TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY
With TOLSTOY and DOSTOYEVSKY, we come not only to the two great
pillars of modern Russian literature which tower above all others like
two colossal statues in the desert, but to two of the greatest figures
in the literature of the world. Russia has not given the world a
universal poet, a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Goethe, or a Molière; for
Pushkin, consummate artist and inspired poet as he was, lacks that
peculiar greatness which conquers all demarcations of frontier and
difference of language, and produces work which becomes a part of the
universal inheritance of all nations; but Russia has given us two
prose-writers whose work has done this very thing. And between them
they sum up in themselves the whole of the Russian soul, and almost
the whole of the Russian character; I say almost the whole of the
Russian _character_, because although between them they sum up all
that is greatest, deepest, and all that is weakest in the Russian
_soul_, there is perhaps one element of the Russian _character_,
which, although they understood it well enough, their genius forbade
them to possess. If you take as ingredients Peter the Great,
Dostoyevsky's Mwyshkin--the idiot, the pure fool who is wiser than the
wise--and the hero of Gogol's _Revisor_, Hlestyakov the liar and
wind-bag, you can, I think, out of these elements, reconstitute any
Russian who has ever lived. That is to say, you will find that every
single Russian is compounded either of one or more of these elements.
For instance, mix Peter the Great with a sufficient dose of
Hlestyakov, and you get Boris Godunov and Bakunin; leave the Peter the
Great element unmixed, and you get Bazarov, and many of Gorky's
heroes; mix it slightly with Hlestyakov, and you get Lermontov; let
the Hlestyakov element predominate, and you get Griboyedov's
Molchalin; let the Mwyshkin element predominate, with a dose of
Hlestyakov, and you get Father Gapon; let it predominate without the
dose of Hlestyakov, and you get Oblomov; mix it with a dose of Peter
the Great, you get Herzen, Chatsky; and so on. Mix all the elements
equally, and you get Onegin, the average man. I do not mean that there
are necessarily all these elements in every Russian, but that you will
meet with no Russian in whom there is not to be found either one or
more than one of them.
Now, in Tolstoy, the Peter the Great element dominates, with a dose of
Mwyshkin, and a vast but unsuccessful aspiration towards the complete
characteristics of Mwyshkin; while in Dostoyevsky the Mwyshkin
predominates, blent with a fiery streak of Peter the Great; but in
neither of them is there a touch of Hlestyakov. In Russia, it
constantly happens that a man in any class, be he a soldier, sailor,
tinker, tailor, rich man, poor man, plough-boy, or thief, will
suddenly leave his profession and avocation and set out on the search
for God and for truth. These men are called _Bogoiskateli_, Seekers
after God. The one fact that the whole world knows about Tolstoy is
that, in the midst of his great and glorious artistic career, he
suddenly abjured literature and art, denounced worldly possessions,
and said that truth was to be found in working like a peasant, and
thus created a sect of Tolstoyists. The world then blamed him for
inconsistency because he went on writing, and lived as before, with
his family and in his own home. But in reality there was no
inconsistency, because there was in reality no break. Tolstoy had been
a _Bogoiskatel_, a seeker after truth and God all his life; it was
only the manner of his search which had changed; but the quest itself
remained unchanged; he was unable, owing to family ties, to push his
premises to their logical conclusion until just before his death; but
push them to their logical conclusion he did at the last, and he died,
as we know, on the road to a monastery.
Tolstoy's manner of search was extraordinary, extraordinary because he
was provided for it with the eyes of an eagle which enabled him to see
through everything; and, as he took nothing for granted from the day
he began his career until the day he died, he was always subjecting
people, objects, ideas, to the searchlight of his vision, and testing
them to see whether they were true or not; moreover, he was gifted
with the power of describing what he saw during this long journey
through the world of fact and the world of ideas, whether it were the
general or the particular, the mass or the detail, the vision, the
panorama, the crowd, the portrait or the miniature, with the strong
simplicity of a Homer, and the colour and reality of a Velasquez. This
made him one of the world's greatest writers, and the world's greatest
artist in narrative fiction. Another peculiarity of his search was
that he pursued it with eagle eyes, but with blinkers.
In 1877 Dostoyevsky wrote: "In spite of his colossal artistic talent,
Tolstoy is one of those Russian minds which only see that which is
right before their eyes, and thus press towards that point. They have
not the power of turning their necks to the right or to the left to
see what lies on one side; to do this, they would have to turn with
their whole bodies. If they do turn, they will quite probably maintain
the exact opposite of what they have been hitherto professing; for
they are rigidly honest." It is this search carried on by eyes of
unsurpassed penetration between blinkers, by a man who every now and
then did turn his whole body, which accounts for the many apparent
changes and contradictions of Tolstoy's career.
Another source of contradiction was that by temperament the Lucifer
element predominated in him, and the ideal he was for ever seeking was
the humility of Mwyshkin, the pure fool, an ideal which he could not
reach, because he could not sufficiently humble himself. Thus when
death overtook him he was engaged on his last and his greatest voyage
of discovery; and there is something solemn and great about his having
met with death at a small railway station.
Tolstoy's works are a long record of this search, and of the memories
and experiences which he gathered on the way. There is not a detail,
not a phase of feeling, not a shade or mood in his spiritual life that
he has not told us of in his works. In his _Childhood, Boyhood and
Youth_, he re-creates his own childhood, boyhood and youth, not always
exactly as it happened in reality; there is _Dichtung_ as well as
_Wahrheit_; but the _Dichtung_ is as true as the _Wahrheit_, because
his aim was to recreate the impressions he had received from his early
surroundings. Moreover, the searchlight of his eyes even then fell
mercilessly upon everything that was unreal, sham and conventional.
As soon as he had finished with his youth, he turned to the life of a
grown-up man in _The Morning of a Landowner_, and told how he tried to
live a landowner's life, and how nothing but dissatisfaction came of
it. He escapes to the Caucasus, and seeks regeneration, and the result
of the search here is a masterpiece, _The Cossacks_. He goes back to
the world, and takes part in the Crimean war; he describes what he saw
in a battery; his eagle eye lays bare the _splendeurs et misères_ of
war more truthfully perhaps than a writer on war has ever done, but
less sympathetically than Alfred de Vigny--the difference being that
Alfred de Vigny is innately modest, and that Tolstoy, as he wrote
himself, at the beginning of the war, "had no modesty."
After the Crimean war, he plunges again into the world and travels
abroad; and on his return to Russia, he settles down at Yasnaya
Polyana and marries. The hero of his novel _Domestic Happiness_
appears to have found his heart's desire in marriage and country life.
It was then that he wrote _War and Peace_, which he began to publish
in 1865. He always had the idea of writing a story on the Decembrist
movement, and _War and Peace_ was perhaps the preface to that
unwritten work, for it ends when that movement was beginning. In _War
and Peace_, he gave the world a modern prose epic, which did not
suffer from the drawback that spoils most historical novels, namely,
that of being obviously false, because it was founded on his own
recollection of his parents' memories. He gives us what we feel to be
the very truth; for the first time in an historical novel, instead of
saying "this is very likely true," or "what a wonderful work of
artistic reconstruction," we feel that we were ourselves there; that
we knew those people; that they are a part of our very own past. He
paints a whole generation of people; and in Pierre Bezukhov, the new
landmarks of his own search are described. Among many other episodes,
there is nowhere in literature such a true and charming picture of
family life as that of the Rostovs, and nowhere a more vital and
charming personality than Natasha; a creation as living as Pushkin's
Tatiana, and alive with a reality even more convincing than Turgenev's
pictures of women, since she is alive with a different kind of life;
the difference being that while you have read in Turgenev's books
about noble and exquisite women, you are not sure whether you have
not known Natasha yourself and in your own life; you are not sure she
does not belong to the borderland of your own past in which dreams and
reality are mingled. _War and Peace_ eclipses all other historical
novels; it has all Stendhal's reality, and all Zola's power of dealing
with crowds and masses. Take, for instance, a masterpiece such as
Flaubert's _Salammbô_; it may and very likely does take away your
breath by the splendour of its language, its colour, and its art, but
you never feel that, even in a dream, you had taken part in the life
which is painted there. The only bit of unreality in _War and Peace_
is the figure of Napoleon, to whom Tolstoy was deliberately unfair.
Another impression which Tolstoy gives us in _War and Peace_ is that
man is in reality always the same, and that changes of manners are not
more important than changes in fashions of clothes. That is why it is
not extravagant to mention _Salammbô_ in this connection. One feels
that, if Tolstoy had written a novel about ancient Rome, we should
have known a score of patricians, senators, scribblers, clients,
parasites, matrons, courtesans, better even than we know Cicero from
his letters; we should not only feel that we _know_ Cicero, but that
we had actually known him. This very task--namely, that of
reconstituting a page out of Pagan history--was later to be attempted
by Merezhkovsky; but brilliant as his work is, he only at times and by
flashes attains to Tolstoy's power of convincing.
_Anna Karenina_ appeared in 1875-76. And here Tolstoy, with the touch
of a Velasquez and upon a huge canvas, paints the contemporary life of
the upper classes in St. Petersburg and in the country. Levin, the
hero, is himself. Here, again, the truth to nature and the reality is
so intense and vivid that a reader unacquainted with Russia will in
reading the book probably not think of Russia at all, but will imagine
the story has taken place in his own country, whatever that may be. He
shows you everything from the inside, as well as from the outside. You
feel, in the picture of the races, what Anna is feeling in looking on,
and what Vronsky is feeling in riding. And with what reality, what
incomparable skill the gradual dawn of Anna's love for Vronsky is
described; how painfully real is her pompous and excellent husband;
and how every incident in her love affair, her visit to her child, her
appearance at the opera, when, after having left her husband, she
defies the world, her gradual growing irritability, down to the final
catastrophe, bears on it the stamp of something which must have
happened just in that very way and no other.
But, as far as Tolstoy's own development is concerned, Levin is the
most interesting figure in the book. This character is another
landmark in Tolstoy's search after truth; he is constantly putting
accepted ideas to the test; he is haunted by the fear of sudden death,
not the physical fear of death in itself, but the fear that in the
face of death the whole of life may be meaningless; a peasant opens a
new door for him and furnishes him with a solution to the problem--to
live for one's soul: life no longer seems meaningless.
Thus Levin marks the stage in Tolstoy's evolution of his abandoning
materialism and of seeking for the truth in the Church. But the Church
does not satisfy him. He rejects its dogmas and its ritual; he turns
to the Gospel, but far from accepting it, he revises it. He comes to
the conclusion that Christianity as it has been taught is mere
madness, and that the Church is a superfluous anachronism. Thus
another change comes about, which is generally regarded as _the_
change cutting Tolstoy's life in half; in reality it is only a fresh
right-about-turn of a man who is searching for truth in blinkers. In
his _Confession_, he says: "I grew to hate myself; and now all has
become clear." He came to believe that property was the source of all
evil; he desired literally to give up all he had. This he was not able
to do. It was not that he shrank from the sacrifice at the last; but
that circumstances and family ties were too strong for him. But his
final flight from home in the last days of his life shows that the
desire had never left him.
Art was also subjected to his new standards and found wanting, both in
his own work and in that of others. Shakespeare and Beethoven were
summarily disposed of; his own masterpieces he pronounced to be
worthless. This more than anything shows the pride of the man. He
could admire no one, not even himself. He scorned the gifts which were
given him, and the greatest gifts of the greatest men. But this
landmark of Tolstoy's evolution, his turning his back on the Church,
and on his work, is a landmark in Russian history as well as in
Russian art. For far less than this Russian thinkers and writers of
high position had been imprisoned and exiled. Nobody dared to touch
Tolstoy. He fearlessly attacked all constituted authority, both
spiritual and temporal, in an epoch of reaction, and such was his
prestige that official Russia raised no finger. His authority was too
great, and this is perhaps the first great victory of the liberty of
individual thought over official tyranny in Russia. There had been
martyrs in plenty before, but no conquerors.
After _Anna Karenina_, Tolstoy, who gave up literature for a time, but
for a time only, nevertheless continued to write; at first he only
wrote stories for children and theological and polemical pamphlets;
but in 1886 he published the terribly powerful peasant drama: _The
Powers of Darkness_. Later came the _Kreutzer Sonata_, the _Death of
Ivan Ilitch_, and _Resurrection_. Here the hero Nehludov is a lifeless
phantom of Tolstoy himself; the episodes and details have the reality
of his early work, so has Maslova, the heroine; but in the squalor
and misery of the prisons he shows no precious balms of humanity and
love, as Dostoyevsky did; and the book has neither the sweep and epic
swing of _War and Peace_, nor the satisfying completeness of _Anna
Karenina_. Since his death, some posthumous works have been published,
among them a novel, and a play: _The Living Corpse_. He died, as he
had lived, still searching, and perhaps at the end he found the object
of his quest.
Tolstoy, even more than Pushkin, was rooted to the soil; all that is
not of the soil--anything mystic or supernatural--was totally alien to
him. He was the oak which could not bend; and being, as he was, the
king of realistic fiction, an unsurpassed painter of pictures,
portraits, men and things, a penetrating analyst of the human heart, a
genius cast in a colossal mould, his work, both by its substance and
its artistic power, exercised an influence beyond his own country,
affected all European nations, and gives him a place among the great
creators of the world. Tolstoy was not a rebel but a heretic, a
heretic not only to religion and the Church, but in philosophy,
opinions, art, and even in food; but what the world will remember of
him are not his heretical theories but his faithful practice, which is
orthodox in its obedience to the highest canons, orthodox as Homer and
Shakespeare are orthodox, and like theirs, one of the greatest earthly
examples of the normal and the sane.
To say that DOSTOYEVSKY is the antithesis to Tolstoy, and the second
great pillar of Russian prose literature, will surprise nobody now.
Had one been writing ten years ago, the expression of such an opinion
would have met with an incredulous smile amongst the majority of
English readers of Russian literature, for Dostoyevsky was practically
unknown save for his _Crime and Punishment_, and to have compared him
with Turgenev would have seemed sacrilegious. Now when Dostoyevsky is
one of the shibboleths of our _intelligentsia_, one can boldly say,
without fear of being misunderstood, that, as a creator and a force in
literature, Dostoyevsky is in another plane than that of Turgenev, and
as far greater than him as Leonardo da Vinci is greater than Vandyke,
or as Wagner is greater than Gounod, while some Russians consider him
even infinitely greater than Tolstoy. Let us say he is his equal and
complement. He is in any case, in almost every respect, his
antithesis. Tolstoy was the incarnation of health, and is above all
things and pre-eminently the painter of the sane and the earthly.
Dostoyevsky was an epileptic, the painter of the abnormal, of
criminals, madmen, degenerates, mystics. Tolstoy led an even,
uneventful life, spending the greater part of it in his own country
house, in the midst of a large family. Dostoyevsky was condemned to
death, served a sentence of four years' hard labour in a convict
settlement in Siberia, and besides this spent six years in exile; when
he returned and started a newspaper, it was prohibited by the
Censorship; a second newspaper which he started came to grief; he
underwent financial ruin; his first wife, his brother, and his best
friend died; he was driven abroad by debt, harassed by the authorities
on the one hand, and attacked by the liberals on the other; abused and
misunderstood, almost starving and never well, working under
overwhelming difficulties, always pressed for time, and ill requited
for his toil. That was Dostoyevsky's life.
Tolstoy was a heretic; at first a materialist, and then a seeker after
a religion of his own; Dostoyevsky was a practising believer, a
vehement apostle of orthodoxy, and died fortified by the Sacraments of
the Church. Tolstoy with his broad unreligious opinions was
narrow-minded. Dostoyevsky with his definite religious opinions was
the most broad-minded man who ever lived. Tolstoy hated the
supernatural, and was alien to all mysticism. Dostoyevsky seems to get
nearer to the unknown, to what lies beyond the flesh, than any other
writer. In Tolstoy, the Peter the Great element of the Russian
character predominated; in Dostoyevsky that of Mwyshkin, the pure
fool. Tolstoy could never submit and humble himself. Submission and
humility and resignation are the keynotes and mainsprings of
Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy despised art, and paid no homage to any of the
great names of literature; and this was not only after the so-called
change. As early as 1862, he said that Pushkin and Beethoven could not
please because of their absolute beauty. Dostoyevsky was catholic and
cosmopolitan, and admired the literature of foreign countries--Racine
as well as Shakespeare, Corneille as well as Schiller. The essence of
Tolstoy is a magnificent intolerance. The essence of Dostoyevsky is
sweet reasonableness. Tolstoy dreamed of giving up all he had to the
poor, and of living like a peasant; Dostoyevsky had to share the hard
labour of the lowest class of criminals. Tolstoy theorized on the
distribution of food; but Dostoyevsky was fed like a beggar. Tolstoy
wrote in affluence and at leisure, and re-wrote his books; Dostoyevsky
worked like a literary hack for his daily bread, ever pressed for time
and ever in crying need of money.
These contrasts are not made in disparagement of Tolstoy, but merely
to point out the difference between the two men and between their
circumstances. Tolstoy wrote about himself from the beginning of his
career to the end; nearly all his work is autobiographical, and he
almost always depicts himself in all his books. We know nothing of
Dostoyevsky from his books. He was an altruist, and he loved others
better than himself.
Dostoyevsky's first book, _Poor Folk_, published in 1846, is a
descendant of Gogol's story _The Cloak_, and bears the influence, to a
slight extent, of Gogol. In this, the story of a minor public servant
battling against want, and finding a ray of light in corresponding
with a girl also in poor circumstances, but who ultimately marries a
rich middle-aged man, we already get all Dostoyevsky's peculiar
sweetness; what Stevenson called his "lovely goodness," his almost
intolerable pathos, his love of the disinherited and of the failures
of life. His next book, _Letters from a Dead House_, has a far more
universal interest. It is the record of his prison experiences, which
is of priceless value, not only on account of its radiant moral
beauty, its perpetual discovery of the soul of goodness in things
evil, its human fraternity, its complete absence of egotism and pose,
and its thrilling human interest, but also on account of the light it
throws on the Russian character, the Russian poor, and the Russian
peasant.
In 1866 came _Crime and Punishment_, which brought Dostoyevsky fame.
This book, Dostoyevsky's _Macbeth_, is so well known in the French and
English translations that it hardly needs any comment. Dostoyevsky
never wrote anything more tremendous than the portrayal of the anguish
that seethes in the soul of Raskolnikov, after he has killed the old
woman, "mechanically forced," as Professor Brückner says, "into
performing the act, as if he had gone too near machinery in motion,
had been caught by a bit of his clothing and cut to pieces." And not
only is one held spellbound by every shifting hope, fear, and doubt,
and each new pang that Raskolnikov experiences, but the souls of all
the subsidiary characters in the book are revealed to us just as
clearly: the Marmeladov family, the honest Razumikhin, the police
inspector, and the atmosphere of the submerged tenth in St.
Petersburg--the steaming smell of the city in the summer. There is an
episode when Raskolnikov kneels before Sonia, the prostitute, and says
to her: "It is not before you I am kneeling, but before all the
suffering of mankind." That is what Dostoyevsky does himself in this
and in all his books; but in none of them is the suffering of all
mankind conjured up before us in more living colours, and in none of
them is his act of homage in kneeling before it more impressive.
This book was written before the words "psychological novel" had been
invented; but how all the psychological novels which were written
years later by Bourget and others pale before this record written in
blood and tears! _Crime and Punishment_ was followed by _The Idiot_
(1868). The idiot is Mwyshkin, who has been alluded to already, the
wise fool, an epileptic, in whom irony and arrogance and egoism have
been annihilated; and whose very simplicity causes him to pass
unscathed through a den of evil, a world of liars, scoundrels, and
thieves, none of whom can escape the influence of his radiant
personality. He is the same with every one he meets, and with his
unsuspicious sincerity he combines the intuition of utter goodness, so
that he can see through people and read their minds. In this
character, Dostoyevsky has put all his sweetness; it is not a portrait
of himself, but it is a portrait of what he would have liked to be,
and reflects all that is best in him. In contrast to Mwyshkin,
Rogozhin, the merchant, is the incarnation of undisciplined passion,
who ends by killing the thing he loves, Nastasia, also a creature of
unbridled impulses,--because he feels that he can never really and
fully possess her. The catastrophe, the description of the night after
Rogozhin has killed Nastasia, is like nothing else in literature;
lifelike in detail and immense, in the way in which it makes you
listen at the keyhole of the soul, immense with the immensity of a
great revelation. The minor characters in the book are also all of
them remarkable; one of them, the General's wife, Madame Epanchin, has
an indescribable and playful charm.
_The Idiot_ was followed by _The Possessed_, or _Devils_, printed in
1871-72, called thus after the Devils in the Gospel of St. Luke, that
left the possessed man and went into the swine; the Devils in the book
are the hangers-on of Nihilism between 1862 and 1869. The book
anticipated the future, and in it Dostoyevsky created characters who
were identically the same, and committed identically the same crimes,
as men who actually lived many years later in 1871, and later still.
The whole book turns on the exploitation by an unscrupulous,
ingenious, and iron-willed knave of the various weaknesses of a crowd
of idealist dupes and disciples. One of them is a decadent, one of
them is one of those idealists "whom any strong idea strikes all of a
sudden and annihilates his will, sometimes for ever"; one of them is a
maniac whose single idea is the production of the Superman which he
thinks will come, when it will be immaterial to a man whether he lives
or dies, and when he will be prepared to kill himself not out of fear
but in order to kill fear. That man will be God. Not the God-man, but
the Man-God. The plan of the unscrupulous leader, Peter Verkhovensky,
who was founded on Nechaev, a Nihilist of real life, is to create
disorder, and amid the disorder to seize the authority; he imagines a
central committee of which he pretends to be the representative,
organizes a small local committee, and persuades his dupes that a
network of similar small committees exist all over Russia; his aim
being to create them gradually, by persuading people in every plot of
fresh ground that they exist everywhere else.
Thus the idea of the book was to show that the strength of Nihilism
lay, not in high dogmas and theories held by a large and
well-organized society, but in the strength of the will of one or two
men reacting on the weaker herd and exploiting the strength, the
weakness, and the one-sidedness of its ideals, a herd which was
necessarily weak owing to that very one-sidedness. In order to bind
his disciples with a permanent bond, Verkhovensky exploits the _idée
fixe_ of suicide and the superman, which is held by one of his dupes,
to induce him to commit a crime before he kills himself, and thus make
away with another member of the committee who is represented as being
a spy. Once this is done, the whole committee will be jointly
responsible, and bound to him by the ties of blood and fear. But
Verkhovensky is not the hero of the book. The hero is Stavrogin, whom
Verkhovensky regards as his trump card, because of the strength of his
character, which leads him to commit the most outrageous
extravagances, and at the same time to remain as cold as ice; but
Verkhovensky's whole design is shattered on Stavrogin's character, all
the murders already mentioned are committed, the whole scheme comes to
nothing, the conspirators are discovered, and Peter escapes abroad.
When _Devils_ appeared in 1871, it was looked upon as a gross
exaggeration, but real life in subsequent years was to produce
characters and events of the same kind, which were more startling than
Dostoyevsky's fiction. The book is the least well-constructed of
Dostoyevsky's; the narrative is disconnected, and the events,
incidents, and characters so crowded together, that the general effect
is confused; on the other hand, it contains isolated scenes which
Dostoyevsky never surpassed; and in its strength and in its
limitations it is perhaps his most characteristic work.
From 1873-80 Dostoyevsky went back to journalism, and wrote his _Diary
of a Writer_, in which he commented on current events. In 1880, he
united all conflicting and hostile parties and shades of public
opinion, by the speech he made at the unveiling of Pushkin's memorial,
in one common bond of enthusiasm. At the end of the seventies, he
returned to a work already begun, _The Brothers Karamazov_, which,
although it remains the longest of his books, was never finished. It
is the story of three brothers, Dimitri, Ivan, and Alyosha; their
father is a cynical sensualist. The eldest brother is an
undisciplined, passionate character, who expiates his passions by
suffering; the second brother is a materialist, the tragedy of whose
inner life forms a greater part of the book; the third brother,
Alyosha, is a lover of humanity, and a believer in God and man. He
seeks a monastery, but his spiritual father sends him out into the
world, to live and to suffer. He is to go through the furnace of the
world and experience many trials; for the microbe of lust that is in
his family is dormant in him also. The book was called the _History of
a Great Sinner_, and the sinner was to be Alyosha. But Dostoyevsky
died before this part of the subject is even approached.
He died in January 1881; the crowds of men and women of all sorts and
conditions of life that attended his funeral, and the extent and the
sincerity of the grief manifested, gave it an almost mythical
greatness. The people gave him a funeral such as few kings or heroes
have ever had. Without fear of controversy or contradiction one can
now say that Dostoyevsky's place in Russian literature is at the top,
equal and in the opinion of some superior to that of Tolstoy in
greatness. He is also one of the greatest writers the world has ever
produced, not because, like Tolstoy, he saw life steadily and saw it
whole, and painted it with the supreme and easy art of a Velasquez;
nor because, like Turgenev, he wove exquisite pictures into musical
words. Dostoyevsky was not an artist; his work is shapeless; his books
are like quarries where granite and dross, gold and ore are mingled.
He paid no attention to style, and yet so strong and vital is his
spoken word that when the Moscow Art Theatre put some scenes in _The
Brothers Karamazov_ and _Devils_ on the stage, they found they could
not alter one single syllable; and sometimes his words have a power
beyond that of words, a power that only music has. There are pages
where Dostoyevsky expresses the anguish of the soul in the same manner
as Wagner expressed the delirium of dying Tristram. I should indeed
put the matter the other way round, and say that in the last act of
Tristram, Wagner is as great as Dostoyevsky. But Dostoyevsky is great
because of the divine message he gives, not didactically, not by
sermons, but by the goodness that emanates, like a precious balm, from
the characters he creates; because more than any other books in the
world his books reflect not only the teaching and the charity, but the
accent and the divine aura of love that is in the Gospels.
"I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom,
conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that
addresses your spirit, just as if both had passed through the grave,
and we stood at God's feet, equal--as we are!" These words, spoken by
Charlotte Brontë's _Jane Eyre_, express what Dostoyevsky's books do.
His spirit addresses our spirit. "Be no man's judge; humble love is a
terrible power which effects more than violence. Only active love can
bring out faith. Love men, and do not be afraid of their sins; love
man in his sin; love all the creatures of God, and pray God to make
you cheerful. Be cheerful as children and as the birds." This was
Father Zosima's advice to Alyosha. And that is the gist of
Dostoyevsky's message to mankind. "Life," Father Zosima also says to
Alyosha, "will bring you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on
account of them, and you will bless life and cause others to bless
it." Here we have the whole secret of Dostoyevsky's greatness. He
blessed life, and he caused others to bless it.
It is objected that his characters are abnormal; that he deals with
the diseased, with epileptics, neurasthenics, criminals, sensualists,
madmen; but it is just this very fact which gives so much strength and
value to the blessing he gave to life; it is owing to this fact that
he causes others to bless life; because he was cast in the nethermost
circle of life's inferno; he was thrown together with the refuse of
humanity, with the worst of men and with the most unfortunate; he saw
the human soul on the rack, and he saw the vilest diseases that
afflict the human soul; he faced the evil without fear or blinkers;
and there, in the inferno, in the dust and ashes, he recognized the
print of divine footsteps and the fragrance of goodness; he cried from
the abyss: "Hosanna to the Lord, for He is just!" and he blessed life.
It is true that his characters are taken almost entirely from the
_Despised and Rejected_, as one of his books was called, and often
from the ranks of the abnormal; but when a great writer wishes to
reveal the greatest adventures and the deepest experiences which the
soul of man can undergo, it is in vain for him to take the normal
type; it has no adventures. The adventures of the soul of Fortinbras
would be of no help to mankind; but the adventures of Hamlet are of
help to mankind, and the adventures of Don Quixote; and neither Don
Quixote nor Hamlet are normal types.
Dostoyevsky wrote the tragedy of life and of the soul, and to do this
he chose circumstances as terrific as those which unhinged the reason
of King Lear, shook that of Hamlet, and made Oedipus blind himself.
His books resemble Greek tragedies by the magnitude of the spiritual
adventures they set forth; they are unlike Greek Tragedies in the
Christian charity and the faith and the hope which goes out of them;
they inspire the reader with courage, never with despair, although
Dostoyevsky, face to face with the last extremities of evil, never
seeks to hide it or to shun it, but merely to search for the soul of
goodness in it. He did not search in vain, and just as, when he was on
his way to Siberia, a conversation he had with a fellow-prisoner
inspired that fellow-prisoner with the feeling that he could go on
living and even face penal servitude, so do Dostoyevsky's books come
to mankind as a message of hope from a radiant country. That is what
constitutes his peculiar greatness.