University of Virginia Library

Dostoevski
By G. R. Noyes.

Fedor Dostoevski [*] was born in 1821 and died in 1881, so that he was an exact contemporary of George Eliot (1820-1821). During his lifetime none of his writings seem to have been translated into English; of the half-dozen books that were translated in the thirteen years following his death, only his masterpiece, "Crime and Punishment," won sufficient popular success to remain in print. Dostoevski's power was recognized by a few critics and persons of literary tastes, but he was almost unknown to the general public. Recently there has been a great increase of interest in him, and writers who speak with real knowledge of their topic have termed Dostoevski one of the two great masters of Russian literature, far superior to Turgenev, and, to quote directly from Mr. Baring, "a unique product, a more startling revelation and embodiment of genius, a greater elemental force, than Tolstoy or any other Russian writer of fiction."

This superlative praise has had at least one excellent result, if we may regard it as the impulse to the new translation of Dostoevski by Mrs. Garnett. Mrs. Garnett's skill both in Russian and in English has steadily increased, and no versions from the Russian deserve more unstinted commendation than her rendering of Dostoevski: one may say that the author loses nothing essential in her translation. The numbers of Everyman's Library that include writings not yet translated by her are unfortunately of inferior workmanship. The volume of Dostoevski's letters is welcome in that it allows English readers to derive a direct impression of his personality. But one regrets that Miss Mayne has translated at second-hand, from German and French; in this respect her book is a reversion to the methods of a time that one fancied had passed forever.

2. I.

English enthusiasm for Dostoevski is in no small degree merely a reflection of his increased popularity in his own country. In Russia his present fame may partly be accounted for by transitory, accidental circumstances. Dostoevski alone of the great Russian writers since the time of Gogol was an ardent Russian patriot and a devoted admirer of the Russian State Church. His peculiar blend of chauvinism with mystical religiosity has appealed to the imagination of Russians like Merezhkovski, who believe that their country has a mysterious national destiny, as the successor of Rome and Byzantium, and who look upon the differing cosmopolitanisms of Turgenev and Tolstoy as each a proof of indifference to the national cause. Dostoevski is the greatest literary figure of the Slavophile movement, which, particularly in these last years, as a reaction from the revolutionary period of 1905-7, has become a really potent force in Russian life, and is in part responsible for Russia's share in the present war.

Again, Dostoevski is vague, cloudy, suggestive, symbolic, in contrast to the crystal simplicity of Turgenev, the apparent commonplaceness of Tolstoy's fiction, and the Biblical directness of Tolstoy's religious writings. He thus has something in common with modern Russian writers as different as Morezhkovski and Andreev. His grewsomeness, his emphasis on suffering, horror, crime, and cruelty, are once more features in which he anticipated contemporary writers.

These factors, however potent in Russia, certainly can have had small effect in accomplishing Dostoevski's fame abroad. What, then, are the great qualities that Dostoevski's English admirers find in him? One above all others: he is, they allege, the most truly national Russian writer, and his very nationality makes him a world writer; he reveals to the world the mysterious Russian soul, while Turgenev and Tolstoy, confining themselves to externals, show us a society that is not essentially different from our own. Now one must cheerfully admit that the men and women whom one meets in "The Brothers Karamazov" are much more unlike our personal acquaintances than are the heroes and heroines of "Fathers and Children" or "Anna Karenin"; but to jump from this to the conclusion that they are therefore more representative of the Russian nation is to reason in a somewhat girlish fashion.

Of the three greatest Russian novelists of the mid-nineteenth century, Dostoevski was by the external circumstances of his life the least representative of the Russian people as a whole. Russia was in his day (and so it remains, with slight modification) a country of peasants and landed proprietors; in 1897 the urban classes numbered only 13 per cent. of the population. Dostoevski, however, was a child of the city; born in Moscow, he spent a comparatively small portion of his life in the country. City life dominates his books. Not one of the prominent characters in his novels is a peasant, or even of peasant origin; nearly all of them, like the author himself, belong to the minor nobility. Dostoevski did, however, have one chance to become intimately acquainted with the plain people of his country; he spent more than three years in a Siberian prison as a "political," along with murderers and ruffians of all sorts. When released, he proudly proclaimed: "I have learned 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." One may question whether his education was not marked by undue specialization.

When discharged from prison, Dostoevski spent five years in the army before, in 1859, he was allowed to return to Russia. He promptly resumed his trade of writer, and was henceforth dependent on his pen for support. Unpractical in his habits, at times a gambler, he suffered from chronic poverty until the last years of his life. It was his habit to receive an advance from a periodical for a novel as yet unwritten, and then work feverishly to discharge the debt. He solicited money from a new periodical, the Zarya, while still under obligations to the Russki Viestnik. Except perhaps during his closing years, he seems never to have been in free, wholesome relations with his fellow-men. Though he had warm friends, his personality was unattractive to most men and women. His life, like his works, was unhealthy and abnormal.

A man of preëminently literary temperament, Dostoevski read widely from his youth up in imaginative literature; his letters are full of enthusiasm for such heterogeneous authors as Homer, Racine, Corneille, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Sterne, Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, Schiller, Goethe, Hoffmann, George Sand, not to mention the writers of his native country. Of Kant and Hegel he knew something, though he does not seem to have been strongly influenced by them. In science, despite his attendance at a school of engineering, he apparently had no interest; scientific materialism and the socialism with which it was associated in Russia he hated with his whole soul. Though exiled for membership in a socialistic circle, even in his youth he seems to have condemned socialistic speculation as idle dreaming. His momentary opposition to the Government was mere indignation against administrative abuses, from which he fully recovered during his period of Siberian exile. His thought in his later years was dominated by a blind, unreasoning, patriotic enthusiasm for Russia and everything connected with it; for the Slavophile trinity, autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality. His very religion was founded on patriotism; he apparently believed in God and the Saviour because the Russian people believed in them. While still in Siberia he rarely went to church, and could not endure priests. In his later years the Russian Church appeared to him surrounded with a halo of sanctity; it was destined to reveal a new religion to humanity. Everything that came from the West he despised, Catholicism as well as skepticism. The Liberals as well as the Socialists deserved the knout. Practical, utilitarian knowledge might be borrowed from the West, but the Russian soul must be preserved from contamination. Unlike Turgenev and Tolstoy, Dostoevski had

no international sympathies; to understand his type of thought one must temporarily lay aside one's attachment to European civilization. And, quite otherwise than with Tolstoy, the sacrifice is not in the name of any general understandable ideals of universal love and toleration, but of a faith in the mystic destiny of Russia.

Though he has been called the greatest of Russian realists, Dostoevski is not, except for "The House of the Dead," in any ordinary sense of the word, a realist at all. His great novels, "Crime and Punishment," "The Idiot," "The Possessed," "The Brothers Karamazov," are each primarily a series of conversations. But these conversations are often, or generally, such as could no more occur in actual life than could those of "Comus" or "Paradise Lost." The important characters are for the most part criminals, epileptics, prostitutes, voluptuaries of various types, mentally deranged persons of numerous and interesting ailments. Murder is a central and controlling interest in each of these novels. The few normal, conventional persons who occur are uninteresting to a degree. Now, a novelist may be privileged to choose what material he will for his work, but if he prefers to select no material from ordinary, normal existence one may at least suspect a certain weakness in his talent, one may doubt whether he deserves to be placed at the head of the literature of any country. One refuses to believe that such a writer is the best revelation of the Russian soul. To do so would be to draw up a severe indictment against a great nation.

3. II.

What, then, are the qualities on account of which Dostoevski really deserves fame? First of all, he is a realist in one book. In "The House of the Dead" he has given a picture of life in his Siberian prison that will always remain a great classic. Here he is concrete, vivid, truthful, in the same way as Tolstoy in his "Sevastopol." Turgenev, who was by temperament no admirer of Dostoevski, said truly that the description of the bath was worthy of Dante. Dozens of wretches, clad only in chains, are crowded into the hot, steaming room; humanity at its lowest terms, but still humanity vigorous, buoyant, and eager to be clean. Quite as powerful, and more touching, is the account of the Christmas theatricals, where the artistic sense of the convicts, cramped as it has been by their life, at last finds expression. The atmosphere is that of a children's party, where bad boys forget their depravity in keen enjoyment of funny charades. Strangely enough, of all Dostoevski's writings this book of the prison is the least harrowing to the reader's nerves. Here he does not draw his material from his diseased imagination, but describes what he has actually seen and transfigures it by his sympathy.

And what of Dostoevski's works of fiction? What qualities does he show in them so preeminent [sic] that they compensate for his evident shortcomings? First of all, one may say, a wonderful command of pathos, a boundless sympathy for suffering humanity; and in the second place, a marvellous power of psychological analysis. To these one may add, with some reserves, a peculiar skill in literary construction.

Pathos is the central element in all Dostoevski's early work. Few more affecting stories have been written than "Poor Folk," the short novel by which, at the age of twenty-four, Dostoevski suddenly became famous. A middle-aged government clerk, poor in brains as in pocket, sacrifices himself to the support of a girl distantly related to him, with whom he is secretly in love. Pretty Varvara accepts his devotion with the same spirit, and with the same fidelity, with which a kitten welcomes caresses; and, when the opportunity offers, promptly marries a wealthy suitor, moves away, and leaves her unprepossessing kinsman broken-hearted. A similar pathos reappears by fits and starts in the later works, above all in the description of poor and helpless children. Almost at random one may cite the scene in which little Polenka, in "Crime and Punishment," kisses the murderer Raskolnikov, and promises to pray for him all her life. Occasionally, as with Dickens, this pathos passes into downright sentimentality. One may term the death of Ilusha, in "The Brothers Karamazov," either sublime or ridiculous.

As time passed, Dostoevski's power of sympathy gradually yielded to a quite different feeling, an absolute delight in the portrayal of suffering, a triumphant teasing of his reader's nerves. This he accomplishes by the masterly exhibition of the feelings of the tortured victims, and, quite as important, of the feelings of their skilled and artistic torturers. In "Crime and Punishment" Raskolnikov commits a murder on page 72 and, aided by a talented detective, proceeds to meditate on his crime for some 400 pages. A reader follows the different stages of his agony with keen intellectual interest rather than with mere sympathy. When Ivan Karamazov dilates on the tortures administered to young children by certain degenerates, he emphasizes — and a reader, if disgust allows him to meditate at all, is obliged to follow him — quite as much the workings of the mind of the persecutor as the sufferings of the victim. No author arouses in his reader such poignant recollections of their own "little, nameless, unremembered acts" of meanness and of spite. The Russian critic Mikhailovski well expresses the change in Dostoevski's methods when he says that Dostoevski's subject is always a wolf eating a lamb: in his earlier books he is more interested in the lamb and in his later in the wolf. In this portrayal of wolfish and lamblike feelings Dostoevski's conversations are his chief tool. They may be compared to the soliloquies and asides in Shakespeare's dramas; in themselves they are unreal and unbelievable, but as aids in the drawing of character they are true works of art.

As a master of narrative, Dostoevski has received high praise, which is justified if one considers only his best work. A reader of "Crime and Punishment" may be impelled to skip some tiresome piece of mental analysis; fifty pages later he suddenly finds that he has missed an essential point in the narrative, and is compelled to retrace his steps. The cunning master has wasted no words even when he seemed most prodigal. But no such praise can be given to "The Idiot" or "The Possessed," where long blocks of rigmarole now serve no purpose — once they helped Dostoevski draw pay from his publishers. In "The Brothers Karamazov" there are whole chapters of moralizing that have no bearing on the story; critics who say that Dostoevski, unlike Tolstoy, is not a preacher, simply ignore obvious facts.

4. III.

Dostoevski's preaching is composed of three main doctrines, one of which enjoins infinite charity, all-embracing forgiveness, another absolute submission to the existing order of things here on earth, and the third a mystic salvation through suffering. The greatest of these is charity, which Dostoevski extends to all inmates of prisons, to say nothing of persons who are on their way to alms-houses or insane asylums, and which he refuses only to keen, enterprising, successful persons who themselves lack this tolerantly all-human spirit that is the greatest of virtues. Charity in Dostoevski is apt to degenerate into maudlin sentimentality that an American may misinterpret as intentionally comic: witness the drunken harangue of Marmeladov near the opening of "Crime and Punishment." Dostoevski's doctrine of submission arises from his faith in his native Russia, from his hatred of socialistic rebels and Westernizing Liberals. His submission is at the other pole from Tolstoy's aggressive anarchistic doctrine of non-resistance to evil; for Dostoevski the state order is sacred, while for Tolstoy it is a negligible trifle. Dostoevski's insistence on suffering as a means of moral regeneration was a comparatively late discovery; he gives no suggestion of it before his exile, and in "The House of the Dead" he confesses that among his fellow convicts he never detected any signs of repentance. Yet in "Crime and Punishment" (1866) the doctrine of salvation through suffering suddenly appears in full vigor: Sonia, the submissive, eternally miserable outcast, furnishes the religious inspiration needed by Raskolnikov in order to cast out the mutinous and rebellious spirit that has made him a murderer. Sonia bids him take up his cross, or, in plain language, confess his crime and submit to exile in Siberia. The same mystic faith in suffering again dominates "The Brothers Karamazov," written just before the author's death; it may be called his characteristic, individual doctrine.

One inquires how far in all this Dostoevski may really interpret the Russian soul. His all-embracing charity, one must agree, is a trait more typical of the Russian temperament than of the Anglo-Saxon. The instinctive moral test applied by a Russian is apt to be kindness of heart, while that of an Anglo-Saxon is self-command, self-restraint. This distinction naturally cannot be pushed

to an extreme: kindness of heart and personal amiability are not frowned on in England. Shakespeare certainly shows no lack of appreciation and sympathy for Falstaff, nor are Tom Jones and Clive Newcome quite models of Philistine propriety. But Shakespeare and Fielding and Thackeray, after all, have in them something of the Lord Chief Justice, who laughs at Falstaff's impudence while retaining a strong conviction of the utility of human judgments; charity is good, but in the long run it is best to have some standards of respectability and propriety. In Dostoevski, standards of propriety vanish: his ideal Russian, Prince Myshkin (in "The Idiot"), behaves to good and bad with equal sympathy and never thinks of judging another's conduct. Tom Jones, after reaping and burning his wild oats, will become a conventional English squire. Alyosha (in "Injury and Insult") can never by any chance develop any notions of self-restraint or moral responsibility, and just because of his thoughtless, childish nature Dostoevski makes a high-minded girl sacrifice herself to become his life companion. Shakespeare wins our sympathy for Macbeth by endowing that murderer with a poetic imagination and by showing the conflict between his ambition and his conscience; Dostoevski makes his murderer, Raskolnikov, win our regard by his sentimental kindliness to children and beggars. All this is an exaggeration of Russian charity rather than a true representation of it. Tolstoy, with his scorn of Philistine respectability, combined with a burning faith in the categorical imperative, and Turgenev, with his gentle kindliness, mixed with a certain admiration for the homespun virtues of respectability and thrift, are the true representatives of the Russian temperament.

If hardness of heart be Dostoevski's cardinal sin, rebellion against Russia is for him the most serious act of criminality. For the Russian people love their Country, their Tsar, and their Church. Any one who revolts against the existing order thereby separates himself from the Russian people and commits apostasy. Such is the sin of the Socialists and the Liberals. An exhibition of the self-conceit, emptiness, futility, and criminality of these rebels fills "The Possessed" and plays no small part in other novels. Whether Dostoevski was right or wrong in this particular interpretation of the Russian soul is a question that time alone can answer. An outsider is loath to believe that the only true Russian is the submissive Russian, and that all attempts to overthrow or modify the rule of the Russian autocracy and the Russian Church are the work of men possessed by unclean spirits.

The rebels against Russia are, however, not necessarily lost souls. They may be redeemed and purified through suffering. In this peculiar exaltation of the value of suffering here on earth one may politely protest, along with Mikhailovski, that Dostoevski does not represent truly the Russian temperament, which is no more fond of suffering than any other. In his doctrine of submission, Dostoevski may find support in millions of Russian peasants who do not meditate, and in a party whose meditations are not always free from interested motives; in this last doctrine he is original and alone. Other Russians have believed that man's true work lies not in submitting to injustice and oppression, and in suffering because of them, but in struggling manfully against them; in laboring for the improvement of material Russian conditions rather than in speculating vaporously about the destiny of Russia. One may hope that they, rather than the eccentric Dostoevski, are truly representative of the Russian soul.

To conclude, Dostoevski is less typical of Russia than either Tolstoy or Turgenev, or perhaps one may add, even than Gorki. His range is narrow, his types of character abnormal, his plots fantastic, his methods of telling a story as far from realism as those of Victor Hugo. Yet he is the greatest novelist of the world in some things. No man, once we come within his power, can hold our minds with more intense interest. No man can make us more fully understand the hidden springs of human action under certain circumstances. No man can make us so completely forget the absurdity of a situation as we follow the minds of the men who find themselves in that situation. Dostoevski is a novelist of special cases. If one must characterize him in a single phrase, there is none better than that discovered long ago by Vogüé, "the Shakespeare of the madhouse."