FEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY: TRAGEDIST, PROPHET, AND PSYCHOLOGIST
A hundred years ago, in Moscow, a being manifested its existence, who
in the fullness of extraordinary vision and intellectuality heralded
a religious rebirth, became the prophet of a new moral, ethical, and
geographical order in the world, and the prototype of a new hero. Time
has accorded Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoievsky the position of one of
the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, and as time passes his
position becomes more secure. Like the prophet of old, during life he
was fastened between two pieces of timber--debts and epilepsy--and sawn
asunder by his creditors and his conscience. Posterity links his name
with Pushkin and Tolstoi as the three great writers of their times.
They are to the Russian Renaissance what Leonardo, Michelangelo, and
Raphael were to the Italian Renaissance.
It is appropriate now, the centenary of his birth, to make a brief
statement of Dostoievsky's position as a writer or novelist, and
in so doing estimate must be made of him as a prophet, preacher,
psychologist, pathologist, artist, and individual. Though he was not
schooled to speak as expert in any of these fields, yet speak in them
he did, and in a way that would have reflected credit upon a professor.
It is particularly the field of morbid psychology, usually called
psychiatry, that Dostoievsky made uniquely his own. He described many
of the nervous and mental disorders, such as mania and depression, the
psychoneuroses, hysteria, obsessive states, epilepsy, moral insanity,
alcoholism, and that mysterious mental and moral constitution called
“degeneracy” (apparently first hand, for there is no evidence or
indication that he had access to books on mental medicine), in such a
way that alienists recognise in his descriptions masterpieces in the
same way that the painter recognises the apogee of his art in Giotto or
Velázquez.
Not only did he portray the mental activity and output of the
partially and potentially insane, but he described the conduct and
reproduced the speech of individuals with personality defects, and
with emotional disequilibrium, in a way that has never been excelled
in any literature. For instance, it would be difficult to find a more
comprehensive account of adult infantilism than the history of Stepan
Trofimovitch, a more accurate presentation of the composition of a
hypocrite than Rahkitin, of “The Brothers Karamazov.” No one save
Shakespeare has shown how consuming and overwhelming jealousy may be.
That infirmity has a deeper significance for anyone familiar with the
story of Katerina Ivanovna. Indeed Dostoievsky is the novelist of
passions. He creates his creatures that they may suffer, not that they
may enjoy from the reactions of life, though some of them get pleasure
in suffering. Such was Lise, the true hysteric, who said, “I should
like some one to torture me, marry me and then torture me, deceive me
and then go away. I don't want to be happy.”
[Illustration: FEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY]
Like Baudelaire and Nietzsche, whom he resembled morally and
intellectually, Dostoievsky was an intellectual romantic in rebellion
against life. His determination seemed to be to create an individual
who should defy life, and when he had defied it to his heart's content
“to hand God back his ticket,” having no further need of it as the
journey of existence was at an end. There is no place to go, nothing
to do, everything worth trying has been tried and found valueless, and
wherever he turns his gaze he sees the angel standing upon the sea
and upon the earth avowing that there shall be time no longer; so he
puts a bullet in his temple if his name is Svidrigailov, or soaps a
silken cord so that it will support his weight when one end is attached
to a large nail and the other to his neck, if it is Stavrogin.
Dostoievsky as a littérateur was obsessed with sin and expiation.
He connived and laboured to invent some new sin; he struggled and
fought to augment some old one with which he could inflict one of his
creation, and then watch him contend with it, stagger beneath it, or
flaunt it in the world's face. After it has wrought havoc, shipwrecked
the possessor's life, and brought inestimable calamity and suffering
to others, then he must devise adequate expiation. Expiation is
synonymous with sincere regret, honest request for forgiveness, and
genuine determination to sin no more, but Dostoievsky's sinners must
do something more; they must make renunciation in keeping with the
magnitude of their sins, and as this is beyond human expression they
usually kill themselves or go mad.
He had planned for his masterpiece “The Life of a Great Sinner,” and
the outline of it from his note-book deposited in the Central Archive
Department of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, has
now been published. The hero is a composite of the Seven Deadly Sins:
pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth, plus the
sin against the Holy Ghost. No one has yet succeeded in defining that
sin satisfactorily, but it is what Dostoievsky's antinomian heroes were
trying to do, especially such an one as Stavrogin. Another noteworthy
feature about them is that they were all sadistic or masochistic: they
got pleasure varying from an appreciative glow to voluptuous ecstasy
and beyond, from causing pain and inducing humiliation, or having it
caused in them by others.
This was a conditioning factor of conduct of all his antinomian heroes,
and unless it be kept in mind when reading of them, their antics and
their reflections are sometimes difficult of comprehension. He makes
one of them, one of the most intellectual and moral, Ivan Karamazov,
say “You know we prefer beating-rods and scourges--that's our national
institution.... I know for a fact there are people who at every blow
are worked up to sensuality, which increases progressively at every
blow they inflict.”
It is difficult for a psychiatrist, after reading Dostoievsky's novels,
to believe that he did not have access to the literature of insanity
or have first-hand knowledge of the insane, and the criminologist must
wonder where he got his extraordinary knowledge of the relation between
suffering and lust. It may be that the habits of the Emperor Cheou-sin
Yeow-waug were known to him, just as those of Caligula and Claudius
were known to him.
It is not with the passions of the body or of the senses alone that
his heroes contend, but with those of the mind. The fire that burns
within them is abstraction, and the fuel that replenishes it is
thought--thought of whence and whither. By it the possessors are lashed
to a conduct that surpasses that of hate, jealousy, lubricity, or any
of the baser passions as the light of an incandescent bulb surpasses
that of a tallow candle. They are all men of parts, either originally
endowed with great intelligence or brought to a certain elevation of
intellectuality by education. Their conduct, their actions, their
misdeeds, their crimes are the direct result of their argumentation,
not of concrete, but of abstract things, and chiefly the nature and
existence of God, the varieties of use that an individual may permit
his intelligence, free-will, free determination, and of the impositions
of dogma founded on faith and inspiration which seem contrary to reason
and science.
All his heroes are more or less insane. Herein lies Dostoievsky's
strength and his weakness in character creation. None of them could
be held fully responsible in a court of justice. Out of the mouth
of babes and sucklings the Lord ordained strength, but there is no
writing to show that out of the mouths of the insane comes wisdom. Not
that insanity is inimical to brilliant, even wise, utterance; but the
pragmatic application of wisdom to life calls for sanity.
Dostoievsky himself was abnormal. He was what the physician calls a
neuropathic and psychopathic individual. In addition, he had genuine
epilepsy, that is, epilepsy not dependent upon some accidental disease,
such as infection, injury, or new growth. He was of psychopathic
temperament and at different times in his life displayed hallucination,
obsession, and hypochondria.
He wrote of them as if he were the professor, not the possessor. The
psychopathic constitution displays itself as:
“An unstable balance of the psychic impulses, an overfacile
tendency to emotion, an overswift interchange of mental phases,
an abnormally violent reaction of the psychic mechanism. The
feature most striking to the beholder in the character of such
sufferers is its heterogeneous medley of moods and whims, of
sympathies and antipathies; of ideas in turn joyous, stern,
gloomy, depressed and philosophical; of aspirations at first
charged with energy then dying away to nothing. Another feature
peculiar to these sufferers is their self-love. They are the
most naïve of egoists; they talk exclusively and persistently
and absorbedly of themselves; they strive always to attract the
general attention, to excite the general interest and to engage
everyone in conversation concerning their personality, their
ailments and even their vices.”
Scores of his characters had such constitution, and in none is it more
perfectly delineated than in Katerina Ivanovna, though Lise Hohlakov,
of the same novel, had wider display of the hysteria that grew on this
fertile soil.
The facts of Dostoievsky's life that are important to the reader who
would comprehend his psychopathic creations are that his father,
surgeon to the Workhouse Hospital at Moscow, was a stern, suspicious,
narrow-minded, gloomy, distrustful man who made a failure of life. “He
has lived in the world fifty years and yet he has the same opinions
of mankind that he had thirty years ago,” wrote Feodor when seventeen
years old. His mother was tender-minded, pious, and domestic, and died
early of tuberculosis. Although much has been written of his boyhood,
there is nothing particularly interesting in it bearing on his career
save that he was sensitive, introspective, unsociable, and early
displayed a desire to be alone. The hero of the book “Youth” relates
that in the lowest classes of the gymnasium he scorned all relations
with those of his class who surpassed him in any way in the sciences,
physical strength, or in clever repartee. He did not hate such a person
nor wish him harm. He simply turned away from him, that being his
nature. These characteristics run like a red thread through the entire
life of Dostoievsky. A tendency to day-dreaming was apparent in his
earliest years, and he gives graphic accounts of hallucination in “An
Author's Diary.” At the age of sixteen he was admitted to the School of
Engineering and remained there six years. During the latter part of his
student days he decided upon literature as a career. Before taking it
up, however, he had a brief experience with life after he had obtained
his commission as engineer, which showed him to be totally incapable
of dealing with its every-day eventualities, particularly in relation
to money, whose purpose he knew but whose value was ever to remain a
secret. It was then that he first displayed inability to subscribe or
to submit to ordinary social conventions; indeed, a determination to
transgress them.
From his earliest years the misfortunes of others hurt him and
distressed him, and in later life the despised and the rejected, the
poor and the oppressed, always had his sympathy and his understanding.
God and the people, that is the Russian people, were his passion. “The
people have a lofty instinct for truth. They may be dirty, degraded,
repellent, but without them and in disregard of them nothing useful
can be effected.” The intellectuals who held themselves aloof from
the masses he could not abide, and atheists, and their propaganda
socialism, were anathema. He demanded of men who arrogated to
themselves a distinction above their fellow men, “who go to the people
not to learn to know it, but condescendingly to instruct and patronise
it,” not only repentance, but expiation by suffering.
His first important literary contribution was entitled “Poor Folk.”
He was fortunate enough to be praised by his contemporaries and
particularly by Bielinsky, an editor and great critic, who saw in
the central idea of the story corroboration of his favourite theory,
viz.: abnormal social conditions distort and dehumanise mankind to
such an extent that they lose the human form and semblance. As the
result of this publication, Dostoievsky made the acquaintance of the
leading literary lights of St. Petersburg, many of whom praised him too
immoderately for his own good, as he produced nothing worthy of his
fame until many years after the event in his life which must be looked
upon as the beginning of his mental awakenment--banishment and penal
servitude in Siberia.
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrines of the
Frenchman, Charles Fourier, were having such acceptance in this
country, where the North American Phalanx in New Jersey and the
Brook farm in Massachusetts were thriving, as to encourage the
disciples of that sentimental but wholly mad socialist in other lands,
particularly in Russia, that their hopes of seeing the world dotted
with _Phalansteres_ might be fulfilled. Dostoievsky later stated most
emphatically that he never believed in Fourierism, but nibbling at it
nearly cost him his life. In fact, all that stood between him and death
was the utterance of the word “Go,” which it would seem the lips of the
executioner had puckered to utter when the reprieve came. Dostoievsky
was suspected of being a Revolutionary. One evening at the Petrashevsky
Club he declaimed Pushkin's poem on Solitude:
“My friends, I see the people no longer oppressed,
And slavery fallen by the will of the Czar,
And a dawn breaking over us, glorious and bright,
And our country lighted by freedom's rays.”
In discussion he suggested that the emancipation of the peasantry might
have to come through a rising. Thus he became suspected. But it was not
until he denounced the censorship and reflected on its severity and
injustice that he was taken into custody. He and twenty-one others were
sentenced to death. He spent four years in a Siberian prison and there
became acquainted with misery, suffering, and criminality that beggars
description.
“What a number of national types and characters I became
familiar with in the 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. I learnt to know the Russian
people as only a few know them.”
After four years he was, through the mediation of powerful friends,
transferred for five years to military service in Siberia, chiefly at
Semipalatinsk. In 1859 he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg,
and in the twenty years that followed he published those books upon
which his fame rests; namely, “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “The
Possessed,” “The Journal of an Author,” and “The Brothers Karamazov.”
In 1867 he was obliged to leave Russia to escape imprisonment for debt,
and he remained abroad, chiefly in Switzerland, for four years.
In his appeal to General Todleben to get transferred from the military
to the civil service and to be permitted to employ himself in
literature, he said:
“Perhaps you have heard something of my arrest, my trial and
the supreme ratification of the sentence which was given in the
case concerning me in the year 1849. I was guilty and am very
conscious of it. I was convicted of the intention (but only the
intention) of acting against the Government; I was lawfully
and quite justly condemned; the hard and painful experiences
of the ensuing years have sobered me and altered my views in
many respects, but then while I was still blind I believed in
all the theories and Utopias. For two years before my offense
I had suffered from a strange moral disease--I had fallen into
hypochondria. There was a time even when I lost my reason. I was
exaggeratedly irritable, had a morbidly developed sensibility
and the power of distorting the most ordinary events into things
immeasurable.”
While Dostoievsky was in prison his physical health improved very
strikingly, but, despite this, his epilepsy, which had previously
manifested itself only in vague or minor attacks, became fully
developed. Attempts have been made to prove that prison life and
particularly its hardships and inhumanities were responsible in a
measure for Dostoievsky's epilepsy; but such allegations are no more
acceptable than those which attribute it to his father's alcoholism.
His epilepsy was a part of his general make-up, a part of his
constitution. It was an integral part of him and it became an integral
part of his books.
The phenomena of epilepsy may be said to be the epileptic personality
and the attack with its warning, its manifestations, and the
after-effects. The disease is veiled in the same mystery today as it
was when Hercules was alleged to have had it. Nothing is known of its
causation or of its dependency, and all that can truthfully be said
of the personality of the epileptic is that it is likely to display
psychic disorder, evanescent or fixed. Attacks are subject to the
widest variation both as to frequency and intensity, but the most
enigmatic things about the disease are the warnings of the attack, and
the phenomena that sometimes appear vicariously of the attack--the
epileptic equivalent they are called. Dostoievsky had these _auræ_ and
equivalents in an unusual way and with extraordinary intensity, and
narration of them as they were displayed in the different characters
of his creation who were afflicted with epilepsy, and of their effects
and consequences is an important part of every one of his great books.
Dostoievsky would seem to have been of the belief that a brain in
which some of the mechanisms are disordered may yet remain superior
both intellectually and morally to others less affected, and that
the display of such weakness or maladjustment may put the possessor
in tune with the Infinite, may permit him to blend momentarily with
the Eternal Harmony, to be restored temporarily to the Source of its
temporal emanation. Although he describes this in his “Letters,” as he
experienced it, he elaborates it in his epileptic heroes, and in none
so seductively as in “The Idiot.” He makes Prince Myshkin say:
“He thought amongst other things how in his epileptic
condition there was one stage, just before the actual attack,
when suddenly in the midst of sadness, mental darkness and
oppression his brain flared up, as it were, and with an unwonted
outburst all his vital powers were vivified simultaneously. The
sensation of living and of self-consciousness was increased at
such moments almost tenfold. They were moments like prolonged
lightning. As he thought over this afterward in a normal state
he often said to himself that all these flashes and beams of
the highest self-realisation, self-consciousness and “highest
existence” were nothing but disease, the interruption of the
normal state. If this were so, then it was by no means the
highest state, but, on the contrary, it must be reckoned as the
very lowest. And yet he came at last to the very paradoxical
conclusion: What matter if it is a morbid state? What difference
can it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result itself,
if the moment of sensation when remembered and examined in the
healthy state proves to be in the highest degree harmony and
beauty, and gives an unheard-of and undreamed-of feeling of
completion, of balance, of satisfaction and exultant prayerful
fusion with the highest synthesis of life? If at the last moment
of consciousness before the attack he had happened to say to
himself lucidly and deliberately “for this one moment one might
give one's whole life,” then certainly that moment would be
worth a lifetime. However, he did not stand out for dialectics;
obfuscation, mental darkness and idiocy stand before him as the
obvious consequences of those loftiest moments.”
It is a question for the individual to decide whether one would give
his whole life for a moment of perfection and bliss, but it is probable
that no one would without assurance that some permanent advantage, some
growth of spirit that could be retained, some impress of spirituality
that was indelible, such as comes from an understanding reading of
“Hamlet” or a comprehended rendering of “Parsifal,” would flow from
it or follow it. But to have it and then come back to a world that
is “just one damn thing after another” it is impossible to believe.
Dostoievsky was right when he said that Myshkin could look forward
to obfuscation, mental darkness, and imbecility with some certainty,
for physicians experienced with epilepsy know empirically that the
unfortunates who have panoplied warnings, and especially illusions,
are most liable to become demented early. But that all epileptics with
such warnings do not suffer this degradation is attested by the life of
Dostoievsky, who was in his mental summation when death seized him in
his sixtieth year.
Another phenomenon of epilepsy that Dostoievsky makes many of his
characters display is detachment of the spirit from the body. They
cease to feel their bodies at supreme moments, such as at the
moment of condemnation, of premeditated murder, or planned crime.
In other words, they are thrown into a state of ecstasy similar to
that responsible for the mystic utterances of St. Theresa, or of
insensibility to obvious agonies such as that of Santa Fina. He not
only depicts the phenomena of the epileptic attack, its warnings, and
its after-effects in the most masterful way, as they have never been
rendered in literature, lay or scientific, but he also describes many
varieties of the disease. Before he was exiled, in 1847, he gave a most
perfect description of the epileptic constitution as it was manifested
in Murin, a character in “The Landlady.” The disease, as it displays
itself in the classical way, is revealed by Nelly in “The Insulted and
Injured,” but it is in Myshkin, in “The Idiot,” that we see epilepsy
transforming the individual from adult infantilism, gradually, almost
imperceptibly, to imbecility, the victim meantime displaying nobility
and tender-mindedness that make the reader's heart go out to him.
The first fruits of Dostoievsky's activities after he had obtained
permission to publish were inconsequential. It was not until the
appearance of “Letters from a Deadhouse,” which revealed his
experiences and thoughts while in prison, and the volume called “The
Despised and the Rejected,” that the literary world of St. Petersburg
realised that the brilliant promise which he had given in 1846 was
realised. Some of his literary adventures, especially in journalism,
got him into financial difficulties, and he began to write under the
lash, as he described it, and against time.
In 1865 appeared the novel by which he is widely known, “Crime and
Punishment,” in which Dostoievsky's first great antinomian hero,
Raskolnikov, a repentant nihilist, is introduced to the reader.
He believes that he has a special right to live, to rebel against
society, to transgress every law and moral precept, and to follow
the dictates of his own will and the lead of his own thought. Such
a proud, arrogant, intellectual spirit requires to be cleansed,
and inasmuch as the verity, the essence of life, lies in humility,
Dostoievsky makes his hero murder an old pawnbroker and his sister and
then proceeds to put him through the most excruciating mental agony
imaginable. At the same time his mother and sister undergo profound
vicarious suffering, while a successor of Mary Magdalene succours
him in his increasingly agonised state and finally accompanies him
to penal servitude. Many times Raskolnikov appears upon the point of
confessing his crime from the torments of his own conscience, but, in
reality, Svidrigailov, a strange monster of sin and sentiment, and the
police officer, Petrovitch, a forerunner of Sherlock Holmes, suggest
the confession to him, and between the effect of their suggestion and
the appeal of Sonia, whose love moves him strangely, he confesses but
does not repent. He does not repent because he has done no sin. He has
committed no crime. The scales have not yet fallen from his eyes. That
is reserved for the days and nights of his prison life and is to be
mediated by Sonia's sacrificial heroism.
It is interesting to contemplate Dostoievsky at the state of
development when he wrote “Crime and Punishment,” or rather the state
of development of his idea of free will. Raskolnikov has the same
relation to Stavrogin of “The Possessed” and to Kirillov, the epileptic
of the same book, as one of the trial pictures of the figures in the
Last Supper has to Leonardo's masterpiece. Dostoievsky apparently was
content to describe a case of moral imbecility in its most attractive
way, and then when he had outlined its lineaments, to leave it and not
adjust it to the other groupings of the picture that was undertaken.
It would seem that his interest had got switched from Raskolnikov to
Svidrigailov, who has dared to outrage covenants and conventions,
laws and morality, and has measured his will against all things.
Svidrigailov knows the difference between good and evil, right and
wrong; indeed he realises it with great keenness, and when he finds
that he is up against it, as it were, and has no escape, he puts the
revolver to his temple and pulls the trigger. Death is the only thing
he has not tried, and why wait to see whether eternity is just one
little room like a bathhouse in the country, or whether it is something
beyond conception? Why not find out at once as everything has been
found out? Svidrigailov is Dostoievsky's symbol of the denial of God,
the denial of a will beyond his own.
“If there is a will beyond my own, it must be an evil will
because pain exists. Therefore I must will evil to be in
harmony with it. If there is no will beyond my own, then I must
assert my own will until it is free of all check beyond itself.
Therefore I must will evil.”
Raskolnikov represents the conflict of will with the element of moral
duty and conscience, and Svidrigailov represents its conflict with
defined, deliberate passion. This same will in conflict with the will
of the people, the State, is represented by Stavrogin and Shatov, while
its conflict with metaphysical and religious mystery is represented
by Karamazov, Myshkin, and Kirillov. Despite the fact that they pass
through the furnace of burning conflicts and the fire of inflaming
passions, the force of dominant will is ever supreme. Their human
individuality, as represented by their ego, remains definite and
concrete. It is untouched, unaltered, undissolved. Though they oppose
themselves to the elements that are devouring them, they continue to
assert their ego and self-will even when their end is at hand. Myshkin,
Alyosha, and Zosima submit to God's will but not to man's.
“Crime and Punishment” and “The Brothers Karamazov” are the books by
which Dostoievsky is best known in this country, and the latter, though
unfinished, was intended by him to be his great work, “a work that is
very dear to me for I have put a great deal of my inmost self into
it,” and it has been so estimated by the critics. Indeed, it is the
summary of all his thoughts, of all his doubts, of all his fancies, and
such statement of his faith as he could formulate. It is saturated in
mysticism and it is a _vade mecum_ of psychiatry. It is the narrative
of the life of an egotistic, depraved, sensuous monster, who is a toad,
a cynic, a scoffer, a drunkard, and a profligate, the synthesis of
which, when combined with moral anæsthesia, constitutes degeneracy; of
his three legitimate sons and their mistresses; and of an epileptic
bastard son who resulted from the rape of an idiot girl.
The eldest son, Dimitri, grows up unloved, unguided, unappreciated,
frankly hostile to his father whom he loathes and despises,
particularly when he is convinced that the father has robbed him of his
patrimony. He has had a rake's career, but when Katerina Ivanovna puts
herself unconditionally in his power to save her father's honour he
spares her. Three months later, when betrothed to her, he has become
entangled in Circe's toils by Grushenka, for whose favour Fyodor
Pavlovitch, his father, is bidding.
The second son, Ivan, half brother to Dimitri, whose mother was driven
to insanity by the orgies staged in her own house and by the lusts
and cruelties of her husband, is an intellectual and a nihilist. He
is in rebellion against life, but he has an unquenchable thirst for
life, and he will not accept the world. To love one's neighbours is
impossible; even to conceive of it is repugnant. He will not admit
that all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, and he insists
“while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures.” He does
not want forgiveness earned for him vicariously. He wants to do it
himself. He wants to avenge his suffering, to satisfy his indignation,
even if he is wrong. Too high a price is asked for harmony; it is
beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. “And so,” he says to
his younger brother, the potential Saint Alyosha, “I hasten to give
back my entrance ticket. It's not God that I don't accept, only I most
respectfully return Him the ticket.”
Dostoievsky speaks oftener out of the mouth of Ivan than of any of his
other characters. When some understanding Slav like Myereski shall
formulate Dostoievsky's religious beliefs it will likely be found that
they do not differ materially from those of Ivan, as stated in the
chapter “Pro and Contra” of “The Brothers Karamazov.” He sees in Christ
the Salvation of mankind, and the woe of the world is that it has not
accepted Him.
The third brother, Alyosha, is the prototype of the man's redeemer--a
tender-minded, preoccupied youth, chaste and pure, who takes no thought
for the morrow and always turns the other cheek, and esteems his
neighbour far more than himself. At heart he is a sensualist. “All the
Karamazovs are insects to whom God has given sensual lust which will
stir up a tempest in your blood,” said Ivan to Alyosha when he was
attempting to set forth his philosophy of life. But this endowment
permits him the more comprehensively to understand the frailties of
others and to condone their offences. The monastic life appeals to
him, but he is warded off from it by Father Zosima, the prototype of
Bishop Tikhon, in “Stavrogin's Confession,” whose clay was lovingly
moulded by Dostoievsky, but into whose nostrils he did not blow the
breath of life. This monk, who had been worldly and who, because of
his knowledge, forgives readily and wholly, is a favourite figure
of Dostoievsky, and one through whom he frequently expresses his
sentiments and describes his visions. His convictions, conduct and
teaching may be summarised in his own words:
“Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don't fret. If only your
penitence fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin, and
there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not
forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great
as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin
which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance,
continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe
that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you
with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over
one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten
righteous men. Go, and fear not. Be not bitter against men.
Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the dead man in your
heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in truth.
If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God.
All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I,
a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on
you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure
that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only
your own sins but the sins of others.”
Alyosha is Dostoievsky's attempt to create a superman. He is the most
real, the most vital, the most human, and, at the same time, the most
lovable of all his characters. He is the essence of Myshkin and
Stavrogin and Karamazov and Father Zosima, the residue that is left
in the crucible when their struggles were reduced, their virtues and
their vices distilled. He is Myshkin whose mind has not been destroyed
by epilepsy, he is Stavrogin who has seen light before his soul was
sold to the devil, he is Ivan Karamazov redeemed by prayer and good
works, he is the apotheosis of Father Zosima. “He felt clearly and as
it were tangibly that something firm and unshakable as the vault of
heaven had entered into his soul. It was as though some idea had seized
the sovereignty of his mind--and it was for all his life and for ever
and for ever.” In other words, Alyosha realises in a mild form and
continuously that which Myshkin realises as the result of disease and
spasmodically. Alyosha goes into a state of faith, of resignation,
of adjustment with the Infinite, and Myshkin goes into dementia via
ecstasy.
As a peace-maker, adjuster, comforter, and inspiration he has few
superiors in profane literature. His speech at the Stone of Ilusha
embodies the whole doctrine of brotherly love.
Dimitri's hatred of his father becomes intense when they are rivals for
Grushenka's favours, so that it costs him no pang to become potentially
a parricide on convincing himself that the father has been a successful
rival. Psychologically he represents the type of unstable, weak-willed,
uninhibited being who cannot learn self-control. Such individuals
may pass unmarked so long as they live in orderly surroundings, but
as soon as they wander from the straight path they get into trouble.
Their irritability, manifested for the smallest cause, may give rise
to attacks of boundless fury which are further increased by alcohol,
and the gravest crimes are often committed in these conditions. The
normal inhibitions are entirely absent; there is no reflection, no
weighing of the costs. The thought which develops in the brain is at
once translated into action. Their actions are irrational, arbitrary,
dependent upon the moment, governed by accidental factors.
Despite overwhelming proof, Dimitri denies his guilt from the start.
It is an open question if the motive of this denial is repentance,
shame, love for Grushenka, or fear. The three experts of the trial each
has his own opinion. The first two declare Dimitri to be abnormal.
The third regards him as normal. The author himself has made it easy
to judge of Dimitri's state of mind. Though on the boundary line of
accountability, he is not in such a pathological condition as to
exclude his free determination; however, he is not fully responsible
for the crime, and extenuating circumstances have to be conceded by the
judge.
Smerdyakov, the illegitimate child of the idiot girl whom Karamazov
_pere_ raped on a wager and who eventually murders his father
(vicariously, as it were, his morality having been destroyed by Ivan),
is carefully delineated by Dostoievsky. He is epileptic. Not only are
the disease and its manifestations described, but there is a masterly
presentation of the personality alteration which so often accompanies
its progress. In childhood he is cruel, later solitary, suspicious,
and misanthropical. He has no sense of gratitude and he looks at the
world mistrustfully. When Fyodor Pavlovitch hears he has epilepsy he
takes interest in him, sees to it that he has treatment, and sends him
to Moscow to be trained as cook. During the three years of absence his
appearance changes remarkably. Here it may be remarked that though
Dostoievsky lived previous to our knowledge of the rôle that the
ductless glands play in maintaining the appearance and conserving the
nutritional equilibrium of the individual, he gives, in his delineation
of Smerdyakov, an extraordinarily accurate description of the somatic
and spiritual alteration that sometimes occurs when some of them
cease functioning. It is his art also to do it in a few words, just
as it is his art to forecast Smerdyakov's crime while discussing the
nature and occurrence of epileptic-attack equivalents, which he called
contemplations.
The way he disentangles the skeins from the confused mass of putridity,
disease, and crime of which this novel is constituted, has been the
marvel and inspiration of novelists the world over for the past fifty
years. Dimitri wants to kill his father for many reasons, but the one
that moves him to meditate it and plan it is: Grushenka, immoral and
unmoral, will then be beyond the monster's reach; Grushenka whose
sadism peeps out in her lust for Alyosha and who can't throw off
her feeling of submission for the man who had violated her when she
was seventeen. Dimitri loves Grushenka and Grushenka loves Dimitri
“abnormals with abnormal love which they idealised.” During an orgy
which would have pleased Nero, Dimitri lays drunken Grushenka on the
bed, and kisses her on the lips.
“'Don't touch me,' she faltered in an imploring voice. 'Don't
touch me till I am yours.... I have told you I am yours, but
don't touch me ... spare me.... With them here, with them close
you mustn't. He's here. It's nasty here.'”
He sinks on his knees by the bedside. He goes to his father's house at
a propitious time and suitably armed for murder; he hails him to the
window by giving the signal that he has learned from Smerdyakov would
apprise him of the approach of Grushenka; but before he can strike
him Smerdyakov, carrying out a plan of his own, despatches him, and
Dimitri flees. The latter half of the book is taken up with the trial
of Dimitri and the preliminaries to it, which give Dostoievsky an
opportunity to pay his respects to Jurisprudence and to medicine and
to depict a Slav hypocrite, Rahkitin. Smerdyakov commits the crime to
find favour in the eyes of his god Ivan. He knows that Ivan desired
it, suggested it, and went away knowing it was going to be done--at
least that is the impression the epileptic mind of Smerdyakov gets--and
under that impression he acts when he despatches his father with
the three-pound paper weight. The unprejudiced reader will feel the
sympathies that have gradually been aroused for Smerdyakov because
of his disease fade as he reads of the plan that the murderer made,
and when he has hung himself after confessing to Ivan. In proportion
as they recede for the valet, they will be rearoused for Ivan whose
brain now gives away under the hereditary and acquired burden. This
gives Dostoievsky the opportunity to depict the prodromata and early
manifestations of acute mania as they have never, before or since, been
depicted in lay literature.
Description of the visual hallucination which Ivan has in the early
stages, that a “Russian gentleman of a particular kind is present,”
and the delusion that he is having an interview with him, might have
been copied from the annals of an asylum, had they been recorded there
by a master of the narrative art. It is one of the first, and the most
successful attempts to depict dual personality, and to record the
beliefs and convictions of each side of the personality. He listens to
his _alter ego_ sit in judgment upon him and his previous conduct, and
is finally goaded by him to assault, as was Luther under similar though
less dramatic circumstances. “Voices,” as the delirious and insane
call them, have never been more accurately rendered than in the final
chapters of the Ivan section of the book.
An exhaustive psychosis displaying itself in intermittent delirium, and
occurring in a profoundly psychopathic individual, is the label that
a physician would give Ivan's disorder. Alyosha saw in it that God,
in whom Ivan disbelieved, and His truth were gaining mastery over his
heart, which still refused to submit.
“The Idiot” was one of Dostoievsky's books which had a cold reception
from the Russian reading public, but which has been, next to “The
Brothers Karamazov” and “Crime and Punishment,” the most popular in
this country. The basic idea is the representation of a truly perfect
and noble man, and it is not at all astonishing that Dostoievsky made
him an epileptic. He had been impressed, he said, that all writers who
had sought to represent Absolute Beauty were unequal to the task. It is
so difficult, for the beautiful is the ideal, and ideals have long been
wavering and waning in civilised Europe. There is only one figure of
absolute beauty, Christ, and he patterns Prince Myshkin upon the Divine
model. He brings him in contact with Nastasya Filipovna, who is the
incarnation of the evil done in the world, and this evil is represented
symbolically by Dostoievsky as the outrage of a child. The nine years
of brooding which had followed the outrage inflicted upon Nastasya as
a child by Prince Tosky had imprinted upon her face something which
Myshkin recognises as the pain of the world, and from the thought of
which he cannot deliver himself, and which he cannot mitigate for her.
She marries him after agonies of rebellion, after having given him to
her _alter ego_ in virginal state, Aglaia Epanchin, and then takes
him away to show her power and demonstrate her own weakness; but she
deserts him on the church steps for her lover Rogozhin, who murders
her that night. Myshkin, finding Rogozhin next morning, says more than
“Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” He lies beside him
in the night and bathes his temples with his tears, but fortunately in
the morning when the murderer is a raving lunatic a merciful Providence
has enshrouded Myshkin in his disease.
As Dimitri Merejkowski, the most understanding critic and interpreter
of Dostoievsky who has written of him, truthfully says, his works are
not novels or epics, but tragedies. The narrative is secondary to the
construction of the whole work, and the keystone of the narrative is
the dialogue between the characters. The reader feels that he hears
real persons talking and talking without artifice, just as they would
talk in real life; and they express sentiments and convictions which
one would expect from individuals of such inheritance, education,
development, and environment, obsessed particularly with the
injustices of this world and the uncertainties of the world to be,
concerned day and night with the immortality of the soul, the existence
of God, and the future of civilisation.
It has been said that he does not describe the appearance of his
characters, for they depict themselves, their thoughts and feelings,
their faces and bodies, by their peculiar forms of language and tones
of voice. Although he does not dwell on portraiture, he has scarcely a
rival in delineation, and his portraits have that quality which perhaps
Leonardo of all who worked with the brush had the capacity to portray,
and which Pater saw in the _Gioconda_; the revelation of the soul and
its possibilities in the lineaments. The portrait of Mlle. Lebyadkin,
the imbecile whom the proud Nikolay Stavrogin married, not from love
or lust, but that he might exhaust the list of mortifications, those
of the flesh, for himself, and those of pride for his family; that he
might kill his instincts and become pure spirit, is as true to life as
if Dostoievsky had spent his existence in an almshouse sketching the
unfortunates segregated there. The art of portraiture cannot surpass
this picture of Shatov, upon whose plastic soul Stavrogin impressed his
immoralities in the shape of “the grand idea” and who said to Stavrogin
in his agony, “Sha'n't I kiss your foot-prints when you've gone? I
can't tear you out of my heart, Nikolay Stavrogin:”
“He was short, awkward, had a shock of flaxen hair, broad
shoulders, thick lips, very thick overhanging white eyebrows, a
wrinkled forehead, and a hostile, obstinately downcast, as it
were shamefaced, expression in his eyes. His hair was always
in a wild tangle and stood up in a shock which nothing could
smooth. He was seven or eight and twenty.”
It is not as a photographer of the body that Dostoievsky is a source
of power and inspiration in the world today, and will remain so for
countless days to come--for he has depicted the Russian people as has
no one else save Tolstoi, and his pictures constitute historical
documents--but as a photographer of the soul, a psychologist.
Psychology is said to be a new science, and a generation ago there was
much ado over a new development called “experimental psychology,” which
was hailed as the key that would unlock the casket wherein repose the
secrets of the mind; the windlass that would lift layer by layer the
veil that has, since man began, concealed the mysteries of thought,
behaviour, and action. It has not fulfilled its promise. It would be
beyond the truth to say that it has been sterile, but it is quite true
to say that the contributions which it has made have been as naught
compared with those made by abnormal psychology. Some, indeed, contend
that the only real psychological contributions of value have come from
a study of disease and deficiency, and their contentions are granted by
the vast majority of those entitled to opinion.
Dostoievsky is the master portrayer of madness and of bizarre states
of the soul and of the mind that are on the borderland of madness.
Not only has he depicted the different types of mental alienation,
but by an intuition peculiar to his genius, by a species of artistic
divination, he has understood and portrayed their display, their
causation, their onset--so often difficult to determine even for the
expert--and finally the full development of the disease. Indeed,
he forestalled the description of the alienists. “They call me a
psychologist,” says Dostoievsky; “it is not true. I am only a realist
in the highest sense of the word, that is I depict all the soul's
depth. Arid observations of every-day trivialities I have long ceased
to regard as realism--it is quite the reverse.”
It is the mission of one important branch of psychology to depict the
soul's depth, the workings of the conscious mind, and as the interior
of a house that one is forbidden to enter is best seen when the house
has been shattered or is succumbing to the incidences of time and
existence, so the contents of the soul are most discernible in the
mind that has some of its impenetralia removed by disease. It was in
this laboratory that Dostoievsky conducted his experiments, made his
observations, and recorded the results from which he drew conclusions
and inferences. “In my works I have never said so much as the twentieth
part of what I wished to say, and perhaps could actually have said. I
am firmly convinced that mankind knows much more than it has hitherto
expressed either in science or in art. In what I have written there
is much that came from the depth of my heart,” he says in a letter to
a friendly critic, to which may be added that what he has said is in
keeping with the science of today, and is corroborated by workers in
other fields of psychology and psychiatry.
“The Possessed,” in which Dostoievsky reached the high-water mark of
personality analysis, has always been a stumbling block to critics
and interpreters. The recent publication by the Russian Government of
a pamphlet containing “Stavrogin's Confession” sheds an illuminating
light on the hero; and even second-hand knowledge of what has gone
on in Russia, politically and socially, during the past six years
facilitates an understanding of Pyotr Stepanovitch, Satan's impresario,
and of Kirillov, nihilist.
The task that Dostoievsky set himself in “The Possessed” was not
unlike that which the Marquis de Sade set himself in “Justine, or the
Misfortunes of Virtue,” and Sacher-Masoch in “Liebesgeschichten”; viz.,
to narrate the life of an unfortunate creature whose most important
fundamental instinct was perverted and who could get the full flavour
of pleasure only by inflicting cruelty, causing pain, or engendering
humiliation.
“Every unusually disgraceful, utterly degrading, dastardly, and
above all, ridiculous situation in which I ever happened to
be in my life, always roused in me, side by side with extreme
anger, an incredible delight.”
Stavrogin was apparently favoured by fortune: he had charm, education,
wealth, and health. In reality he was handicapped to an incalculable
degree. After a brilliant brief career in the army and in St.
Petersburg society, he withdrew from both and associated with the dregs
of the population of that city, with slip-shod government clerks,
discharged military men, beggars of the higher class, and drunkards of
all sorts. He visited their filthy families, spent days and nights in
dark slums and all sorts of low haunts. He threw suspicion of theft
on the twelve-year-old daughter of a woman who rented him a room for
assignations that he might see her thrashed, and a few days later he
raped her. The next day he hated her so he decided to kill her and
was preparing to do so when she hanged herself. This is not featured
in the novel as it now stands. Until the publication of “Stavrogin's
Confession” interpreters of Stavrogin's personality who maintained
that he was a sadist were accused of having read something into his
character that Dostoievsky did not intend him to have. After committing
this “greatest sin in the world,” he determined to cripple his life
in the most disgusting way possible, that he might pain his mother,
humiliate his family, and shock society. He would marry Marya, a
hemiplegic idiot who tidied up his room. After the ceremony he went
to stay with his mother, the granddame of their province. He went to
distract himself, which included seducing and enslaving Darya, Shatov's
sister, a ward of his mother, and a member of the family.
Suddenly, apropos of nothing, he was guilty of incredible outrages
upon various persons and, what was most enigmatic, these outrages
were utterly unheard of, quite inconceivable, entirely unprovoked and
objectless. For instance, one day at the club, he tweaked the nose of
an elderly man of high rank in the service. When the Governor of the
club sought some explanation Stavrogin told him he would whisper it in
his ear.
“When the dear, mild Ivan Ossipovitch hurriedly and trustfully
inclined his ear Stavrogin bit it hard. The poor Governor would
have died of terror but the monster had mercy on him, and let go
his ear.”
The doctor testified that he was temporarily unbalanced, and after a
few weeks' rest and isolation he went abroad for four years and there
Lizaveta Nikolaevna, Shatov's wife, and several others succumbed, and
he also met his old tutor's son, Pyotr Stepanovitch, his deputy in
the Internationale, who from that moment became his apologist, his
tool, his agent, and finally the instrument of his destruction. The
gratification of Stavrogin's perverted passion, the machinations of the
Republicans and nihilists, and the revelations of Shatov's limitations
and of Mr. Kirillov's nihilistic idealism are the threads of the story.
Shatov was the son of a former valet of Stavrogin's mother who had been
expelled from the University after some disturbance, a radical with a
tender heart, who had held Stavrogin up as an ideal.
“He was one of those idealistic beings common in Russia who are
suddenly struck by some overmastering idea which seems, as it
were, to crush them at once and sometimes for ever. They are
never equal to coping with it, but put passionate faith in it,
and their whole life passes afterward, as it were, in the last
agonies under the weight of the stone that has fallen upon them
and half crushed them.”
Shatov's overmastering idea was that Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch could do
no wrong, and the stone that crushed him was Nikolay's misdeeds. Mr.
Kirillov, the engineer, believed that he who conquers pain and terror
will become a god.
“Then there will be a new life, a new man, everything will be
new ... then they will divide history into two parts: from the
gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of
God to the transformation of the earth and of man physically.
Man will be God and will be transformed physically and all men
will kill themselves.”
“He who kills himself only to kill fear will become a god at once.”
Kirillov believed or feared that eternal life was now, not hereafter.
There are moments when time suddenly stands still for men, and it
was fear that it might become eternal that he could not tolerate. In
Dostoievsky's books there is always one contemptible character, a
sanctimonious hypocrite, a fawning holier-than-thou, a pious scandal
monger, a venomous volunteer of first aid to the morally injured. In
this book his name is Liputin, an elderly provincial official.
These are the chief figures of the drama.
When Shatov had been killed; when Kirillov's promise: namely, that he
would commit suicide on request, had been exacted; when Stavrogin's
imbecile wife and her brother Lebyadkin had been despatched; when
Lisa, who was abducted by Stavrogin on the eve of her marriage and
then abandoned, had been knocked on the head and killed by the mob
because she was Stavrogin's woman who “had come to look at the wife
he had murdered”; when Shatov's wife had come back to him and borne
Stavrogin's child in his presence; when Stepan Trofimovitch had
displayed his last infantile reaction and his son Peter, the Russian
Mephistopheles, had made a quick and successful get-away, Stavrogin
wrote to Darya and suggested that she go with him to the Canton of
Uri, of which he was a citizen, and be his nurse. Darya, for whom
humiliation spelled happiness, consented and Varvara Petrovna, hearing
of the plan, succumbed to the sway of maternal love and arranged to go
with them.
The day they had planned to begin their journey Stavrogin was not to be
found, but search of the loft revealed his body hanging from a hook by
means of a silken cord which had been carefully soaped before he slung
it around his neck.
At the inquest the doctors absolutely and emphatically rejected all
idea of insanity.
“The Possessed” has been the most enigmatic of the writer's books
because critics could not agree as to the motives of Stavrogin's crimes
and conduct. With the publication of “Stavrogin's Confession” the
riddles were solved. In the book as originally planned (and modified
at the request of the publisher of the periodical in which the novel
originally appeared), Stavrogin, instead of hanging himself, went
to Our Lady Spasso-Efimev Monastery and confessed himself to Bishop
Tikhon. Dostoievsky recruited his spiritual _menschenkenners_ from
the ranks of those who, in youth, had played the game of life hard,
transgressed, and repented. Tikhon was one of them, a strange composite
of piety and worldliness chained to his cell by chronic rheumatism and
alcoholic tremours.
Stavrogin had been obsessed by a phrase from the Apocalypse: “I know
thy works; that thou art neither hot nor cold. I would thou wert cold
or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot,
I will spew thee out of my mouth.” He would be lukewarm no longer. He
handed Tikhon three little sheets of ordinary small-sized writing paper
printed and stitched together. It was entitled “From Stavrogin” and
was a confession of his sins. He couldn't dislodge from his mind the
vision of the little girl Matryosha. He identified her with photographs
of children that he saw in shop windows. A spider on a geranium leaf
caused the vision of her as she killed herself to rise up before him,
and this vision came to him now every day and every night
“not that it comes itself, but that I bring it before myself and
cannot help bringing it although I can't live with it. I know I
can dismiss the thought of Matryosha even now whenever I want
to. I am as completely master of my will as ever. But the whole
point is that I never wanted to do it; I myself do not want to,
and never shall.”
Tikhon suggested that he would be forgiven if his repentance was
sincere, and told him he knew an old man, a hermit and ascetic of such
great Christian wisdom that he was beyond ordinary understanding. He
suggested that Stavrogin should go to him, into retreat, as novice
under his guidance, for five years, or seven, for as many as were
necessary. He adjured him to make a vow to himself so that by this
great sacrifice he would acquire all that he longed for and didn't
even expect, and assured him that he could not possibly realise now
what he would obtain from such guidance and isolation and repentance.
Stavrogin hesitated and the Bishop suddenly realised that he had no
intention of repenting. It dawned upon him that Stavrogin's plan was to
flaunt his sin in the face of God as he had previously flaunted it in
the face of society, and in a voice which penetrated the soul and with
an expression of the most violent grief Tikhon exclaimed,
“Poor lost youth, you have never been so near another and a
still greater crime as you are at this moment. Before the
publication of the 'Confession,' a day, an hour perhaps before
the great step, you will throw yourself on another crime, as a
way out, and you will commit it solely in order to avoid the
publication of these pages.”
Stavrogin shuddered with anger and almost with fear and shouted “You
cursed psychologist!,” and left the cell without looking at Tikhon.
The annihilation of the sense of time in Dostoievsky's stories was
first dwelt upon by Merejkowski, and it has been much discussed by all
of his serious commentators. Events occur and things take place within
a few hours in his books which would ordinarily take months and years.
The reason for this timeless cycle of events may be sought in the
experiences that the author had in the moments preceding his attacks of
epilepsy in which he had thoughts and emotions which a lifetime would
scarcely suffice to narrate.
Dostoievsky is the greatest of subjective writers because he goes
deepest and is the most truthful. His books are narratives of sins and
crimes and descriptions of attempts at expiation. He didn't invent
sins, he took them from life; he presented those he had committed and
seen committed. He invented only the expiation, and some of that,
it must be admitted, he experienced. His sinners are never normal
mentally. They are never insane legally, but all of them are insane
medically.
Dostoievsky himself was far from “normal” mentally, aside from his
epilepsy, though he made approximation to it as he grew older. His
mind was a garden sown with the flower seeds of virtue and the thistle
seeds of vice. All of them germinated. Some became full blown, others
remained stunted and dwarfed.
“I have invented a new kind of enjoyment for myself,” he wrote
to his brother, “a most strange one--to make myself suffer. I
take your letter, turn it over in my hand for several minutes,
feel if it is full weight, and having looked on it sufficiently
and admired the closed envelope, I put it in my pocket. You
won't believe what a voluptuous state of soul, feeling and heart
there is in that!”
That is the _anlage_ of masochism. In the outline of “The Life of a
Great Sinner,” the novel whose completion would permit him to die in
peace, for then he should have expressed himself completely, one sees
the wealth of detail taken by the author from his boyhood and early
manhood. The hero of the “Life” was unsociable and uncommunicative;
a proud, passionate, and domineering nature. So was Dostoievsky. So
here was to be apotheosis of individualism, consciousness of his
superiority, of his determination, and of his uniqueness. Dostoievsky
wrote of himself in 1867, “Everywhere and in everything I reach the
furthest limits; I have passed beyond the boundaries of all life.”
The most inattentive reader of his “Letters” will be reminded of
Dostoievsky when they read that the hero of the “Life” “surprised
everybody by unexpectedly rude pranks,” “behaved like a monster,”
“offended an old woman,” and that he was obsessed with the idea of
amassing money; and the alternative stages of belief and disbelief of
the hero are obviously recollections of his own trials. “I believe I
shall express the whole of myself in it” he wrote of it to a friend,
and no one familiar with his books and his life can read the outline
of it and doubt that he would have succeeded. Wherever Dostoievsky
looked he saw a question mark and before it was written “Is there a
God? Does God exist?” He was determined to find the answer. He had
found Christ abundantly and satisfactorily, but the God of Job he never
knew, nor had He ever overthrown him or compassed him with His net.
Dostoievsky was a rare example of dual personality. His life was the
expression of his ego personality (and what a life of strife and misery
and unhappiness it was!), revealed with extraordinary lucidity in his
“Letters” and “The Journal of an Author”; and his legacy to mankind
is the record of his unconscious mind revealed in his novels. The
latter is the life he would have liked to live, and in it he depicts
the changes in man's moral nature that he would have liked to witness.
His contention was that man should be master of his fate, captain of
his soul. He must express his thought and conviction in action and
conduct, particularly in his relation to his fellow-man. He must take
life's measure and go to it no matter what it entails or how painful,
unpleasant, or disastrous the struggle, or the end.
Many thoughtful minds believe that Dostoievsky has shown us the only
salvation in the great crisis of the European conscience. The people,
it matters not of what nationality, still possess the strength and
equilibrium of internal power. The conviction that man shall not live
as a beast of burden still survives in the Russian people and is shared
with them by the masses throughout the civilised world. Salvation from
internal anarchy was his plea, and it is the plea that is today being
made by millions in other lands than his.
As a prophet he foresaw the supremacy of the Russian people, the
common people succoured to knowledge, faith, and understanding by
liberty, education, and health, and by conformation to its teaching
the Renaissance of the Christian faith, which shall be a faith that
shall show man how to live and how to die, and which shall be manifest
in conduct as well as by word of mouth; primacy of the Russian church;
and the consummation of European culture by the effort and propaganda
of Russia. “Russia is the one God-fearing nation and her ultimate
destiny shall be to make known the Russian Christ for the salvation
of lost humanity.” No one can say at this day that his prophecies may
not come true, and to the student of history there may seem to be more
suggestive indication of it in the Russia of today than in that of half
a century ago; for from a world in ferment unexpected distillations
may flow. But to the person who needs proof Russia is silent now.
Dostoievsky's doctrines have not dropped as the rain, nor has his
speech been distilled as the dew, though he published the name of the
Lord and ascribed greatness unto our God. Indeed, the fate that has
overtaken Russia would seem to deny the possibility of the fulfillment
of his prophecies either for his country or his people.
As a narrator of the events of life here, and of the thoughts of life
here and hereafter, he has had few peers of any nation or language.
That he did it in a disorderly way must be admitted; that the events of
his tragedies had little time incidence is obvious to the most casual
reader; that the reader has to bring to their perusal concentration
and application is beyond debate; and that his characters are
“degenerates,” using that word in its biological sense, there is no
doubt. But despite these defects, Dostoievsky succeeds in straining the
essence of the Russian's soul through his unconscious to his conscious
mind, and then expressing it; and his books are the imperishable
soul-prints of his contemporaneous countrymen. Not only does he stand
highest in literary achievement of all men of his time, but he is a
figure of international significance in the world of literature. His
life and struggle was Hauptmann's song,
“Always must the heart-strings vibrate in the breath of the
world's sorrow, for the world's sorrow is the root of heaven's
desire.”
He foresaw with clairvoyancy the necessity of making religion livable,
not professed with the lips and scorned in action, but a code or
formulation that would combine Life, Love, and Light pragmatically;
and although he was not able to formulate his thought or to express
it clearly and forcibly, to synthetise and codify it, as it were,
formulators of the new religion, of Christianity revivified or
dematerialised, will consult frequently and diligently the writings of
Feodor Dostoievsky.