Dostoevsky
“I am going to recount my life during this time. Not the whole of it,
though. That is impossible, for in such a case one never tells in
letters the essential facts. There are things I cannot narrate simply.
That’s why I shall confine myself to a summary account of the past year
of my life.
“You probably know that four years ago my brother Michael undertook
the publication of a review, wherein I collaborated. Everything was
going well. My _House of the Dead_ had met with considerable success
and given a fresh lease of life to my literary reputation. When my
brother began publication, he owed a lot of money; his debts were
being paid off when suddenly, in May, 1863, the review was suspended
on account of a strong and patriotic article, which, misinterpreted,
was read as a protest against the conduct of the Government and public
opinion. The blow killed him; debt after debt accumulated, and his
health became impaired. At the moment, I was far away, in Moscow, at
the bedside of my dying wife. Yes, dear friend, you wrote to sympathize
in my cruel loss, the death of my beloved brother, but you did not know
how heavy the hand of fate was upon me. Another creature who loved me,
and whom I loved infinitely--my wife--died of consumption in Moscow,
where she had been settled for a twelvemonth. The whole winter of 1864
I never left her bedside....
“... Ah, dear friend, she loved me deeply, and I returned her love;
yet, we did not live happily together. I shall tell you all about it
when I see you. Let me say just this. Although we were unhappy (by
reason of her difficult character--she was hypochondriac, and full of a
sick woman’s whims), we could not cease to love each other. Indeed, the
unhappier we grew, the closer we were drawn together. Strange though
it may seem, it is true. She was the best, the noblest, the most
generous-hearted woman I have ever known. After she was gone (despite
all my anxieties during the twelvemonth I watched her dying), although
I felt and painfully realized what I was burying with her, I could not
picture the emptiness and misery of my life. That is a year ago now,
and the feeling is still the same.
“Immediately after the funeral, I hastened to Petersburg to my brother.
He alone was left me! Three months later he, too, was no more. His
illness lasted only a month. It did not appear serious and the attack
which carried him off in three days was practically unforeseen.
“Then I was suddenly left alone; and I knew fear! It has become
terrible! My life is broken in two. On one hand, the past, with all
that I had to live for; on the other, the unknown, with not one loving
heart to comfort me in my loss. There was literally no reason why I
should go on living. Forge new links, start a fresh existence? The very
thought revolted me! Then I realized for the first time that I could
not replace my loved ones; they were all I held dear, and new loves
could not, ought not to exist.”[45]
This letter was continued in April, and a fortnight after this cry
of despair, we read, under the date April 14: “Of all my reserves of
strength and energy, there is nothing left save a vague uneasiness of
soul, a state bordering on despair. Bitterness and indecision--a mood
foreign to me. And then I’m utterly alone. I’ve lost the friend of a
lifetime. Yet I always have the feeling that I am going to begin to
live! Ridiculous, isn’t it? The cat and its nine lives?”[46]
He adds these words: “I write to you at great length, and I see that
of the very essence of my moral or spiritual life I have given you not
a notion,” which passage I should like to set side by side with an
extraordinary paragraph I find in _Crime and Punishment_.
In this novel Dostoevsky tells us the story of Raskolnikov, who commits
a crime and is sent to Siberia. In the last pages he speaks of the
strange feeling that takes possession of his hero’s being, the feeling
that at last he is going to live. “And what were all, all the agonies
of the past! Everything, even his crime, sentence, and imprisonment,
seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external, strange
fact, with which he had no concern. But he could not think for long
together of anything that evening, and he could not have analysed
consciously, he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of
theory.”[47]
These sentences I have read to you in justification of my opening
remarks. The great external events of Dostoevsky’s life, tragic though
they were, are less important than this one small fact which it is
now time to consider. During his years in Siberia, Dostoevsky made the
acquaintance of a woman who put the New Testament into his hand--this,
by the way, being the only officially sanctioned reading matter in
gaol. This reading and meditating the Gospels was of vital importance
to Dostoevsky. All his subsequently written works are steeped in the
teaching of the Gospels, and we shall be obliged again and again to
revert to the truths he discovered in reading them.
I find it highly interesting to observe and compare in two natures
akin in so many respects, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the very different
reactions to contact with the Gospels. With Nietzsche the reaction,
immediate and marked, was, we may as well admit, jealousy. It does not
seem to me possible to understand Nietzsche’s works without taking
account of this feeling. Nietzsche was jealous of Jesus Christ, jealous
to the point of madness. In writing his _Zarathustra_, Nietzsche is
ever harassed by his desire to write a counterpart to the Gospels. He
even adopts at times the form of the Beatitudes the better to make
mockery of them. He wrote the _Anti-Christ_, and in his last work,
_Ecce Homo_, he poses as the adversary triumphant of Him he sought to
oust.
With Dostoevsky the reaction is far different. He felt at once that
he was face to face with something superior, not only to himself,
but to entire mankind, something divine.... The humility of which
I spoke earlier in the day, and to which I shall time and again
return, predisposed him to making submission before what was avowedly
better and higher than himself. He bowed his head humbly before Jesus
Christ, and the first, the greatest consequence of his submission
and self-surrender was the safeguarding intact his nature’s rich
complexity. No artist ever more truly practised the teaching of the
Gospel: “_For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever
will lose his life for My sake, the same shall save it._”
By reason of this sacrifice and renunciation the most discordant
elements are able to live side by side in Dostoevsky’s soul, and the
extraordinary wealth of antagonisms is preserved.
At our next meeting we shall inquire whether several of Dostoevsky’s
characteristics, which to us Westerners seem perchance more than
strange, are not common to all Russians, and by so inquiring we may
be enabled to discern such features as are more purely individual and
personal.
II
The few psychological and moral truths Dostoevsky’s works will permit
us to touch upon are in my estimation so important that I am all
eagerness to reach them. By their very boldness and originality they
would seem paradoxical to you if I approached them directly. I needs
must proceed warily.
In our last talk I spoke to you of the figure of the man himself. The
moment is favourable, I think, for presenting it in its own atmosphere
the better to bring its particular features into relief.
I have been on intimate terms with some Russians, but I have never been
in Russia; hence, without help, my task would be extremely difficult.
I shall first of all submit a few observations on the Russian people
that I found in a German monograph on Dostoevsky. Mme. Hoffmann, in her
excellent biography, insists first and foremost on the solidarity, the
common brotherhood between all classes of Russian society, which end
in sweeping away social barriers and facilitate naturally the freedom
of intercourse we find in all Dostoevsky’s novels. An introduction, a
sudden feeling of sympathetic understanding; and we have at once what
one of his heroes so expressively describes as “chance relationships.”
Homes are transformed into hostelries, the stranger of yesterday
becomes the honoured guest of to-day: a friend’s friend visits you, and
immediately everything between you is on a footing of intimacy.
Another observation of Mme. Hoffmann’s concerning the Russian people.
It is inherently incapable of leading a strict and methodical
existence, of being punctual even. It would seem as if the Russian did
not suffer much in consequence of his own improvidence, for he makes no
great effort to free himself from it. And if I may be permitted to seek
an excuse for the lack of order in my causeries, I shall find it in the
very confusion of Dostoevsky’s ideas, in their extreme entanglement and
in the peculiar difficulties experienced in trying to hold them to a
plan which satisfies our Western logic. This wavering and indecision
Mme. Hoffmann ascribes partly to the weakening of time sense due to the
endless summer days and interminable winter nights, when the rhythm of
the passing hours is lost. In a short address delivered at the _Vieux
Colombier_ I already quoted Mme. Hoffmann’s illustration of the Russian
who met reproaches on account of his unpunctuality with “Yes, life is
difficult! There are moments which must be lived well, and this is more
important than the punctual keeping of any engagement!”--a sentence
full of significance, for it reveals at the same time the strange
consciousness a Russian has of his inner life, more important to him
than all social connections.
I should like to point out, with Mme. Hoffmann, the propensity to pity
and suffering, _Leiden und Mitleiden_, to compassion extending even
to the criminal. In Russia there exists but one word to designate the
poor and the criminal, but one to cover actual crime and ordinary
offences. Add to this an almost religious contrition and we shall
the better understand the Russian’s ineradicable mistrustfulness in
all his relations with strangers, with foreigners in particular.
Westerners often complain of this mistrustfulness, which proceeds,
so Mme. Hoffmann maintains, from the uneasy consciousness of his own
insufficiency and proneness to sin, rather than from any feeling that
other people are of no account: it is a mistrust that springs from
humility of spirit.
Nothing could better throw light on this strange religiosity of the
Russian, which persists even when belief is long since dead, than the
four conversations of Prince Myshkin, the hero of _The Idiot_. These I
shall now read to you.
“‘As to the question of faith,’ he began, smiling, ... ‘I had four
different conversations in two days last week. I came in the morning by
the new railway and talked for four hours with a man in the train. We
made friends on the spot. I had heard a great deal about him beforehand
and had heard he was an atheist, among other things. He really is a
very learned man. What’s more, he’s an unusually well-bred man, so that
he talked to me quite as if I were his equal in ideas and attainments.
He doesn’t believe in God. Only, one thing struck me: that he seemed
not to be talking about that at all the whole time; and it struck me,
just because whenever I have met unbelievers before, or read their
books, it always seemed to me that they were speaking and writing in
their books about something quite different, although it seemed to
me about that on the surface. I said so to him at the time, but I
suppose I didn’t say so clearly, or did not know how to express it,
for he didn’t understand. In the evening, I stopped for the night at a
provincial hotel, and a murder had just been committed there the night