Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky was never reticent concerning his epilepsy; his attacks of
the _falling sickness_ were, alas! all too frequent not to have been
witnessed at times by some of his intimates, aye, and by strangers
too. Strakhov describes one of these fits in his _Reminiscences_,
unconscious, as the sufferer himself was, that there could be the
slightest shame attached to the epileptic condition, or that it implied
any moral or intellectual “inferiority” apart from the resultant
hindrances to work. Even to correspondents of the other sex who were
personally unknown to him and whom he was addressing for the first
time, he would apologize for his delay in writing, with the naïve and
simple remark: “I have just had three of my epileptic fits, uncommonly
violent and in rapid succession. But after the attacks, for two or
three days I was unable to work, write, or even read, because I am a
wreck, body and soul. So now I’ve told you, and I ask your forgiveness
for leaving you so long without a reply.”
This disease, from which he suffered even before Siberia, grew worse
during his imprisonment; it abated but very little during an occasional
stay abroad, renewing its force as soon as he returned home. Sometimes
the interval between the attacks is longer, but this only augments
their violence. “When the fits are infrequent and one suddenly comes
over me, I am subject to blackest melancholy. I am reduced to despair.
Formerly (he was fifty when he wrote this) this mood lasted three days
after the attack, nowadays, a week or more.”
Braving his attacks, he holds fast to his work, making huge efforts
to implement his promises: “The next instalment (of _The Idiot_) is
announced for April, and I’ve nothing ready, except one unimportant
chapter. What am I to send? I have no idea. The day before yesterday I
did some writing all the same, in a state bordering on madness.”
If the sole consequence were pain and discomfort! But, alas! “I
notice to my despair that I am no longer fit to work as quickly as of
old, indeed, as up till quite recently.” Again and again he laments
the weakening of his memory and his imagination, and at the age of
fifty-eight, two years before his death, he said: “For a long time
I’ve been conscious that where work is concerned, the longer, the more
difficult, and so my thoughts are gloomy, and there is nowhere solace
for me.” And yet, he could write _The Karamazovs_.
When Baudelaire’s _Letters_ were published last year, M. Mendès was
shocked and protested, in no measured terms, either, invoking the
poet’s right to have his intimate concerns respected.
No doubt there will always be ultra-sensitive, easily shocked readers
who prefer to see only the heads and shoulders of great men, who rise
up in revolt at the publication of personal documents and private
correspondence, discerning in these only what can agreeably flatter a
mediocre intelligence which delights to find a hero bound by the same
infirmities as itself. So they talk of “indiscretion”; or if they are
of a romantic turn of mind, of “ghouls”; at the mildest, of “unhealthy
curiosity.” “Leave the man in peace,” they say, “his work alone is of
account.” Agreed! but the wonder of it, and, to me, the profound lesson
of it, is, that the “work” should have been written in spite of the
“man.”
I am not writing Dostoevsky’s biography, I am merely drawing his
likeness from the elements of his _Correspondence_, so I have discussed
only the difficulties engendered by his very constitution. I think I am
justified in including amongst them his chronic poverty, so intimately
connected with him and which would seem to have met some secret need
of his being.... But everything goes against him; at the outset of his
career, in spite of his delicacy in childhood, he is pronounced fit
for military service, whereas his brother, Michael, more robust in
health, is rejected. Straying into a group of political suspects, he
is arrested, condemned to death, then respited and sent to Siberia to
expiate his offence. He spends ten years there: four in prison, six
at Semipalatinsk in a regiment of the line. While there he married;
perhaps not very much “in love” according to our usual interpretation
of the phrase, but out of a kind of burning compassion, out of pity or
softened feeling, out of a need for sacrificing himself and a natural
propensity for assuming burdens and shirking no issue. His wife was
the widow of a prisoner, Issaïev, and the mother of a growing boy (a
good-for-nothing, almost mentally defective), who there and then became
dependent upon Dostoevsky. In a letter to his friend Wrangel, after his
wife’s death, he wrote: “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 became, the more closely we drew
together. Strange though it may seem, it’s true!”--“If you question
me about myself, what can I say? I have family cares, and they press
heavily. But I believe my day is not done, and I am determined not to
die,” he says elsewhere. After his brother Michael’s death, he has to
support his family too. As soon as he puts some money aside--which
means the possibility of some respite--he starts newspapers and
reviews,[19] at once financing and editing the publications. “Energetic
measures were imperative. I started publications with three different
presses, and I have spared neither money, health, nor efforts. I ran
everything single-handed. I revised proofs, kept in touch with the
authors and with the Censorship, found the necessary money. I was up
till six in the morning, and took only five hours sleep. I at last
managed to put the review on its feet, but too late.” As a matter of
fact, this review _did_ collapse. “But the worst of it,” he continues,
“was, that working like a galley-slave at these concerns, I could
not write anything for the review: not a line from _my_ pen. My name
was never in the public’s eye, and not only in the provinces, but in
Petersburg even, it was not known that I was the editor.”
He persists in spite of everything, and makes a fresh start; nothing
can discourage him or bring him down. In the last year of his life,
however, he is still struggling, not against public opinion which he
has at length won over, but against opposition papers. “For what I said
in Moscow (his speech on ‘Pushkin’), just look how I’ve been treated
by almost the whole of the press: it is as if I were a thief or had
embezzled from some bank or other. Ukhantsev (a notorious swindler of
the time) is less foully abused than I.”
But it is not a reward that he is seeking, any more than it is
amour-propre or an author’s vanity that inspires his conduct. Nothing
could be more significant than his manner of accepting his first
success: “I’ve been writing for three years already, and it dazes me; I
am not living. I haven’t time to think.... A precarious reputation has
been built up round me, and I don’t know how long the damnable thing
will last.”
He is so persuaded of the worth of his ideas that personal values are
absorbed and lost. “What have I done”, he wrote to his friend, Baron
Wrangel, “that you should bestow such affection upon me?” And near
the close of his life, writing to an anonymous correspondent: “Do you
think I am one of those who mend hearts, deliver the soul, and drive
out suffering? Many people write to tell me this, but I am certain I am
more capable of provoking disillusion and disgust. I have little skill
in healing, although I have sometimes tried it.” Such love in this
tormented soul! “I dream of you every night,” he writes from Siberia to
his brother, “and I am terribly worried. I do not want you to die; I
must see you and kiss you again. Calm my apprehensions for God’s sake.
And for dear Christ’s sake, if you are well, forget your business and
your worries, and do write to me immediately, else I shall go mad.”[20]
Is there any help for him, this time, at least? “Write to me at once
and in detail how you found my brother,” he writes from Semipalatinsk,
on March 23, 1856, to Baron Wrangel: “What does he think about me? He
used to love me passionately. He wept when he bade me good-bye. Has his
feeling towards me grown cold? Has his character changed? That would be
a grief. Has he forgotten all the past? I cannot believe it, but how
else am I to explain his not writing for seven or eight months? And
I seem to see so little warmth in him to remind one of days gone by!
I shall never forget what he said to K---- who delivered my message
entreating him to exert himself on my behalf: ‘The best thing for _him_
to do is to remain in Siberia.’” He actually wrote these words, but he
would give anything to forget his brother’s cruelty. The affectionate
letter to Michael from which I quoted a moment ago, is subsequent to
this one.
During his four years in prison, Dostoevsky was left without news of
his family. On February 22, 1854, he wrote to his brother the first
of the Siberian letters preserved to us--and an admirable letter it
was: “At last I can talk with you somewhat more explicitly, and, I
believe, in a more reasonable manner. But before I write another line
I _must_ ask you: tell me, for God’s sake, why you have never written
me a single syllable till now? Could I have expected this from you?
Believe me, in my lonely and isolated state, I sometimes fell into
utter despair, for I believed that you were no longer alive; through
whole nights I would brood upon what was to become of your children,
and I cursed my fate because I could not help them....”[21]--“Can you
possibly have been forbidden to write to me? Because writing _is_
actually permitted! All the political prisoners have several letters
each year.... But I think I have guessed the true cause of your
silence: it is your natural apathy.”
“Tell my brother”, he wrote later to Wrangel, “that I fold him in my
arms, that I ask his forgiveness for all the pain I’ve caused him,
and kneel at his feet”;[22] and to his brother himself, on August 21,
1855: “Dear brother, when in my letter of last October, I repeated
my complaints at your silence, you answered that these had made very
painful reading for you. Oh, Mysha! for the love of God, bear me no
ill-will: remember my loneliness. I am like a pebble cast aside. I’ve
always been of a gloomy, sickly, susceptible disposition: remember
all that, and forgive me if my reproaches were unjust and my fancies
absurd. I am myself thoroughly convinced I was in the wrong.”
Mme. Hoffmann was right, no doubt, and Western readers will protest in
face of such humility and contrition. Our literature, too often tinged
with Castillian pride, has so thoroughly taught us to see nobility of
character in the non-forgiveness of injury and insult!
But what will he have to say, the Western-European reader when he reads
this: “You write that everybody loves the Tsar. I venerate him.”? And
Dostoevsky was still in Siberia when he wrote these words. Irony,
perchance? No. In letter after letter he takes up the theme: “The
Emperor is infinitely generous and kind.” And this is what he says
when, after ten years’ imprisonment, he solicits permission to return
to Petersburg and a place for his stepson, Paul, at the Gymnasium: “I
have been thinking if one request is refused, maybe the other will be
granted, and if the Emperor does not think fit to allow me to live in
Petersburg, perhaps he will agree to find an opening for Paul, so that
his refusal will not be absolute.”
Decidedly, submissiveness, to this degree, is disconcerting! Nothing