Chapter VI: Dostoievsky (1)

“In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life; and this emotion is very variously provoked. We are moved when Levine labours in the field, when André sinks beyond emotion, when Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony, not cowardly, puts off his helmet, when Kent has infinite pity on the dying Lear, when in Dostoiefsky’s _Despised and Rejected_, the uncomplaining hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. These are notes which please the great heart of man.”

R. L. STEVENSON, _Across the Plains_

“Raskolnikoff (_Crime and Punishment_) is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years.... I divined ... the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of to-day which prevents them from living in a book or a character and keeps them afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified....

“Another has been translated--_Humiliés et offensés_. It is even more incoherent than _Le Crime et le Châtiment_, but breathes much of _the same lovely goodness_.”[17]

R. L. STEVENSON, _Letters_

I

INTRODUCTORY

In the autumn of 1897 I was staying in the South of Russia at the house of a gentleman who has played no unimportant part in Russian politics. We were sitting one evening at tea, a party of nearly thirty people round the table, consisting of country gentlemen, neighbours and friends. The village doctor was present: he was an ardent Tolstoyist, and not only an admirer of Tolstoy’s genius, but a disciple, and a believer in his religious teaching. He had been talking on this subject for some time, and expressing his hero-worship in emphatic terms, when the son of my host, a boy at school, only seventeen years of age, yet familiar with the literature of seven languages, a writer, moreover, of English and Russian verse, fired up and said:

“In fifty years’ time we Russians shall blush with shame to think that we gave Tolstoy such fulsome admiration, when we had at the same time a genius like Dostoievsky, the latchet of whose shoes Tolstoy is not worthy to unloose.”

A few months after this I read an article on Dostoievsky in one of the literary weeklies in England, in which the writer stated that Dostoievsky was a mere _fueilletonist_, a concocter of melodrama, to be ranked with Eugène Sue and Xavier de Montépin. I was struck at the time by the divergence between English and Russian views on this subject. I was amazed by the view of the English critic in itself; but the reason that such a view could be expressed at all is not far to seek, since there is at this moment no complete translation of Dostoievsky’s works in England, and no literary translation of the same. Only one of his books, _Crime and Punishment_, is known at all, and the rest of them are difficult even to obtain in the English language.

However this may be, at the present time Dostoievsky’s fame in Russia is every day becoming more universally and more emphatically recognised. The present generation are inclined to consider him the greatest of all their novelists; and although they as a rule, with the critic Merejkowski, put him equal with Tolstoy as one of the two great pillars which uphold the Temple of Russian literature, they are for the most part agreed in thinking that he was a unique product, a more startling revelation and embodiment of genius, a greater elemental force, than Tolstoy or any other Russian writer of fiction. In fact, they hold the same view about him that we do with regard to Shelley in our poetical literature. We may not think that Shelley is a greater poet than Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge or Byron, but he certainly is a more exceptional incarnation of poetical genius. We can imagine poets like Keats arising again,--one nearly akin to him and almost equally exquisite did appear in the shape of Tennyson. We can imagine there being other writers who would attain to Wordsworth’s simplicity and communion with nature, but Shelley has as yet been without kith or kindred, without mate or equal, in the whole range of the world’s literary history. He does not appear to us like a plant that grows among others, differing from them only in being more beautiful and striking, which is true even of poets like Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe, who reveal in the highest degree qualities which other poets possess in a lesser degree, and complete and fulfil what the others aim at and only partially achieve; but Shelley is altogether different in kind: he aims at and achieves something which is beyond the range and beyond the ken of other poets. It is as though he were not a man at all, but an embodiment of certain elemental forces.

So it is with Dostoievsky. And for this reason those who admire him do so passionately and extravagantly. It must not be thought that they do not discern his faults, his incompleteness, and his limitations, but the positive qualities that he possesses seem to them matchless, and so precious, so rare, so tremendous, that they annihilate all petty criticism. The example of Shelley may again serve us here. Only a pedant, in the face of such flights of genius as “The Cloud,” the “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Sensitive Plant,” or that high pageant of grief, fantasy, of “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,”--“Adonais,”--would apply a magnifying glass to such poems and complain of the occasional lapses of style or of the mistakes in grammar which may be found in them. These poems may be full of trivial lapses of this kind, but such matters are of small account when a poet has evoked for us a vision of what dwells beyond the veil of the senses, and struck chords of a music which has the power and the wonder of a miracle.

With Dostoievsky the case is somewhat but not in all respects similar. He possesses a certain quality which is different in kind from those of any other writer, a power of seeming to get nearer to the unknown, to what lies beyond the flesh, which is perhaps the secret of his amazing strength; and, besides this, he has certain great qualities which other writers, and notably other Russian writers, possess also; but he has them in so far higher a degree that when seen with other writers he annihilates them. The combination of this difference in kind and this difference in degree makes something so strong and so tremendous, that it is not to be wondered at when we find many critics saying that Dostoievsky is not only the greatest of all Russian writers, but one of the greatest writers that the world has ever seen. I am not exaggerating when I say that such views are held; for instance, Professor Brückner, a most level-headed critic, in his learned and exhaustive survey of Russian literature, says that it is not in _Faust_, but rather in _Crime and Punishment_, that the whole grief of mankind takes hold of us.

Even making allowance for the enthusiasm of his admirers, it is true to say that almost any Russian judge of literature at the present day would place Dostoievsky as being equal to Tolstoy and immeasurably above Tourgeniev; in fact, the ordinary Russian critic at the present day no more dreams of comparing Tourgeniev with Dostoievsky, than it would occur to an Englishman to compare Charlotte Yonge with Charlotte Brontë.

Dostoievsky’s fame came late, although his first book, _Poor Folk_, made a considerable stir, and the publication of his _Crime and Punishment_ ensured his popularity. But when I say “fame,” I mean the universal recognition of him by the best and most competent judges. This recognition is now an accomplished fact in Russia and also in Germany. The same cannot be said positively of France, although his books are for the most part well translated into French, and have received the warmest and the most acute appreciation at the hands of a French critic, namely, M. de Vogüé in _Le Roman Russe_.[18] In England, Dostoievsky cannot be said to be known at all, since the translations of his works are not only inadequate, but scarce and difficult to obtain, and it is possible to come across the most amazing judgments pronounced on them by critics whose judgment on other subjects is excellent.[19] The reason of this tardy recognition of Dostoievsky in his own country is that he was one of those men whose innate sense of fairness and hatred of cant prevent them from whole-heartedly joining a political party and swallowing its tenets indiscriminately, even when some of these tenets are nonsensical and iniquitous. He was one of those men who put truth and love higher than any political cause, and can fight for such a cause only when the leaders of it, in practice as well as in theory, never deviate from the one or the other. He was between two fires: the Government considered him a revolutionary, and the revolutionaries thought him a retrograde; because he refused to be blind to the merits of the Government, such as they were, and equally refused to be blind to the defects of the enemies of the Government. He therefore attacked not only the Government, but the Government’s enemies; and when he attacked, it was with thunderbolts. The Liberals never forgave him this. Dostoievsky was unjustly condemned to spend four years in penal servitude for a political crime; for having taken part in a revolutionary propaganda. He returned from Siberia a Slavophil, and, I will not say a Conservative, as the word is misleading; but a man convinced not only of the futility of revolution, but also of the worthlessness of a great part of the revolutionaries. Nor did the Liberals ever forgive him this. They are only just beginning to do so now. Moreover, in one of his most powerful books, _The Possessed_, he draws a scathing picture of all the flotsam and jetsam of revolution, and not only of the worthless hangers-on who are the parasites of any such movement, but he reveals the decadence and worthlessness of some of the men, who by their dominating character played leading parts and were popular heroes. Still less did the Liberals forgive him this book; and even now, few Liberal writers are fair towards it. Again, Dostoievsky was, as I shall show later, by nature an antagonist of Socialism and a hater of materialism; and since all the leading men among the Liberals of his time were either one or the other, if not both, Dostoievsky aroused the enmity of the whole Liberal camp, by attacking not only its parasites but its leaders, men of high principle such as Bielinsky, who were obviously sincere and deserving of the highest consideration and respect. One can imagine a similar situation in England if at the present time there were an autocratic government, a backward and ignorant peasantry, and a small and Liberal movement carried on by a minority of extremely intellectual men, headed, let us say, by Mr. Bernard Shaw, Lord Morley, Professor Raleigh, and Sir J. J. Thomson. I purposely take men of widely different opinions, because in a country where there is a fight going on for a definite thing, such as a Constitution, there is a moment when men, who under another régime would be split up into Liberals and Conservatives, are necessarily grouped together in one big Liberal camp. Now, let us suppose that the men who were carrying on this propaganda for reform were undergoing great sacrifices; let us likewise suppose them to be Socialists and materialists to the core. Then suppose there should appear a novelist of conspicuous power, such as George Meredith or Mr. Thomas Hardy or Mr. H. G. Wells, who by some error was sent to Botany Bay for having been supposed to be mixed up with a revolutionary propaganda, and on his return announced that he was an Anti-Revolutionary, violently attacked Mr. Shaw, wrote a book in which he caricatured him, and drew a scathing portrait of all his disciples,--especially of the less intelligent among them. One can imagine how unpopular such an author would be in Liberal circles. This was the case of Dostoievsky in Russia. It is only fair to add that his genius has now obtained full recognition, even at the hands of Liberals, though they still may not be able to tolerate his book, _The Possessed_. But considering the magnitude of his genius, this recognition has been, on the whole, a tardy one. For instance, even in so valuable a book as Prince Kropotkin’s _Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature_, Dostoievsky receives inadequate treatment and scanty appreciation. On the other hand, in Merejkowsky’s _Tolstoy and Dostoievsky_, Merejkowsky, who is also a Liberal, praises Dostoievsky with complete comprehension and with brilliance of thought and expression.

II

DOSTOIEVSKY’S LIFE

Dostoievsky was the son of a staff-surgeon and a tradesman’s daughter. He was born in a charity hospital, the “Maison de Dieu,” at Moscow, in 1821. He was, as he said, a member of a stray family. His father and five children lived in a flat consisting of two rooms and a kitchen. The nursery of the two boys, Michael and Fedor, consisted of a small part of the entrance hall, which was partitioned off. His family belonged to the lowest ranks of the nobility, to that stratum of society which supplied the bureaucracy with its minor public servants. The poverty surrounding his earliest years was to last until the day of his death.

Some people are, as far as money is concerned, like a negative pole--money seems to fly away from them, or rather, when it comes to them, to be unable to find any substance it can cleave to. Dostoievsky was one of these people; he never knew how much money he had, and when he had any, however little, he gave it away. He was what the French call a _panier percé_: money went through him as through a sieve. And however much money he had, it was never he but his friends who benefited by it.

He received his earliest education at a small school in Moscow, where a schoolmaster who taught Russian inspired him and his brother with a love of literature, of Pushkin’s poetry and other writers, introduced him also to the works of Walter Scott, and took him to see a performance of Schiller’s _Robbers_. When his preliminary studies were ended, he was sent with his brother to a school of military engineers at St. Petersburg. Here his interest in literature, which had been first aroused by coming into contact with Walter Scott’s works, was further developed by his discovery of Balzac, George Sand, and Homer. Dostoievsky developed a passionate love of literature and poetry. His favourite author was Gogol. He left this school in 1843 at the age of twenty-three, with the rank of sub-lieutenant.

His first success in literature was his novel, _Poor Folk_ (published in 1846), which he possibly began to write while he was still at school. He sent this work to a review and awaited the result, utterly hopeless of its being accepted. One day, at four o’clock in the morning, just when Dostoievsky was despairing of success and thinking of suicide, Nekrasov the poet, and Grigorovitch the critic, came to him and said: “Do you understand yourself what you have written? To have written such a book you must have possessed the direct inspiration of an artist.”

This, said Dostoievsky, was the happiest moment of his life. The book was published in Nekrasov’s newspaper, and was highly praised on all sides. He thus at once made a name in literature. But as though Fate wished to lose no time in proving to him that his life would be a series of unending struggles, his second story, _The Double_, was a failure, and his friends turned from him, feeling that they had made a mistake. From that time onward, his literary career was a desperate battle, not only with poverty but also with public opinion, and with political as well as with literary critics.

Dostoievsky suffered all his life from epilepsy. It has been said that this disease was brought on by his imprisonment. This is not true: the complaint began in his childhood, and one of his biographers gives a hint of its origin: “It dates back,” he writes, “to his earliest youth, and is connected with a _tragic event_ in their family life.” This sentence affords us an ominous glimpse into the early years of Dostoievsky, for it must indeed have been a tragic event which caused him to suffer from epileptic fits throughout his life.

In 1849 came the most important event in Dostoievsky’s life. From 1840 to 1847 there was in St. Petersburg a group of young men who met together to read and discuss the Liberal writers such as Fourier, Louis Blanc and Prudhon. Towards 1847 these circles widened, and included officers and journalists: they formed a club under the leadership of Petrachevsky, a former student, the author of a Dictionary of Foreign Terms. The club consisted, on the one hand, of certain men, followers of the Decembrists of 1825, who aimed at the emancipation of the serfs and the establishment of a Liberal Constitution; and, on the other hand, of men who were predecessors of the Nihilists, and who looked forward to a social revolution. The special function of Dostoievsky in this club was to preach the Slavophil doctrine, according to which Russia, sociologically speaking, needed no Western models, because in her workmen’s guilds and her system of mutual reciprocity for the payment of taxes, she already possessed the means of realising a superior form of social organisation.

The meetings of this club took place shortly after the revolutionary movement which convulsed Western Europe in 1848. The Emperor Nicholas, who was a strong-minded and a just although a hard man, imbued with a religious conviction that he was appointed by God to save the crumbling world, was dreaming of the emancipation of the serfs, and by a fatal misunderstanding was led to strike at men whose only crime was that they shared his own aims and ideals. One evening at a meeting of this club, Dostoievsky had declaimed Pushkin’s Ode on the Abolition of Serfdom, when some one present expressed a doubt of the possibility of obtaining this reform except by insurrectionary means. Dostoievsky is said to have replied: “Then insurrection let it be!” On the 23rd of April 1849, at five o’clock in the morning, thirty-four suspected men were arrested. The two brothers Dostoievsky were among them. They were imprisoned in a citadel, where they remained for eight months. On the 22nd of December, Dostoievsky was conducted, with twenty-one others, to the public square, where a scaffold had been erected. The other prisoners had been released. While they were taking their places on the scaffold, Dostoievsky communicated the idea of a book which he wished to write to Prince Monbelli, one of his fellow-prisoners, who related the incident later. There were, that day, 21 degrees of frost (Réaumur); the prisoners were stripped to their shirts, and had to listen to their sentence; the reading lasted over twenty minutes: the sentence was that they were to be shot. Dostoievsky could not believe in the reality of the event. He said to one of his comrades: “Is it possible that we are going to be executed?” The friend of whom he asked the question pointed to a cart laden with objects which, under the tarpaulin that covered them, looked like coffins. The Registrar walked down from the scaffold; the Priest mounted it, taking the cross with him, and bade the condemned men make their last confession. Only one man, of the shopkeeper class, did so: the others contented themselves with kissing the cross. Dostoievsky thus relates the close of the scene in a letter to his brother:

“They snapped swords above our heads, they made us put on the long white shirts worn by persons condemned to death. We were bound in parties of three to stakes to suffer execution. Being third in the row, I concluded that I had only a few minutes to live. I thought of you and your dear ones, and I managed to kiss Pleshtcheev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell.”

The officer in charge had already commanded his firing party to load; the soldiers were already preparing to take aim, when a white handkerchief was waved in front of them. They lowered their guns, and Dostoievsky and the other twenty-one learned that the Emperor had cancelled the sentence of the military tribunal, and commuted the sentence of death to one of hard labour for four years. The carts really contained convict uniforms, which the prisoners had to put on at once, and they started then and there for Siberia. When the prisoners were unbound, one of them, Grigoriev, had lost his reason. Dostoievsky, on the other hand, afterwards affirmed that this episode was his salvation; and never, either on account of this or of his subsequent imprisonment, did he ever feel or express anything save gratitude. “If this catastrophe had not occurred,” said Dostoievsky, alluding to his sentence, his reprieve and his subsequent imprisonment, “I should have gone mad.” The moments passed by him in the expectation of immediate death had an ineffaceable effect upon his entire after-life. They shifted his angle of vision with regard to the whole world. He knew something that no man could know who had not been through such moments. He constantly alludes to the episode in his novels, and in _The Idiot_ he describes it thus, through the mouth of the principal character:

“I will tell you of my meeting last year with a certain man; this man was connected with a strange circumstance, strange because it is a very unusual one. He was once led, together with others, on to the scaffold, and a sentence was read out which told him that he was to be shot for a political crime. He spent the interval between the sentence and the reprieve, which lasted twenty minutes, or at least a quarter of an hour, with the certain conviction that in a few minutes he should die. I was very anxious to hear how he would recall his impressions. He remembered everything with extraordinary clearness, and said that he would never forget a single one of those minutes. Twenty paces from the scaffold round which the crowd and the soldiers stood, three stakes were driven into the ground, there being several prisoners. The first three were led to the stakes and bound, and the white dress of the condemned was put on them. This consisted of a long white shirt, and over their eyes white bandages were bound so that they should not see the guns. Then in front of each stake a firing party was drawn up. My friend was No. 8, so he went to the stake in the third batch. A priest carried the cross to each of them. My friend calculated that he had five minutes more to live, not more. He said that these five minutes seemed to him an endless period, infinitely precious. In these five minutes it seemed to him that he would have so many lives to live that he need not yet begin to think about his last moment, and in his mind he made certain arrangements. He calculated the time it would take him to say good-bye to his comrades; for this he allotted two minutes. He assigned two more minutes to think one last time of himself, and to look round for the last time. He remembered distinctly that he made these three plans, and that he divided his time in this way. He was to die, aged twenty-seven, healthy and strong, after having said good-bye to his companions. He remembered that he asked one of them a somewhat irrelevant question, and was much interested in the answer. Then, after he had said good-bye to his comrades, came the two minutes which he had set aside for thinking of himself. He knew beforehand of what he would think: he wished to represent to himself as quickly and as clearly as possible how this could be: that now he was breathing and living, and that in three minutes he would already be something else, some one or something, but what? and where? All this he felt he could decide in those two minutes. Not far away was the church, and the cathedral with its gilded dome was glittering in the sunshine. He remembered that he looked at the dome with terrible persistence, and on its glittering rays. He could not tear his gaze away from the rays. It seemed to him somehow that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would be made one with them. The uncertainty and the horror of the unknown, which was so near, were terrible. But he said that during this time there was nothing worse than the unceasing thought: ‘What if I do not die? What if life were restored to me now? What an eternity! And all this would be mine. I would in that case make every minute into a century, lose nothing, calculate every moment, and not spend any atom of the time fruitlessly.’ He said that this thought at last made him so angry that he wished that they would shoot him at once.”

Dostoievsky’s sentence consisted of four years’ hard labour in the convict settlement in Siberia, and this ordeal was doubtless the most precious boon which Providence could have bestowed on him. When he started for prison he said to A. Milioukov, as he wished him good-bye: “The convicts are not wild beasts, but men probably better, and perhaps much worthier, than myself. During these last months (the months of his confinement in prison) I have gone through a great deal, but I shall be able to write about what I shall see and experience in the future.” It was during the time he spent in prison that Dostoievsky really found himself. To share the hard labour of the prisoners, to break up old ships, to carry loads of bricks, to sweep up heaps of snow, strengthened him in body and calmed his nerves, while the contact with murderers and criminals and prisoners of all kinds, whose inmost nature he was able to reach, gave him a priceless opportunity of developing the qualities which were especially his own both as a writer and as a man.

With the criminals he was not in the position of a teacher, but of a disciple; he learnt from them, and in his life with them he grew physically stronger, and found faith, certitude and peace.

At the end of the four years (in 1853) he was set free and returned to ordinary life, strengthened in body and better balanced in mind. He had still three years to serve in a regiment as a private soldier, and after this period of service three years more to spend in Siberia. In 1859 he crossed the frontier and came back to Russia, and was allowed to live first at Tver and then at St. Petersburg. He brought a wife with him, the widow of one of his former colleagues in the Petrachevsky conspiracy, whom he had loved and married in Siberia. Until 1865 he worked at journalism.

Dostoievsky’s nature was alien to Socialism, and he loathed the moral materialism of his Socialistic contemporaries. Petrachevsky repelled him because he was an atheist and laughed at all belief; and the attitude of Bielinsky towards religion, which was one of flippant contempt, awoke in Dostoievsky a passion of hatred which blazed up whenever he thought of the man. Dostoievsky thus became a martyr, and was within an ace of losing his life for the revolutionary cause; a movement in which he had never taken part, and in which he disbelieved all his life.

Dostoievsky returned from prison just at the time of the emancipation of the serfs, and the trials which awaited him on his release were severer than those which he endured during his captivity. In January 1861 he started a newspaper called the _Vremya_. The venture was a success. But just as he thought that Fortune was smiling upon him, and that freedom from want was drawing near, the newspaper, by an extraordinary misunderstanding, was prohibited by the censorship for an article on Polish affairs. This blow, like his condemnation to death, was due to a casual blunder in the official machinery. After considerable efforts, in 1864 he started another newspaper called the _Epocha_. This newspaper incurred the wrath, not of the Government censorship, but of the Liberals; and it was now that his peculiar situation, namely, that of a man between two fires, became evident. The Liberals abused him in every kind of manner, went so far as to hint that the _Epocha_ and its staff were Government spies, and declared that Dostoievsky was a scribbler with whom the police should deal. At this same time his brother Michael, his best friend Grigoriev, who was on the staff of his newspaper, and his first wife, Marie, died one after another. Dostoievsky was now left all alone; he felt that his whole life was broken, and that he had nothing to live for. His brother’s family was left without resources of any kind. He tried to support them by carrying on the publication of the _Epocha_, and worked day and night at this, being the sole editor, reading all the proofs, dealing with the authors and the censorship, revising articles, procuring money, sitting up till six in the morning, and sleeping only five out of the twenty-four hours. But this second paper came to grief in 1865, and Dostoievsky was forced to own himself temporarily insolvent. He had incurred heavy liabilities, not only to the subscribers of the newspaper, but in addition a sum of £1400 in bills and £700 in debts of honour. He writes to a friend at this period: “I would gladly go back to prison if only to pay off my debts and to feel myself free once more.”

A publishing bookseller, Stellovsky, a notorious rascal, threatened to have him taken up for debt. He had to choose between the debtors’ prison and flight: he chose the latter, and escaped abroad, where he spent four years of inexpressible misery, in the last extremity of want.

His _Crime and Punishment_ was published in 1866, and this book brought him fame and popularity; yet in spite of this, on an occasion in 1869, he was obliged to pawn his overcoat and his last shirt in order with difficulty to obtain two thalers.

During all this time his attacks of epilepsy continued. He was constantly in trouble with his publishers, and bound and hampered by all sorts of contracts. He writes at this epoch: “In spite of all this I feel as if I were only just beginning to live. It is curious, isn’t it? I have the vitality of a cat.” And on another occasion he talks of his stubborn and inexhaustible vitality. He also says through the mouth of one of his characters, Dimitri Karamazov, “I can bear anything, any suffering, if I can only keep on saying to myself: ‘I live; I am in a thousand torments, but I live! I am on the pillory, but I exist! I see the sun, or I do not see the sun, but I know that it is there. And to know that there _is_ a sun is enough.’”

It was during these four years, overwhelmed by domestic calamity, perpetually harassed by creditors, attacked by the authorities on the one hand and the Liberals on the other, misunderstood by his readers, poor, almost starving, and never well, that he composed his three great masterpieces: _Crime and Punishment_ in 1866, _The Idiot_ in 1868, and _The Possessed_ in 1871-2; besides planning _The Brothers Karamazov_. He had married a second time, in 1867. He returned to Russia in July 1871: his second exile was over. His popularity had increased, and the success of his books enabled him to free himself from debt. He became a journalist once more, and in 1873 edited Prince Meschtcherki’s newspaper, _The Grazjdanin_. In 1876 he started a monthly review called _The Diary of a Writer_, which sometimes appeared once a month and sometimes less often. The appearance of the last number coincided with his death. This review was a kind of encyclopædia, in which Dostoievsky wrote all his social, literary and political ideas, related any stray anecdotes, recollections and experiences which occurred to him, and commented on the political and literary topics of the day. He never ceased fighting his adversaries in this review; and during this time he began his last book, _The Brothers Karamazov_, which was never finished. In all his articles he preached his Slavophil creed, and on one occasion he made the whole of Russia listen to him and applaud him as one man. This was on June 8, 1880, when he made a speech at Moscow in memory of Pushkin, and aroused to frenzy the enthusiasm even of those men whose political ideals were the exact opposite of his own. He made people forget they were “Slavophils” or “Westernisers,” and remember only one thing--that they were Russians.

In the latter half of 1880, when he was working on _The Brothers Karamazov_, Strakhov records: “He was unusually thin and exhausted; his body had become so frail that the first slight blow might destroy it. His mental activity was untiring, although work had grown very difficult for him. In the beginning of 1881 he fell ill with a severe attack of emphysema, the result of catarrh in the lung. On January 28 he had hæmorrhage from the throat. Feeling the approach of death, he wished to confess and to receive the Blessed Sacrament. He gave the New Testament used by him in prison to his wife to read aloud. The first passage chanced to be Matthew iii. 14: “But John held Him back and said, ‘It is I that should be baptized by Thee, and dost Thou come to me?’ And Jesus answered and said unto him, ‘Detain Me not; for thus it behoves us to fulfil a great truth.’”

When his wife had read this, Dostoievsky said: “You hear: Do not detain me. That means that I am to die.” And he closed the book. A few hours later he did actually die, instantaneously, from the rupture of an artery in the lungs.

This was on the 28th of January 1881; on the 30th he was buried in St. Petersburg. His death and his funeral had about them an almost mythical greatness, and his funeral is the most striking comment on the nature of the feeling which the Russian public had for him both as a writer and as a man. On the day after his death, St. Petersburg witnessed a most extraordinary sight: the little house in which he had lived suddenly became for the moment the moral centre of Russia. Russia understood that with the death of this struggling and disease-stricken novelist, she had lost something inestimably precious, rare and irreplaceable. Spontaneously, and without any organised preparation, the most imposing and triumphant funeral ceremony was given to Dostoievsky’s remains; and this funeral was not only the greatest and most inspiring which had ever taken place in Russia, but as far as its inward significance was concerned there can hardly ever have been a greater one in the world. Other great writers and other great men have been buried with more gorgeous pomp and with a braver show of outward display, but never, when such a man has been followed to the grave by a mourning multitude, have the trophies and tributes of grief been so real; for striking as they were by their quantity and their nature, they seemed but a feeble and slender evidence of the sorrow and the love to which they bore witness. There were deputations bearing countless wreaths, there were numerous choirs singing religious chants, there were thousands of people following in a slow stream along the streets of St. Petersburg, there were men and women of every class, but mostly poor people, shabbily dressed, of the lower middle or the lower classes. The dream of Dostoievsky, that the whole of Russia should be united by a bond of fraternity and brotherly love, seemed to be realised when this crowd of men, composed of such various and widely differing elements, met together in common grief by his grave. Dostoievsky had lived the life of a pauper, and of a man who had to fight with all his strength in order to win his daily bread. He had been assailed by disease and hunted by misfortune; his whole life seemed to have rushed by before he had had time to sit down quietly and write the great ideas which were seething in his mind. Everything he had written seemed to have been written by chance, haphazardly, to have been jotted down against time, between wind and water. But in spite of this, in his work, however incomplete, however fragmentary and full of faults it may have been, there was a voice speaking, a particular message being delivered, which was different from that of other writers, and at times more precious. While it was there, the public took it for granted, like the sun; and it was only when Dostoievsky died that the hugeness of the gap made by his death, caused them to feel how great was the place he had occupied both in their hearts and in their minds. It was only when he died that they recognised how great a man he was, and how warmly they admired and loved him. Everybody felt this from the highest to the lowest. Tolstoy, in writing of Dostoievsky’s death, says: “I never saw the man, and never had any direct relations with him, yet suddenly when he died I understood that he was the nearest and dearest and most necessary of men to me. Everything that he did was of the kind that the more he did of it the better I felt it was for men. And all at once I read that he is dead, and a prop has fallen from me.” This is what the whole of Russia felt, that a support had fallen from them; and this is what they expressed when they gave to Dostoievsky a funeral such as no king nor Captain has ever had, a funeral whose very shabbiness was greater than any splendour, and whose trophies and emblems were the grief of a nation and the tears of thousands of hearts united together in the admiration and love of a man whom each one of them regarded as his brother.

III

DOSTOIEVSKY’S CHARACTER

Such, briefly, are the main facts of Dostoievsky’s crowded life. Unlike Tolstoy, who has himself told us in every conceivable way everything down to the most intimate detail which is to be known about himself, Dostoievsky told us little of himself, and all that we know about him is gathered from other people or from his letters; and even now we know comparatively little about his life. He disliked talking about himself; he could not bear to be pitied. He was modest, and shielded his feelings with a lofty shame. Strakhov writes about him thus:

“In Dostoievsky you could never detect the slightest bitterness or hardness resulting from the sufferings he had undergone, and there was never in him a hint of posing as a martyr. He behaved as if there had been nothing extraordinary in his past. He never represented himself as disillusioned, or as not having an equable mind; but, on the contrary, he appeared cheerful and alert, when his health allowed him to do so. I remember that a lady coming for the first time to Michael Dostoievsky’s (his brother’s) evenings at the newspaper office, looked long at Dostoievsky, and finally said: ‘As I look at you it seems to me that I see in your face the sufferings which you have endured.’ These words visibly annoyed Dostoievsky. ‘What sufferings?’ he said, and began to joke on indifferent matters.”

Long after his imprisonment and exile, when some friends of his tried to prove to him that his exile had been a brutal act of injustice, he said: “The Socialists are the result of the followers of Petrachevsky. Petrachevsky’s disciples sowed many seeds.” And when he was asked whether such men deserved to be exiled, he answered: “Our exile was just; the _people_ would have condemned us.”

The main characteristics of his nature were generosity, catholicity, vehement passion, and a “sweet reasonableness.” Once when he was living with Riesenkampf, a German doctor, he was found living on bread and milk; and even for that he was in debt at a little milk shop. This same doctor says that Dostoievsky was “one of those men to live with whom is good for every one, but who are themselves in perpetual want.” He was mercilessly robbed, but he would never blame any one who took advantage of his kindness and his trustfulness. One of his biographers tells us that his life with Riesenkampf proved expensive to him, because no poor man who came to see the doctor went away without having received something from Dostoievsky. One cannot read a page of his books without being aware of the “sweet reasonableness” of his nature. This pervaded his writings with fragrance like some precious balm, and is made manifest to us in the touching simplicity of some of his characters, such as the Idiot and Alexis Karamazov, to read of whom is like being with some warm and comforting influence, something sweet and sensible and infinitely human. His catholicity consists in an almost boundless power of appreciation, an appreciation of things, persons and books widely removed from himself by accidents of time, space, class, nationality and character. Dostoievsky is equally able to appreciate the very essence of a performance got up by convicts in his prison, and the innermost beauty of the plays of Racine. This last point is singular and remarkable. He was universal and cosmopolitan in his admiration of the literature of foreign countries; and he was cosmopolitan, not because he wished to cut himself away from Russian traditions and to become European and Westernised, but because he was profoundly Russian, and had the peculiarly Russian plastic and receptive power of understanding and assimilating things widely different from himself.

When he was a young man, Shakespeare and Schiller were well known, and it was the fashion to admire them. It was equally the fashion to despise the French writers of the seventeenth century. But Dostoievsky was just as enthusiastic in his admiration of Racine and Corneille and all the great classics of the seventeenth century. Thus he writes: “But Phèdre, brother! You will be the Lord knows what if you say this is not the highest and purest nature and poetry; the outline of it is Shakespearian, but the statue is in plaster, not in marble.” And again of Corneille: “Have you read _The Cid_? Read it, you wretch, read it, and go down in the dust before Corneille!”

Dostoievsky was constantly “going down in the dust” before the great masterpieces, not only of his own, but of other countries, which bears out the saying that “La valeur morale de l’homme est en proportion de sa faculté d’admirer.”

Dostoievsky never theorised as to how alms should be given, or as to how charity should be organised. He gave what he had, simply and naturally, to those who he saw had need of it; and he had a right to this knowledge, for he himself had received alms in prison. Neither did he ever theorise as to whether a man should leave the work which he was fitted by Providence to do (such as writing books), in order to plough fields and to cut down trees. He had practised hard labour, not as a theoretic amateur, but as a constrained professional. He had carried heavy loads of bricks and broken up ships and swept up heaps of snow, not out of philosophy or theory, but because he had been obliged to do so; because if he had not done so he would have been severely punished. All that Tolstoy dreamed of and aimed at, which was serious in theory but not serious in practice, that is to say, giving up his property, becoming one with the people, ploughing the fields, was a reality to Dostoievsky when he was in prison. He knew that hard labour is only real when it is a necessity, when you cannot leave off doing it when you want to; he had experienced this kind of hard labour for four years, and during his whole life he had to work for his daily bread. The result of this is that he made no theories about what work a man _should_ do, but simply did as well as he could the work he _had_ to do. In the words of a ballade written by Mr. Chesterton, he might have said:

“We eat the cheese,--you scraped about the rind,
You lopped the tree--we eat the fruit instead.
You were benevolent, but we were kind,
You know the laws of food, but we were fed.”

And this is the great difference between Dostoievsky and Tolstoy. Tolstoy was benevolent, but Dostoievsky was kind. Tolstoy theorised on the distribution of food, but Dostoievsky was fed and received alms like a beggar. Dostoievsky, so far from despising the calling of an author, or thinking that it was an occupation “thin sown with aught of profit or delight” for the human race, loved literature passionately. He was proud of his profession: he was a great man of letters as well as a great author. “I have never sold,” he wrote, “one of my books without getting the price down beforehand. I am a literary proletarian. If anybody wants my work he must ensure me by prepayment.”

There is something which resembles Dr. Johnson in the way he talks of his profession and his attitude towards it. But there is, nevertheless, in the phrase just quoted, something bitterly ironical when one reflects that he was a poor man all his life and incessantly harassed by creditors, and that he derived almost nothing from the great popularity and sale of his books.

“Dostoievsky,” writes Strakov, “loved literature; he took her as she was, with all her conditions; he never stood apart from literature, and he never looked down upon her. This absence of the least hint of literary snobbishness is in him a beautiful and touching characteristic. Russian literature was the one lodestar of Dostoievsky’s life, and he cherished for it a passionate love and devotion. He knew very well that when he entered the lists he would have to go into the public market-place, and he was never ashamed of his trade nor of his fellow-workers. On the contrary, he was proud of his profession, and considered it a great and sacred one.”

He speaks of himself as a literary hack: he writes at so much a line, three and a half printed pages of a newspaper in two days and two nights. “Often,” he says, “it happened in my literary career that the beginning of the chapter of a novel or story was already set up, and the end was still in my mind and had to be written by the next day.” Again: “Work from want and for money has crushed and devoured me. Will my poverty ever cease? Ah, if I had money, then I should be free!”

I have said that one of the main elements of Dostoievsky’s character was vehement passion. There was more than a vehement element of passion in Dostoievsky; he was not only passionate in his loves and passionate in his hates, but his passion was unbridled. In this he resembles the people of the Renaissance. There were perilous depths in his personality; black pools of passion; a seething whirlpool that sent up every now and then great eddies of boiling surge; yet this passion has nothing about it which is undefinably evil; it never smells of the pit. The reason of this is that although Dostoievsky’s soul descended into hell, it was purged by the flames, and no poisonous fumes ever came from it. There was something of St. Francis in him, and something of Velasquez. Dostoievsky was a violent hater. I have already told how he hated Bielinsky, the Socialists and the materialists whom he attacked all his life, but against Tourgeniev he nourished a blind and causeless hatred. This manifests itself as soon as he leaves prison, in the following outburst: “I know very well,” he writes, “that I write worse than Tourgeniev, but not so very much worse, and after all I hope one day to write quite as well as he does. Why, with my crying wants, do I receive only 100 roubles a sheet, and Tourgeniev, who possesses two thousand serfs, receives 400 roubles? Owing to my poverty I am _obliged_ to hurry, to write for money, and consequently to spoil my work.” In a postscript he says that he sends Katkov, the great Moscow editor, fifteen sheets at 100 roubles a sheet, that is, 1500 roubles in all. “I have had 500 roubles from him, and besides, when I had sent three-quarters of the novel, I asked him for 200 to help me along, or 700 altogether. I shall reach Tver without a farthing. But, on the other hand, I shall shortly receive from Katkov seven or eight hundred roubles.”

It must not be forgotten that the whole nature of Dostoievsky, both as man and artist, was profoundly modified by the disease from which he suffered all his life, his epilepsy. He had therefore two handicaps against him: disease and poverty. But it is his epilepsy which was probably the cause of his dislikes, his hatreds and his outbreaks of violent passion. The attacks of epilepsy came upon him about once a month, and sometimes, though not often, they were more frequent. He once had two in a week. His friend Strakov describes one of them thus: “I once saw one of his ordinary attacks: it was, I fancy, in 1863, just before Easter. Late in the evening, about eleven o’clock, he came to see me, and we had a very animated conversation. I cannot remember the subject, but I know that it was important and abstruse. He became excited, and walked about the room while I sat at the table. He said something fine and jubilant. I confirmed his opinion by some remark, and he turned to me a face which positively glowed with the most transcendent inspiration. He paused for a moment, as if searching for words, and had already opened his lips to speak. I looked at him all expectant for fresh revelation. Suddenly from his open mouth issued a strange, prolonged, and inarticulate moan. He sank senseless on the floor in the middle of the room.”