Dostoevsky
of himself, “My life long I have toiled for money, and my life long I
have been in need, more sorely now than ever.”[8] Debts, or gambling,
lack of restraint, and that instinctive, prodigal generosity which made
Riesenkampf, the companion of his youth, say, “Dostoevsky is one of
these people in whose company a man lives well, but who himself will
remain a needy creature till the very end of his days.”
When fifty, he wrote: “This plan of a novel (i.e. _The Brothers
Karamazov_, not written till nine years later) has been tormenting me
now for more than three years; but I have not made a start with it,
because I should like to write it in my own good time, like Tolstoy,
Turgeniev, and Gontcharov. Let me write at least one of my works
unhampered and without the preoccupation of being ready at a fixed
date.”[9] But it is in vain that he repeats, “I don’t understand
hurriedly done work, written for money”: this money question invariably
obtrudes itself, together with the fear of not being ready in time.
“I dread not being ready in time, being late. I should hate to spoil
things by my haste. I admit the plan has been well conceived and
thought over; but haste can ruin all.”[10]
The result of this is terrible overstrain, for he stakes his honour on
an ideal of faithfulness that is beset with difficulties, and he would
die in harness sooner than furnish imperfect work. Towards the close
of his life he can say: “Throughout my literary career, I have kept my
agreements with scrupulous exactness, not once have I broken my word;
and what is more, I have never written for money’s sake alone, nor
in order to deliver myself from accepted obligations,” and a little
before, in the same letter: “I have never invented a theme for money’s
sake, to meet the obligation of writing up to a previously agreed
time-limit. I always made an agreement ... and sold myself into bondage
beforehand ... only when I already had my theme in mind prepared for
writing, and when it was one that I felt it necessary to develop.”[11]
So if in one of his early letters (written at the age of twenty-four)
he makes protest: “Whatever befall me, my resolution will remain
unshaken; even if driven to the extreme limit of privation, I shall
stand firm and never compose to order. Constraint is pernicious and
soul-destroying. I want each of my works to be good in itself”[12] ...
we can, without cavilling, admit that he did not break his vow.
But he cherished throughout his life the belief that with more time and
freedom he could have given better expression to his thought. “There
is one consideration that troubles one greatly: if I spent a year
writing the novel beforehand, and then two or three months in copying
and revising it, I guarantee the result would be very different.”
Self-delusion, maybe? Who can tell? With greater leisure, to what could
he have attained? After what was he still striving? Greater simplicity,
no doubt, and a more complete subordination of detail. As they are,
his best works rise, almost throughout, to a degree of precision and
clarity that it is not easy to imagine excelled.
And to reach this, what expenditure of effort! It is only now and
again that sudden inspiration is vouchsafed; everything else means
painful toil. To his brother, who doubtless had reproached him with not
writing “simply” enough, meaning to say “quickly” enough, and with not
“surrendering himself to inspiration,” he replied, young as he was: “It
is clear that you are confusing, as often happens, inspiration, that
is, the first momentary creation of the picture, or the stirring of the
soul, with work. Thus, for instance, I make note at once of a scene
just as it appeared to me, and I am delighted: then, for months, for
a year even, I work at it ... and believe me, the finished article is
much superior. Provided, of course, that the inspiration is vouchsafed!
Naturally without inspiration nothing can be accomplished....” Must I
crave pardon for this prodigality of quotation, or will you not rather
be grateful to me for allowing Dostoevsky to be his own spokesman as
much as possible? “At the beginning, that is at the end of last year,
I thought the novel (he refers to _The Possessed_) very _made_ and
artificial and rather scorned it. But later I was overtaken by real
enthusiasm. I fell in love with my work of a sudden, and made a big
effort to get all that I had written into good trim....”[13] “The whole
year,” he goes on to say (1870), “I have done nothing but destroy.... I
have altered my plan at least ten times, and I’ve re-written the first
part entirely. Two or three months ago I was in despair. Now everything
has fallen into place together and cannot be changed.” And again the
ever-present obsession: “If I had had time to write without hurrying
myself, without a time-limit in view, it is possible that something
good might have developed out of it.”[14]
This anguish and this dissatisfaction with himself were gone through
for every work that he wrote. “It is a long novel, in six parts (_Crime
and Punishment_). At the end of November a large part of it was written
and ready; I burned the lot! Now, I can frankly admit that it did not
please me. A new form, a new plan hurried me along. I have made a
fresh start. I am working night and day; still, progress is slow.”--“I
am working hard and little comes of it,” he says elsewhere: “I am
constantly tearing my work up. I am terribly discouraged.” And again:
“I have done so much work that I’ve become stupid, and my head is
dazed.”--“I am working here (Staraia Roussa) like a convict in spite of
the fine weather to be taken advantage of; I am tied night and day to
my task.”
Sometimes a mere article gives him as much trouble as a book, because
his conscientiousness is as rigid in little things as in great.
“I have let it drag on till now” (i.e. a memoir on Bielinsky, which
has not been traced), “and at last I’ve finished it, gnashing my teeth
the while. Ten pages of a novel are more easily written than these two
sheets. Consequently I’ve written, all in all, this confounded article
five times at least, and even then I’ve scored everything out and
changed what I’d written. Finally I’ve completed the article after a
fashion, but it is so bad that I am full of disgust.”[15] For while he
clings to the profound belief in his worth, in the worth of his ideas
at least, he is always exacting while the work is in progress, and
never pleased when it is completed.
“I’ve seldom happened to have anything newer, more complete or more
original. I can say this without being accused of pride, because I am
speaking of the subject only, of the idea that has sprung up in my
head, and not of its realization; as for the latter, it lies with God.
I can make a complete mess of it--which has happened before to-day.”
“However wretched and abominable what I’ve written may be,” he says in
another passage, “the idea of the novel and the labour I expend on it
are to me, its unhappy author, my most precious possession in life.”
“My dissatisfaction with my novel amounts to disgust,” so he writes
when working at _The Idiot_. “I have made a terrible effort to work,
but simply could not; my heart is bad. Just now I am making a last
effort for the third part. If I succeed in polishing off this book,
I’ll get better: if not, it is all over with me.”
Having already written not only the three books M. de Vogüé reckons
his masterpieces, but _Notes from Underground_, _The Idiot_, and _The
Eternal Husband_, he concentrates all his efforts on a new theme (_The
Possessed_), exclaiming, “It’s high time I wrote something serious.”
And the year of his death, writing to Mlle. N----, he says: “I am
conscious that, as a writer, I have many defects, because I am the
first to be dissatisfied with my own efforts. You can just picture
the times when I cross-examine myself, to find that I have literally
not expressed the twentieth part of what was in my mind, and could,
perhaps, have been expressed! My salvation lies in the sure hope that
one day God may grant me such strength and inspiration that I shall
find perfect self-expression and be able to make plain all that I carry
in my heart and imagination.”[16]
How remote from Balzac with his self-assurance and rich imperfection!
Can even Flaubert have known what it is to make such demands upon
oneself, to struggle so hard and toil in such mad frenzies? I think
not. His exigencies are more purely literary, and if his uncompromising
uprightness as a writer and the tale of his prodigious labours are
prominently displayed in his letters, it is simply because he becomes
attached to this very labour, and without exactly vaunting it, he is at
least uncommonly proud of it. Besides, he suppressed all else, holding
life so “loathsome a thing, that the only way to bear it is to avoid
it,” and compared himself to the “Amazons who cut off their breasts,
the better to bend the bow.” Dostoevsky suppressed nothing; he had a
wife and children, whom he adored, and life he did not scorn. After
his release from prison, he wrote: “At least, I have lived; I have
suffered, but I have lived!” His sacrifices for love of his art are
the nobler and the more tragic because less arrogant, less conscious,
less deliberate. He frequently quotes Terence, refusing to concede
that anything human should be foreign to himself either. “Man has not
the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world
around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.
Homo sum, et nihil humanum....” He does not despise his suffering, but
assumes the burden in all its fullness. Losing wife and brother within
the space of a few months, he writes: “And then I was suddenly left
alone, and I knew fear! It has become terrible. My life 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! I realized then
for the first time that I could not replace my lost ones, they were all
I held dear, and new loves could not, ought not to exist.”[17] But a
fortnight later, this is what he wrote: “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. Yet I always have the feeling that I
am going to begin to live! Ridiculous, isn’t it? The cat and its nine
lives?”[18] He was at this moment forty-four years of age, and less
than a year later, he married a second time.
At twenty-eight years of age, confined in a fortress pending transfer
to Siberia, he cried, “I see I have within me resources of vitality
that it will be hard to exhaust.” And in 1856, still in Siberia,
but released from prison, and not long married to a widow, Marie
Dimitrievna Issaïev by name, he wrote: “Now things are different from
what they used to be! So much more reflection, effort and energy
enters into my work. Can it be that after struggling so resolutely and
courageously for six long years I am incapable of earning enough money
to support my wife and myself? Impossible! Nobody knows yet the worth
of my powers or the extent of my talent, and this is what I chiefly
count on!”
But, alas! he has to struggle against other ills than poverty.
“My work is done in care and suffering, and I am always at high nervous
tension. When I do too much, I become physically ill.”--“Of late I’ve
been working literally day and night, in spite of my attacks.” And
again: “These attacks will make an end of me: after one, it takes me
four days to straighten out my thoughts.”