation of
Dostoevsky’s doctrine. A discussion of his beliefs would lead us into a
far country, for I can anticipate the storm of protest I should provoke
if I dared affirm that Dostoevsky does not plunge us into anarchy,
but simply and naturally leads us to the Gospels. On this point we
must be clear. Christian doctrine as contained in the New Testament is
usually seen by people of our nation through the medium of the Roman
Catholic Church, as she has modified it, moreover, in harmony with her
own needs. Now, Dostoevsky abhors all churches, the Church of Rome in
particular. He claims it his right to accept Christ’s teaching directly
from the Scriptures, and from them alone, which is precisely what the
Catholic cannot possibly concede.
In his letters we come across countless passages inveighing against
the Roman Catholic Church, accusations so vehement and so categorical
that I dare not repeat them to you here. But they confirm the general
impression I gather at each fresh reading of Dostoevsky and help me to
a better understanding of him. I know no author at once more Christian
and less Catholic in spirit.
“But you have put your finger on the very crux of the question,” Roman
Catholics will say, “and you have yourself explained it, many and many
a time, seemingly with full understanding. The Gospels, the words of
our Lord Jesus Christ, considered apart, lead but to anarchy, whence
the need for St. Paul, for the Church, for Catholicism as a whole....”
I shall not attempt to argue with them.
Dostoevsky leads us, we may take it, if not to anarchy, to a sort of
Buddhism, or at least _quietism_, and we shall see that in the judgment
of the orthodox, this is not his only heresy. He draws us far away from
Rome--the Rome of the Encyclicals, I mean--far, too, from worldly codes
of honour.
“But look here, Prince, are you a man of honour?” cries one of his
characters to Prince Myshkin, the hero who best embodied his philosophy
until the day when he wrote _The Karamazovs_ and presented to us
these angelic creatures, Alyosha and Father Zossima. What then does
Dostoevsky exalt as his ideal? The life contemplative? A life wherein
man, renouncing reason and will, shall know love alone?
Perhaps Dostoevsky would find personal happiness in such an existence,
but certainly not man’s higher destiny. As soon as Prince Myshkin,
far from his native land, reaches the higher plane, he is urgently
impelled to turn his steps homeward, and when young Alyosha confides
to Father Zossima his secret aspirations towards ending his days in
the monastery, his confessor says to him: “Go hence from this house,
thou wilt be of greater use out in the world! Thy brothers have need of
thee!”... “_I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world,
but that thou shouldest keep them from evil._”
I notice (and with this remark I come to treat of the demonic
element in Dostoevsky’s works) that most translations of the Bible
render Jesus’s words “_But deliver them from evil_,” which is not
quite accurate. The translations I mean are Protestant versions.
Protestantism is inclined to leave out of the reckoning angel and
demon alike. By way of experiment I have often asked Protestants
if they believed in the Devil, and invariably my question has been
received with bewilderment. Then I realized that in most cases this
was a question the Protestant had never put to himself. In the end he
replied that he did, of course, believe in evil, and when I pressed
him, he admitted that in evil he discerned only the absence of good,
as in darkness the absence of light. Now, we are here far removed
indeed from the Gospel texts which mention time and again a diabolic
force, real, present, and defined. “_Deliver them from evil?_”... No!
“_Deliver them from the Evil One._” This problem of the Devil occupies,
I may say, an important place in Dostoevsky’s work. Some no doubt will
see in him a Manichean. We are aware that the great heresiarch, Mani,
recognized two principles controlling the universe--the Power of Good
and the Power of Evil, equally active, independent, and indispensable,
by which belief the Manichean doctrine is directly associated with the
teaching of Zarathustra. We observed (and on this point I am bound
to insist) how Dostoevsky assigns the Devil’s habitation, not to the
baser elements in man, but to the very noblest--the realm of intellect,
the seat of reason, although man’s entire being even can become the
Archfiend’s dwelling-place and prey. The most cunning snares laid
for us by the Evil One are, in Dostoevsky’s reckoning, intellectual
temptations and problems. I do not think it will be going far astray
from my subject if I consider first of all the problems expressing
mankind’s torturing obsessions.... What is Man? Whence comes he and
whither does he return? What was he before birth, what becomes of
him after death? To what Truth can mankind attain?--or even more
pertinently--What _is_ Truth?
With Nietzsche a new problem arose, completely different from the
rest, and far from being absorbed amongst these others, it pressed
straight to the forefront. As a problem it, too, has its torturing
uncertainty--an uncertainty that drove Nietzsche to madness. “What can
mankind accomplish? What can one single man accomplish?” The question
implies the terrible apprehension that man could have been other
than he is, could have accomplished--could yet accomplish--greater
things, whereas he is content to take his graceless ease at the first
halting-place without thought of crowning his progress.
Was Nietzsche actually the first to formulate this question? I dare not
affirm that he was, for I am confident he had already come across the
problem amongst the Greeks and amongst the Italians of the Renaissance.
But with the latter the question was answered immediately, and man
turned eagerly to the domain of practical activity. The solution was
sought and found unerringly in action and in the practice of the
arts. I have in mind Alexander and Cæsar Borgia, Frederick II, King
of the Two Sicilies, Leonardo da Vinci, and Goethe--creators, men of
a superior race. For artists and for men of action the problem of the
_superman_ does not exist, or is at least readily solved. Their very
lives and activity provide an answer in themselves. The torturing
dread begins when the problem is left unsolved, or when the interval
between question and answer is protracted. The being who thinks and
invents and does not act brews his own poison draught. Hearken again to
William Blake: “_He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence_”--the
pestilence that proved mortal to Nietzsche.
“What can a man accomplish?” is the atheist’s characteristic query, and
Dostoevsky exquisitely realized the fact that to deny God is inevitably
to exalt man.
God a myth?... Then everything is lawful! We find this idea in _The
Possessed_ and it is repeated in _The Karamazovs_:
“If God exists, all is His will, and from His will I cannot escape.
If not; it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will.”[101] How
can a man assert his independence? Again begins that torturing dread.
Everything is possible. Is it? Everything? What can one man accomplish?
Whenever we see one of Dostoevsky’s characters ask himself this
question, we can be sure of witnessing ere long his utter downfall.
Take Raskolnikov, for instance, the first of them to formulate the idea
clearly, the very idea which Nietzsche transformed into his theory of
the _superman_. Raskolnikov is responsible for an article somewhat
subversive in tone, dividing, according to Porfiry’s version of it, all
men into _ordinary_ and _extraordinary_.
“Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress
the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary
men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in
any way, just because they are extraordinary.”--“That wasn’t quite
my conclusion,” began Raskolnikov, simply and modestly. “Yet I admit
that you have stated it almost correctly; perhaps, if you like,
perfectly so.” (It almost gave him pleasure to admit this.) “The only
difference is that I don’t contend that extraordinary people are
always bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it. In fact,
I doubt whether such an argument could be published. I simply hinted
that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right ... that is, not an official
right but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep
certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical
fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole
of humanity).... Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that
all--well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon,
Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on--were all without exception criminals,
from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the
ancient one, handed down from their ancestors, and held sacred by
the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either, if that
bloodshed (often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence of
ancient law) were of use to their cause. It’s remarkable, in fact, that
the majority, indeed, of those benefactors and leaders of humanity were
guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men, or
even a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some
new word, must from their very nature be criminals--more or less, of
course. Otherwise, it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and
to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their
very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to
it.”[102]
Observe, however, that in the face of this profession Raskolnikov
confesses his abiding faith in God--a testimony which differentiates
him from Dostoevsky’s other _supermen_.
“Do you believe in God? Excuse my curiosity!”
“I do,” repeated Raskolnikov, raising his eyes to Porfiry.
“And do you--believe in Lazarus’s rising from the dead?”
“I do! Why do you ask all this?”
“You believe it literally?”
“Literally.”[103]
“_One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression_”, says William Blake.
But the very fact that Raskolnikov puts himself the question, instead
of making action his answer, proves that he is no real _superman_. His
bankruptcy is complete. Not for one moment can he rid himself of the
conviction of his own mediocrity. He excites himself to commit a crime
in order to satisfy himself that he is a _superman_. “I divined then
... that power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and
pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to
dare! Then for the first time in my life an idea took shape in my mind
which no one had ever thought of before me, not one! I saw as clear as
daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad
world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying
to the devil. I wanted _to have the daring_ ... and I killed her. I
only wanted to have the daring.”[104]
Later, after the crime, he says: “Perhaps I should never have committed
a murder again. I wanted to find out something else; it was something
led me on. I wanted to find out then, and quickly, whether I was a
louse like everybody else or a man, whether I can step over barriers
or not, whether I dare to stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a
trembling creature or whether I have the right....”[105]
Moreover he is unwilling to accept the idea of his own failure. He
refuses to acknowledge he had not the right to dare.
“I couldn’t carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible,
that’s what’s the matter!... If I had succeeded I should have been
crowned with glory, but now I’m trapped.”[106]
After Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Kirillov, Ivan Karamazov and the _Raw
Youth_ will have their turn.
The utter inefficiency of every one of his intellectual heroes is
rooted in Dostoevsky’s belief that the man of active brain is wellnigh
incapable of action.
_Notes from Underground_, the little book he wrote shortly before _The
Eternal Husband_, marks for me the height of his career. It is the
keystone of his whole work, the clue to his thought. “_He who thinks,
acts not...._” ’Tis but a step then to the insinuation that action
presupposes a certain intellectual inferiority.
From first page to last, this little volume, _Notes from Underground_,
is a monologue pure and simple, and it really seems a trifle daring
to assert, as did our friend Valery Larbaud recently, that James
Joyce, the author of _Ulysses_, devised this form of narrative. Had he
forgotten Dostoevsky, Poe even, and Browning, of whom I cannot help
but think as I read these _Notes from Underground_ anew? Browning and
Dostoevsky seem to me to bring the monologue straightway to perfection,
in all the diversity and subtlety to which this literary form lends
itself.
Perhaps I shock the literary sense of some of my audience by coupling
these two names, but I can do no other, nor help being struck by the
profound resemblance, not merely in form, but in substance between
certain Browning monologues (I am thinking especially of _My Last
Duchess_, _Porphyria’s Lover_, and the two depositions of Pompilia’s
husband in the _Ring and the Book_) and that admirable little story in
Dostoevsky’s _Journal_, _Krotchkaya_, which means, I am told, _Faint
Heart_, the title it bears in the latest edition of the volume.
But to an even greater degree than the form and the manner of their
work, what urges my comparison of Browning and Dostoevsky is their
optimism--an optimism which has no affinity with Goethe’s, but brings
them both very close to Nietzsche and to William Blake, of whom I shall
have occasion to speak again.
Yes, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Browning, and Blake, are four stars of one
single constellation. For long Blake was completely unknown to me, then
recently I discovered him, and as an astronomer can sense the influence
of a star and determine its position before he has even glimpsed it,
I can say that Blake I had long anticipated. Is this equivalent to
saying his influence was considerable? No, indeed! I am not aware he
ever exerted any. Even in England, till late years, Blake remained
practically unknown, a pure and distant star whose rays are only now
reaching us.
The most significant of his works, _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_,
from which I shall quote passages now and again, will help us, I am
sure, to a better understanding of certain traits in Dostoevsky.
That sentence I quoted a moment ago from his _Proverbs of Hell_, as he
entitles some of his aphorisms, would be a fitting device to introduce
Dostoevsky’s _Notes from Underground_--or else this other saying of
Blake’s--“_Expect poison from standing water._”
“Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be
pre-eminently a characterless creature,” declares the hero (save the
mark!) of the _Underground_. The man of action according to Dostoevsky
must be mediocre in intellect, for the proud in mind are withheld
from action which they deem a compromise, a limitation to thought.
He who acts will be a Pyotr Stepanovitch, as in _The Possessed_, or
a Smerdiakov, for in _Crime and Punishment_ Dostoevsky had not yet
established the division between thought and action.
The mind does not act; it conditions action. In several of Dostoevsky’s
novels we come across an odd distribution of rôles, the uneasy
relationship and hidden connivance between a thinking being and
another acting under its influence, vicariously almost. Think of
Ivan Karamazov, Smerdiakov, Stavrogin, and Pyotr Stepanovitch, whom
Stavrogin called his “shadow.”
Strange, is it not, to find what I may term a first version of the
queer relationship between Ivan Karamazov the thinker and Smerdiakov
the lackey in _Crime and Punishment_, the first of his great novels?
Dostoevsky tells us of one Filka, a serf, Svidrigaïlov’s servant, who
hanged himself to escape, not blows, but his master’s mockery of him.
“Filka was a sort of hypochondriac, a sort of domestic philosopher.”
The other servants used to say “he read himself silly.”[107]
These lackeys, these shadows, these puppets that act in place of the
thinking beings, have one and all a love amounting to veritable
devotion for the diabolical superiority of intellect. Stavrogin’s
prestige in the eyes of Pyotr Stepanovitch is as exaggerated as that
intellectual’s scorn for his miserable inferior.
“‘Do you want the whole truth?’ said Pyotr Stepanovitch to Stavrogin.
‘You see the idea really did cross my mind--you hinted it yourself,
not seriously, but teasing me (for of course you would not hint it
seriously); but I couldn’t bring myself to it, and wouldn’t bring
myself to it for anything, not for a hundred roubles....’
“In the heat of his talk, he went close up to Stavrogin and took hold
of the revers of his coat (really, it may have been on purpose). With
a violent movement Stavrogin struck him on the arm: ‘Come, what is it?
... give over, you’ll break my arm.’”[108] (Ivan Karamazov’s conduct
towards Smerdiakov is marked by like brutality.)
“Nicolay Vsyevolodovitch, tell me, as before God, are you guilty or
not, and I’ll swear I’ll believe your word as though it were God’s, and
I’ll follow you to the end of the earth. Yes, I will, I’ll follow you
like a dog.... I am a buffoon, but I don’t want you, my better half, to
be one! Do you understand me?”[109]
The thinking being enjoys his domination of the other: yet this very
domination is a source of constant exasperation. For his creature’s
fumbling actions are served up as the caricature of his own thoughts.
Dostoevsky’s letters enlighten us concerning the elaboration of his
novels, _The Possessed_ in particular. Personally, I judge this work
to be most extraordinarily powerful and wonderful. In it we are
vouchsafed to witness a rare literary phenomenon. The book Dostoevsky
planned to write was very different from that we actually have. While
he was putting it into shape a new character, of which at first he
had scarcely dreamed, asserted itself, gradually took front rank, and
ousted the intended hero!
“None of my works has given me so much trouble as this one,” he
wrote from Dresden to his friend Strakhov in October, 1870. “At the
beginning, that is, at the end of last year, I thought the novel _made_
and artificial, and rather scorned it. But later I was overtaken by
real enthusiasm. I fell in love with my work of a sudden and made a big
effort to get all that I had written into good trim. Then in the summer
came a transformation, up started a new, vital character, who insisted
on being the hero of the book, the original hero (a most interesting
figure, but not worthy to be called a hero) fell into the background.
The new one so inspired me that I once more began to go over the whole
book afresh.”[110]
The new character, to which all his attention is now devoted,
is Stavrogin, the strangest perhaps and the most terrifying of
Dostoevsky’s creations. Stavrogin reads his own riddle towards the end
of the book. It is seldom that a character of Dostoevsky’s fails to
give, sooner or later, the key, as it were, to his nature, often in
most unexpected fashion, by some words he lets slip all of a sudden.
Listen, for instance, to Stavrogin’s account of himself:
“I have no ties in Russia--everything is as alien to me there as
everywhere. It’s true that I dislike living there more than anywhere,
but I can’t hate anything even there! I’ve tried my strength
everywhere. You advised me to do this, ‘that I might learn to know
myself.’ As long as I was experimenting for myself and for others, it
seemed infinite, as it has all my life. Before your eyes I endured a
blow from your brother; I acknowledged my marriage in public. But to
what to apply my strength, that is what I’ve never seen, and do not see
now in spite of all your praises in Switzerland, which I believed in.
I am still capable, as I always was, of desiring to do something good,
and of feeling pleasure from it; at the same time I desire evil, and
feel pleasure from that too.”[111]
At our last meeting we shall come back to the first item in this
declaration--a very important one in Dostoevsky’s estimation. Stavrogin
had no ties in his native land. To-day let us consider only this
double-headed hydra of desire that is gnawing Stavrogin. Man ever
entreats, says Baudelaire, God and the Devil at one and the same time.
At the bottom, what Stavrogin worships is energy. William Blake
will give us the key to this baffling character: “_Energy is the
only Life--Energy is Eternal Delight._” Aye, hearken further to his
proverbs: “_The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom_,” or “_If
the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise_.”--“_You
never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough._”
Blake’s glorification of energy expresses itself in divers forms. “_The
roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea,
and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the
eye of man._”
We further read: “_The cistern contains: the fountain overflows_,” and
“_The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction_.” And
the formula which introduces his _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ seems
to have been appropriated all unconsciously by Dostoevsky: “_Without
Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and
Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence._” “_These
two classes of men are always upon earth, and they should be enemies:
whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence._”
Allow me to add to Blake’s proverbs two of my own invention: “_Fine
feelings are the stuff that bad literature is made on_,” and “_The
Fiend is a party to every work of art_.” Yes, of a truth, every work
of art is a _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, and William Blake tells us:
“_The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God,
and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet,
and of the Devil’s party without knowing it._”
Dostoevsky was tormented his life long by his horror of evil and by
his sense of its inevitability. By evil I mean suffering also. I think
of him when I read the parable of the man which sowed good seed in his
field, but while men slept his enemy came and sowed tares among the
wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought
forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.... And the servants said
unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said,
Nay: lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with
them. Let them both grow together until the harvest.
Two years ago, in neutral territory, I met Walther Rathenau. He spent
two days with me, I remember, and I questioned him on the events of the
time, seeking in particular his opinion of Bolshevism and the Russian
Revolution. His answer was that naturally he suffered at the horrible
abominations practised by the revolutionaries. “But, believe me,” he
added, “a nation learns to know itself, as a man his own soul, only by
passing through the depths of suffering and the abyss of sin.... And
America has not yet gained a soul because she refuses to accept sin and
suffering.”
Now you know my grounds for saying, when we saw Father Zossima kneel
before Dmitri and Raskolnikov before Sonia, that they were humbling
themselves, not merely before suffering, but before sin.
Let us make no mistake as regards what was in Dostoevsky’s mind. I
repeat that even though he clearly formulates the problem of the
_superman_ which insidiously reappears in each of his works, we
witness the glorious vindication of none but Gospel truths. Dostoevsky
perceives and imagines salvation only in the individual’s renunciation
of self; but, on the other hand, he gives us to understand that man is
never nearer God than in his extremity of anguish. Then and not till
then does he cry: “_Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of
eternal life._”
He knows this imploring cry cannot proceed from the lips of the
righteous man who has ever been sure of his course and confident he has
acquitted his obligations to God and to himself alike, but from those
of the unhappy creature “who has nowhere left to turn.”... “Do you
understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn? No,
that you don’t understand yet!”[112] Only through anguish and crime,
after his expiation even, cut off from the society of his fellow-men,
did Raskolnikov come face to face with the Gospel.
There has no doubt been a measure of desultoriness in the ideas I have
submitted to you to-day--but maybe responsibility for the confusion
falls in part to Dostoevsky’s share as well. “_Improvement makes
straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of
Genius._”
At all events, Dostoevsky was convinced, as I too am convinced, that in
the Gospel truths is no confusion--the one consideration of moment!
VI
I am overwhelmed by the number and importance of the things I have
still left to say to you. You have grasped, have you not, what I meant
in my introduction when I said that Dostoevsky was often an excuse
for expressing my own ideas? I should crave your pardon did I think
that thereby I had presented Dostoevsky’s in a false light. No, like
the bees Montaigne tells of, I have but gathered from his works what
I needed to make my own honey. However life-like a portrait, there
is always much of the artist in it, as much of him almost as of the
sitter. The most precious model is undoubtedly that which warrants the
widest diversity of likeness and lends itself to the greatest number of
portraits. I have attempted Dostoevsky’s likeness; I know I have not
exhausted his semblance.
Overwhelming, too, the number of touches I should like to add to my
preceding papers. After each one I have felt there was something I had
forgotten to tell you. At our last meeting, for example, I wanted to
make plain the meaning of my two “proverbs”: “_Fine feelings are the
stuff bad literature is made on_,” and “_The Fiend is party to every
work of art._” What to me seems transparent may appear a paradox to
you, and as such to call for elucidation. I loathe paradoxes and never
seek effect in surprises, but had I nothing new to suggest I should
not attempt these papers; and remember, a new idea wears invariably
the guise of a paradox. To help you acknowledge the truth of what
I am saying, I proposed to call your attention to two figures, St.
Francis of Assisi and Fra Angelico. If it was vouchsafed the latter
to be a great artist (the better to prove my contention I choose as
my example the most shiningly pure figure in the whole history of
art), it was because, in spite of his purity, his art permitted of
demonic collaboration. There is no work of art to which the Demon is
not a co-signatory. The true saint is not Fra Angelico, but Francis of
Assisi. There are no artists amongst the saints, no saints amongst the
artists.
Creative art may be likened to the box of sweet spices which Mary
Magdalene brake not. I have already quoted that strange dictum of
Blake’s: “_The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels
and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a
true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it._”
There are three threads in the loom on which every work of art is
woven, the three lusts pointed out by the apostle: “... _the lust of
the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life_.”
Remember Lacordaire’s remark when congratulated upon an admirable
sermon he had just delivered: “The Devil has forestalled you.” The
Devil would not have told him his sermon was fine, indeed, he would
have been there to speak, had he not been party to it.
After citing lines from Schiller’s _Hymn to Joy_, Dmitri Karamazov
exclaims: “And the awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as
terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is
the heart of man.”[113]
No artist, I am sure, has given the demonic so large a share in his
work as Dostoevsky, unless Blake himself, who concluded his admirable
little book, _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, with these words:
“_This Angel who is now become a Devil is my particular friend. We
often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense,
which the world shall have if they behave well._”
After leaving you, I realized that in quoting the strangest of
William Blake’s _Proverbs of Hell_, I had omitted to read to you the
entire passage from _The Possessed_ which had called forth these very
quotations. May I atone for my omission? In this one page from _The
Possessed_ you will marvel at the fusion--not to say confusion--of the
divers elements I sought to point out in my previous papers: optimism
first and foremost, the wild love of life we come across again and
again in Dostoevsky’s works, love of life and all the world, Blake’s
vast delectable world wherein dwells the tiger as well as the lamb.
“Are you fond of children?”
“I am,” answered Kirillov, though rather indifferently.
“Then you’re fond of life?”
“Yes, I’m fond of life! What of it?”
“Though you’ve made up your mind to shoot yourself?”
“What of it? Why connect it? Life’s one thing, and that’s another. Life
exists, but death doesn’t at all....”[114]
We saw too Dmitri Karamazov ready to take his life in a fit of
optimism, beside himself with enthusiasm.
“You seem to be very happy, Kirillov?”
“Yes, very happy,” he answered, as though making the ordinary reply.
“But you were distressed so lately, angry with Liputin?”
“H’m!... I’m not scolding now. I did not know then that I was
happy.”[115]
Do not draw a mistaken conclusion from this seeming ferocity which is
frequent in Dostoevsky. It is an integral part of his quietism, as of
Blake’s. You remember my saying that Dostoevsky’s Christianity had
closer affinities with Asia than with Rome? Yet his acceptance of the
doctrine of energy, a doctrine positively glorified by Blake, is rather
of the West than of the East.
But for Blake and Dostoevsky both, the truth of New Testament teaching
is too radiantly clear for them to deny this ferocity as but a
transitory phase, the short-lived consequence of a passing blindness.
And to reveal to you only the vision of his cruelty would be an act
of treachery towards Blake. I wish I could counter my quotations from
his terrible _Proverbs of Hell_ by reading one of the loveliest of his
_Songs of Innocence_--alas! its aëry form eludes translation--the poem
where he foretells the time when the lion in his strength will lie down
with the lamb and watch over the fold.
But let us continue with our reading from _The Possessed_.
“They’re bad because they don’t know they’re good; when they find out
they won’t outrage a little girl. They’ll find out that they’re good
and they’ll all become good, every one of them,” declares Kirillov.[116]
And so the conversation continues until we stumble across the singular
conception of the man-God.
“Here you’ve found it out! So you’ve become good then?”
“I am good.”
“That I agree with, though,” muttered Stavrogin, frowning.
“He who teaches that all are good will end the world.”
“He who taught it was crucified.”
“He will come, and his name will be the man-God.”
“The God-man?”
“The man-God! That’s the difference.”[117]
The notion of a man-God succeeding the God-man brings us round again
to Nietzsche. À propos of the _superman_ theory, I should like to
contribute one emendation in protest against an opinion which is only
too current and too easily accepted. Nietzsche’s _superman_ (observe,
pray, wherein he differs from the _superman_ of Raskolnikov’s or
Kirillov’s vision), though _ruthlessness_ is his motto, is ruthless not
to others but to himself. The humanity he aspires to outstrip is his
own. In short: to one and the same problem Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
propose different, radically opposed solutions. Nietzsche advocates the
affirmation of the personality--for him it is the one possible aim in
life: Dostoevsky postulates its surrender. Nietzsche presupposes the
heights of achievement where Dostoevsky prophesies utter ruin.
At the darkest hour of the War, I read in the letters of a Red Cross
orderly (his modesty forbids me to name him), living in the midst of
agonizing sufferings and hearing but the voice of despair, “Ah, if
only they could make a sacrifice of their sufferings!”--a thought so
luminous that all commentary were a matter for reproach. I shall only
compare it with this sentence from _The Possessed_:
“Every earthly woe and every earthly tear is a joy for us. And when
you water the earth with your tears a foot deep, you will rejoice at
everything at once, and your sorrow will be no more, such is the
prophecy.”[118] Are not we very near to Pascal’s “_sweet and perfect
resignation_” and his cry of “_Joy! Joy! Tears of joy!_”?
Is not this state of bliss depicted by Dostoevsky the very one exalted
by the Gospel, a state into which we are born anew, the joy whose
fulfilment is possible only through renunciation of self, for it
is love of self which prevents us from leaping into Eternity, from
entering into the Kingdom of God and communing in the mystery of life
universal?
The first consequence of such regeneration is that man becomes as a
little child. “_Except ye be converted, and become as little children,
ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven._” In the words of La
Bruyère, “_Little children have neither past nor future, for they live
in the present_,” which man has lost the power to do.
“At that moment,” said Prince Myshkin to Rogozhin--“at that moment I
seem somehow to understand the extraordinary saying that _there shall
be no more time_.”[119]
This direct participation is, as I have earlier indicated, taught by
the Gospel, unwearying in its insistence upon these words, “_Et nunc_”
... “_And now_.” The perfect joy Christ means is not of the future, but
of the immediate present.
“You’ve begun to believe in future eternal life?”
“No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are
moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still and it will
become eternal.”[120]
And towards the end of _The Possessed_ Dostoevsky reverts once more to
Kirillov’s uncanny rapture. Let us read the passage in question. It
will help us to appreciate Dostoevsky’s idea, and prepare the way for
one of the most essential truths I have left to discuss.
“There are seconds--they come five or six at a time--when you
suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained.
It’s something not earthly--I don’t mean in the sense that it’s
heavenly--but in that sense that man cannot endure it in his earthly
aspect. He must be physically changed or die. This feeling is clear and
unmistakable; it’s as though you apprehend all nature and suddenly say,
‘Yes, that’s right.’ God, when He created the world, said at the end of
each day of creation, ‘Yes, it’s right, it’s good.’ It--it’s not being
deeply moved, but simply joy. You don’t forgive anything, because there
is no more need of forgiveness. It’s not that you love--oh, there’s
something in it higher than love--what’s most awful is that it’s
terribly clear and such joy. If it lasted more than five seconds, the
soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live
through a lifetime, and I’d give my whole life for them, because they
are worth it. To endure ten seconds one must be physically changed.
I think man ought to give up having children--what’s the use of
children, what’s the use of evolution when the goal has been attained?
In the Gospel it is written that there will be no child-bearing in the
resurrection, but that man will be like the angels of the Lord....”[121]
“‘Kirillov, does this often happen?’
“‘Once in three days, or once a week.’
“‘Don’t you have fits, perhaps?’
“‘No.’
“‘Well, you will. Be careful, Kirillov. I’ve heard that’s just how fits
begin. An epileptic described exactly that sensation before a fit,
word for word as you’ve done. He mentioned five seconds too, and said
that more could not be endured. Remember Mahomet’s pitcher from which
no drop of water was spilt while he circled Paradise on his horse.
That was a case of five seconds too; that’s too much like your eternal
harmony, and Mahomet was an epileptic. Be careful, Kirillov, it’s
epilepsy.’
“‘It won’t have time.’ Kirillov smiled gently.”[122]
In _The Idiot_ we hear Prince Myshkin connect this condition of
euphoria, familiar to him too, with the epileptic attacks to which he
is subject.
So there we have Prince Myshkin an epileptic, Kirillov an epileptic,
Smerdiakov an epileptic. There is an epileptic in each of Dostoevsky’s
great works. We know Dostoevsky himself was thus afflicted, and his
persistence in making epilepsy intervene as a factor in his novels
sufficiently indicates the rôle he assigned this disease in moulding
his ethical conceptions and directing the course of his thought.
If we seek far enough, we shall invariably find the genesis of
every serious moral reform in some physiological enigma, some
non-satisfaction of the flesh, irritation, or anomaly. Forgive me for
quoting myself again, but if I am to express my idea as explicitly as
before, I must use the same phraseology as on that previous occasion.
“It is natural that every important moral change, or, as Nietzsche
would say, _transmutation of values_, should be due to some
physiological disturbance. With physical well-being, mental activity
is in abeyance, and as long as conditions continue to be satisfactory,
no change can possibly be contemplated. By conditions I mean spiritual
circumstance, for where the external and material are implicated,
the reformer’s motive is utterly different: the one readjustment
involved is chemical, the other mechanical. There lies at the root
of every reform a distemper. The reformer is a sick man by reason of
some ill-adjustment in his spiritual balance. Densities, ratios, and
moral values present themselves to him in different perspectives,
so he exerts himself to establish a fresh accord. He aims at a new
co-ordination. His work is nothing but an attempt to reorganize, in the
light of his logic and reasoning, the elements of confusion he senses
within himself, for the unsystematic he cannot tolerate. Of course I
do not suggest that lack of balance is the necessary condition for the
making of a reformer, but I do contend that every reformer starts out
with a lack of balance.”[123]
So far as I know, it would be impossible to find, amongst the reformers
who have held up to humanity a new measure of values, one single
instance where we could fail to discern what Dr. Binet-Sanglé is
pleased to qualify a _hereditary taint_.[124]
Mahomet was an epileptic. Epileptics, too, the Prophets of Israel,
and Luther, and Dostoevsky. Socrates had his demon, Saint Paul his
mysterious “thorn in the flesh,” Pascal his abyss, Nietzsche and
Rousseau their mania.
I can hear you say, “But what is there new in this theory? It belongs
properly to Lombroso and Max Nordau. Genius is a neurosis.” No, not so
fast! I must insist on this point, for it is extraordinarily important.
There do exist geniuses, Victor Hugo for example, sane and whole.
Their perfect spiritual poise precludes the possibility of any fresh
problem. Rousseau, without his leaven of madness, would, I am sure,
be no better than an undigested Cicero. It is pointless to lament the
infirmity but for which he would never have sought to analyse the
problem raised by his own anomaly or find a harmony which would not
reject his discord. Sound and healthy reformers do undoubtedly exist,
but such are lawgivers. The man whose inner balance is perfect can
well contribute reforms--reforms which touch the outer man: he draws up
new constitutions. But the individual who is abnormal refuses to submit
to laws already established.
From knowledge of his own case, Dostoevsky supposes a pathological
condition which, for a space, imposes and suggests to one or other of
his characters a new formula of existence. To take a concrete instance,
let us consider Kirillov, who carries on his shoulders the entire plot
of _The Possessed_. We are aware he intends to take his life, but not
that his suicide is imminent: self-destruction is, however, certainly
in his mind. Why? The motive is withheld almost till the very end of
the book.
“I don’t understand what fancy possesses you to put yourself to death,”
says Pyotr Stepanovitch to him. “It wasn’t my idea; you thought of
it yourself before I appeared, and talked of your intention to the
committee abroad before you said anything to me. And you know, no one
has forced it on you; no one of them knew you, but you came to confide
in them yourself, from sentimentalism. And what’s to be done if a plan
of action here, which can’t be altered now, was founded upon that
with your consent and upon your suggestion?--_your_ suggestion, mind
that!”[125]
Kirillov’s suicide is absolutely gratuitous. I mean to say there is an
absence of outward motivation. We shall presently see what absurdities
are introduced into this world under cover of a _gratuitous act_.
After Kirillov resolves to take his life, everything becomes a matter
of profound indifference to him. His peculiar state of mind which
sanctions and accounts for his suicide (gratuitous, but _not_ without a
motive) will leave him unmoved by the imputation of a crime others will
commit and which he will calmly suffer to be laid at his own door. Such
at least is Pyotr Stepanovitch’s belief.
Pyotr Stepanovitch imagines the crime he is planning will strengthen
the bonds between the conspirators he heads and over whom he feels his
control weakening. He reckons that each individual party to the plot,
having shared in the crime, will feel his complicity and be unable,
indeed will not dare, to break away. Who is to be sacrificed?
Pyotr Stepanovitch is still undecided. It is necessary that the victim
should present himself spontaneously.
The conspirators are met together in a large room; in the course of
conversation, the question is asked, “Can there be, even now, an
informer in our midst?” An extraordinary commotion follows this remark:
everybody begins to talk at once.
“‘Gentlemen, if that is so,’ Verhovensky went on, ‘I have compromised
myself more than anyone, and so I will ask you to answer one question,
if you care to, of course. You are all perfectly free.’
“‘What question? What question?’ every one clamoured.
“‘A question that will make it clear whether we are to remain together,
or take up our hats and go our several ways without speaking.’
“‘The question! The question!’
“‘If any one of us knew of a proposed political murder, would he, in
view of the consequences, go to give information, or would he stay at
home and await events? Opinions may differ on this point. The answer
to the question will tell us clearly whether we are to separate, or to
remain together, and for far longer than this one evening.’
“After which Pyotr Stepanovitch begins to interrogate apart several
members of this secret society. He is interrupted.
“‘It’s an unnecessary question. Every one will make the same answer.
There are no informers here.’
“‘What’s that gentleman getting up for?’ cried the girl student.
“‘That’s Shatov. What are you getting up for?’ cried the lady of the
house.
“Shatov did, in fact, stand up. He was holding his cap in his hand and
looking at Verhovensky. Apparently he wanted to say something to him,
but was hesitating. His face was pale and wrathful, but he controlled
himself. He did not say one word, but in silence walked towards the
door.
“‘Shatov, this won’t make things better for you!’ Verhovensky called
after him enigmatically.
“‘But it will for you, since you are a spy and a scoundrel!’ Shatov
shouted to him from the door as he went out.
“Shouts and exclamations again.
“‘That’s what comes of a test,’ cried a voice.”[126]
Thus the victim is marked, and by his own hand. Haste is imperative:
Shatov’s murder must anticipate his denunciation.
We must admire Dostoevsky’s art in this, because constantly carried
away in my enthusiasm to discuss his ideas, I am afraid I have
neglected all too much his wonderful skill in exposition.
At this juncture in the narrative, an astounding thing comes to pass
which raises a particular artistic problem. It is a commonplace that,
passed a certain point in the evolution of the plot, there must be
nothing to deflect attention: events must move more quickly and lead
straight to the ultimate issue. Well, this is the moment, when the
action has entered on its phase of maximum rapidity, that Dostoevsky
contrives to introduce the most startling interruptions. He is
conscious that so tense is his reader’s attention everything will
assume an importance out of all proportion. With this knowledge, he
does not hesitate to distract attention from the main course of events
by brusque modulations which develop his most cherished ideas. The very
night Shatov is destined to turn informer or be murdered, his wife,
whom he has not seen for years, suddenly reappears at his house. Her
time is at hand, but at first Kirillov does not realize her condition.
Inadequately handled, this scene could become grotesque. It ranks
amongst the finest in the book. In theatrical jargon it would be
described as a _utility_, in literature as a _cheville_, but it is
precisely one of the rarest manifestations of Dostoevsky’s artistry.
Like Pushkin he could say, “I have never treated anything lightly,”
which is the hallmark of a great artist, utilizing everything,
transforming disadvantage into opportunity. At this stage the pace
needs must slacken, and every detail that can arrest events in their
precipitancy becomes of supreme importance. The passages where
Dostoevsky describes the arrival, unannounced, of Shatov’s wife, the
conversation between husband and wife, Kirillov’s interposition, and
the prompt establishment of an intimacy between the two men, constitute
perhaps the most moving chapter in the book. We marvel anew at the
utter absence of jealousy I discussed with you on a previous occasion.
Shatov knows that his wife is going to have a child, but the father of
this child she expects is not even mentioned. Shatov is consumed with
love for this suffering creature who can find none but words that wound.
“It was only that fact [i.e. his wife’s reappearance] that saved the
scoundrels from Shatov’s carrying out his intention, and at the same
time helped them to get rid of him. To begin with, it agitated Shatov,
threw him out of his regular routine, and deprived him of his usual
clear-sightedness and caution. Any idea of his own danger would be the
last thing to enter his head at this moment when he was absorbed with
such different considerations.”[127]
But to come back to Kirillov: the time is at hand when Pyotr
Stepanovitch calculates personal advantage from the other man’s
suicide. What grounds has Kirillov for taking his own life? Pyotr
Stepanovitch questions him: he has no clear idea, and is seeking
clumsily to get at the truth. Up till the last minute, he is in terror
lest Kirillov change his mind and thus escape him. But no!
“I won’t put it off. I want to kill myself now,”[128] says Kirillov.
The conversation between Verhovensky and Kirillov is especially
obscure, obscure even in Dostoevsky’s own mind. As we have earlier
observed, Dostoevsky never expresses his ideas as ideas pure and
simple, but always through the medium of his characters who become
their interpreters. Kirillov is in a highly unusual pathological state,
for in a moment or two he is going to take his own life, and his talk
is agitated and incoherent. We are left to unravel in it the clue to
Dostoevsky’s own thought.
The idea which prompts Kirillov’s suicide is of a mystic nature and
closed to Pyotr Stepanovitch’s comprehension.
“If God exists, all is His will, and from His will I cannot escape. If
not, it’s all my will, and I am bound to show self-will.... I am bound
to show myself because the highest point of my self-will is to kill
myself with my own hands....”
“‘God is necessary and so must exist,’ said Kirillov.
“‘Well, that’s all right then,’ encouraged Pyotr Stepanovitch.
“‘But I know He doesn’t and can’t.’
“‘That’s more likely.’
“‘Surely you must understand that a man with two such ideas can’t go on
living?’
“‘Must shoot himself, you mean?’
“‘Surely you understand that one might shoot oneself for that alone?’
“‘But you won’t be the only one to kill yourself: there are lots of
suicides.’
“‘With good cause! But to do it without any cause at all, simply for
self-will, I am the only one.’
“‘He won’t shoot himself,’ flashed across Pyotr Stepanovitch’s mind
again.
“‘Do you know,’ he observed irritably, ‘if I were in your place, I
should kill someone else to show my self-will, not myself. You might
be of use. I’ll tell you whom, if you are not afraid. Then you needn’t
shoot yourself to-day, perhaps. We may come to terms.’”[129]
For a moment Pyotr Stepanovitch dreams, in the event of Kirillov’s
refusing to carry out his plan of self-destruction, of using him as
the instrument to murder Shatov, instead of merely imputing the crime
to him.
“‘To kill someone else would be the lowest point of self-will, and you
should show your whole soul in that. I am not you; I want the highest
point, and I’ll kill myself.... I am bound to show my unbelief,’ said
Kirillov, walking about the room. ‘I have no higher idea than disbelief
in God. I have all the history of mankind on my side. Man has done
nothing but invent God so as to go on living, and not kill himself:
that’s the whole of universal history up till now. I am the first one
in the whole history of mankind who would not invent God.’”[130]
Do not forget Dostoevsky’s Christianity is real. What he reveals in
Kirillov’s declaration is again a case of moral bankruptcy. Dostoevsky,
I repeat, has visions of salvation only through renunciation. But a
fresh idea has crept in to complicate his theory: to illuminate it, I
must have recourse once more to William Blake’s _Proverbs of Hell_.
“_If others had not been foolish, we should be so._” In order that we
might be spared foolishness, others consented to foolishness before us.
Into Kirillov’s half-mad brain enters the idea of sacrifice: “I will
begin and open the door and save--mankind.”
If it is necessary that Kirillov be abnormal in order to entertain such
ideas--ideas moreover which Dostoevsky does not unreservedly sanction
since they betoken insubordination--there is none the less a particle
of truth in his conception, and if it is necessary that Kirillov be
abnormal in order to entertain such ideas, it is that we also may have
them in our day, yet be in our right mind.
“‘So at last you understand!’ cried Kirillov rapturously. ‘So it can
be understood if even a fellow like you understands. Do you understand
now that salvation for all consists in proving this idea to every one?
Who will prove it? I! I can’t understand how an atheist could know that
there is no God and not kill himself on the spot. To recognize that
there is no God, and not to recognize at the same instant that one is
God oneself is an absurdity, else one would certainly kill oneself. If
you recognize it, you are sovereign, and then you won’t kill yourself,
but live in the greatest glory. But one, the first, must kill himself,
for else who will begin and prove it? So I must certainly kill myself,
to begin and prove it. Now I am only a God against my will, and I am
unhappy, because I am bound to assert my will. All are unhappy because
all are afraid to express their will. Man has hitherto been so unhappy
and so poor because he has been afraid to assert his will up to the
highest point, and has shown his self-will only in little things, like
a schoolboy.... But I will assert my will, I am bound to believe that
I don’t believe. I will begin and will make an end of it and open
the door, and save--mankind. For three years I’ve been seeking the
attribute of my Godhead and I’ve found it; the attribute of my Godhead
is self-will. That’s all I can do to prove in the highest point my
independence and my new terrible freedom. For it is very terrible,
and I am killing myself to prove my independence and my new terrible
freedom.’”[131]
Blasphemous as Kirillov’s words may appear, rest assured that
Dostoevsky, in drawing his figure, was possessed by the idea of Christ,
by the necessity of the Crucifixion as a sacrifice to redeem mankind.
If Christ had to be offered up, was it not that we, Christians, might
be such without dying His death? “_If Thou be Christ, save Thyself!_”
If Christ had saved Himself, mankind would have been lost: to save it,
He surrendered His own life.
These few lines of Dostoevsky’s, taken from his _Essay on the
Bourgeoisie_, throw fresh light on Kirillov’s figure.
“Be clear as to my meaning! Voluntary sacrifice, offered consciously
and without constraint, the sacrifice of the individual for the good
of mankind, is to my mind the mark of personality in its noblest and
highest development, of perfect self-control--the absolute expression
of free will. To offer one’s life for others, to suffer for others on
the cross or at the stake, is possible only when there is a powerful
development of the personality. A strongly-developed personality,
conscious of its right to be such, having cast out fear, cannot use
itself, cannot be used except in sacrifice for others, that these
become like unto itself, self-determinate and happy. It is Nature’s
law, and mankind tends to reach it.”[132]
At last you see why behind Kirillov’s talk, which seemed at first
hearing somewhat incoherent, we succeed in discerning what was the
philosophy of Dostoevsky himself.
I am conscious how far I am from having exhausted the teaching that
can be found in his books. I insist once more on the fact that I have
sought, consciously or unconsciously, what had most intimate connection
with my own ideas. Others no doubt will be able to discern different
things. And now that I am come to the end of my last paper, you are
awaiting, I am sure, a conclusion of some kind from me. Whither does
Dostoevsky lead us? What precisely is his teaching?
Some will say that he leads us straight to Bolshevism, although they
know the horror Dostoevsky professed for anarchy. The whole of _The
Possessed_ prophesies the revolution of which Russia is at present
in the throes. But every man who, in defiance of existing systems,
contributes new _tables of values_ is bound to seem, in the eyes of the
conservative, an anarchist. Conservative and nationalist, deigning to
see no more than what is chaotic in Dostoevsky, conclude he can be of
no service whatsoever to us. To which my reply is that their opposition
seems to do great hurt to the genius of France. By our unwillingness
to accept anything foreign unless it reflects our system and logic,
our whole likeness, in short, we err most grievously. His conception
of beauty happens to differ from our Mediterranean standards, and were
the divergence even greater, of what use would our national genius be,
how could we apply our logic practically, unless in instances which
clamour for regulation? In meditating none but her own likeness, the
reflection of her past, France is exposed to a mortal danger. Let me
explain my meaning as accurately and temperately as possible. It is
well that France should have conservative elements reacting and taking
a stand against what savours of foreign invasion. But what justifies
the existence of these elements if not this fresh contribution without
which French culture would ere long be nothing but a hollow form, a
hardened shell? What do they know of France’s genius? What _do_ we
know, except its past? It is the same with national feeling as with
the Church. I mean the conservative elements often mete out to genius
the same treatment as the Church to her saints at times. Many who were
rejected, repulsed, denied in the name of tradition, are become its
very corner-stones.
My opinion of intellectual protectionism I have often voiced: I believe
it presents a great peril; on the other hand, any essay in intellectual
denationalization involves a risk no less considerable. I am merely
expressing what was Dostoevsky’s finding likewise. There never was an
author more Russian in the strictest sense of the word and withal so
universally European. Because it is essentially Russian, his humanity
is all-embracing and touches each one of us personally.
“Veteran European Russian” he chose to describe himself. I shall let
Versilov of _A Raw Youth_ develop Dostoevsky’s idea this time!
“The highest Russian thought is the reconciliation of ideas, and who
in the whole world could understand such a thought at that time? I was
a solitary wanderer: I am not speaking of myself personally--it’s the
Russian idea I’m speaking of. There all was strife and logic; there
the Frenchman was nothing but a Frenchman, the German nothing but a
German, and this more intensely so than at any time in their history.
Consequently never had the Frenchman done so much harm to France, or
the German to Germany, as just at that time! In these days in all
Europe there was not one European! I alone of all the vitriol-throwers
could have told them to their face that their Tuileries was a mistake.
And I alone among the avenging reactionists could have told them that
the Tuileries, although a crime, was none the less logical. And that,
my boy, was because I, as a Russian, was the only European in Russia. I
am not talking of the whole Russian idea....
“Europe has created a noble type of Frenchman, of Englishman, and of
German, but of the man of the future she scarcely knows at present.
And, I fancy, so far she does not want to know. And that one can well
imagine; they are not free, and we are free. I, with my Russian
melancholy, was the only one free in Europe.... Take note, my dear,
of a strange fact: every Frenchman can serve not only his France,
but humanity, only on condition that he remains French to the utmost
possible degree, and it’s the same for the Englishman and the German.
Only to the Russian, even in our day, has been vouchsafed the capacity
to become most of all Russian only when he is most European, and this
is true even in our day, that is, long before the millennium has been
reached.”[133]
But, to offset this declaration and show how acutely conscious
Dostoevsky was of the danger to any country in too marked
europeanization, I must read you this remarkable passage from _The
Possessed_:
“‘Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a
secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be
till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force
which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and
inexplicable; that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on
to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force
of persistent assertion of one’s own existence, and a denial of death.
It’s the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, the river of living
water, the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It’s the
æsthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the ethical principle
with which they identify it, “the seeking for God,” as I call it more
simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and at
every period of its existence, is only the seeking for its God, who
must be its own God, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is
the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning
to its end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have
had one common god, but each has always had its own. It’s a sign of the
decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods are
common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them,
together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people, the more
individual their God. There never has been a nation without a religion,
that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own
conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same
conception of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then
these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good
and evil is beginning to disappear.[134]... These are your own words,
Stavrogin.... I haven’t altered anything of your ideas, or even of your
words, not a syllable.’
“‘I don’t agree that you’ve not altered anything,’ Stavrogin observed
cautiously. ‘You accepted them with ardour, and in your ardour have
transformed them unconsciously. The very fact that you reduce God to a
simple attribute of nationality....’
“He suddenly began watching Shatov with intense and peculiar attention,
not so much his words as himself.
“‘I reduce God to an attribute of nationality?’ cried Shatov. ‘On the
contrary, I raise the people to God. And has it ever been otherwise?
The people is the body of God. Every people is only a people so long as
it has its own God and excludes all other gods on earth irreconcilably,
so long as it believes that by its God it will conquer and drive out of
the world all other gods. Such, from the beginning of time, has been
the belief of all great nations, all, anyway, who have been specially
remarkable, all who have been leaders of humanity. There is no going
against facts. The Jews lived only to await the coming of the true
God and left the world the true God. The Greeks deified nature and
bequeathed the world their religion, that is, philosophy and art.
Rome deified the people in the State, and bequeathed the idea of the
State to the nations. France throughout her long history was only the
incarnation and development of the Roman God....
“‘If a great people does not believe that the truth is only to be
found in itself (in itself alone and in it exclusively), if it does
not believe that it alone is fit and destined to raise up and save all
the rest by its truth, it would at once sink into being ethnographical
material, and not a great people. A really great people can never
accept a secondary part in the history of humanity, nor even one of the
first, but will have the first. A nation which loses this belief ceases
to be a nation.’”[135]
And by the way of corollary, we have Stavrogin’s reflection which might
be a fitting conclusion: “An individual out of touch with his country
has lost God.”
What would Dostoevsky think of Russia to-day and of her people? It is
a painful speculation.... Did he apprehend, was he able to foresee her
ghastly torments?
In _The Possessed_ we find all the seeds of Bolshevism. You need only
listen to Shigalev’s exposition of his theory and the admission he
makes at its close:
“I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is a direct
contradiction to the original idea with which I start. Starting from
unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”[136] And that
loathsome Pyotr Stepanovitch Verhovensky exults: “There’s going to be
such an upset as the world has never seen before.... Russia will be
overwhelmed with darkness, the earth will weep for its old gods.”[137]
Imprudent, dishonest even, I admit, to impute to the author himself
the thoughts expressed by the characters in his novels or tales. But
we know this was Dostoevsky’s medium of expression, often utilizing
a colourless individual to formulate one of his cherished truths. We
seem to hear him speak from the lips of a secondary character in _The
Eternal Husband_ when the “malady of the age” is mentioned.
“To be a good citizen is better than being in aristocratic society. I
say that because in Russia, nowadays, one doesn’t know whom to respect.
You’ll agree that it’s a serious malady of the age, when people don’t
know whom to respect, isn’t it?”[138]
I am sure that beyond the darkness enveloping tortured Russia to-day
Dostoevsky would still see the light of hope. Perhaps too he would
think (the idea appears several times in his novels and in his letters)
that Russia is offering herself in sacrifice like Kirillov, and for the
salvation, perhaps, of the rest of Europe, and of humanity.
FOOTNOTES
[31] _House of the Dead_, p. 240.
[32] Bienstock, p. 449. Letter to Mlle. Guérassimov, Petersburg, March
7, 1877.
[33] Bienstock, p. 94. Letter to his brother Michael, spring of 1847.
[34] Bienstock, p. 98. Letter to his brother Michael, from the
fortress, July 18, 1849.
[35] Bienstock, p. 100. Letter to his brother Michael, from the
fortress, August 27, 1849.
[36] Bienstock, p. 101. Letter to his brother Michael, from the
fortress, September 14, 1849.
[37] Bienstock, p. 103. Letter to his brother Michael, from the
fortress, December 22, 1849.
[38] A. P. Miliukov in his _Reminiscences_, 1881.
[39] See Mayne, pp. 51 sqq.
[40] The _Decembrists_.
[41] Mayne, pp. 51-65.
[42] Bienstock, pp. 104-105. Letter to his brother Michael,
Semipalatinsk, July 30, 1854.
[43] Bienstock, p. 106. Letter to his brother Andrey, Semipalatinsk,
November 6, 1854.
[44] Bienstock, p. 107. Letter to his brother Andrey, Semipalatinsk,
November 6, 1854.
[45] Bienstock, pp. 233-235. Letter to Baron Alexander Wrangel,
Petersburg, March 31, 1865.
[46] Bienstock, p. 239. Letter to Baron Alexander Wrangel, Petersburg,
April 14, 1865.
[47] _Crime and Punishment_, p. 492.
[48] _The Idiot_, pp. 217-220.
[49] See _Nouvelle Revue Française_, June-July, 1922, and _Stavrogin’s
Confession_, translated, with introductory and explanatory notes, by
_S. S. Koteliansky_ and _Virginia Woolf_, 1922. (_Translator’s note._)
[50] _The Possessed_, p. 172.
[51] _The Possessed_, p. 175.
[52] _The Possessed_, p. 175.
[53] _A Raw Youth_, p. 327.
[54] _Notes from Underground_, pp. 86-87.
[55] _Notes from Underground_, pp. 88-89.
[56] “However adventurous the Russian genius,” wrote Boris de
Schloezer in the _Nouvelle Revue Française_, February, 1922, “it
characteristically chooses a firm foundation in concrete fact and
living reality: this basis once assured, it launches out into
speculation of the most abstract and daring nature, returning in the
end, rich with the gathered spoils of thought, to the fact and reality
from which it started and in which it is perfected.”
[57] E.g. Lebedyev in _The Idiot_. See Appendix (2), the admirable
chapter describing Lebedyev’s enjoyment in torturing General Ivolgin.
[58] _The Possessed_, p. 495.
[59] _A Raw Youth_, p. 507.
[60] _The Possessed_, pp. 489-490.
[61] _A Raw Youth_, p. 215.
[62] See the _Journal_.
[63] Garnett, Vol. XI.
[64] Garnett, Vol. X.
[65] Bienstock and Nau, pp. 99-100.
[66] Bienstock and Nau, pp. 176-181.
[67] Bienstock and Nau, pp. 294 et seq., 450-452.
[68] Nietzsche, _The Twilight of the Idols_, translated by Anthony M.
Ludovici, 1911, p. 104.
[69] Nietzsche, _The Twilight of the Idols_, translated by Anthony M.
Ludovici, 1911, pp. 64-65.
[70] Bienstock, p. 367. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, March 24,
1870.
[71] Bienstock, p. 374. Letter to A. N. Maïkov, Dresden, March 25, 1870.
[72] _Nouvelle Revue Française_, February, 1922, pp. 176-177.
[73] _Crime and Punishment_, p. 369.
[74] _A Raw Youth_, pp. 205-206.
[75] _A Raw Youth_, p. 503. Compare this other passage (_ibid._, p.
548) dealing with one of these pathological cases I mentioned a little
space ago. “Versilov can have had no definite aim, and I believe,
indeed, he did not reflect on the matter at all, but acted under the
influence of a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. But the theory of
actual madness I cannot accept, especially as he is not in the least
mad now. But the ‘second self’ I do accept unquestionably. What is a
second self exactly? The second self, according to a medical book,
written by an expert, which I purposely read afterwards, is nothing
else than the first stage of serious mental derangement, which may lead
to something very bad.”
[76] _The Possessed_, p. 635.
[77] _Journaux Intimes_, p. 57.
[78] André Gide, _Morceaux Choisis_, pp. 102-103.
[79] _The Idiot_, pp. 587-588.
[80] _The Idiot_, p. 519.
[81] _A Raw Youth_, p. 253.
[82] _Crime and Punishment_, p. 492.
[83] _The Idiot_, p. 616.
[84] Bienstock, pp. 319-320.
[85] Bienstock, p. 343. Letter to A. N. Maïkov, Dresden, October 27,
1869.
[86] _The Eternal Husband_, p. 2.
[87] _The Eternal Husband_, pp. 35-36.
[88] _The Eternal Husband_, p. 75.
[89] _Vauvenargues_, Maxim xxxix; _Œuvres_, p. 377.
[90] _The Eternal Husband_, pp. 65-66.
[91] _The Eternal Husband_, pp. 116-117.
[92] _The Eternal Husband_, pp. 117-118.
[93] _The Eternal Husband_, p. 124.
[94] _The Eternal Husband_, pp. 124-126.
[95] Schopenhauer, _The World as Will and Idea_, translated by Haldane
and Kemp; Bk. IV, p. 457.
[96] _A Raw Youth_, p. 68.
[97] _A Raw Youth_, p. 130.
[98] _The Idiot_, p. 225.
[99] _The Possessed_, p. 219.
[100] _The Possessed_, pp. 220, 221.
[101] _The Possessed_, p. 580.
[102] _Crime and Punishment_, pp. 236, 237.
[103] _Crime and Punishment_, p. 238.
[104] _Crime and Punishment_, p. 377.
[105] _Crime and Punishment_, p. 378.
[106] _Crime and Punishment_, p. 467.
[107] _Crime and Punishment_, p. 272.
[108] _The Possessed_, pp. 492, 493.
[109] _The Possessed_, pp. 498, 499.
[110] Mayne, p. 198. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, October 9, 1870.
[111] _The Possessed_, pp. 634, 635.
[112] _Crime and Punishment_, p. 14.
[113] _The Brothers Karamazov_, p. 110.
[114] _The Possessed_, p. 219.
[115] _The Possessed_, p. 220.
[116] _The Possessed_, p. 221.
[117] _The Possessed_, p. 221.
[118] _The Possessed_, p. 133.
[119] _The Idiot_, p. 225.
[120] _The Possessed_, p. 219.
[121] _The Possessed_, pp. 554-5.
[122] _The Possessed_, p. 555.
[123] André Gide, _Morceaux Choisis_, p. 101, §1.
[124] Dr. Binet-Sanglé is the author of a blasphemous work to which he
has given the title _La Folie de Jésus-Christ_: he attempts to deny the
importance of Christ and of Christianity by showing that Christ was mad
and a degenerate.
[125] _The Possessed_, p. 577.
[126] _The Possessed_, pp. 383, 385.
[127] _The Possessed_, p. 540.
[128] _The Possessed_, p. 275.
[129] _The Possessed_, pp. 579, 580.
[130] _The Possessed_, p. 580.
[131] _The Possessed_, pp. 582, 583.
[132] Bienstock, pp. 540-2.
[133] _A Raw Youth_, pp. 462-4.
[134] Reclus, _Geography_, XIV, 931. “The island populations of Oceania
are fast dying out, for they have lost the body of ideas which governed
their actions, and lack a common measure to judge good and evil.”
[135] _The Possessed_, pp. 232-234.
[136] _The Possessed_, p. 376.
[137] _The Possessed_, p. 395.
[138] _The Eternal Husband_, p. 128.
APPENDIX
I
“And now I will tell two anecdotes to wind up my account of the
‘_idea_,’ that it may not hinder my story again.
“In July, two months before I came to St. Petersburg, when my time was
all my own, Marie Ivanovna asked me to go to see an old maiden lady
who was staying in the Troitsky suburb to take her a message of no
interest for my story. Returning the same day, I noticed in the railway
carriage an unattractive-looking young man, not very poorly though
grubbily dressed, with a pimply face and a muddy dark complexion. He
distinguished himself by getting out at every station, big and little,
to have a drink. Towards the end of the journey he was surrounded by
a merry throng of very low companions. One merchant, also a little
drunk, was particularly delighted at the young man’s power of drinking
incessantly without becoming drunk. Another person, who was awfully
pleased with him, was a very stupid fellow who talked a great deal. He
was wearing European dress and smelt most unsavoury--he was a footman,
as I found out afterwards: this fellow got quite friendly with the
young man who was drinking and, every time the train stopped, roused
him with the invitation, ‘It’s time for a drop of vodka,’ and they
got out with their arms round each other. The young man who drank
scarcely said a word, but yet more and more companions joined him. He
only listened to their chatter, grinning incessantly with a drivelling
snigger, and only from time to time, always unexpectedly, brought
out a sound something like ‘Ture-lure-loo!’ while he put his finger
up to his nose in a very comical way. This diverted the merchant,
and the footman and all of them, and they burst into a very loud and
free and easy laughter. It is sometimes impossible to understand why
people laugh. I joined them, too, and I don’t know why, the young man
attracted me too, perhaps by his very open disregard for the generally
accepted conventions and proprieties. I didn’t see, in fact, that he
was simply a fool. Anyway, I got on to friendly terms with him at once,
and as I got out of the train, I learnt from him that he would be in
the Tverskoy Boulevard between eight and nine. It appeared that he had
been a student. I went to the boulevard, and this was the diversion he
taught me. We walked together up and down the boulevards, and, a little
later, as soon as we noticed a respectable woman walking along the
street, if there were no one else near, we fastened upon her. Without
uttering a word we walked one on each side of her, and with an air of
perfect composure, as though we didn’t see her, began to carry on a
most unseemly conversation. We called things by their names, preserving
unruffled countenances as though it were the natural thing to do; we
entered into such subtleties in our description of all sorts of filth
and obscenity as the nastiest mind of the lewdest debauchee could
scarcely have conceived. (I had, of course, acquired all this knowledge
at the boarding school, before I went to the Grammar School, though
I knew only words, nothing of the reality.) The woman was dreadfully
frightened, and made haste to try and get away, but we quickened our
pace too, and went on in the same way. Our victim, of course, could
do nothing; it would be no use to cry out, there were no spectators;
besides, it would be a strange thing to complain of. I repeated this
diversion for eight days. I can’t think how I can have liked doing it;
although, indeed, I didn’t like doing it--I simply did it. At first
I thought it original, as something outside everyday conventions and
conditions, besides, I couldn’t endure women. I once told the student
that in his _Confessions_ Jean Jacques Rousseau describes how, as a
youth, he used to behave indecently to women. The student responded
with his ‘Ture-lure-loo!’ I noticed that he was extraordinarily
ignorant, and that his interests were astonishingly limited. There was
no trace of any latent idea such as I hoped to find in him. Instead of
originality, I found nothing but a wearisome monotony. I disliked him
more and more. The end came quite unexpectedly. One night when it was
quite dark, we persecuted a girl who was quickly and timidly walking
along the boulevard. She was very young, perhaps sixteen, or even less,
very tidily and modestly dressed, possibly a working girl hurrying home
to an old widowed mother with other children; there is no need to be
sentimental though. The girl listened for some time, and hurried fast
as she could with her head bowed and her veil drawn over her face,
frightened and trembling. But suddenly she stood still, threw back her
veil, showing, as far as I remember, a thin but pretty face, and cried
with flashing eyes:
“‘Oh, what scoundrels you are!’
“She may have been on the verge of tears, but something different
happened. Lifting her thin little hand, she gave the student a slap in
the face which could not have been more dexterously delivered. It did
come with a smack! He would have rushed at her, swearing, but I held
him back, and the girl had time to run away. We began quarrelling at
once. I told him all that I had been saving up against him in those
days. I told him that he was the paltriest commonplace fool without
the trace of an idea. He swore at me.... (I had once explained to him
that I was illegitimate.) Then we spat at each other, and I’ve never
seen him since. I felt frightfully vexed with myself that evening,
but not so much the next day, and by the day after that had quite
forgotten it. And though I sometimes thought of the girl again, it was
only casually, for a moment. It was only after I’d been a fortnight in
Petersburg I suddenly recalled the whole scene. I remembered it, and
I was suddenly so ashamed that tears of shame literally ran down my
cheeks. I was wretched the whole evening, and all that night, and I am
rather miserable about it now. I could not understand at first how I
could have sunk to such a depth of degradation, and still less how I
could have forgotten it without feeling shame or remorse. It is only
now that I understand what was at the root of it; it was all due to my
‘_idea_.’... The ‘_idea_’ comforted me in disgrace and insignificance.
But all the nasty things I did took refuge, as it were, under the
‘_idea_.’ It, so to speak, smoothed over everything, but it also put
a mist before my eyes, and such a misty understanding of things and
events may, of course, be a great hindrance to the ‘_idea_’ itself, to
say nothing of other things.
“Now for another anecdote.
“On the 1st of April last year, Marie Ivanovna was keeping her name
day; some visitors, though only a few, came for the evening. Suddenly
Agrafena rushed in, out of breath, announcing that a baby was crying in
the passage before the kitchen, and that she didn’t know what to do. We
were all excited at the news. We went out and saw a bark basket, and
in the basket a three- or four-week-old child, crying. I picked up the
basket and took it into the kitchen. Then I immediately found a folded
note:
“‘Gracious benefactors, show kind charity to the girl christened
Arina, and we will join with her to send our tears to the Heavenly
Throne for you for ever, and congratulate you on your name day.
“‘Persons unknown to you.’
“Then Nikolay Semyonovitch, for whom I have such a respect, greatly
disappointed me. He drew a very long face, and decided to send the
child at once to the Foundling Home. I felt very sad. They lived
frugally and had no children and Nikolay Semyonovitch was always
glad of it. I carefully took the little Arina out of the basket and
held her up under the arms. The basket had that sour, pungent odour
characteristic of a small child which has not been washed for a long
time. I opposed Nikolay Semyonovitch and suddenly announced that I
would keep the child at my expense. In spite of his gentleness he
protested with some severity, and, though he ended by joking, he
adhered to his intention in regard to the foundling. I got my way,
however. In the same block of buildings, but in a different wing, lived
a very poor carpenter, an elderly man, given to drink, but his wife, a
very healthy and still youngish woman, had only just lost a baby, and
what is more, the only child she had had in eight years of marriage,
also a girl, and by a strange piece of luck also called Arina. I call
it good luck, because while we were arguing in the kitchen, the woman,
hearing of what had happened, ran in to look at the child, and when she
learned that it was called Arina, she was greatly touched. She still
had milk, and unfastening her dress, she put the baby to her breast. I
began persuading her to take the child home with her, saying I would
pay for it every month. She was afraid her husband would not allow it,
but she took it for the night. Next morning, her husband consented
to her keeping it for eight roubles a month, and I immediately paid
him for the first month in advance. He at once spent the money on
drink. Nikolay Semyonovitch, still with a strange smile, agreed to
guarantee that the money would be paid regularly every month. I would
have given my sixty roubles into Nikolay Semyonovitch’s keeping as
security, but he did not take it. He knew, however, that I had the
money, and trusted me. Our momentary quarrel was smoothed over by this
delicacy on his part. Marie Ivanovna said nothing, but wondered at my
undertaking such a responsibility. I particularly appreciated their
delicacy in refraining from the slightest jest at my expense, but on
the contrary, taking the matter with proper seriousness. I used to
run over to the carpenter’s wife three times a day, and at the end of
the week I slipped an extra three roubles into her hand without her
husband’s knowledge. For another three I bought a little quilt and
swaddling clothes. But ten days later little Arina fell ill. I called
in a doctor at once, he wrote a prescription, and we were up all night
tormenting the mite with horrid medicine. Next day he declared that he
had been sent for too late, and answered my entreaties--which I fancy
were more like reproaches--by saying with majestic evasiveness: ‘I
am not God.’ The baby’s little tongue and lips and whole mouth were
covered with a minute white rash and towards evening she died, gazing
at me with her big black eyes as though she understood already. I don’t
know why I never thought to take a photograph of the dead baby. But
will it be believed that I cried that evening, and, in fact, I howled
as I had never let myself do before, and Marie Ivanovna had to try to
comfort me, again without the least mockery either on her part or on
Nikolay Semyonovitch’s. The carpenter made a little coffin, and Marie
Ivanovna finished it with a frill and a pretty little pillow, while I
bought flowers and strewed them on the baby. So they carried away my
poor little blossom, whom it will hardly be believed I can’t forget
even now. A little afterwards, however, this sudden adventure made me
reflect seriously. Little Arina had not cost me much, of course, the
coffin, the burial, the doctor, the flowers, and the payment of the
carpenter’s wife came altogether to thirty roubles. As I was going to
Petersburg I made up this sum from the forty roubles sent to me by
Versilov for the journey and from the sale of various articles before
my departure, so that my capital remained intact. But I thought: ‘If I
am going to be turned aside like this, I shan’t get far.’ The affair
with the student showed that the ‘_idea_’ might absorb me till it
blurred my impressions and drew me away from the realities of life. The
incident with little Arina proved, on the contrary, that no ‘_idea_’
was strong enough to absorb me, at least so completely that I should
not stop short in the face of an overwhelming fact and sacrifice to it
at once all that I had done for the ‘idea’ by years of labour. Both
conclusions were nevertheless true.”[139]
II
“‘In what way can I be of use to you, honoured prince, since anyway you
... called me just now,’ he said at last after a brief silence.
“‘Why, I asked you about the general,’ Myshkin, who had been musing for
a moment, answered hurriedly, ‘and ... in regard to that theft you told
me about.’
“‘In regard to what?’
“‘Why, as though you don’t understand me now! Oh dear, Lukyan
Timofeyitch, you’re always acting a part! The money, the money, the
four hundred roubles you lost, that day in your pocket-book, and about
which you came to tell me in the morning, as you were setting off for
Petersburg. Do you understand at last?’
“‘Ah, you’re talking about that four hundred roubles!’ drawled
Lebedyev, as though he had only just guessed. ‘I thank you, prince, for
your sincere sympathy: it is too flattering for me, but ... I’ve found
it some time since.’
“‘Found it? Ah, thank God!’
“‘That exclamation is most generous on your part, for four hundred
roubles is no small matter for a poor man who lives by his hard work,
with a large family of motherless children....’
“‘But I didn’t mean that! Of course, I am glad you found the money,’
Myshkin corrected himself quickly, ‘but how did you find it?’
“‘Very simply. I found it under the chair on which my coat had been
hung, so that the pocket-book must have slipped out of the pocket on to
the floor!’
“‘Under the chair? It’s impossible! Why, you told me yourself you
had hunted in every corner. How was it you came to overlook the most
obvious place?’
“‘I should think I did look! I remember only too well how I looked! I
crawled on all fours, felt the place with my hands, moving back the
chairs because I couldn’t trust my own eyes: I saw there was nothing
there, for the place was as smooth and empty as my hands, and yet I
went on fumbling. You always see that weakness in anyone who is very
anxious to find anything, when anything serious and important has been
lost. A man sees there’s nothing there, the place is empty, and yet he
peeps into it a dozen times.’
“‘Yes, I dare say; only, how was it seen?... I still don’t understand,’
muttered Myshkin, disconcerted. ‘You told me before it wasn’t there,
and you had looked in that place, and then it suddenly turned up!’
“‘And then it suddenly turned up.’
“Myshkin looked strangely at Lebedyev. ‘And the general?’ he asked
suddenly. ‘What about the general?...’ Lebedyev seemed at a loss again.
“‘Oh dear! I ask you what did the general say when you found the
pocket-book under the chair? You looked for it together, you know.’
“‘We did look together before. But that time, I confess, I held my
tongue, and preferred not to tell him that the pocket-book had been
found by me and alone.’
“‘But ... why? And the money--was it all there?’
“‘I opened the pocket-book. The money was untouched, every rouble of
it.’
“‘You might have come to tell me,’ Myshkin observed thoughtfully.
“‘I was afraid to disturb you, prince, in your personal and, so to say,
absorbing interests, and besides, I made as though I had found nothing.
I opened the pocket-book and looked at it, then I shut it and put it
back under the chair.’
“‘But what for?’
“‘Oh, n-nothing, from curiosity,’ chuckled Lebedyev, rubbing his hands.
“‘Then it has been lying there since the day before yesterday?’
“‘Oh, no; it only lay there for a day and a night. You see it was
partly that I wanted the general to find it. For since I had found it,
why should not the general notice the object, which lay conspicuous
under the chair, so to speak, catching the eye.
“‘I lifted that chair several times and put it so that the pocket-book
was completely in view, but the general simply didn’t notice it, and
so it went on for twenty-four hours. He seems to be extraordinarily
unobservant now, and there’s no making him out. He talks, tells
stories, laughs, chuckles, and then flies into a violent temper with
me. I don’t know why. At last, as we were going out of the room, I left
the door open on purpose; he hesitated, would have said something, most
likely he was uneasy about the pocket-book with such a sum of money in
it, but suddenly flew into an awful rage and said nothing. Before we
had gone two steps in the street, he left me and walked away in the
other direction. We only met in the evening in the tavern.’
“‘But in the end you did take the pocket-book from under the chair?’
“‘No, it vanished from under the chair that same night.’
“‘Then where is it now?’
“‘Oh, here,’ cried Lebedyev, laughing suddenly, drawing himself up to
his full height and looking amiably at Myshkin. ‘It suddenly turned up
here, in the lappet of my coat. Here; won’t you look, feel?’
“The left lappet of the coat had indeed been formed into something like
a bag in front, in the most conspicuous place, and it was clear at once
to the touch that there was a leather pocket-book there that had fallen
down from a torn pocket.
“‘I took it out and looked. The money’s all there. I dropped it in
again, and so I’ve been walking about since yesterday morning. I carry
it in my coat and it knocks against my legs.’
“‘And you take no notice of it?’
“‘And I take no notice of it. He-he! And would you believe it, honoured
prince, though the subject is not worthy of so much notice on your
part, my pockets were always perfectly good, and then a hole like that,
all of a sudden, in one night! I began to look at it more curiously;
it’s as though someone had cut it with a penknife. Isn’t it almost
incredible?’
“‘And ... the general?’
“‘He’s been angry all day; both yesterday and to-day: fearfully
ill-humoured. At one time he’d be beaming and hilarious till he began
to pay me compliments, then he’d be sentimental to tears, then suddenly
angry: so much so that I’d be frightened really, for I’m not a military
man, after all. We were sitting yesterday in the tavern, and the lappet
of my coat stood out as though by chance, in the most prominent way: a
perfect mountain. He looked at it on the sly and was angry. He hasn’t
looked me straight in the face for a long time, unless he’s very drunk
or sentimental, but yesterday he gave me a look that made a shudder run
down my spine. To-morrow, though, I mean to find the pocket-book, but I
shall have an evening’s fun with him before then.’
“‘Why are you tormenting him so?’ cried Myshkin.
“‘I’m not tormenting him, prince, I’m not tormenting him,’ Lebedyev
replied with warmth. ‘I sincerely love and--respect him; and now,
whether you believe it or not, he’s dearer to me than ever. I have come
to appreciate him even more.’
“‘You love him and you torment him like this! Why, by the very act
of putting the lost pocket-book where it could be seen under the
chair and in your coat, by that alone he shows you that he doesn’t
want to deceive you, but with your open-hearted simplicity asks your
forgiveness. Do you hear? He’s asking your forgiveness. So he relies on
the delicacy of your feelings, so he believes in your friendship for
him. And yet you reduce to such humiliation a man like that--a most
honest man!’
“‘Most honest prince, most honest.’ Lebedyev assented, with sparkling
eyes. ‘And you, most noble prince, are the only person capable of
uttering that true word about him! For that, I am devoted to you, and
ready to worship you, though I am rotten to the core with vices of all
sorts! That’s settled it! I will find the pocket-book now, at once, not
to-morrow. Look, I will take it before your eyes; here it is. There’s
the money, untouched here. Take it, most noble prince, take care of
it till to-morrow. To-morrow or next day I’ll have it. And, you know,
prince, it’s evident that it must have been lying somewhere in my
garden, hidden under some stone, the first night it was lost. What do
you think?’
“‘Mind you don’t tell him directly to his face that you’ve found the
pocket-book. Let him simply see that there’s nothing in the lappet of
your coat, and he’ll understand.’
“‘You think so? Wouldn’t it be better to tell him I have found it, and
to pretend I had not guessed about it till now?’
“‘N-no,’ Myshkin pondered, ‘n-no; it’s too late for that now. That’s
more risky. You’d really better not speak of it. Be kind to him,
but--don’t show too much, and--and--you know....’
“‘I know, prince, I know. That is, I know that I shan’t do it properly,
perhaps, for one needs to have a heart like yours to do it. Besides,
he’s irritable and prone to it himself, he has begun to treat me too
superciliously sometimes of late. One minute he is whimpering and
embracing me, and then he’ll suddenly begin to snub me, and sneer at me
contemptuously, and then I just show him the lappet on purpose. He-he!
Good-bye, prince; for it’s dear I’m keeping you and interrupting you in
your most interesting feelings, so to say....’
“‘But for goodness’ sake, the same secrecy as before.’
“‘Treading softly, treading softly!’
“But, though the matter was settled, Myshkin remained almost more
puzzled than before. He awaited with impatience his interview with the
general next day.”[140]
FOOTNOTES
[139] _A Raw Youth_, pp. 88-93.
[140] _The Idiot_, pp. 490-494.
Transcriber’s Notes
• Italics represented with _underscores_.
• Small caps converted to ALL CAPS.
• Footnotes renumbered consecutively and moved to the end of their
respective chapters.
• Obvious typographic errors silently corrected.
• Variations in spelling and hyphenation kept as in the original.
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