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 review24 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.