Dostoevsky
reflection made by a Russian and quoted in Mme. Hoffmann’s biography,
the best by far I know, but which unfortunately has not yet been
translated. His reflection, she holds, will enable us to discern one
of the peculiarities of the Russian soul. Once reproached with his
unpunctuality this Russian gravely retorted: “Yes, life is difficult!
There are moments that must be lived well, and this is more important
than the keeping of any engagement.”[2] The inner life is thus
more highly prized than relations with one’s fellow-man. Here lies
Dostoevsky’s secret, the thing which makes him for some so great, for
many others so insufferable!
Not for a moment do I suggest that in Western Europe, in France, for
example, man is wholly a social being, ever dressed for a part. We
have Pascal’s _Thoughts_ and the _Fleurs du Mal_, strangely solitary
and profound, yet as French as any other works in our literature.
But a certain category of problems, heart-searchings, passions,
and associations seem to be the province of the moralist and the
theologian, and a novelist has no call to burden himself with them.
The miracle Dostoevsky accomplished consists in this: each of his
characters--and he created a world of them--lives by virtue of his
own personality, and these intimately personal beings, each with his
peculiar secret, are introduced to us in all their puzzling complexity.
The wonder of it is that the problems are lived over by each of his
characters, or rather let us say the problems exist at the expense of
his characters: problems which conflict, struggle, and assume human
guise to perish or triumph before our eyes.
No question too transcendent for Dostoevsky to handle in one of his
novels; but, having said this, I am bound at once to add that he
never approaches a question from the abstract, ideas never exist for
him but as functions of his characters, wherein lies their perpetual
relativity and source of power. One individual evolves a certain theory
concerning God, providence, and life eternal because he knows he must
die in a few days’ time, in a few hours maybe (Ippolit in _The Idiot_):
another (in _The Possessed_) builds up an entire system of metaphysics,
containing Nietzsche in embryo, on the premise of self-destruction, for
in a quarter of an hour he is going to take his own life, and hearing
him speak, it is impossible to distinguish whether his philosophy
postulates his suicide or his suicide his philosophy. Prince Myshkin
owes his most wonderful, most heavenly raptures to the imminence of an
epileptic fit. In conclusion I have only one comment to offer: though
pregnant with thought, Dostoevsky’s novels are never abstract, indeed,
of all the books I know, they are the most palpitating with life.
Representative as Dostoevsky’s characters are, they never seem to
forsake their humanity to become mere symbols or the types familiar in
our classical drama. They keep their individuality which is as specific
as in Dickens’s most peculiar creations, and as powerfully drawn and
painted as any portrait in any literature.
Listen to this: “There are people whom it is difficult to describe
correctly in their typical and characteristic aspect. These are the
people who are usually called ‘the mass,’ ‘the majority,’ and who
do actually make up the vast majority of mankind. To this class of
‘commonplace’ or ‘ordinary’ people belong certain persons of my tale,
such as Gavril Ardalionovitch.”[3]
Now, this is a character particularly difficult to delineate. What will
he succeed in telling us about him?
“A profound and continual consciousness of his own lack of talent,
and at the same time the overwhelming desire to prove to himself
that he was a man of great independence, had rankled in his heart
from boyhood up. He was a young man of violent and envious cravings,
who seemed to have been positively born with his nerves overwrought.
The violence of his desires he took for strength. This passionate
craving to distinguish himself sometimes led him to the brink of most
ill-considered actions, but our hero was always at the last moment too
sensible to take the final plunge. That drove him to despair.”[4] And
this for one of the least important characters in the book! I must add
that the others, the chief protagonists, he does not portray, leaving
them to limn in their own portrait, never finished, ever changing, in
the course of the narrative. His principal characters are always in
course of formation, never quite emerging from the shadows. In passing,
note how profoundly different he is from Balzac, whose chief care
seems ever to be the perfect consistency of his characters. Balzac
paints like David; Dostoevsky like Rembrandt, and his portraits are
artistically so powerful and often so perfect that even if they lacked
the depths of thought that lie behind them, and around them, I believe
that Dostoevsky would still be the greatest of all novelists.
FOOTNOTES
[1] _The Idiot_, p. 455.
[2] Hoffmann, p. 7, “Es gibt Augenblicke, die richtig gelebt sein
wollen.” (_Translator’s note._)
[3] _The Idiot_, pp. 461-462.
[4] _The Idiot_, p. 464.
DOSTOEVSKY IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE
(1908)
I
You are prepared to find a super-man: you lay hold on a fellow
mortal, sick, poor, toiling without respite, and strangely lacking
in that pseudo-quality he himself criticized so strongly in the
French--eloquence. In dealing with a book so bare of all pretension, I
shall hold remote every consideration save one, straightforwardness.
If some there be who seek in these pages fine writing or intellectual
entertainment, I warn them now, it were well to read no further.
The text of the letters is often confused, inaccurate, unskilfully put
together, and we are grateful to Dostoevsky’s translator for having
renounced all idea of introducing a certain artificial elegance or
attempting to remedy their characteristic awkwardness.[5]
The first contact is indeed discouraging. Mme. Hoffmann, Dostoevsky’s
German biographer, leads us to understand that the selection of
letters issued by the Russian editors might have been better made; but
she entirely fails to convince me that its keynote could have been
different. As it stands, the volume is bulky, and the reader gasps
in astonishment less at the number of the letters than at the vast
formlessness of each one of them. Perhaps we have never yet had an
example of a literary man’s letters so badly written, by that I mean
written with so little regard for style. Ideas seem to come from his
pen not in ordered sequence, but in a rich confusion, which, once it
is brought under control, contributes powerfully to the complexity of
his novels. The same man who is so uncompromising and so tenacious
where his own work is concerned, correcting, destroying, modifying
his stories, page by page, until each becomes “the expression of his
very being,” writes his correspondence anyhow: never crossing a phrase
out, but constantly catching himself up, hurrying on as fast as he
can, and never able to bring his letter to a satisfactory close; and
nothing helps us better to estimate the distance between a work and its
creator. Inspiration? romantic and flattering convenience! The muse is
not so readily wooed. And if ever Buffon’s modest saying--“_A patience
that knows no weariness_”--were applicable, ’tis here.
“What theory is this you’ve got hold of?” he writes to his brother, on
the very threshold of his career.[6] “A picture ought to be painted
at one sitting, you say? When did you acquire this conviction? Believe
me, in all things, labour, yes, prolonged labour, is indispensable.
A few lines of Pushkin’s verse, light and polished, truly seem the
fruit of one effort, thanks to the hours Pushkin spent arranging and
revising them. It needs more than a happy knack to produce mature work.
We are told that Shakespeare’s work bears no trace of correction:
that is exactly why we find in it so many imperfections and so much
that is contrary to good taste. If he had spent more time over it,
the result would have been better.” Such is the keynote of the whole
correspondence. The best of his life and spirit Dostoevsky devotes to
his work. None of his letters was written from pleasure. He constantly
reverts to his “terrible, unmasterable, incredible distaste for
letter-writing.”--“Letters,” he declares, “have neither rhyme nor
reason: it is impossible to unburden oneself in them.” He goes even
further: “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,
and so it will remain as long as we continue to correspond; I _cannot_
write letters: I cannot write about myself and be just.”[7] Elsewhere
he says that “in a letter it’s impossible to write anything. There’s
the secret of my dislike to Madame de Sévigné: the woman wrote her
letters too well!” Or with a touch of humour: “If ever I go to the
lower regions, I shall beyond a doubt be sentenced to write for my sins
some ten letters a day”--and I think this is the one flicker of humour
you can discern throughout the whole gloomy book.
So only direst compulsion will drive him to write a letter. His
correspondence (save during the last ten years of his life, when
the tone is altered--and of this period I shall speak apart) is one
prolonged cry of distress: he is penniless, desperate, and he seeks
help. A cry, did I say? It is one unending, monotonous lament. He is a
beggar, and does not know how to beg: he is all awkwardness, without
pride, and innocent of irony. He reminds me of the angel of whom we
read in the _Little Flowers of St. Francis_. This angel, in the form
of a traveller who had lost his way, came to the Val de Spolete and
knocked at the door of the infant settlement. His knocking was so
loud, long, and precipitate that the brethren grew indignant, and
Brother Masseo (M. de Vogüé, I presume!) at last opened the door,
asking, “Whence comest thou to knock in so unseemly wise?” And the
angel inquired, “How then must I knock?” Brother Masseo replied, “Knock
thrice with deliberation, then pause. Leave the porter time to say
a pater-noster. Then if he comes not, knock again.” “But I am sore
pressed,” continued the angel.
“I am in such poverty that I am fit to hang myself,” writes Dostoevsky,
“I can neither pay my debts nor leave, lacking funds for the journey,
and I am in black despair.”--“What is to become of me between now and
the close of the year? Dear knows. My head is bursting. I have not a
soul left from whom I can borrow.”--(“Do you realize what it means, to
have nowhere to go?” says one of his characters.) “I’ve written to a
relative to ask him for six hundred roubles. If he doesn’t send them,
then all is lost.” His correspondence is so full of such laments and
others in like strain that I make my selection at random. Sometimes
there is, every six months or so, a note of greater insistence: “It is
only once in a lifetime that money can possibly be so cruelly needed.”
Towards the end--drunk with the humility he used to intoxicate the
heroes of his novels, that uncanny humility of the Russian, which may
be Christ-like, but, according to Mme. Hoffmann, is still found in the
depths of the Russian soul even when Christian faith is lacking, and
which the Western mind will never fully understand since it reckons
self-respect a virtue--towards the end, he asks, “Why should they deny
me? I make no demands. I am but a humble petitioner!”
But perhaps these letters furnish, wrongly, the impression of a human
creature ever deep in despair, seeing that they were written only when
despair was greatest. No: incoming moneys were immediately swallowed
up by debts, and thus, at the age of fifty, he could truthfully say