for the money you sent. In your next letter (even if it’s ‘_official_,’
for I don’t know yet whether it is possible for me to correspond with
you)--in your next, write as fully as you can of all your affairs, of
Emilie Fyodorovna, the children, all relations and acquaintances; also
of those in Moscow--who is alive and who is dead; and of your business;
tell me what capital you started with, whether it is lucrative, whether
you are in funds, finally, whether you will help me financially, and
how much you will send me a year. But send no money with the official
letter--particularly if I don’t find a covering address. For the
present, give Michael Petrovitch as the consignor of all packets (you
understand, don’t you?). For the time, I have some money, but I have no
books. If you can, send me the magazines for this year, or at any rate
the _O.Z._
“But what I urgently need are the following: I need (very necessary!)
ancient historians (in French translation), modern historians: Guizot,
Thierry, Thiers, Ranke, and so forth; national studies, and the Fathers
of the Church. Choose the cheapest and most compact editions. Send them
by return.
“People try to console me: ‘They’re quite simple sort of fellows
there.’ But I dread simple men more than complex ones. For that matter,
men everywhere are just--men. Even among the robber-murderers in
the prison, I came to know some men in those four years. Believe me,
there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often
gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior. And not in a
single case, or even two, but in several cases. Some inspired respect,
others were downright fine. I taught the Russian language to a young
Circassian--he had been transported to Siberia for robbery with murder.
How grateful he was to me! Another convict wept when I said good-bye to
him. Certainly I had often given him money, but it was so little, and
his gratitude so boundless! My character, though, was deteriorating;
in my relations with others I was ill-tempered and impatient. They
accounted for it by my mental condition, and bore all without
grumbling. Apropos, what a number of national types and characters I
became familiar with in prison! I lived _into_ their lives, and so I
believe I know them really well. Many tramps’ and thieves’ careers
were laid bare to me, and above all, the whole wretched existence of
the common people. Decidedly I have not spent my time there in vain. I
have learnt to know the Russian people as only a few know them. I am a
little vain of it. I hope that such vanity is pardonable....
“Send me the Koran, and Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_, and if you
have the chance of sending me anything not officially, then be sure
to send Hegel, but particularly Hegel’s _History of Philosophy_. Upon
that depends my whole future. For God’s sake, exert yourself to get
me transferred to the Caucasus; try to find out from well-informed
sources whether I shall be permitted to print my works, and in what way
I should seek this sanction. I intend to try for permission in two or
three years. I beg you to sustain me so long. Without money I shall be
destroyed by military life. So please!...
“Now I mean to write novels and plays. But I must still read a great
deal. Don’t forget me.
“Once again farewell.
“F. D.”[41]
This letter, like so many others, remained unanswered. It is evident
that Dostoevsky was left without news from his family during his
whole term of imprisonment. Are we to suppose, on his brother’s part,
prudence, fear of compromising himself, or maybe indifference? I cannot
tell. Mme. Hoffmann, in her biography, inclines to the last-mentioned
supposition.
The first we know of Dostoevsky’s letters subsequent to his release and
enlistment in the 7th Siberian Line Regiment is dated March 27, 1854.
It does not appear in the French edition of his correspondence. In this
letter we read as follows:
“Send me--not newspapers, but European histories. Economists--Church
Fathers--as many of the classics as possible. Herodotus, Thucydides,
Tacitus, Pliny, Flavius, Plutarch, Diodorus, etc., in French
translations. And the Koran and a German Dictionary. Not all at once,
of course, but as much as you can. Send me Pissaren’s _Physics_
too, and a manual of physiology, any one, in French if better than
in Russian. All in the cheapest editions. Not in one consignment,
but slowly, one book after another. I shall be grateful for every
little thing you can do for me. Do realize how urgently I need this
intellectual food!...”
“Now you know my chief occupations,” he writes a little later. “Really
I have none but these connected with my duty. No outside events, no
disturbances in my life, no mishaps. But what is happening in soul,
heart, and mind, what has sprung up, ripened or been blighted, what
has been cast aside with the tares, _that_ cannot be told and written
down on a scrap of paper. Here I live in isolation; I shrink out of
sight, as usual. Moreover, for five years I lived with an escort,
and there are times when it is pure bliss for me to be alone. On
the whole, prison has destroyed many things in me and created new.
For example, I’ve already spoken about my illness: strange attacks
resembling epilepsy. And yet not epilepsy. Some day I shall give you
particulars.”[42]
In the last of these causeries we shall come back to this terrible
question of his illness.
In a letter dated November 6 of the same year we find:
“It will soon be ten months since I took up my new life. As for the
other four years, I look upon them as a period when I was buried alive
and closed in a coffin. What terrible years! I cannot, my friend, tell
you how terrible. Unspeakable suffering without end, for every hour,
every minute lay heavy on my soul. During the whole of these four
years, not a moment but what I was conscious of my prison walls.”[43]
But, immediately after, watch how far his optimism rises above it all:
“I was so busy all summer that I had scarcely time for sleep. But now
I have grown used to things. My health too has improved slightly.
And, hope not wholly lost, I can look at the future with moderate
fortitude.”[44]
Three letters from the same period were given in the _Niva_, April,
1898. Of these the French edition of Dostoevsky’s _Correspondence_
includes the first only. In one (August 21, 1855) there is reference to
a letter of the previous October, which has not been traced.
“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. I am myself thoroughly
convinced I was in the wrong.”
Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg on November 29, 1859. At
Semipalatinsk he had married the widow of a deportee, mother of a
growing son whose intelligence seemingly was less than mediocre.
Dostoevsky adopted the boy, for whom he made himself answerable. He had
a perfect mania for assuming burdens.
“He was but little altered,” his friend Miliukov tells us. “His mien
is more confident than of yore, and his features have lost none of the
energy they used to express.”
In 1861 he published _Insulted and Injured_; in 1861-2 his _Memories of
the House of the Dead_. _Crime and Punishment_, the first of his great
novels, did not appear till 1866.
During the years 1863-1865, he busied himself actively with a review.
One of his letters speaks so eloquently of the years between that I
must read further passages: this is, I think, the last time I shall
quote to you from his correspondence! This particular letter is dated
March 31, 1865.
“I am going to recount my life during this time. Not the whole of it,
though. That is impossible, for in such a case one never tells in
letters the essential facts. There are things I cannot narrate simply.
That’s why I shall confine myself to a summary account of the past year
of my life.
“You probably know that four years ago my brother Michael undertook
the publication of a review, wherein I collaborated. Everything was
going well. My _House of the Dead_ had met with considerable success
and given a fresh lease of life to my literary reputation. When my
brother began publication, he owed a lot of money; his debts were
being paid off when suddenly, in May, 1863, the review was suspended
on account of a strong and patriotic article, which, misinterpreted,
was read as a protest against the conduct of the Government and public
opinion. The blow killed him; debt after debt accumulated, and his
health became impaired. At the moment, I was far away, in Moscow, at
the bedside of my dying wife. Yes, dear friend, you wrote to sympathize
in my cruel loss, the death of my beloved brother, but you did not know
how heavy the hand of fate was upon me. Another creature who loved me,
and whom I loved infinitely--my wife--died of consumption in Moscow,
where she had been settled for a twelvemonth. The whole winter of 1864
I never left her bedside....
“... 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 grew, the closer we were drawn together. Strange though
it may seem, it is true. She was the best, the noblest, the most
generous-hearted woman I have ever known. After she was gone (despite
all my anxieties during the twelvemonth I watched her dying), although
I felt and painfully realized what I was burying with her, I could not
picture the emptiness and misery of my life. That is a year ago now,
and the feeling is still the same.
“Immediately after the funeral, I hastened to Petersburg to my brother.
He alone was left me! Three months later he, too, was no more. His
illness lasted only a month. It did not appear serious and the attack
which carried him off in three days was practically unforeseen.
“Then I was suddenly left alone; and I knew fear! It has become
terrible! My life is 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! Then I realized for the first time that I could
not replace my loved ones; they were all I held dear, and new loves
could not, ought not to exist.”[45]
This letter was continued in April, and a fortnight after this cry
of despair, we read, under the date April 14: “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. I’ve lost the friend of a
lifetime. Yet I always have the feeling that I am going to begin to
live! Ridiculous, isn’t it? The cat and its nine lives?”[46]
He adds these words: “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,” which passage I should like to set side by side with an
extraordinary paragraph I find in _Crime and Punishment_.
In this novel Dostoevsky tells us the story of Raskolnikov, who commits
a crime and is sent to Siberia. In the last pages he speaks of the
strange feeling that takes possession of his hero’s being, the feeling
that at last he is going to live. “And what were all, all the agonies
of the past! Everything, even his crime, sentence, and imprisonment,
seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external, strange
fact, with which he had no concern. But he could not think for long
together of anything that evening, and he could not have analysed
consciously, he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of
theory.”[47]
These sentences I have read to you in justification of my opening
remarks. The great external events of Dostoevsky’s life, tragic though
they were, are less important than this one small fact which it is
now time to consider. During his years in Siberia, Dostoevsky made the
acquaintance of a woman who put the New Testament into his hand--this,
by the way, being the only officially sanctioned reading matter in
gaol. This reading and meditating the Gospels was of vital importance
to Dostoevsky. All his subsequently written works are steeped in the
teaching of the Gospels, and we shall be obliged again and again to
revert to the truths he discovered in reading them.
I find it highly interesting to observe and compare in two natures
akin in so many respects, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the very different
reactions to contact with the Gospels. With Nietzsche the reaction,
immediate and marked, was, we may as well admit, jealousy. It does not
seem to me possible to understand Nietzsche’s works without taking
account of this feeling. Nietzsche was jealous of Jesus Christ, jealous
to the point of madness. In writing his _Zarathustra_, Nietzsche is
ever harassed by his desire to write a counterpart to the Gospels. He
even adopts at times the form of the Beatitudes the better to make
mockery of them. He wrote the _Anti-Christ_, and in his last work,
_Ecce Homo_, he poses as the adversary triumphant of Him he sought to
oust.
With Dostoevsky the reaction is far different. He felt at once that
he was face to face with something superior, not only to himself,
but to entire mankind, something divine.... The humility of which
I spoke earlier in the day, and to which I shall time and again
return, predisposed him to making submission before what was avowedly
better and higher than himself. He bowed his head humbly before Jesus
Christ, and the first, the greatest consequence of his submission
and self-surrender was the safeguarding intact his nature’s rich
complexity. No artist ever more truly practised the teaching of the
Gospel: “_For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever
will lose his life for My sake, the same shall save it._”
By reason of this sacrifice and renunciation the most discordant
elements are able to live side by side in Dostoevsky’s soul, and the
extraordinary wealth of antagonisms is preserved.
At our next meeting we shall inquire whether several of Dostoevsky’s
characteristics, which to us Westerners seem perchance more than
strange, are not common to all Russians, and by so inquiring we may
be enabled to discern such features as are more purely individual and
personal.
II
The few psychological and moral truths Dostoevsky’s works will permit
us to touch upon are in my estimation so important that I am all
eagerness to reach them. By their very boldness and originality they
would seem paradoxical to you if I approached them directly. I needs
must proceed warily.
In our last talk I spoke to you of the figure of the man himself. The
moment is favourable, I think, for presenting it in its own atmosphere
the better to bring its particular features into relief.
I have been on intimate terms with some Russians, but I have never been
in Russia; hence, without help, my task would be extremely difficult.
I shall first of all submit a few observations on the Russian people
that I found in a German monograph on Dostoevsky. Mme. Hoffmann, in her
excellent biography, insists first and foremost on the solidarity, the
common brotherhood between all classes of Russian society, which end
in sweeping away social barriers and facilitate naturally the freedom
of intercourse we find in all Dostoevsky’s novels. An introduction, a
sudden feeling of sympathetic understanding; and we have at once what
one of his heroes so expressively describes as “chance relationships.”
Homes are transformed into hostelries, the stranger of yesterday
becomes the honoured guest of to-day: a friend’s friend visits you, and
immediately everything between you is on a footing of intimacy.
Another observation of Mme. Hoffmann’s concerning the Russian people.
It is inherently incapable of leading a strict and methodical
existence, of being punctual even. It would seem as if the Russian did
not suffer much in consequence of his own improvidence, for he makes no
great effort to free himself from it. And if I may be permitted to seek
an excuse for the lack of order in my causeries, I shall find it in the
very confusion of Dostoevsky’s ideas, in their extreme entanglement and
in the peculiar difficulties experienced in trying to hold them to a
plan which satisfies our Western logic. This wavering and indecision
Mme. Hoffmann ascribes partly to the weakening of time sense due to the
endless summer days and interminable winter nights, when the rhythm of
the passing hours is lost. In a short address delivered at the _Vieux
Colombier_ I already quoted Mme. Hoffmann’s illustration of the Russian
who met reproaches on account of his unpunctuality with “Yes, life is
difficult! There are moments which must be lived well, and this is more
important than the punctual keeping of any engagement!”--a sentence
full of significance, for it reveals at the same time the strange
consciousness a Russian has of his inner life, more important to him
than all social connections.
I should like to point out, with Mme. Hoffmann, the propensity to pity
and suffering, _Leiden und Mitleiden_, to compassion extending even
to the criminal. In Russia there exists but one word to designate the
poor and the criminal, but one to cover actual crime and ordinary
offences. Add to this an almost religious contrition and we shall
the better understand the Russian’s ineradicable mistrustfulness in
all his relations with strangers, with foreigners in particular.
Westerners often complain of this mistrustfulness, which proceeds,
so Mme. Hoffmann maintains, from the uneasy consciousness of his own
insufficiency and proneness to sin, rather than from any feeling that
other people are of no account: it is a mistrust that springs from
humility of spirit.
Nothing could better throw light on this strange religiosity of the
Russian, which persists even when belief is long since dead, than the
four conversations of Prince Myshkin, the hero of _The Idiot_. These I
shall now read to you.
“‘As to the question of faith,’ he began, smiling, ... ‘I had four
different conversations in two days last week. I came in the morning by
the new railway and talked for four hours with a man in the train. We
made friends on the spot. I had heard a great deal about him beforehand
and had heard he was an atheist, among other things. He really is a
very learned man. What’s more, he’s an unusually well-bred man, so that
he talked to me quite as if I were his equal in ideas and attainments.
He doesn’t believe in God. Only, one thing struck me: that he seemed
not to be talking about that at all the whole time; and it struck me,
just because whenever I have met unbelievers before, or read their
books, it always seemed to me that they were speaking and writing in
their books about something quite different, although it seemed to
me about that on the surface. I said so to him at the time, but I
suppose I didn’t say so clearly, or did not know how to express it,
for he didn’t understand. In the evening, I stopped for the night at a
provincial hotel, and a murder had just been committed there the night
before, so that every one was talking about it when I arrived. Two
peasants, middle-aged men, friends who had known each other for a long
time, and were not drunk, had had tea and were meaning to go to bed
in the same room. But one had noticed during those last two days that
the other was wearing a silver watch on a yellow bead chain, which he
seems not to have seen on him before. The man was not a thief: he was
an honest man, in fact, and by a peasant’s standard by no means poor.
But he was so taken by the watch, and so fascinated by it, that at last
he could not restrain himself. He took a knife, and when his friend
had turned away, he approached him cautiously from behind, and praying
fervently, “God forgive me for Christ’s sake!” he cut his friend’s
throat at one stroke like a sheep and took his watch.’
“Rogozhin went off into peals of laughter; he laughed as though he were
in a sort of fit. It was positively strange to see such laughter after
the gloomy mood that had preceded it.
“‘I do like that! Yes, that beats everything!’ he cried convulsively,
gasping for breath. ‘One man doesn’t believe in God at all, while the
other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!...
You could never have invented that, brother! Ha!--ha!--ha! That beats
everything!’
“‘Next morning I went out to walk about the town,’ Myshkin went on, as
soon as Rogozhin was quiet again, though his lips still quivered with
spasmodic convulsive laughter. ‘I saw a drunken soldier in a terribly
disorderly state staggering about the wooden pavement. He came up to
me. “Buy a silver cross, sir?” said he. “I’ll let you have it for
twenty kopecks. It’s silver.” I saw in his hand a cross--he must have
just taken it off--on a very dirty blue ribbon; but one could see at
once it was only tin. It was a big one with eight corners, of a regular
Byzantine pattern. I took out twenty kopecks and gave them to him, and
at once put the cross round my neck; and I could see from his face how
glad he was that he had cheated a stupid gentleman, and he went off
immediately to drink what he had got for it, there was no doubt about
that. At that time, brother, I was quite carried away by the rush of
impressions that burst upon me in Russia; I had understood nothing
about Russia before. I had grown up, as it were, inarticulate, and my
memories of my country were somehow fantastic during those five years
abroad. Well, I walked on, thinking, “Yes, I’ll put off judging that
man who sold his Christ. God only knows what’s hidden in these weak
drunken beasts.” An hour later, when I was going back to the hotel, I
came upon a peasant woman with a tiny baby in her arms. She was quite a
young woman, and the baby was about six weeks old. The baby smiled at
her for the first time in its life. “What are you doing, my dear?” (I
was always asking questions in those days.) “God has just such gladness
every time He sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to him with all
his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s
face.” That was what the woman said to me almost in those words, this
deep, subtle, and truly religious thought--a thought in which all the
essence of Christianity finds expression; that is the whole conception
of God as our Father and of God’s gladness in man, like a father’s in
his own child--the fundamental idea of Christ! A simple peasant woman!
It’s true she was a mother ... and who knows, very likely that woman
was the wife of that soldier. Listen, Parfyon! You asked me a question
just now; here is my answer. The essence of religious feeling does not
come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do
with any crimes or misdemeanours. There is something else here, and
there will always be something else--something that the atheists will
for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else. But
the chief thing is that you will notice it more clearly and quickly
in the Russian heart than anywhere else. And this is my conclusion.
It’s one of the chief convictions I’ve gathered from our Russia. There
is work to be done, Parfyon! There is work to be done in our Russian
world, believe me.’”[48]
And we see at the end of this story another characteristic reveal
itself: the belief in the special mission of the Russian people.
This belief we find in several Russian writers: in Dostoevsky it
becomes an active and painful conviction, and his chief grievance
against Turgeniev was simply that he could not trace in him this
national feeling, his opinion being that Turgeniev was too westernized.