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 review[24] 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.
ADDRESSES
(1922)
I
Some time before the war I was preparing for Charles Péguy’s _Cahiers
de la Quinzaine_, a _Life of Dostoevsky_ after the manner of Romain
Rolland’s fine monographs on Beethoven and Michelangelo. War came, and
I was forced to lay aside the notes I had taken. For long other cares
and duties absorbed me and my project was to all intents and purposes
abandoned, when recently at the celebration of Dostoevsky’s Centenary,
Jacques Copeau asked me to address a meeting in his theatre, the _Vieux
Colombier_. I brought my packet of notes out into the light of day
again, and re-reading them after the lapse of time, I found the ideas
I had jotted down seemed worth our attention, but that chronological
order, though necessary for biographical purposes, was perhaps not
the most advisable on this occasion. It is often a difficult task to
separate the ideas Dostoevsky weaves, as it were, into a fine web in
each of his novels, but we never lose track of them. In my eyes these
ideas are all that is most precious in Dostoevsky and I have made them
my own. If I took up each of his works in turn, I could not possibly
avoid repeating myself. There is, however, another--and better--way:
pursuing his ideas from one novel to another, I shall try to lay hold
of them and set them forth as plainly as is possible despite their
apparent confusion. Psychologist, sociologist, moralist--Dostoevsky
is all three, and novelist as well. Whereas in his works ideas are
never presented in their crude state, but always through the medium
of the character expressing them (which accounts for their confusion
and relativity), I, for my part, will try to avoid abstractions and
outline the ideas as sharply as possible. I should like first of all to
introduce you to Dostoevsky in person, and speak of some incidents in
his life that reveal his character and help us to draw a clear likeness
of him.
My pre-war plan of the biography comprised an introduction in which
I proposed to discuss the commonly accepted idea of him. To throw
light on the subject, I should have drawn a parallel between him and
Rousseau--and no arbitrary one, I can assure you. Their natures reveal
such deep-laid analogies that Rousseau’s _Confessions_ were able to
exert an extraordinary influence on Dostoevsky. But in my opinion
Rousseau, from the very beginning of his life, was poisoned, as it
were, by Plutarch, through whom he fashioned for himself a somewhat
rhetorical and pompous notion of a “great man.” He set up before
himself the image of a fancied hero, and his life was one prolonged
effort to be like it. He tried hard to _be_ what he wanted to _seem_.
I allow that his painting of his own character may be sincere, but he
is ever thinking of his pose, which pride alone dictates.
“False greatness,” in the admirable words of La Bruyère, “is shy and
inaccessible. Conscious of its foible, it hides away, or at least
never shows an open face, letting be seen only as much as will make
an impression and save it from being revealed for what it really is,
something mean and small.”
And if I do not go so far as to recognize Rousseau in this description,
I _do_ think of Dostoevsky when a little farther on I read:
“True greatness is free, gentle, familiar, unaffected; it can be
touched and handled, and loses nothing when seen at close quarters.
The better you are acquainted with it, the more you admire it. It
bends out of goodness of heart to its inferiors, and returns to its
own level without effort. Sometimes it lets itself go, neglecting and
surrendering its natural advantages, but ever ready to recover them and
put them to use.”
With Dostoevsky there is this complete absence of pose or
stage-management. He never considers himself a _superman_. He is most
humbly human, and I do not think that pride of intellect could ever
properly understand him.
The word _humility_ comes up again and again in his letters and
works. “Why should they deny me? I make no demands. I am but a humble
petitioner.” (November 23, 1869.)--“I do not demand, I only seek in
all humility.” (December 7, 1869.)--“I have made the humblest of
requests.” (February 12, 1870.)