DOSTOEVSKY
DOSTOEVSKY
By André Gide
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
With an Introduction by
ARNOLD BENNETT
“Dostoevsky
was the only psychologist
from whom I had anything to learn:
he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life,
happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.”
NIETZSCHE
[Illustration Publisher’s Colophon]
ALFRED A. KNOPF
1926
D O S T O E V S K Y
By André Gide, was first
published in Paris by
PLON-NOURRIT et CIE.
in 1923
Made and Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and
London
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
André Gide is now one of the leaders of French literature. The
first book of his to attract wide attention among the lettered was
_L’Immoraliste_. Since then, in some twenty years of productiveness, he
has gradually consolidated his position until at the present day his
admirers are entitled to say that no other living French author stands
so firm and so passionately acknowledged as an influence. His authority
over the schools of young writers who contribute to or are published
by _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ (with which he has been intimately
connected from its foundation) is quite unrivalled. And it must be
stated, as a final proof of mastership, that he has powerful and not
despicable opponents.
To my mind his outstanding characteristic is that he is equally
interested in the æsthetic and in the moral aspect of literature.
Few imaginative writers have his broad and vivacious curiosity about
moral problems, and scarcely any moralists exhibit even half his
preoccupation with the æsthetic. He is a distinguished, if somewhat
fragmentary, literary critic--not merely of French but of Russian,
English and classical literatures. I shall not forget his excitement
when he first read _Tom Jones_. “Ce livre m’attendait,” said he, with
grave delight. His practical interest in the technique of fiction never
fades; indeed it grows. So much so that his latest novel, now appearing
serially in _La Nouvelle Revue Française_, really amounts to an essay
in a new form; and with startling modesty he has labelled it, in the
dedication, “my first novel.”
Of course no novelist can achieve anything permanent without a moral
basis or background. Balzac had it. De Maupassant had it to the point
of savagery. Zola had it, in his degree. Paul Bourget--a writer whom
highbrows French and English have still to reckon with--has it. But
André Gide writes in the very midst of morals. They are not only his
background, but frequently his foreground. Scarcely one of his books
(the exception may be _Les Caves du Vatican_) but poses and attempts to
resolve a moral problem.
It was natural and even necessary that such a writer as Gide should
deal with such a writer as Dostoevsky. They were made for each
other--or rather Dostoevsky was made for Gide. I first met Gide in the
immense field of Dostoevsky. He said, and I agreed, that _The Brothers
Karamazov_ was the greatest novel ever written. This was ages ago, and
years have only confirmed us in the opinion.
“But,” said Gide, “everything that Dostoevsky ever wrote is worth
reading and must be read. Nothing can safely be omitted.”
At that period there was none but a mutilated French translation of
_The Brothers Karamazov_, and Gide had to read Dostoevsky in German. A
complete translation, I fear, still lacks in French, but André Gide can
now read him in full in English: which is to our credit and his. Let
us, however, not be too much uplifted. Dostoevsky’s important _Journal
d’un Ecrivain_ exists in French but not in English.
Those who read Gide’s _Dostoevsky_ will receive light, some of it
dazzling, on both Dostoevsky and Gide. I can recall no other critical
work which more cogently justifies and more securely establishes its
subject. If anyone wants to appreciate the progress made by Western
Europe in the appreciation of Russian psychology, let him compare the
late Count Melchior de Voguë’s _Le Roman Russe_ with the present work.
It is impossible to read this _Dostoevsky_ without enlarging one’s idea
of Dostoevsky and of the functions of the novel. All the conventional
charges against the greatest of the Russians--morbidity, etc., etc.,
fall to pieces during perusal. They are not killed; they merely
expire. And Dostoevsky in the end stands out not simply as a supreme
psychologist and narrator, but also as a publicist of genius endowed
with a prophetic view over the future of the nations as astounding as
his insight into the individual. “There never was,” says Gide, “an
author more Russian in the strictest sense of the word and withal so
universally European.”
Dostoevsky had various and distressing personal defects, but his
humanity and his wisdom, doubtless derived from the man Jesus who
delivered the Sermon on the Mount, are unique; and André Gide’s
demonstration of their worth is his invaluable contribution to
Dostoevsky literature.
ARNOLD BENNETT.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
In the early months of 1922, M. André Gide delivered before M. Jacques
Copeau’s School of Dramatic Art at the _Vieux-Colombier_ a series of
six addresses on DOSTOEVSKY, first published from shorthand notes--with
but slender emendation, lest the style should lose in spontaneity--in
the _Revue Hebdomâdaire_, Nos. 2-8, 1923, then later in the same year
in book form, together with selected essays. These addresses form the
basis of the present translation from which two short chapters, _Les
Frères Karamazov_ and an _Allocution lue au Vieux-Colombier pour la
Célébration du Centenaire de Dostoïevsky_, have been omitted by desire
of the Author, who adapted his original preface specially for this
English edition.
By courtesy of Messrs. William Heinemann, we are permitted to quote
extensively from Mrs. Constance Garnett’s translations of _Dostoevsky’s
Novels_ (12 vols., 1912-1920). We have utilized as far as possible Miss
Ethel Colburn Mayne’s _Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to
his Family and Friends_ (Messrs. Chatto and Windus, 1917): elsewhere we
have cited J. W. Bienstock’s _Correspondance et Voyage à l’Étranger_
(Paris, 1908). Quotations are further made from Bienstock and Nau’s
version of the _Journal_ (Paris, 1904), and from _Th. M. Dostoevsky:
eine biographische Studie_, by N. Hoffmann (Berlin, 1899).
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY NOTE v
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE ix
AUTHOR’S PREFACE 1
DOSTOEVSKY IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE (1908) 8
ADDRESSES ON DOSTOEVSKY (1922)
I 45
II 76
III 99
IV 118
V 144
VI 170
APPENDIX 199
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
Tolstoy in his immensity still overshadows our horizon; but as a
traveller in a land of mountains sees, with each receding step, appear
above the nearest peak one loftier yet, screened hitherto by the
surrounding heights, some eager spirits herald perchance the rise of
Dostoevsky behind Tolstoy’s giant figure. This cloud-capped summit is
the secret heart of the chain and source of many a generous stream in
whose waters the Europe of to-day may slake her strange new thirsts.
Dostoevsky, not Tolstoy, merits rank beside Ibsen and Nietzsche: great
as they, mayhap the mightiest of the three.
In Germany translations of Dostoevsky are multiplying, each an
advance on its predecessor as regards vigour and scrupulous accuracy.
England, stubborn and slow to move, yet makes it her concern not to be
outstripped. When he introduced Mrs. Constance Garnett’s translation in
the _New Age_, Arnold Bennett wished all English novelists and short
story writers could come under the influence of these “most powerful
works of the imagination ever produced.” Speaking more particularly
of _The Brothers Karamazov_, he declared this book, in which human
passion reaches its maximum intensity, contains about a dozen figures
that are simply colossal. Who can tell if these colossal figures have
ever made, even in Russia, so direct appeal as to us, whether their
call sounded ever before so pressing?
Dostoevsky’s admirers were recently rare enough, but as invariably
happens when the earliest enthusiasts are recruited from the élite,
their number goes on increasing steadily. First of all, I should like
to inquire how it is that certain minds are still obdurately prejudiced
against his work, admirable though it be. Because the best way to
overcome a lack of comprehension is to accept it as sincere and try to
understand it.
The principal charge brought against Dostoevsky in the name of our
Western-European logic has been, I think, the irrational, irresolute,
and often irresponsible nature of his characters, everything in their
appearance that could seem grotesque and wild. It is not, so people
aver, real life that he unfolds, but nightmares. In my belief this
is utterly mistaken; but let us grant the truth of it for argument’s
sake, and refrain from answering after the manner of Freud that there
is more sincerity in our dream-life than in the actions of our real
existence. Hear rather what Dostoevsky has to say for himself on the
subject of dreams: “These obvious absurdities and impossibilities with
which your dream was overflowing ... you accepted all at once, almost
without the slightest surprise, at the very time when, on another
side, your reason was at its highest tension and showed extraordinary
power, cunning, sagacity, and logic. And why, too, on waking and fully
returning to reality, do you feel almost every time, and sometimes
with extraordinary intensity, that you have left something unexplained
behind with the dream, and at the same time you feel that interwoven
with these absurdities some thought lies hidden, and a thought that is
real, something belonging to your actual life, something that exists
and always has existed in your heart. It’s as though something new,
prophetic, that you were awaiting, has been told you in your dream.”[1]
What Dostoevsky says here about dreams we shall apply to his own books,
not for a moment that I would consider assimilating these stories to
the absurdities of certain dreams, because we feel when we leave one of
his books, even should our reason refuse complete agreement with it,
that he has laid his finger on some obscure spot “which is part of our
actual life.” In this, I think, we shall find explained the refusal of
certain minds, in the name of Western-European civilization, to admit
Dostoevsky’s genius, because I readily observe that in all our Western
literature (and I do not limit myself to French alone) the novel, with
but rare exceptions, concerns itself solely with relations between
man and man, passion and intellect, with family, social, and class
relations, but never, practically never with the relations between
the individual and his self or his God, which are to Dostoevsky all
important. I fancy nothing could better illustrate my idea than the
reflection made by a Russian and quoted in Mme. Hoffmann’s biography,
the best by far I know, but which unfortunately has not yet been
translated. His reflection, she holds, will enable us to discern one
of the peculiarities of the Russian soul. Once reproached with his
unpunctuality this Russian gravely retorted: “Yes, life is difficult!
There are moments that must be lived well, and this is more important
than the keeping of any engagement.”[2] The inner life is thus
more highly prized than relations with one’s fellow-man. Here lies
Dostoevsky’s secret, the thing which makes him for some so great, for
many others so insufferable!
Not for a moment do I suggest that in Western Europe, in France, for
example, man is wholly a social being, ever dressed for a part. We
have Pascal’s _Thoughts_ and the _Fleurs du Mal_, strangely solitary
and profound, yet as French as any other works in our literature.
But a certain category of problems, heart-searchings, passions,
and associations seem to be the province of the moralist and the
theologian, and a novelist has no call to burden himself with them.
The miracle Dostoevsky accomplished consists in this: each of his
characters--and he created a world of them--lives by virtue of his
own personality, and these intimately personal beings, each with his
peculiar secret, are introduced to us in all their puzzling complexity.
The wonder of it is that the problems are lived over by each of his
characters, or rather let us say the problems exist at the expense of
his characters: problems which conflict, struggle, and assume human
guise to perish or triumph before our eyes.
No question too transcendent for Dostoevsky to handle in one of his
novels; but, having said this, I am bound at once to add that he
never approaches a question from the abstract, ideas never exist for
him but as functions of his characters, wherein lies their perpetual
relativity and source of power. One individual evolves a certain theory
concerning God, providence, and life eternal because he knows he must
die in a few days’ time, in a few hours maybe (Ippolit in _The Idiot_):
another (in _The Possessed_) builds up an entire system of metaphysics,
containing Nietzsche in embryo, on the premise of self-destruction, for
in a quarter of an hour he is going to take his own life, and hearing
him speak, it is impossible to distinguish whether his philosophy
postulates his suicide or his suicide his philosophy. Prince Myshkin
owes his most wonderful, most heavenly raptures to the imminence of an
epileptic fit. In conclusion I have only one comment to offer: though
pregnant with thought, Dostoevsky’s novels are never abstract, indeed,
of all the books I know, they are the most palpitating with life.
Representative as Dostoevsky’s characters are, they never seem to
forsake their humanity to become mere symbols or the types familiar in
our classical drama. They keep their individuality which is as specific
as in Dickens’s most peculiar creations, and as powerfully drawn and
painted as any portrait in any literature.
Listen to this: “There are people whom it is difficult to describe
correctly in their typical and characteristic aspect. These are the
people who are usually called ‘the mass,’ ‘the majority,’ and who
do actually make up the vast majority of mankind. To this class of
‘commonplace’ or ‘ordinary’ people belong certain persons of my tale,
such as Gavril Ardalionovitch.”[3]
Now, this is a character particularly difficult to delineate. What will
he succeed in telling us about him?
“A profound and continual consciousness of his own lack of talent,
and at the same time the overwhelming desire to prove to himself
that he was a man of great independence, had rankled in his heart
from boyhood up. He was a young man of violent and envious cravings,
who seemed to have been positively born with his nerves overwrought.
The violence of his desires he took for strength. This passionate
craving to distinguish himself sometimes led him to the brink of most
ill-considered actions, but our hero was always at the last moment too
sensible to take the final plunge. That drove him to despair.”[4] And
this for one of the least important characters in the book! I must add
that the others, the chief protagonists, he does not portray, leaving
them to limn in their own portrait, never finished, ever changing, in
the course of the narrative. His principal characters are always in
course of formation, never quite emerging from the shadows. In passing,
note how profoundly different he is from Balzac, whose chief care
seems ever to be the perfect consistency of his characters. Balzac
paints like David; Dostoevsky like Rembrandt, and his portraits are
artistically so powerful and often so perfect that even if they lacked
the depths of thought that lie behind them, and around them, I believe
that Dostoevsky would still be the greatest of all novelists.
FOOTNOTES
[1] _The Idiot_, p. 455.
[2] Hoffmann, p. 7, “Es gibt Augenblicke, die richtig gelebt sein
wollen.” (_Translator’s note._)
[3] _The Idiot_, pp. 461-462.
[4] _The Idiot_, p. 464.
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