III Dostoiëwsky, Psychologist and Visionary
Now let us turn to that visionary novelist whom Voguié introduces to his readers in these words:
“Here comes the Scythian, the true Scythian, who puts off the habiliments of our modern intellect, and leads us by the hand to the centre of Moscow, to the monstrous Cathedral of St. Basil, wrought and painted like a Chinese pagoda, built by Tartar architects, and yet consecrated to the God whom the Christians adore. Dostoiëwsky was educated at the same school, led by the same current of thought, and made his first appearance in the same year as Turguenief and Tolstoï; but the latter are opposite poles, and have but one ground in common, which is the sympathy for humanity, which was incarnate and expanded in Dostoiëwsky to the highest degree of piety, to pious despair, if such a phrase is possible.”
Dostoiëwsky is really the barbarian, the primitive type, whose heart-strings still reverberate certain motive tones of the Russian soul that were incompatible with the harmonious and tranquil spirit of Turguenief. Dostoiëwsky has the feverish, unreasoning, abnormal psychological intensity of the cultivated minds of his country. Let no one of tender heart and weak nerves read his books; and those who cling to classic serenity, harmony, and brightness should not so much as touch them. He leads us into a new region of æsthetics, where the horrible is beautiful, despair is consoling, and the ignoble has a halo of sublimity: where guilty women teach gospel truths, and men are regenerated by crimes; where the prison is the school of compassion, and fetters are a poetic element. Much against our will we are forced to admire a novelist whose pages almost excite to assassination and nightmare horrors, this Russian Dante who will not allow us to omit a single circle of the Inferno.
Feodor, son of Michael Dostoiëwsky, was born in Moscow in 1821, in a hospital at which his father was a medical attendant. There is frequently a strange connection between the environment of great writers and the development and direction of their genius, not always evident to the general public, but apparent to the careful critic; in Dostoiëwsky’s case it seems plain enough to all, however. His family belonged to the country gentlefolk from whom the class of government employees are drawn; Feodor, with his brother Alexis, whom he dearly loved, entered the school of military engineers, though his tastes were rather for belles-lettres and the humanities than for dry and unartistic details. His literary education was therefore reduced to fitful readings of Balzac, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and especially of Gogol, whose works first inspired him with tenderness toward the humble, the outcast, and the miserable. Shortly after leaving college he abandoned his career for a literary life, and began the usual struggle with the difficulties of a young writer’s precarious condition. The struggle lasted almost to the end of his life; for forty years he was never sure of any other than prison bread. Proud and suspicious by nature, the humiliations and bitterness of poverty must have contributed largely to unsettle his nerves, disconcert his mind, and undermine his health, which was so precarious that he used sometimes to leave on his table before going to sleep a paper with the words: “I may fall into a state of insensibility to-night; do not bury me until some days have passed.” He was sometimes afflicted with epilepsy, cruelly aggravated later in Siberia under the lashes laid upon his bleeding shoulders.
Like one of his own heroes he dreamed of fame; and without having read or shown his manuscripts to any one, alone with his chimeras and vagaries, he passed whole nights in imaginary intercourse with the characters he created, loving them as though they had been his relatives or his friends, and weeping over their misfortunes as though they had been real. These were hours of pure emotion, ideal love, which every true artist experiences some time in his life. Dostoiëwsky was hen twenty-three years old. One day he begged a friend to take a few chapters of his first novel called “The Poor People” to the popular poet Nekrasof; his friend did so, and in the early hours of the morning the famous poet called at the door of the unknown writer and clasped him in his arms under the excitement of the emotion caused by perusal of the story. Nekrasof did not remit his attentions; he at once sought the dreaded critic Bielinsky, the intellectual chief and lawgiver of the glorious company of writers to which Turguenief, Tolstoï, and Gontcharof belonged, the Russian Lessing, who died of consumption at the age of thirty-eight years, just when others are beginning to acquire discernment and tranquillity,—the great Bielinsky, who had formed two generations of great artists and pushed forward the national literature to a complete development. A man in his position, more prone to meet with the sham than the genuine in art, would naturally be not over-delighted to receive people armed with rolls of manuscript. When Nekrasof entered his room exclaiming, “A new Gogol is born to us!” the critic replied in a bad humor, “Gogols are born nowadays as easily as mushrooms in a cellar.” But when the author came in a tremor to learn the dictum of the judge, the latter cried out impetuously, “Young man, do you understand how much truth there is in what you have written? No, for you are scarcely more than twenty years old, and it is impossible that you should understand. It is a revelation of art, a gift of Heaven. Respect this gift, and you will be a great writer!” The success achieved by this novel on its publication in the columns of a review did not belie Bielinsky’s prophecy.
It is easy to understand the surprise of the critic on reading this work of a scarcely grown man, who yet seemed to have observed life with a vivid and deep sense of realism, and an unequivocal minuteness that is generally learned only through the bitter experience of prosaic sufferings, and comes forth after the illusions and vague sentimentalities of youth have been dispelled and practical life has begun. I said once, and I repeat it, that a true artist under twenty-five would be a marvel; Dostoiëwsky was indeed such a marvel.
This first novel was the humble drama of two lonely souls, wounded and ground down by poverty, but not spoiled by it; a case such as one might meet with on turning the very next corner, and never think worthy of attention or study, and which, even in the midst of modern currents of thought, the novelist is quite likely to pass by. Yet the book is a work of art,—of the new and the old art compounded, classic art infused with the new warm blood of truth. This work of Dostoiëwsky, this touching, tearful story, had a model in Gogol’s “The Cloak,” but it goes beyond the latter in energy and depth of sadness. If Dostoiëwsky ever invoked a muse, it must have been the muse of Hypochondria.
It was not likely that Dostoiëwsky would escape the political fatality which pursued the generality of Russian writers. During those memorable forties the students were wont to meet more or less secretly for the purpose of reading and discussing Fourier, Louis Blanc, and Proudhon. About 1847 these circles began to expand, and to admit public and military men; they were moved by one desire, and what began as an intellectual effervescence ended in a conspiracy. Dostoiëwsky was good material for any revolutionary cabal, being easily disposed thereto by his natural enmity to society, his continuous poverty, his nervous excitement, his Utopian dreams, and his inordinate and fanatical compassion for the outcast classes. The occasion was ill-timed, and the hour a dangerous one, being just at the time of the French outbreak, which seemed a menace to every throne in Europe. The police got wind of it, and on the 23rd of April, 1849, thirty-four suspected persons were arrested, the brothers Feodor and Alexis Dostoiëwsky among them. The novelist was thrown into a dungeon of the citadel, and when at last he came forth, it was to mount the scaffold in a public square with some of his companions. They stood there in shirt-sleeves, in an intense cold, expecting at first only to hear read the sentence of the Council of War. While they waited, Dostoiëwsky began to relate to a friend the plan of a new novel he had been thinking about in prison; but he suddenly exclaimed, as he heard the officer’s voice, “Is it possible we are to be executed?” His friend pointed to a car-load of objects which, though covered with a cloth, were shaped much like coffins. The suspicion was soon confirmed; the prisoners were all tied to posts, and the soldiers formed in line ready to fire. Suddenly, as the order was about to be given, word arrived from the emperor commuting the death-sentence to exile to Siberia. The prisoners were untied. One of them had lost his reason.
Dostoiëwsky and the others then set out upon their sad journey; on arriving at Tobolsk they were each shaved, laden with chains, and sent to a different station. During this painful experience a pathetic incident occurred which engraved itself indelibly upon the mind of the novelist, and is said to have largely influenced his works. The wives of the “Decembrists” (conspirators of twenty-five years before), most of them women of high rank who had voluntarily exiled themselves in order to accompany their husbands, came to visit in prison the new generation of exiles, and having nothing of material value to offer them, they gave each one a copy of the Gospels. During his four years of imprisonment, Dostoiëwsky never slept without this book under his pillow; he read it incessantly, and taught his more ignorant fellow-prisoners to read it also.
He now found himself among outcasts and convicts, and his ears were filled with the sounds of unknown languages and dialects, and speech which, when understood, was profane and abhorrent, and mixed with yells and curses more dreadful than all complaints. What horrible martyrdom for a man of talent and literary vocation,—reckoned with evil-doers, compelled to grind gypsum, and deprived of every means of satisfying the hunger and activity of his mind! Why did he not go mad? Some may answer, because he was that already,—and perhaps they would not be far wrong; for no writer in Russia, not excepting even Gogol and Tolstoï, so closely approaches the mysterious dividing line, thin as a hair, which separates insanity and genius. The least that can be said is, that if Dostoiëwsky was not subject to mental aberration from childhood, he had a violent form of neurosis. He was a bundle of nerves, a harp with strings too tense; he was a victim of epilepsy and hallucinations, and the results are apparent in his life and in his books. But it is a strange fact that he himself said that had it not been for the terrible trials he endured, for the sufferings of the prison and the scaffold, he certainly would have gone mad, and he believed that these experiences fortified his mind; for, the year previous to his captivity, he declared that he suffered a terrible temptation of the Devil, was a victim to chimerical infirmities, and overwhelmed with an inexplicable terror which he calls mystic fear, and thus describes in one of his novels: “On the approach of twilight I was attacked by a state of soul which frequently comes upon me in the night; I will call it mystic fear. It is an overwhelming terror of something which I can neither define nor imagine, which has no existence in the natural order of things, but which I feel may at any moment become real, and appear before me as an inexorable and horrible thing.” It seems then quite possible that the writer was cured of his imaginary ills by real ones.
I have remarked that Gogol’s “Dead Souls” reminded me of “Don Quixote” more than any book I know; let me add that the book inspired by the prison-life of Dostoiëwsky—“The Dead House”—reminds me most strongly of Dante’s Inferno. There is no exact likeness or affinity of literary style; for “The Dead House” is not a poem, but a plain tale of the sufferings of a few prisoners in a miserable Siberian fort. And yet it is certainly Dantesque. Instead of the laurel-crowned poet in scholar’s gown, led by the bright genius of antiquity, we see the wistful-eyed, tearful Sclav, his compressed lips, his attitude of resignation,—and in his hands a copy of the Gospels; but the Florentine and the Russian manifest the same melancholy energy, use the same burin to trace their burning words on plates of bronze, and unite a prophetic vision with a brutal realism of miserable and sinful humanity.
“The Dead House” also has the merit of being perhaps the most profound study written in Europe upon the penitentiary system and criminal physiology; it is a more powerful teacher of jurists and legislators than all didactic treatises. Dostoiëwsky shows especially, and with implacable clearness, the effect produced on the minds of the prisoners by the cruel penalty of the lash. The complacency of narration, the elaborateness of detail, the microscopic precision with which he notes every phase of this torture, inflict positive pain upon the nervous system of the reader. It is fascinating, it is the refinement of barbarism, but it was also a work of charity, for it finally brought about the abolition of that kind of punishment, and wiped out a foul stain upon the Russian Code. It makes one turn cold and shudder to read those pages which describe this torture,—so calmly and carefully related without one exclamation of pity or comment, and even sometimes painfully humorous. The trepidation of the condemned for days before it is inflicted, his frenzy after it is over, his subterfuges to avoid it, the blind fury with which sometimes he yields to it, throwing himself under the painful blows as a despairing man throws himself into the sea,—these are word-pictures never to be forgotten.
Voguié makes a striking comparison of the different fates awarded to certain books, and says that while “My Prisons,” by Silvio Pellico, went all over the world, this autobiographical fragment by Dostoiëwsky was unknown to Europe until very recently; yet it is far superior in sincerity and energy to that of the Italian prisoner. The most interesting and moving stories of captivity that I know of are Russian, and chief among them I would mention “Memories of a Nihilist,” by Paulowsky. The tone of resignation, of melancholy simplicity, in all these tales, however, is sure to touch all hearts. I will not quote a line from “The Dead House;” it must be read, attentively and patiently, and, like most Russian books, it has not the merit of brevity. But the style is so shorn of artifice and rhetorical pretension, and the story runs along so unaffectedly, that I cannot select any one page as an example of excellence; for the excellence of the book depends on the whole,—on the accumulated force of observation, on the complete aspect of a soul that feels deeply and sees clearly,—and we must not break the icy ring of Siberian winter which encloses it. It is enhanced by the apparent serenity of the writer, by his sweetness, his half-Christian, half-Buddhist resignation. With the Gospels in his hand, Dostoiëwsky at last leaves his house of pain, without rancor or hatred or choleric protests; more than this, he leaves it declaring that the trial has been beneficial to him, that it has regenerated body and soul; that in prison he has learned to love the brethren, and to find the spark of goodness and truth lighted by God’s hand even in the souls of reprobates and criminals; to know the charity that passes understanding and the pity that is foolishness to the wise; he has learned, in fact, to love,—the only learning that can redeem the condemned.
Although he had been (at the time of writing this) four years released from prison, he delayed still six years longer before returning to Europe to publish his works. When he began his labors for the press, he did not unite himself to the liberal party, but, erratic as usual, he turned to the Sclavophiles,—the blind lovers of old usages and customs, the bitter enemies of the civilization of the Occident. Fate was not yet weary in persecuting him. After the death of his wife and brother he was obliged to flee the country on account of his creditors. His sorrows were not exactly of the sublime nature of Puchkine’s and the melancholy poet’s; they were on the contrary very prosaic,—lack of money, combined with terrible fits of epilepsy. To understand the mortifications of poverty to a proud and sensitive man, one must read Dostoiëwsky’s correspondence,—so like Balzac’s in its incessant complaints against pecuniary affairs. He exclaims, “The details of my poverty are shameful. I cannot relate them. Sometimes I spend the whole night walking my room like a caged beast, tearing my hair in despair. I must have such or such a sum to-morrow, without fail!” Gloomy and ill, he wandered through Germany, France, and Italy, caring nothing for the wonders of civilization, and impressed by no sights except the guillotine. He wrote during this time his three principal novels, whose very names are nightmares,—“Possessed with Devils,” “The Idiot,” and “Crime and Punishment.”
I know by experience the diabolical power of Dostoiëwsky’s psychological analysis. His books make one ill, although one appear to be well. No wonder that they exercise a perturbing influence on Russian imaginations, which are only too prone to hallucination and mental ecstasy. I will briefly mention his best and most widely known book, “Crime and Punishment,” of which the following is the argument: A student commits a crime, and then voluntarily confesses it to the magistrate. This seems neither more nor less than an ordinary notice in the newspaper, but what an analysis is conveyed by means of it! It is horrible to think that the sentiments so studiously wrought out can be human, and that we all carry the germs of them hidden in some corner of the soul; and not only human, but possessed even by a person of great intellectual culture, like the hero, whose crime is the result of great reading reduced to horrible sophisms. Those two Parisian students who, after saturating their minds with Darwin and Haeckel, cut a woman to pieces with their histories, must have been prototypes of Rodion Romanovitch, the hero of this novel of Dostoiëwsky. This young man is not only clever, but possesses really refined sentiments; one of the motives that lead to his crime is that one of his sisters, the most dearly loved, may have to marry an unworthy man in order to insure the welfare of the family. Such a sale as this poor girl’s marriage would be seems to the student a greater wrong than the assassination of the old money-lender. The first seed of the crime falls upon his soul on overhearing at a wine-shop a dialogue between another student and an officer. “Here you have on the one hand,” says the student, “an old woman, sick, stupid, wicked, useful to nobody, and only doing harm to all the world about her, who does not know what she lives for, and who, when you least expect it, will die a natural death; you have on the other hand a young creature whose strength is being wasted for lack of sustenance, a hundred lives that might be guided into a right path, dozens of families that might be saved from destitution, dissolution, ruin, and vice if that old woman’s money were only available. If somebody were to kill her and use her fortune for the good of humanity, do you not think that a thousand good deeds would compensate for the crime? It is a mathematical question. What weight has a stupid, evil-minded old shrew in the social scale? About as much as a bed-bug.”
“Without doubt,” replies the officer, “the old woman does not deserve to live. But—what can you do? Nature—”
“My friend,” the other replies, “Nature can be corrected and amended. If it were not so we should all be buried to the neck in prejudices, and there would not be a great man amongst us.”
This atrocious ratiocination takes hold upon Rodion’s mind, and he carries it out to terribly logical consequences. Napoleon sacrificed thousands of men on the altar of his genius; why had he not the right to sacrifice one ridiculous old woman to his own great needs? The ordinary man must not infringe the law; but the extraordinary man may authorize his conscience to do away with certain obstacles in his path.
It has been said that Dostoiëwsky’s talents were influenced in some measure by the fascinating personality of Edgar Poe. The analogies are apparent; but the author of “The Gold Beetle,” with all his suggestive intensity and his feverish imagination, never achieved any such tremendous psychological analyses as those of “Crime and Punishment.” It is impossible to select an example from it; every page is full of it. The temptation that precedes the assassination, the horrible moment of committing it, the manner of disposing of the traces of it, the agonizing terror of being discovered, the instinct which leads him back to the scene of the crime with no motive but to yield to a desire as irresistible as inexplicable, his fearful visit to the place where he lives over again the moment when he plunged the knife into the old woman’s skull,—examining all the furniture, laying his hand upon the bell again, with a fiendish enjoyment of the sound of it, and looking again for the marks of blood on the floor,—it is too well done; it makes one excited, nervous, and ill.
“Is this beautiful?” some will ask. All that Dostoiëwsky has written bears the same character; it wrings the soul, perverts the imagination, overturns one’s ideas of right and wrong to an incredible degree. Sometimes one is lost in abysms of gloomy uncertainty, like Hamlet; again one sees the struggle of the evil genius against Providence, like Faust, or a soul lacerated by remorse like Macbeth; and all his heroes are fools, madmen, maniacs, and philosophers of hypochondria and desperation. And yet I say that this is beauty,—tortured, twisted, Satanic, but intense, grand, and powerful. Dostoiëwsky’s are bad books to read during digestion, or on going to bed at night, when every dim object takes an unusual shape, and every breath stirs the window curtains; they are not good books to take to the country, where one sits under the spreading trees with a fresh and fragrant breeze and a soul expanded with contentment, and one thanks God only to be alive. But they are splendid books for the thinker who devours them with reflective attention,—his brow furrowed under the light of the student-lamp, and feeling all around him the stir and excitement of a great city like Paris or St. Petersburg.
But there is a drop of balm in the cup of absinthe to which we may liken Dostoiëwsky’s books; it is the Christianity which appears in them when and where its consoling presence is least expected. Face to face with the student who becomes a criminal through pride and injudicious reading, we see the figure of a pure, modest, pious girl, who redeems him by her love. This unfortunate girl is a flower that fades before its time; it is she who, being sacrificed to provide bread for her family, comes in time to convince the criminal of his sin, enlightens his mind with the lamp of the Gospels, and brings him to repentance, resignation, and the joy of regeneration, in the expiation of his crime by chastisement and the dungeon.
There is one marked difference between “Crime and Punishment” and “The Dead House.” The novel is feverish, the autobiography is calm. Dostoiëwsky is a madman who owes his lucid intervals to tribulations and torture. Suffering clears his mind and alleviates his pain; tears sweeten his bitterness, and sorrow is his supreme religion; like his student hero, he prostrates himself before human suffering.
The best way of taking the measure of Dostoiëwsky’s personality is to compare him with his competitor and rival, and perhaps his enemy, Ivan Turguenief. There could be no greater contrast. Turguenief is above all an artist, almost classic in his serenity, master of the arts of form, delicate, refined, exquisite, a perfect scene-painter, an always interesting narrator, reasonable and temperately liberal in his opinions, optimist, or, if I may be allowed the word, Olympic, to the extent that he could boast of being able to die tranquilly because he had enjoyed all that was truly beautiful in life. Dostoiëwsky is a rabid psychologist, almost an enemy to Nature and the sensuous world, a furious and implacable painter of prisons, hospitals, public houses and by-streets of great cities, awkward in his style, taking only a one-sided view of character, a revolutionary and yet a reactionary in politics, and not only adverse to every sort of paganism, but hazily mystical,—the apostle of redemption through suffering, and of the compassion which seeks wounds to cure with its healing lips. Their two lives are correlative to their characters,—Turguenief in the Occident, famous and fortunate; Dostoiëwsky in the Orient, a barbarian, the plaything of destiny, fighting with poverty shoulder to shoulder. It was only natural that sooner or later the two novelists should know each other as enemies. It is sad to relate that Dostoiëwsky attacked Turguenief in so furious a manner that it can only be attributed to envy and malice.
In his own country, however, and in respect to his popularity and influence with young people, the author of “Crime and Punishment” ranked higher than the author of “Virgin Soil.” Just in proportion as Turguenief was attractive to us in the West, Dostoiëwsky fascinated the people of his country. “Crime and Punishment” was an event in Russia. Dostoiëwsky had the honor—if honor it may be called—of dealing a blow upon the soul of his compatriots, and on this account, as he himself used sometimes to say, especially after his epileptic attacks, he felt himself to be a great criminal, and the guilt of a villanous act weighed upon his soul; and it happened that a certain student, after reading his book, thought himself possessed by the same impulses as the hero, and committed a murder with the same circumstances and details.
After writing “Crime and Punishment,” Dostoiëwsky’s talent declined; his defects became more marked, his psychology more and more involved and painful, his heroes more insensate, lunatic, epileptic, and overwrought, absorbed in inexplicable contemplations, or wandering, rapt in delirious dreams, through the streets. His novels are, in fact, the antechamber to the madhouse. But we may once more notice the influence of Cervantes on Russian minds; for the most important character created by Dostoiëwsky, after the hero of “Crime and Punishment,” is a type, imitated after Quixote, in “The Idiot,”—a righter of wrongs, a fool, or rather a sublime innocent.
As much as Dostoiëwsky excels in originality, he lacks in rhythm and harmony. His way of looking at the world is the way of the fever-stricken. No one has carried realism so far; but his may be called a mystic realism. Neither he nor his heroes belong to our light-loving race or our temperate civilization; they are the outcome of Russian exuberance, to us almost incomprehensible. He is at one moment an apostle, at another a maniac, now a philosopher, then a fanatic. Voguié, in describing his physiognomy, says: “Never have I seen in any other face such an expression of accumulated suffering; all the agonies of flesh and spirit were stamped upon it; one read in it, better than in any book, the recollection of the prison, the long habits of terror, torture, and anguish. When he was angry, one seemed to see him in the prisoner’s dock. At other times his countenance had the sad meekness of the aged saints in Russian sacred pictures.”
In his last years Dostoiëwsky was the idol of the youth of Russia, who not only awaited his novels most eagerly, but ran to consult him as they would a spiritual director, entreating his advice or consolation. The prestige of Turguenief was for the moment eclipsed. Tolstoï found his audience chiefly among the intelligence, and Dostoiëwsky of the lacerated heart was the object of the love and devotion of the new generation. When the monument to Puchkine was unveiled, in 1880, the popularity of Dostoiëwsky was at its height; when he spoke, the people sobbed in sympathy; they carried him in triumph; the students assaulted the drawing-rooms that they might see him near by, and one even fainted with ecstasy on touching him.
He died, February 10, 1881, almost crazed with patriotic love and enthusiasm, like Gogol. The multitudes fought for the flowers that were strewn over his grave, as precious relics. His obsequies were an imposing manifestation. In a land without liberty this novelist was the Messiah of the new generations.