THE DEAD-HOUSE
A dozen years ago in Holland, talking about Dostoievski with my friend
Frederik van Eeden, I remarked that I had made several attempts, but had
never been able to read one of his novels through. Van Eeden replied
that Dostoievski was the world’s greatest novelist; and that is high
praise, because van Eeden is a great novelist himself. Now, under the
strain of the war, my old friend has turned into a Catholic mystic; and
so I understand his passion for the dark Russian, another of those
over-burdened spirits who despair of the human intellect, and seek
refuge in that most powerful auto-suggestion known as God.
Feodor Dostoievski was born in a hospital, his father being a poor
surgeon with a big family. As a child he knew cold and hunger, and was
living in a garret when he wrote his first novel, “Poor People,” at the
age of twenty-four. It is a picture of two suffering, will-less
creatures; and so genuine, so completely “lived,” that it made an
instant impression.
Its author was drawn into literary circles--which in those days meant
also revolutionary circles. In his feeble way he took up the ideas of
Fourier; he attended some radical gatherings, and went so far as to
identify himself with a printing press. The group were arrested, and
Dostoievski lay in a dungeon for many months, and finally with twenty
companions was brought out upon a public square before a scaffold and
prepared for death. At the last moment there came a reprieve from the
tsar, but meantime one of the victims had gone insane. The shock to
Dostoievski’s mind was such that he comes back to the incident again and
again in his books.
He was sent to Siberia at hard labor; herded with common felons, beaten
and tormented--in short, receiving exactly the same treatment now meted
out to social idealists by the states of California and Washington, and
recently by the United States government at Leavenworth. After a few
years the tsar pardoned Dostoievski and impressed him into the army; he
was allowed to come back to Russia after ten years, and wrote the story
of his experiences in a book called “Memoirs of a Dead-House.”
Dostoievski now took up the life of a hack writer. He had a large
following, but somebody else got the money; he was always in debt, his
wife and children starving and freezing. He wrote at terrific speed and
never stopped to revise. He was ill all the time, suffering an attack of
epilepsy every ten days. All this is in his writing; his characters are
drunkards, criminals, epileptics, idiots, and neurotics of every type.
He enters into their souls, and makes every moment of their lives, every
mood of their unhappy beings real to us.
His greatest novel is “Crime and Punishment”; telling the story of a
student who, ambitious and starving, has an impulse to murder an old
woman money-lender and rob her. He commits the crime, but is too much
terrified to get the money; then he is pursued by remorse, and we follow
him through his inner torments. He meets a young girl who has become a
prostitute in order to save her family from starvation; she persuades
him to give himself up to the police, and she follows him to Siberia,
and together their souls are redeemed by love.
I am conscientious in my attitude toward literature, and when I find the
critics raving over a great master, I feel obliged to read him. Some
years ago, I was in a hospital, recuperating from an operation, and that
seemed a good time to tackle an eight hundred-page volume, so I began
Dostoievski’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” There are several of these
brothers, also an old father, and all of them are drunk most of the
time, and tangled up with a stupid prostitute. The old father has money,
and so has the advantage over the sons, and apparently one of the sons
is on the way to murdering him. To cheer you up while the climax is
preparing, there is a monastery full of monks who hate one another like
poison, and one venerable and lovable saint, in whose spirituality you
are expected to find hope for Russia and mankind. But this saint dies,
and the youngest Karamazov brother, who loves him, has his faith in God
and his hope for humanity shattered forever, because the expected
miracle does not happen--Father Zossima stinks like any other
corpse!--That is as far as I got in the novel, and if you want to know
the outcome, you will have to do your own reading.
This is called “realism”; but get my point clear, it is romantic and
subjective to the highest degree; it is impassioned, even frenzied,
propaganda. Dostoievski is an orthodox Eastern or Byzantine Christian;
also he is a Slavophile, or mystical Russian patriot, believing that the
Russian soul is something wonderful and special, having secret
relationship with God. This relationship is the old mediaeval orgy of
suffering and submission, a wallowing in repentance and self-abasement,
the glorification of sores, boils, rags, lice, beggary, and bad smells.
All degradation, if patiently endured, is penitential and holy, whereby
the character is lifted to exalted mystical states. When the young
student in “Crime and Punishment” awakens to the horror of having killed
a human being, he does not decide to redeem himself by devoting his
educated brain to some useful labor; no, he decides he must go to a
police station and deliver himself into the hands of officials who are
worse criminals than he. A government, itself the distilled essence of a
billion hideous crimes, will send him to Siberia, so that he and his
pious prostitute may endure ecstacies of torment.
We see this still more clearly in another novel, whose purpose is to
reduce Christianity to idiocy. Do not take this for hyperbole or
epigram; it is merely the statement of Dostoievski’s thesis. The book is
called “The Idiot,” and the hero is an incarnation of that mystical,
psycho-neurotic Christianity which finds redemption through abasement
deliberately sought. You see, it is so easy to suffer, and it is so hard
to think! It is so easy to give yourself up to epileptic tremblings and
terrors, and call it God! Also, it appears to be easy for literary
critics to take mental disease at its own valuation.
In the whole field of art there is no spiritual tragedy greater than
Dostoievski’s. This man made an attempt in the cause of liberty, and the
Tsardom made him into a martyr; but he came back, not to be a soldier of
enlightenment, but to crawl in the dust and lick the hand which had
lashed him. He came back as a propagandist of reaction, proclaiming a
Russia redeemed by monks. Well, he had his way, and the redeeming monk
appeared--Gregori Rasputin by name!
Mind you, I do not quarrel with Dostoievski because he portrayed the
lost and abandoned, the hopelessly sick and tortured souls he knew. I do
not object because his characters are feverish and hysterical, because
they stare and glare and moan and cry and leap and tremble, because
their knees shake and their teeth chatter and they have nightmares
filling whole chapters. I am willing to read these things; but I want to
read them from the point of view of a scientist who can interpret them,
or of an economist who can remedy them; I do not want to read them as an
apotheosis of idiocy. I do not want them composed and idealized to prove
the divine nature of epilepsy.
And when I hear perfectly sane and comfortable bourgeois critics in the
United States exalting this pathologic mysticism, I want to throw a
brick-bat at them. Here, for example, is Professor William Lyon Phelps
of Yale University, telling us that “of all the masters of fiction both
in Russia and elsewhere, Dostoievski is the most truly spiritual.” At
the beginning of his essay he says that this novelist “was brought up on
the Bible and the Christian religion. The teachings of the New Testament
were with him almost innate ideas. Thus, although his parents could not
give him wealth, or ease, or comfort, or health, they gave him something
better than all four put together.”
“I think,” says Mrs. Ogi, “that you had better take a chapter off and
deal with that.”
Says her husband: “I have a title already chosen--”