Dostoevsky
pursuing his ideas from one novel to another, I shall try to lay hold
of them and set them forth as plainly as is possible despite their
apparent confusion. Psychologist, sociologist, moralist--Dostoevsky
is all three, and novelist as well. Whereas in his works ideas are
never presented in their crude state, but always through the medium
of the character expressing them (which accounts for their confusion
and relativity), I, for my part, will try to avoid abstractions and
outline the ideas as sharply as possible. I should like first of all to
introduce you to Dostoevsky in person, and speak of some incidents in
his life that reveal his character and help us to draw a clear likeness
of him.
My pre-war plan of the biography comprised an introduction in which
I proposed to discuss the commonly accepted idea of him. To throw
light on the subject, I should have drawn a parallel between him and
Rousseau--and no arbitrary one, I can assure you. Their natures reveal
such deep-laid analogies that Rousseau’s _Confessions_ were able to
exert an extraordinary influence on Dostoevsky. But in my opinion
Rousseau, from the very beginning of his life, was poisoned, as it
were, by Plutarch, through whom he fashioned for himself a somewhat
rhetorical and pompous notion of a “great man.” He set up before
himself the image of a fancied hero, and his life was one prolonged
effort to be like it. He tried hard to _be_ what he wanted to _seem_.
I allow that his painting of his own character may be sincere, but he
is ever thinking of his pose, which pride alone dictates.
“False greatness,” in the admirable words of La Bruyère, “is shy and
inaccessible. Conscious of its foible, it hides away, or at least
never shows an open face, letting be seen only as much as will make
an impression and save it from being revealed for what it really is,
something mean and small.”
And if I do not go so far as to recognize Rousseau in this description,
I _do_ think of Dostoevsky when a little farther on I read:
“True greatness is free, gentle, familiar, unaffected; it can be
touched and handled, and loses nothing when seen at close quarters.
The better you are acquainted with it, the more you admire it. It
bends out of goodness of heart to its inferiors, and returns to its
own level without effort. Sometimes it lets itself go, neglecting and
surrendering its natural advantages, but ever ready to recover them and
put them to use.”
With Dostoevsky there is this complete absence of pose or
stage-management. He never considers himself a _superman_. He is most
humbly human, and I do not think that pride of intellect could ever
properly understand him.
The word _humility_ comes up again and again in his letters and
works. “Why should they deny me? I make no demands. I am but a humble
petitioner.” (November 23, 1869.)--“I do not demand, I only seek in
all humility.” (December 7, 1869.)--“I have made the humblest of
requests.” (February 12, 1870.)
“He often astonished me by a kind of humility,” says the _Raw Youth_ in
speaking of his father, and in his effort to understand the possible
relations between his father and mother, and the quality of their love,
he recollects his father’s phrase, “She married me out of humility.”
I read lately in an interview with M. Henry Bordeaux a sentence which
surprised me somewhat: “Seek first to know yourself.” The literary
creator who seeks himself runs a great risk--the risk of finding
himself. From then onwards he writes coldly, deliberately, in keeping
with the self he has found. He imitates himself. If he knows his path
and his limitations, it is only to keep strictly to them. His great
dread is no longer insincerity, but inconsistency. The true artist is
never but half-conscious of himself when creating. He does not know
exactly who he is. He learns to know himself only through his creation,
in it, and after it. Dostoevsky never set out to find himself; he gave
himself without stint in his works. He lost himself in each of the
characters of his books, and, for this reason, it is in them that he
can be found again. Presently we shall see how painfully awkward he
is when speaking in his own name, how eloquent, on the other hand,
when his own ideas are expressed by those whom he inspires. It is
in endowing them with life that he finds himself. He lives in each
of them, and the most obvious result of merging himself in their
diversity is the masking of his own inconsistencies.
I know no writer richer in contradictions and inconsistencies than
Dostoevsky: Nietzsche would describe them as _antagonisms_. Had he been
philosopher instead of novelist, he would certainly have attempted
to bring his ideas into line, whereby we should have lost the most
precious of them.
The happenings in Dostoevsky’s life, however tragic, are but surface
disturbances. The passions overwhelming him seem to shake him to the
depths; but beyond, there remains an inner chamber, unreached by
outside happenings or by passion. In this connection a few of his own
words will seem a revelation, if read in conjunction with another
passage:
“Without some goal and some effort to reach it, no man can live. When
he has lost all hope, all object in life, man often becomes a monster
in his misery.”[31]
But then he seems still in error where his real goal is concerned, for
he adds immediately after: “The one object of the prisoners was freedom
and to get out of prison.”
These words were written in 1861. Such then was his idea of an aim in
life. Of course he was suffering in that dread captivity! (He spent
ten years in Siberia: four in prison, then six more in forced military
service.) He was suffering; but once more a free man, he could realize
that the real goal, the freedom he really longed for, was something
deeper and had no connection with the throwing wide of prison gates.
In 1874 he could write this extraordinary sentence, which I like to
compare with what I read to you a moment ago:
“No aim can possibly be worth a wrecked existence.”[32]
So, according to Dostoevsky, we have each our reason for living,
superior, hidden--hidden often from ourselves--certainly far different
from the ostensible goal assigned by most of us to our existence.
Let us first of all try to picture Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky. His
friend Riesenkampf delineates him as he was at twenty years of age, in
1841:
“The face was rounded and full; the nose slightly retroussé; the hair
light brown, worn short. A broad forehead, and beneath thin eyebrows,
little grey eyes, set deep in the head. Pale cheeks, covered with
freckles. A sickly, almost livid complexion, and very thick lips.”
It is sometimes asserted that his first epileptic attacks occurred
in Siberia; but he was a sick man even before sentence was passed on
him, and the disease certainly made progress in Siberia. “A sickly
complexion.” Dostoevsky had always had poor health. And yet he, weak
and complaining, was singled out for military service while his robust
brother was exempted.
In 1841, that is, at twenty years of age, he was promoted
non-commissioned officer, and then, in 1843, he took the examinations
and was commissioned ensign. We learn that his officer’s pay amounted
to 3,000 roubles, and although he had come into his share of the
father’s fortune after the latter’s death, he led a free life, and had
to take a younger brother in charge, consequently he was always falling
into debt. This money question turns up again and again in his letters,
much more urgently than in Balzac’s. It plays an extremely important
part almost to the very end of his life, and it was not until the
closing years that he was really freed from his financial worries.
In his young days Dostoevsky indulged in every dissipation. He was
assiduous at the play, at concerts, at the ballet. Not a care in the
world! He chooses to rent a flat simply because he has taken a fancy
to the landlord’s appearance. His servant robs him, and he finds
entertainment in watching the pilfering continue. His mood changes
abruptly, according as fortune smiles or frowns. Faced with his utter
inability to steer a course in life, his family and friends are anxious
to see him share quarters with Riesenkampf. “Take this real methodical
German as your model,” they tell him. Riesenkampf, slightly older than
Dostoevsky, was a physician, and came to settle down in Petersburg
in the year 1843. At this moment, Dostoevsky has not a penny to his
name. He is living on bread and milk--both unpaid for. “Fyodor 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.” They set
up quarters together, but Dostoevsky proves himself impossible as a
companion. He receives Riesenkampf’s patients in the waiting-room,
and each time one of them appears needy, Dostoevsky succours him with
Riesenkampf’s funds or with his own, when he _has_ any. One fine day
he receives a thousand roubles from Moscow, the bulk of which sum
is immediately employed in settling some debts; then, the very same
evening, Dostoevsky gambles away the rest, at billiards, by his own
account, and the following morning is obliged to borrow five roubles
from his friend. I forgot to tell you that the last fifty roubles had
been stolen by a patient of Riesenkampf’s, whom Dostoevsky, in a sudden
manifestation of friendliness, had shown into his room. Riesenkampf and
Dostoevsky parted in March, 1844, without much apparent improvement in
the latter’s ways.
In 1846, he published _Poor Folk_. This book had sudden and
considerable success. Dostoevsky’s manner of speaking about his success
is significant of the man. We read in a contemporary letter:
“It dazes me: I am not living. I haven’t time to think.... A precarious
reputation has been built up around me, and I don’t know how long the
damnable thing will last.”[33]
In 1849, along with a group of suspects, he is taken by the police.
This is the affair known as the Petrachevsky Plot.
It is difficult to say what exactly were at this time Dostoevsky’s
political and social opinions. From this frequenting of suspected
individuals we are to infer a great measure of intellectual curiosity
and a certain generous warm-heartedness which ran him into unconsidered
risks. But we have no authority for believing that Dostoevsky ever was
what can be termed an anarchist, a being threatening the safety of the
state.
Numerous passages in his letters and in the _Journal of an Author_
show him as entertaining quite the opposite ideas, and the whole of
_The Possessed_ is, as it were, a speech for the prosecution against
anarchism. At any rate, taken he was amongst these suspects meeting
round Petrachevsky. He was thrown into prison, sent to trial, and heard
himself condemned to death. It was only at the eleventh hour that the
death sentence was commuted and he was exiled to Siberia. All this is
already familiar to you. In these causeries I should like to speak only
of what you could not find elsewhere; but, for the sake of such as
are unfamiliar with them, I shall read to you some passages from his
letters dealing with his sentence and his life in the penal settlement.
I consider them very self-revealing. In them we shall see, through the
portrayal of his sufferings, appear again and again the optimism that
supported him all his days. This is what he wrote, on July 18, 1849,
from the fortress where he lay awaiting the verdict.
“Human beings have an incredible amount of endurance and will to live;
I should never have expected to find so much in myself; now I know from
experience that it is there.”[34]
Then in August, weighed down by ill-health:
“To lose courage is to sin ... work, ever more work, _con amore_,
therein lies real happiness.”[35]