It is impossible not to think of Dostoevsky as a living author when
his books come regularly, as they are coming, to the American public
every few months. Our grandfathers sixty years ago are said to have
lived their imaginative lives in anticipation of the next instalment
of Dickens or Thackeray. I can feel somewhat of the same excitement in
this Dostoevsky stream, though I cannot pretend that the great Russian
will ever become a popular American classic. Yet in the progress from
Dickens to Dostoevsky there is a symbol of the widening and deepening
of the American imagination. We are adrift on a far wider sea than our
forefathers. We are far more adventurous in personal relations, far
more aware of the bewildering variousness of human nature. If you have
once warmed to Dostoevsky, you can never go back to the older classic
fiction on which we were brought up. The lack of _nuance_, the hideous
normality of its people begin to depress you. When once you have a
sense of the illusion of “character,” when once you have felt the
sinister, irrational turn of human thoughts, and the subtle interplay
of impression and desire, and the crude impingement of circumstance,
you find yourself--unless you keep conscious watch--feeling a shade
of contempt for the Scott and Balzac and Dickens and Thackeray
and Trollope who were the authoritative showmen of life for our
middle-class relatives. You relegate such fiction to the level of
“movie” art, with its clean, pigeon-holed categories of the emotions,
and its “registering” of a few simple moods.
You will, of course, be wrong in any such contempt, because these
novelists show a bewildering variety of types and a deep intuition
of the major movements of the soul. Dickens teems with irrational
creatures, with unconventional levels of life. But you can scarcely
contradict me when I say that neither Dickens nor his readers ever
forgot that these human patterns were queer. His appeal lies exactly
in the joyful irrelevance with which we take all these lapses from the
norm, in the pitiful tears which we can shed for human beings done
so obviously as they should not be done by. In reading these familiar
novelists we never lose our moral landmarks. No matter how great the
deviations a character shows, we are always conscious--or could be
conscious if we liked--of the exact amount of that deviation. The
charm of that nineteenth-century fiction, as in the work of belated
Victorians like Mr. Chesterton, lies in that duality between the
sane and the insane, the virtuous and the villainous, the sober and
the mischievous, the responsible and the irresponsible. There is no
falsification in this. These novelists were writing for an epoch that
really had stable “character,” standards, morals, that consistently saw
the world in a duality of body and spirit. They were a reflection of a
class that really had reticences, altruisms, and religious codes.
Dostoevsky appeals to us to-day because we are trying to close up that
dualism. And our appreciation of him and the other modern Russians is
a mark of how far we have actually gone. It is still common to call
this fiction unhealthy, morbid, unwholesome. All that is meant by this
is that the sudden shock of a democratic, unified, intensely the mind
that thinks in the old dual terms as to be almost revolting. What
becomes more and more apparent to the readers of Dostoevsky, however,
is his superb modern healthiness. He is healthy because he has no
sense of any dividing line between the normal and the abnormal, or
even between the sane and the insane. I call this healthy because it
is so particularly salutary for our American imagination to be jolted
out of its stiltedness and preconceived notions of human psychology.
I admit that the shock is somewhat rough and rude. “The Idiot”, which
I have read only once, remains in my mind as a stream of fairly
incomprehensible people and unintelligible emotional changes. Yet I
feel that when I read it again I shall understand it. For Dostoevsky
has a strange, intimate power which breaks in your neat walls and shows
you how much more subtle and inconsequent your flowing life is than
even your introspection had thought. But for all his subtlety he is the
reverse of anything morbidly introspective. In his work you get the
full warm unity of emotional life without losing any of the detail of
the understanding analysis of the soul.
This astounding mergence Dostoevsky actually seems to achieve. That
is what gives him the intimate power which distinguishes every story
of his from anything else you have ever read. Again he contrasts with
the classical novelists. For they are quite palpably outside their
subjects. You are never unaware of the author as telling the story.
He has always the air of the showman, unrolling his drama before
your eyes. His characters may be infinitely warm and human, but the
writer himself is somehow not in them. “Wuthering Heights” is the only
English story I think of that has something of the fierce, absorbed
intensity of Dostoevsky. In the great Russian you lose all sense of
the showman. The writer is himself the story; he is inextricably in
it. In narratives like “The Double” or “A Gentle Spirit” immanence
could go no further. The story seems to tell itself. Its strange,
breathless intimacy of mood follows faithfully every turn and quirk
of thought and feeling. Its tempo is just of that inner life we know,
with its ceaseless boring into the anxious future and its trails of
the unresolved past. These stories follow just that fluctuating line
of our conscious life with its depressions and satisfactions, its
striving always for a sense of control, its uneasiness. In Dostoevsky’s
novels it is not only the author that is immanent. The reader also
is absorbed. After reading “Crime and Punishment” you are yourself
the murderer. For days the odor of guilt follows you around. The
extravaganza of “The Double” pursues you like a vivid dream of your own.
Such stories, however fantastic the problems of the soul, get deeply
into us. We cannot ignore them, we cannot take them irresponsibly.
We cannot read them for amusement, or even in detachment, as we can
our classics. We forget our categories, our standards, our notions of
human nature. All we feel is that we are tracing the current of life
itself. Dostoevsky is so much in his stories that we get no sense
of his attitude toward his characters or of his criticism of life.
Yet the after-impression is one of rich kindness, born of suffering
and imperfection, and of a truly religious reverence for all living
experience. Man as a being with his feet in the mud and his gaze turned
toward the stars, yet always indissolubly one in feet and eyes and
heart and brain! If we are strong enough to hear him, this is the
decisive force we need on our American creative outlook.