Dostoevsky
here for nihilists, anarchists, or even socialists, to use for their
own ends. What! not a cry of revolt? Perhaps it was prudent to show
respect for the Tsar, but why no revolt against society, or against
the prison-cell from which he emerged an aged man? Just listen to what
he says about his prison, in a letter to Michael dated February 22,
1856: “What has happened to my soul and my beliefs, my intellect and
my affections in the space of these four years, I shall not tell you!
The tale would be too long. The unbroken meditation, wherein I found
refuge from the bitterness of reality, has surely not been vain. I now
have hopes and desires which in bygone days I did not even anticipate.”
And in another passage: “Do not imagine, I pray you, that I am still
as moody and suspicious as I was in my last years in Petersburg. All
that has gone for ever. God, too, is leading us.” And not long after,
in another letter to S. D. Janovsky in 1872,[23] we come across this
extraordinary confession (the italics are Dostoevsky’s!): “You loved
me, cared for me, and I was then _sick in mind_ (I realize it now)
_before my journey to Siberia_, where I was cured.”
Not a word of protest; only gratitude. An unrepaying martyr, indeed!
In what faith does he live and move? What are the convictions that
lend him strength? Perhaps an examination of his opinions, so far as
his letters make them plain, will help us to understand the secret
causes, already faintly indicated, of his disfavour and lack of success
with the public, and explain why Dostoevsky still lingers on, as if in
purgatory, in a middle state between obscurity and fame.
II
Dostoevsky was no partisan. Dreading party feeling and the dissensions
it creates, he wrote: “My thoughts are chiefly concerned with what
constitutes our community of ideas, the common ground whereon we all
might meet, irrespective of tendency.” Profoundly convinced that “in
Russian thought lay reconciliation for Europe’s antagonisms”, “veteran
European Russian” as he termed himself, he devoted the whole strength
of his being to the Russian unity which was to confound party and
faction in one great love of country and of humanity. “Yes, I, too,
hold your opinion that in Russia, by the very nature of her mission,
Europe will be consummated. This has long been plain to me,” so he
wrote from Siberia. Elsewhere he describes Russia as “a nation awaiting
her mission,” “fit to lead the common interests of entire humanity.”
And if, by virtue of a conviction which, perchance, was no more than
premature, he deceived himself as to the importance of the Russian
people (which is by no means _my_ opinion), it was not infatuated
jingoism, but his intuition and the deep understanding he had, simply
because he himself was a Russian, of the beliefs and party passions
dividing Europe. Speaking of Pushkin, he credits himself with the
poet’s “gift of world-wide sympathy,” adding, “It is this very faculty,
his in common with all our people, which makes him truly national.” He
considers the Russian soul as “a meeting-ground whereon all European
aims may be reconciled,” exclaiming, “Where is the true Russian who
does not first and foremost think of Europe?” and uttering even these
strange words, “the Russian wanderer has need of world-wide happiness
in order to find peace himself.”
Persuaded that “Russia’s future activity must be in the highest degree
pan-human,” and that “maybe the Russian idea will be the synthesis
of all the ideas developed with such courage and persistence in the
various European nationalities,” his gaze is constantly directed
outside Russia. His political and social judgments of France and of
Germany are, to us, perhaps the most interesting passages of his
correspondence. He travelled abroad, lingering in Italy, Switzerland,
and Germany, attracted in the first instance by his desire to know
them, detained ultimately for months on end by the eternal question of
money, either having an insufficiency of funds to continue his journey
or fearing debts he has left behind in Russia, and the possibility
of tasting imprisonment again. “With my health in the state it is,”
he wrote when he was forty-nine, “I could not stand even six months’
confinement, nor, what is more, could I work.”
But in foreign parts he misses from the very first the air of Russia
and contact with the Russian people. For him, Sparta, Toledo and Venice
might as well not exist, he cannot become acclimatized, nor can he
content himself anywhere for a moment. “I have no words to tell you how
unbearable living abroad is to me,” he writes to his friend Strakhov.
Not a letter written in exile but breathes the same lament: “I _must_
go back to Russia; the monotony of life here is crushing.” And as
though in Russia were hidden the source of nourishment for his work,
and the sap failed as soon as he was torn from his native soil, he
wrote: “I have no taste for writing, or else, when I do write, it is
with much suffering. I cannot think what this means, except it be that
I have need of Russia, to work and to create.... I was only too clearly
conscious that whether we lived at Dresden or elsewhere was a matter of
indifference, for I should always be a foreigner in a foreign land.”
Again: “If only you knew how good-for-nothing and alien I feel here. I
am growing stupid and dull, and am losing touch with Russia. No breath
of Russian air, no Russian spirit. I don’t understand the Russian
exiles: madmen all!”
And yet at Geneva, at Vevey, he wrote _The Idiot_, at Dresden _The
Eternal Husband_ and _The Possessed_. “You have spoken golden words
about my work here. Right enough, I shall fall behind, not behind the
times, but I shall lose touch with what is happening at home (I know
it better than you do, because every day in life I read three Russian
newspapers, every line of them, and I take out a couple of reviews), I
shall become deaf to the living pulse of life, and how that tells on
artistic creation!”
So this “world sympathy” exists together with and is strengthened by
an ardent nationalism--its natural complement in Dostoevsky’s mind.
He never wearies or flags in his protest against those that were
at that time called the “Progressists,” that is to say (I borrow
this definition from Strakhov), “the generation of politicians
which expected the advancement of Russian civilization to proceed
not from an organic development of the national character, but from
an overhasty assimilation of Western teachings.” “The Frenchman is
first and foremost a Frenchman, and an Englishman, an Englishman, and
their highest aim is to remain true to themselves. Therein lies their
strength.” He takes his stand against the “men who seek to uproot the
Russians,” and does not wait for Barrès to warn the young intellectual
“who tears himself away from society and disowns it, and does not ‘go
to the people,’ but loses himself in foreign parts, in ‘Europeanism,’
in the kingdom of the universal man who has never existed, and in
so doing breaks with the people, scorns it and misjudges it.” Like
Barrès dealing with “sickly Kantism,” he writes in the preface to
the review[24] he edits: “No matter how fertile an idea imported
from abroad, it can only strike root here, become acclimatized, and
prove of genuine use to us if our national life, spontaneously and
without pressure from without, made the idea grow up, naturally and
practically, to meet its own needs--needs which have been recognized
by practical experience. No nation on earth, no society with a certain
measure of stability has been developed to order, on the lines of a
programme imported from abroad.”
Here follows a remark I regret not to have found in Barrès: “The
capacity for separating oneself temporarily from one’s mother-earth
for the purposes of self-contemplation, all prejudices apart, is the
mark of a very strong personality, just as the power to look on the
foreigner with kindly eyes is one of nature’s highest and noblest
gifts.” And did Dostoevsky not seem to foresee how this doctrine was
to lead and blind us?--“It is impossible to undeceive a Frenchman and
prevent his believing himself the most important being in the wide
world. Besides, of the wide world he is pretty ignorant. And what is
more, he is not keen to be enlightened. This is a characteristic common
to the whole nation, and very typical.”
Dostoevsky’s individualism, too, differentiates him more sharply--and
more happily--from Barrès. And, set against Nietzsche, he becomes for
us a shining example of how little infatuation and self-sufficiency may
at times accompany belief in the value of the personality. “The hardest
thing on earth,” he writes, “is to remain yourself,” and “no high aim
is worth a life wrecked,” because for him, without individualism as
without patriotism, there exists no way of serving humanity. If some
Barrès enthusiasts were won over to him by the declarations I quoted a
moment ago, is there one of them who would not be alienated by these
fresh statements?
So, too, on reading these words: “In the new humanity, the æsthetic
idea lacks clarity. The moral basis of society, held fast by
positivism, not only gives no results, but cannot define itself, for
it is lost in cloudy aspirations and ideals. Are there yet not enough
facts to prove that society is not established thus, that these are
not the paths leading to happiness, and that this is not, as has been
believed till now, the source of happiness? But what _is_ its source
then? So many volumes are written, and the essential point is ever
missed: the Western World has lost Christ Jesus--and for this, and this
alone, the Western World must perish.” Not a French Catholic but would
applaud--were he not drawn up sharply by the phrase I dropped at the
beginning: “Christ has been lost, by the error of Catholicism.”
What French Catholic will now dare let himself be touched by the tears
of devotion that are shed throughout these letters of Dostoevsky’s?
Vain hope, “to desire to reveal to the world a Russian Christ, unknown
to the wider world, and whose very being is contained in our orthodoxy.”
The French Catholic, by virtue of his own personal orthodoxy, will
refuse to listen, and for the moment, at least, Dostoevsky’s further
remark is made in vain: “In my opinion, here is found the principle of
our future civilizing force and of Europe’s resurrection at our hands,
the very essence of our future strength.”
Although Dostoevsky gives M. de Vogüé grounds for discerning in him a
“bitter animosity against thought and against life in its fullness,” a
“sanctification of the mindless, colourless, and invertebrate,” and so
on, we read in another passage from a letter to his brother: “Simple
folk, you will say. Aye, but I dread simple men more than complex
ones.”[25] This was his reply to a girl who “was anxious to make
herself useful,” and had expressed her desire to become a midwife or
hospital nurse: “By giving regular attention to your general education
you will fit yourself for an activity more useful a hundred times.
Would it not be better to give thought to the higher branches of your
general education?... The majority of our specialists are fundamentally
ignorant--and most of our students, of both sexes, are absolutely
uneducated. What good can _they_ do to humanity?”[26] Frankly I did not
need these words to realize M. de Vogüé’s mistake; but, all the same,
this mistake _was_ possible.
Dostoevsky is not any more easily enrolled “for” or “against”
Socialism; for, if Mme. Hoffmann is justified in saying, “A Socialist,
in the most human acceptation of the word, Dostoevsky never for a
moment ceased to be!” do we not read in his letters, “Socialism has
already undermined Europe: if we delay too long, it will bring it to
complete ruin”?