Dostoevsky
before, so that every one was talking about it when I arrived. Two
peasants, middle-aged men, friends who had known each other for a long
time, and were not drunk, had had tea and were meaning to go to bed
in the same room. But one had noticed during those last two days that
the other was wearing a silver watch on a yellow bead chain, which he
seems not to have seen on him before. The man was not a thief: he was
an honest man, in fact, and by a peasant’s standard by no means poor.
But he was so taken by the watch, and so fascinated by it, that at last
he could not restrain himself. He took a knife, and when his friend
had turned away, he approached him cautiously from behind, and praying
fervently, “God forgive me for Christ’s sake!” he cut his friend’s
throat at one stroke like a sheep and took his watch.’
“Rogozhin went off into peals of laughter; he laughed as though he were
in a sort of fit. It was positively strange to see such laughter after
the gloomy mood that had preceded it.
“‘I do like that! Yes, that beats everything!’ he cried convulsively,
gasping for breath. ‘One man doesn’t believe in God at all, while the
other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!...
You could never have invented that, brother! Ha!--ha!--ha! That beats
everything!’
“‘Next morning I went out to walk about the town,’ Myshkin went on, as
soon as Rogozhin was quiet again, though his lips still quivered with
spasmodic convulsive laughter. ‘I saw a drunken soldier in a terribly
disorderly state staggering about the wooden pavement. He came up to
me. “Buy a silver cross, sir?” said he. “I’ll let you have it for
twenty kopecks. It’s silver.” I saw in his hand a cross--he must have
just taken it off--on a very dirty blue ribbon; but one could see at
once it was only tin. It was a big one with eight corners, of a regular
Byzantine pattern. I took out twenty kopecks and gave them to him, and
at once put the cross round my neck; and I could see from his face how
glad he was that he had cheated a stupid gentleman, and he went off
immediately to drink what he had got for it, there was no doubt about
that. At that time, brother, I was quite carried away by the rush of
impressions that burst upon me in Russia; I had understood nothing
about Russia before. I had grown up, as it were, inarticulate, and my
memories of my country were somehow fantastic during those five years
abroad. Well, I walked on, thinking, “Yes, I’ll put off judging that
man who sold his Christ. God only knows what’s hidden in these weak
drunken beasts.” An hour later, when I was going back to the hotel, I
came upon a peasant woman with a tiny baby in her arms. She was quite a
young woman, and the baby was about six weeks old. The baby smiled at
her for the first time in its life. “What are you doing, my dear?” (I
was always asking questions in those days.) “God has just such gladness
every time He sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to him with all
his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s
face.” That was what the woman said to me almost in those words, this
deep, subtle, and truly religious thought--a thought in which all the
essence of Christianity finds expression; that is the whole conception
of God as our Father and of God’s gladness in man, like a father’s in
his own child--the fundamental idea of Christ! A simple peasant woman!
It’s true she was a mother ... and who knows, very likely that woman
was the wife of that soldier. Listen, Parfyon! You asked me a question
just now; here is my answer. The essence of religious feeling does not
come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do
with any crimes or misdemeanours. There is something else here, and
there will always be something else--something that the atheists will
for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else. But
the chief thing is that you will notice it more clearly and quickly
in the Russian heart than anywhere else. And this is my conclusion.
It’s one of the chief convictions I’ve gathered from our Russia. There
is work to be done, Parfyon! There is work to be done in our Russian
world, believe me.’”[48]
And we see at the end of this story another characteristic reveal
itself: the belief in the special mission of the Russian people.
This belief we find in several Russian writers: in Dostoevsky it
becomes an active and painful conviction, and his chief grievance
against Turgeniev was simply that he could not trace in him this
national feeling, his opinion being that Turgeniev was too westernized.
In his speech at the Pushkin celebrations, Dostoevsky declared that
Pushkin, still in flush of imitating Byron and Chénier, suddenly found
what Dostoevsky calls the “Russian note,” a note “fresh and sincere.”
Replying to the question (which he describes as “accursed”) “What faith
can we have in the Russian people and in its worth?” Pushkin exclaimed,
“Humble thyself, thou son of arrogance, and first conquer thy pride.
Humble thyself and before the people, bend thy neck towards thy mother
earth.”
Never perhaps are ethnic differences more clearly marked than when the
manner of interpreting _honour_ is involved. The hidden mainspring
of civilized man’s conduct seems to me to be less a matter of
amour-propre, as La Rochefoucauld would have said, than a feeling for
what we call the “point of honour.” This feeling for personal honour,
this sensitive spot, is not exactly alike for Frenchman, Englishman,
Italian, and Spaniard. But contrasted with the Russian conception, the
codes of honour of all Western nations seem to fuse practically into
one. When we appreciate the Russian’s idea of honour, we see at once
how often the code of the Western world is opposed to the teaching of
the Gospels. And the Russian idea of honour is as much closer to the
Gospels by virtue of its remoteness from Western nations; in other
words, Christian feeling is predominant in the Russians, and often
takes precedence of “honour” as we Westerners interpret the idea.
Faced with the choice of seeking revenge or asking pardon by admitting
himself in the wrong, the Westerner will often consider the second
alternative lacking in dignity, the attitude of a coward or a
nonentity. The Westerner tends to esteem unwillingness to forgive,
forget, or remit offences a mark of strength of character, and
certainly he tries never to put himself in the wrong; but, should he
have done so, it would appear that the most unpleasant thing that could
befall him would be the necessity for admitting the fact! The Russian,
on the other hand, is ever ready to admit himself in the wrong--and
even before his enemies--equally willing to humble himself and seek
forgiveness.
The Greek Orthodox religion, no doubt, is only encouraging a national
inclination by tolerating, nay, approving, public confession. The
notion of confession, not murmured low into priestly ears, but made
openly, before any and all, comes up again and again, almost with the
quality of an obsession, in Dostoevsky’s novels. When Raskolnikov has
confessed his crime to Sonia, in _Crime and Punishment_, she advises
him, as the one means of unburdening his soul, at once to prostrate
himself in the public street and cry aloud, “I have the blood of a
fellow-being on my hands.” Most of Dostoevsky’s characters are seized
at certain moments--and almost invariably in unexpected and ill-advised
fashion--with the urgent desire to make confession, to ask pardon of
some fellow-creature who often has not a notion what it is all about,
the desire to place themselves in a posture of inferiority to the
person addressed.
You remember, I am sure, the extraordinary scene in _The Idiot_, in
the course of an evening party at Nastasya Filippovna’s house. To pass
the time someone suggested in place of parlour games or charades that
each guest should confess the vilest act he ever committed; and the
wonderful part is that the suggestion was not scouted, and that each
one present commenced his or her confession, with varying degree of
sincerity, no doubt, but almost without a vestige of shame.
And more curious still, an anecdote from Dostoevsky’s own life, which
I have from a Russian in his intimate circle. I was imprudent enough
to tell it to several individuals and already it has been made use
of; but in the form I found it retailed, it was fast approaching
unrecognizability. Hence my anxiety to give the exact facts here.
There are, in Dostoevsky’s life, certain extremely obscure episodes.
One, in particular, already alluded to in _Crime and Punishment_ and
which seems to have served as theme for a certain chapter in _The
Possessed_. This chapter does not figure in the novel, having been
so far withheld in Russia even. It has, I believe, been printed in
Germany, but in an edition for private circulation only.[49] It deals
with the rape of a young girl. The child victim hangs herself, and in
the next room, Stavrogin, the guilty man, knowing that she is hanging
herself, waits until life has left her little body. What measure of
truth is there in this sinister tale? For the moment, it is not for
me to say. The fact remains that Dostoevsky, after an adventure of
this nature, was moved to what one must needs describe as remorse.
This remorse preyed upon him for a while, and doubtless he said to
himself what Sonia said to Raskolnikov. The need for confession became
urgent, but confession not merely to a priest. He sought to find the
person before whom confession would cause him the acutest suffering.
Turgeniev, without the shadow of a doubt! Dostoevsky had not seen him
for long, and was on uncommonly bad terms with him. M. Turgeniev was
a respectable man, rich, famous, and held in wide esteem. Dostoevsky
summoned up all his courage, or rather, he succumbed to a kind of
giddiness, to a mysterious and awful attraction. Picture Turgeniev’s
comfortable study: the author himself at his desk.--The bell rings.--A
manservant announces Fyodor Dostoevsky.--What is his business?--He is
shown in, and at once begins to tell his tale.--Turgeniev listens, dumb
with stupefaction. What business of his is all this? No doubt the other
man is mad!--After the confession, a great silence. Dostoevsky waits
for some word or sign from Turgeniev, believing no doubt that like in
his own novels, Turgeniev will take him in his arms, kiss him and weep
over him, and be reconciled ... but nothing happens:
“Monsieur Turgeniev, I must tell you how deeply I despise myself....”
He pauses again.... The silence remains unbroken until Dostoevsky,
unable to contain himself any longer, bursts out in wrath: “But _you_ I
despise even more! That’s all I wanted to say to you,” and off he goes,
slamming the door behind him.
Here we see how humility is suddenly displaced by a very different
feeling. The man who in his humility was abasing himself, draws up
in revolt at the humiliation. Humility opens the gates of Heaven:
humiliation the gates of Hell. Humility implies a measure of free-will
submission; it is accepted without constraint and proves the truth of
the Gospel teaching: “_For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased:
and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted._” Humiliation, on the
other hand, degrades the soul, warping and deforming it; it irritates,
impoverishes, and blights, inflicting a moral hurt most ill to heal.
There is not, I believe, one single deformation or deviation of
character--these kinks that make so many of Dostoevsky’s characters so
strangely morbid and disturbing--but which has its beginning in some
humiliation.
_Insulted and Injured_ is the title of one of his first books, and
his work as a whole is obsessed without ceasing by the idea that
humiliation damns, whereas humility sanctifies. Heaven, as Alyosha