PPPs ie fd] Saiateateae EMRE Epic can ese eta rae ee hol “s UPS Oey raat wea ribs wg § er nie inter (ek iat f R ' : at tparle f atta ceca i nt Se cee aia on i sas f Deets (eit tapered pe HT M4 Cyt ah fi t er aan 4 Fy ’ r le NS au if feue f G ry etm Ha aN Set y f . aie PW Ee Ee Peewee, Sree asta Sse NetbaytN aotitl ele igi A Gra ns wieihie tee ne Hen ibtar deyit u Pe Ms iy 0 he wan ae ae pica oe ea DEE SO Tonite iat ; ; etaige a aoe sth te tere Gem ae Cer relat eg Penis Mis ied tats reid Fa aenira Aah Aas a gn areca fey vei trae Een tern rattan tree ‘ is a's Lita a Sieuiatt aT erate . pets fata al on gh Srinrrey BS , Mitek pce s eit tht aadichal CHa dptan prinhaaats? : | ; heparin Tae i be hep isha Aig) snot ic tapi tit Tf Sani State ere acer aE pop et ore at eee 4 ‘ornell Univer: Cn A GREAT RUSSIAN REALIST A GREAT RUSSIAN REALIST (FEODOR DOSTOIEFFSKY) BY J. A. T. LLOYD AUTHOR OF ‘‘ TWO RUSSIAN REFORMERS” ETC. WITH A PHOTOGRAVURE FRONTISPIECE NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXII & moe We As, PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN CHAPTER I. II. III. Iv. VI. VII. VIII. IX. xI. XII.. CONTENTS YOUTH . . IN ST. PETERSBURG . THE FIRST NOVEL . CONDEMNED TO DEATH SIBERIA . . A DIFFICULT ROMANCE A YEAR OF MISFORTUNE DOSTOIEFFSKY’S CASES THE IDEAL RUSSIAN DEMONS . . UNDERGROUND . THE GRAND INQUISITOR CHRONOLOGY . HIS WORKS . INDEX . . PAGE ay 45 87 120 147 167___ 197 219 236 256 292 292 25 A GREAT RUSSIAN REALIST e* CHAPTER I YOUTH In 1812 the spirit of the West made yet another attempt to penetrate the mysterious inertia of Russia. The Emperor advanced on Moscow, and through immense distances of forest and marsh and river there vibrated the Polish watchword: ‘ God is with Napoleon, and Napoleon is with us.” But the spirit of the West, with all its genius of alertness, was deflected by something incalculable and irresistible as Nature herself, upon whom the strategy of genius beats idly. Kutusoff was to vanquish Napoleon. Patient as Nature and as ruthless, Russians were to blend with Russia in laying this foreign ghost that had presumed to trouble their slumber. Kutusoff was to pursue the conqueror of Ulm and Jena. The spirit of the West paled before the flames of Moscow. The restless eagles of France withdrew wounded, and again Russia sank back into her icy sleep, and feebler and feebler rang the cry: ‘God is with Napoleon, and Napoleon is with us.” 9 10 A Great Russian Realist But in 1812 the spirit of the West had entered Russia in another and far less imposing disguise. Madame de Staél, the declared enemy of the Emperor, detected in Kutusoff the subtle soul of Russia at bay before the enemy of its dreams. ‘To her, at least, it was no miracle that this old man, who, per- haps, veritably believed himself to be the instrument of God upon earth, should shake off the Antichrist who dared to threaten Holy Russia. To her, at least, the flames of Moscow would not have appeared a sacrifice beyond the patriotism of man. Restless, inquiring, utterly French in her alert intensity, Madame de Staél, with all her racial limitations, detected something of that inner pain of Russia for which the self-contented spirit of the West had as yet no balm beyond the proclamation and the bayonet. Driving for days across the limitless steppes, she divined at once their magic and their menace, and she divined that no ukase of any Tsar, be it Peter himself, could mould this unfathomable people to any caprice of Western logic. For, beneath the silence, the Frenchwoman had detected the power and the pain, and beneath the resignation of the steppes a turbulence of passion beyond the puny cravings of the West. She knew, too, that some day all this would find national expression, and that Russians must find inspiration “in what is most intimate and real in their own souls.” But as yet there was no voice from the ice-filmed steppes. It was a period of blackness, even in the dark history of Youth II Russia. Centuries before, the Northern’ sleeper had refused to waken to the glad summons of the Renais- sance. Centuries before, she had refused to rouse herself sufficiently even to reject the challenge of the Reformation. The Revolution itself had stormed and blazed and passed, leaving Russia steeped in her old, sad dreams. And now the invasion of the grande armée had been stamped out, and it seemed as though Russia would sleep on through the centuries unheeding and unheeded by the world. Such was the country of Nicolai Vasilievitch Gogol, who, born twelve years before Dostoiefisky, was admittedly the founder of the Russian novel. Gogol was a child of three at the time that Madame de Staél was vaguely divining the coming of Russian writers, who would interpret the mystery and the restlessness of the Russian soul. He who knew little or nothing of any atmosphere other than that of the steppes, to whom the talkative battle of ‘“ Hernani” was meaningless, began as a romantic in the simplest sense. For, the great forerunner of Dostoiefisky and all the other Russian novelists, who was at once a realist and a mystic, an observer and a dreamer, ex- perienced a longing to do something great for his sleeping country. He dreamed of this as a clerk in a Government office, and, after hesitating about becoming an actor, he published an unfortunate book, all the copies of which were eventually burnt by his own hand. Then, with the sense of failure heavy upon him, he wrote “ Evenings at the Farm 12 A Great Russian Realist of Dikanka,” which was published in 1831, a year after the triumphant production of “ Hernani” in Paris. Nothing could be less consciously romantic than these sketches of Russian natural life, and though Gogol studied Victor Hugo, as he studied Dickens his power lay in his vision, and his vision was his own. Already the world discerned beneath the coloured films of romanticism the white searchlight of a new and strange genius that had commenced to flash upon the remote distances of Russia. From that moment Gogol may be said to have groped his way out of romanticism into realism, only to pass from realism into mysticism. His genius expressed itself in three phases. He gave the world, in “Tarass Boulba,” what one may call a semi- romantic Russian Iliad. In the “ Revizér,”’ with its famous Tu volles trop pour ta place which rang through Russia like a vibration from the tchinovik’s soul, he gave the world the very core of that Russian satire which is without censoriousness. Finally, in that bitter Odyssey, ‘‘ Dead Souls,” he may be said to have drawn the curtain from the Russian peasant’s isba for the first time in the long history of serfdom. Yet even in this book, which reads often like a satire upon humanity, the strange mysticism of Gogol disentangles itself from scenes of realism as a Greek lyric from the turbulence of Greek comedy. Nowhere has the belief in the in- definable mission of Holy Russia found more exalted expression: “Is it not thus, like the bold troika Youth 13 which cannot be overtaken, that thou art dashing along, oh! Russia, my country? The roads smoke beneath thee, the bridges thunder ; all is left, all will be left, behind thee. ... Yes, on the troika flies inspired by God! oh, Russia, whither art thou dashing? Reply! But she replies not; the horses’ bells break into a wondrous sound; the shattered air becomes a tempest and the thunder growls; Russia flies past everything else on earth; and other peoples, kingdoms, and empires gaze askance as they stand aside to make way for her.” Without traditions to combat or to uphold, Gogol, so far as any human being since the Greeks, or the interpreters of the Greek spirit in the Renaissance, has ever done, looked out at the world around him with his own untired eyes. He communicated his own fresh wonder. “ Don’t blame the mirror, if your mouth is crooked,” is the Russian proverb that he prefixed to his comedy, “ Revizér,” and his avowed aim in all his work—work that in reality was largely subconscious—was “ to drag into light all that was bad in Russia.” Sobakiévitch observes of the Pro- curator in “ Dead Souls,” that “ he is the only decent- mannered man in the town—and even he is a pig.” Pushkin, after reading the book, exclaimed : “ Heavens, what a dreary place our Russia is!” And Gogol had revealed this inarticulate, inchoate Russia frankly and naively as he himself had looked at it. True child, as he was, of that benighted country which had experienced the light of the 14 A Great Russian Realist Renaissance through neither its artistic nor its moral prism, he absorbed the sorrow of the steppes and wrote it down, not with the picturesque local colour of long routine, but with a sobbing and convulsed laughter that was wholly new. “Here is this Russia of ours,”? he seems to say. ‘“‘ Look at these Russians, fools and scoundrels, crushing and crushed alike, their very lies dull and mindless, their very dreams hovering wingless about their starved earth.” But not for an instant does he condemn them, for, is he not one of them, a Russian of the Russians, when all is said? Rogues, blackguards, swindlers, misers, hogs, adulterers, slave-drivers, slave-floggers, slaves— what of it? Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto—the great phrase of Terence, rather than the. Russian proverb on the title-page of the “ Revizér,” may be accepted as the motto of all the Russian realists. Unquestionably it was the motto of Feodor Mikhailo- vitch Dostoiefisky, who was born at Moscow in 1821. He, no more than Gogol, had imbibed the literary principles of the nineteenth century which produced the modern English novel. And, in perhaps an even deeper sense, he had rejected the yet more alien influences that had fashioned the novel of France. The Russian novel of which Gogol was the founder cannot be judged by either of these standards. The nineteenth century was essentially devoted to the development of the bourgeoisie, who, by the Youth 15 irony of history, had inherited the spoils of the French Revolution. England, with her own earlier Revolu- tion and her older bourgeois traditions, shared almost equally in the new régime. English pride and the English reverence for the stability of assured comfort, easily established a bourgeois aristocracy on the foundations of the new wealth. The novelists de- scribed tranquilly this economic revolution which knew nothing of the Terror of France. The novel of manners imperceptibly encroached upon the romance of history. English poets had sung, usually without dangerous exaltation, of rebellion and revolt, but the English novelists, with very few exceptions, took for granted, without any arriére pensée what- soever, the bloodless triumph of the bourgeoisie. English propriety, English piety even—both perhaps intimately associated with the instinct for comfort— still further arranged the novel as a lense specially prepared to be applied to English life. Even the great novelists had to submit, and if they did not join in the universal exploitation of the bourgeois with his new wealth, or of the aristocrat with his old traditions, they at all events refrained from expressing a fresh point of view. The very greatest of them have been perturbed by the pitfalls of English social life, rather than by the catastrophes of hu- manity. Thackeray himself is perpetually haunted by the lorgnette of the English county family in his telescopic sweep of the cosmos. For all this neither Gogol nor his successors cared 16 A Great Russian Realist anything at all. The Russian as opposed to th English novel is without any interest in that sociz competitiveness, bourgeois in its essence and in it aim, which may be said to have been mainly responsibl for the English novel of the nineteenth century Gogol had written down simply and directly wha Russia and the Russians seemed to him to mean. Hi realism meant nothing beyond that clearness o vision which belongs to those who see with thei own eyes. Dostoieffsky in his turn, differing pro foundly in many ways from the author of “ Dea Souls,” was at least one with him in his unconsciou realism. His life is not only interesting in itsel but because it was to a quite exceptional exten the raw material of his art. Few, even in the sa history of Russian literature, have drawn more inti. mately from the long memories of personal suffering than this strange man of genius who was, by Nietzsche’ own admission, the one psychologist from whom ht had been able to learn. Dostoieffsky belonged to a submerged family o noble origin. His father was a doctor at a hospita for the poor in Moscow, and his mother was the daughter of a Moscow merchant, named Netchaiev There were seven children, of whom Michael was the eldest, and Feodor, born on October 30, 1821, the second. The family lived in the greatest poverty. their apartments in the hospital consisting of only two rooms and a kitchen. But when Feodor wa: ten years old, the Doctor bought a small property Youth 17 in the district of Toula, about a hundred miles from the old Russian capital. Here, the mother and children would establish themselves in the summer, and these memories of the good country life left a permanent impression upon the mind of the future novelist. Dostoieffsky has been considered the psy- chologist exclusively of cities, but no one recalls more longingly the breath of the country and the quiet country scenes than this novelist who had the power of tearing the stifling secrets from house after house in St. Petersburg. The children’s first instructor was their mother, and later on they had two teachers, a deacon who taught them religious history, and a teacher of French who had a preparatory school at which Feodor and his elder brother, Michael, afterwards became pupils. The Doctor, himself, undertook to teach them Latin, and in after years Dostoiefisky, who has been too often supposed to be national in the narrowest and most anti-European sense, showed a genuine appreciation of what are called the humanities. In 1834, he and Michael entered the well-known boarding-school of Tchermak, where most of the teachers belonged to the University. Feodor and Michael, indeed, received an education seemingly beyond the narrow means of their parents. But, apart from this, the Doctor and his wife would read aloud to the children in the evenings, and it was in this tranquil family intercourse that Feodor learned to admire the national Russian writers from 2 18 A Great Russian Realist Lomonossov to Karamzine. After entering th boarding-school his reading widened, and, curioush: enough, his taste in reading differed, just as it dic in after life, from the tendency of his temperament As a man he had an incongruous appreciation o Voltaire, and this dreaming, brooding boy becam« absorbed in stories of travel, and in the romance of Walter. Scott. But he had formed one preference at least which was of the essence of his mental de. velopment, for already he was attracted by the work: of Pushkin. Early in 1837 his mother died, and in the same year the Doctor brought his two eldest sons to St Petersburg to have them placed in the School ot Engineers. Feodor was then fifteen, and the twc boys took a preliminary course in a school under the directorship of a certain Kostomaroyv. After this the younger brother alone was admitted to the School of Engineers, Michael having been refused admission on account of his health. But from the very beginning Dostoieffsky was les: an engineering student than a devotee of literature, though, in a letter written jointly with his brother, dated September 6, 1837, he alludes to the fact that the pupils of Kostomarov enjoyed a certain prestige among the candidates for the entrance examination for the School of Engineers. The letters, written together, have a certain boyish stiffness in tone, which vanishes when, in the August of the following year, Dostoiefisky commenced a long series of letters tc Youth 19 his elder brother. He was not yet seventeen, but already he was conscious of the deep truth of Pascal’s maxim: “He who protests against philosophy, is a philosopher himself.” This young engineering stu- dent, worried continually by the most sordid needs of existence, had commenced to look beneath the surface of things, and to examine not only his own heart but the sense of want in the human race. He had become, too, an eager reader, steeping himself in French and German literature, revelling in Balzac and saluting Goethe. But in these letters of a boy of sixteen, as in the novels of the profound psycholo- gist, there is present always the want of money. Not Balzac himself was more obsessed by the great modern need than Dostoieffsky, whose individual preference lay always with the disinherited of man- kind. Like Tolstoy a few years later at the University, Dostoieffsky experienced the humiliation of failing at an examination, and, like his younger rival, he believed that he had met with injustice. But already, again like Tolstoy, he was preoccupied with deeper issues than the vagaries of Russian examiners. For. even as a boy of seventeen, Dostoieffsky divined the great general idea which was to find interpretation in the whole of his future work. The young engineer- ing student knew already that the heart, rather than the intelligence, is the true guide. “The intelli- gence,” he writes, “is a material faculty; the soul or the spirit is nourished by the thought that the 20 A Great Russian Realist heart murmurs to it. Thought is born in the soul. The intelligence is an instrument, a machine set in motion by the fire of our soul.” And already he is imbued with something of that inner pessimism from which, unlike Turgenev, he was afterwards to escape. He is conscious, too, of the brutality of the swarming crowd and of its mindless dominance, but from this attitude of thought he was also very soon to escape. The boy had become a student of human nature who penetrated at once through all external trappings to the soul. Even in these unlaboured, familiar letters, one catches sudden glimpses into the depths of character, sudden flashes of insight such as over and over again in the novels light up the subordinate figures in the background. “ How I pity our poor father!” he exclaims in a letter to Michael, in 1838. “What a strange character! What troubles he has borne! How very sorry I am not to have been able to help him! Do you know? Our father knows nothing at all of the world! He has lived in it for fifty years and he retains the same opinion of people as he had at thirty. Happy ignorance! ” In the spring of the next year he was compelled to write to his father for money, and in the letter he harped pitiably on tea, and boots, exactly as the unfortunate Makar Djevuschkin harps upon them in “‘ Poor Folk.” ‘ When,” he writes to his father, ** owing to bad weather and rain, one is soaked through under the canvas of one’s tent, or when, in the same kind of weather, one returns from drill frozen and Youth 21 tired out, if one does not take tea, one will fall ill, as was the case with me last winter. In spite of all, however, I understand your position, and I will not take tea. Only sixteen roubles are necessary for me to buy two pairs of ordinary boots, then I must arrange my things somewhere: books, boots, pens, paper, etc., etc., must be placed somewhere. For this I must have a chest, for in camp there are no arrangements other than the tents.” ‘That was one of the last letters to his father, who died that year, leaving as guardian of his children the husband of their Aunt Kareline. Brooder as he was, necessity from the very begin- ning compelled Dostoiefisky to consider minutely the details of external life, but even while he was still at the School of Engineers he showed something of his strange power of description and of that far rarer and deeper power of detecting the soul’s growth through suffering. Describing a young poet, a friend of his, he wrote at this period: “‘ He has the aspect of a martyr: he is dried, his cheeks are hollow, his eyes are dry and burning, the spiritual beauty of his face has increased as its physical beauty has dimin- ished.” Dostoieffsky was now under the generous influence of Schiller. ‘I learnt Schiller by heart,” he wrote in the same letter, “I made use of his - language, I dreamed of him; and I believe that my destiny has never brought anything more favourable to me than when it gave me the chance of knowing the great poet at such an epoch in my life.” 22 A Great Russian Realist Schiller, Pushkin, Homer, Byron, Victor Hugo, Corneille, Racine—the young engineering student dreamed of them all, and not only dreamed of them, but dared to share their dreams. He had become conscious of that immense power within himself which years afterwards became for him the thing of all others that he must cherish and defend against a world of enemies. Again and again in these boyish letters, through which there so often vibrates the sad monotone of penury, Dostoiefisky alludes to his limitless ambition, and to his own strange pride, the pride of the artist which differs so profoundly from the pride of him who acquires. And, boy as he was, he had become conscious of the closing in of the vie intérieure, that dangerous encroachment by which the joyous outside world is shut out as it were by black shadows sweeping across the whitened walls of the hospital. ‘But Dostoieffsky knew well what for him were the best things in life. “Brother, brother,” he wrote in the spring of 1841, “let us hasten to the port, let us hasten to liberty! Liberty and a vocation are the great things. I begin to dream of them again as I did before. The soul grows large enough to comprehend the grandeur of life.” In the same year he alluded in one of his letters to those long white nights which, no less than the sad, whitened walls of hospitals, were to be terribly reflected in his future work. His brother was going to be married, and, in a letter Youth 23 asking for the precise date, Dostoieffsky alluded to a spell of insomnia: “As for me, I find it im- possible, at least at present, to write to you fittingly. Would you believe it, I am writing at three o’clock in the morning; last night I did not go to bed at all.”” Examinations were the excuse then, but years after- wards it was in the menacing small hours of the morning that Dostoieffsky evoked those strange and terrible creations that were less characters in fiction than familiar spirits in life. When scarcely out of his teens, Dostoieffsky was already a novelist without knowing it, and one who analysed the mental attitudes towards himself of even unknown people. “I am exceedingly culpable,” he writes to Michael, “ towards your dear fiancée— my little sister, as precious and as dear as you, but of a disposition—forgive me, my good friend—that I donot understand. Can she have so little confidence in her relative, or has she already formed a monstrous opinion of me—of my impoliteness, of my lack of consideration, of my ill-feelings, in fact of all the vices—as to be so prejudiced against me as not to believe in my assurances, and have a grudge against me for my silence, when I speak of lack of time ? ” Some two years later Dostoieffsky finished his course at the College, with the rank of sub-lieutenant, and entered the Russian Service as a designer in the Department of the Engineers. Michael was married now, and had become the father of a little boy who was named after the future novelist, who, incidentally, 24 A Great Russian Realist was on the best of terms with his sister-in-law. But. Feodor was already harassed by debt and difficulties, and, though his guardian supplemented his miserable income by small doles, Dostoieffsky seemed unable to provide himself with the necessaries of life. His interest in engineering grew weaker and weaker as his interest in literature increased. Michael was his confidant in all his literary pro- jects, which included all kinds of translations from the French. Michael had embarked upon a mer- cantile career, but he was always willing to listen to his younger brother’s literary suggestions. Plans for printing and publishing were constantly under dis- cussion, and Feodor’s energy and optimism became overwhelming. But through the correspondence there rings always the harassed cry for the rouble. Hats and boots seem to have haunted for decades the sombre psychologist, who was to sound the deepest plummets of the human soul, to unravel its last evasive windings, to read pityingly the deprecating grimace of fear behind the last mask of all. Hats and boots and buttons, the realities of actual clothes as opposed to the remote philosophy of “ Sartor Resartus,” this is the burden of a correspondence which is to cul- minate, not in a dutiful translation from the French, but in a Russian story taken from life, as Dostoieffsky had commenced to know it. For, the most Russian of all the heirs of Gogol was already conscious of the secret that stirred within him. It was now more than thirty years since Madame Youth 25 de Staél had divined that inevitably there would be men in Russia who would interpret the Russian soul. In actual fact they had followed each other in rapid succession, from Gogol who was born in 1809 to Tolstoy who was born in 1828. Between these dates Turgenev was born in 1818, Nekrassov in 1821, Gri- gorovitch in 1822, and Ostrovésky in 1823. All these writers, except the author of “ Anna Karénina,” made their literary début under the guidance of the Russian critic, Bielinski, whom, in this very year 1843, Turgenev met for the first time. ‘Two years later the famous critic was to hear Feodor Dostoieffsky hailed as “a new Gogol.” In reality he was something infinitely more complex and even perturbing than a new Gogol, and of those three of Gogol’s heirs, whose genius is universally recognised—Turgenev, Dostoiefisky, Tolstoy—it is probable that the second will be accepted as the most profoundly original noumenon. ‘Turgenev and Tolstoy, it is true, appealed primarily to the world rather than to the Russian people, whereas Dostoieff- sky’s appeal was primarily to his own people. The author of “ Smoke” represented the national genius of his country in the West, while the author of * Anna Karénina” attracted European attention to the East. The consummate Russian artist became a cosmopolitan without losing his Russian soul; the creative moralist drew men from all over the world to Yasnaya Polyana. Less than either of these and greater, Dostoiefisky 26 A Great Russian Realist was himself, to an extraordinary degree, the incarna- tion of what each of his powerful rivals interpreted ; he knew where even they could only falteringly guess. The artist, Turgenev, presents a scene in which a man or a woman reveals the core of character. It is the truth, but Tolstoy would begin it. where Turgenev had left off, and the delicate picture would become a truthful confession. But when the last rag of deception had apparently been torn away, Dostoieftsky in his turn would begin where Tolstoy had left off. The verbally truthful confession to a moralist would now become the broken, distorted cry of a stricken soul to itself in its most lonely moment. For, when everything has been said, there are whispers from Dostoieffsky. When the truth has been told and proved by reliable witnesses, Dostoiefisky knows that there is something behind all that. The confes- sion of Tolstoy himself is a mere rough, first reading of truth to this curious inquisitor of the human soul. But as yet Feodor Dostoieffsky was just a young Russian officer of Engineers in pecuniary difficulties, who wanted to translate French novels. As yet, pity, which was at all times the basis of his genius, was almost untinged by terror. And so he was on the eve of producing that poignant romance of reality which was so fittingly called “ Poor Folk.” CHAPTER II IN ST. PETERSBURG Ar the age of twenty-two, Dostoiefisky was more and more dissatisfied with his career in the Engineers, and more and more devoted to literature. He had been steeped for years in French literature, and in 1844 he commenced a translation of Balzac’s “ Eu- génie Grandet,” while at the same time he was engaged in one of his spasmodic efforts at the drama. “The translation is admirable,” he writes to Michael. “They will give me at least three hundred and fifty roubles for it. I am most eager to sell it, but the future capitalist has not enough money to have it re-copied; nor the time either. In the name of the Heavenly angels, send me thirty-five roubles (the price of copying). I swear to you by Olympus and by my Jew, Iankel (in my drama which is just finished), and by what more? By my moustache, if you wish, for, I hope that it will grow some day, that the half of what I receive for ‘ Eugénie’ shall be yours.” All his life the distracted novelist was to make similar suggestions, mortgaging one after the other the fruits of his brain, only to plunge again into fresh calculations for a future always obscure. It seemed to him in these days that translations 27 28 A Great Russian Realist from the French, especially from Balzac and George Sand, would furnish him with the means of existence. In reality, however, the French novel, and perhaps that of Balzac in particular, was more alien from his temperament than even the English. So far as French literature is concerned, the novel implied a certain lowering of tone, somewhat similar, perhaps, to that introduced into Greek drama by Euripides. At all events, the tone of Corneille’s heroes vanished, not so much with the victory of the romanticist in drama as with that of the realist in fiction. From the beginning, indeed, the French novel has been a revolt, first against classicism, then against romanticism, then against realism in the accepted sense, then against naturalism, and so on. Revolt, in the literary sense, has had but little to do with the evolution of the Russian novel. But the nineteenth-century novel in France, as in Russia, has been the deliberate expression of what that century really meant to the people as a whole. Dumas, and his host of imitators, might revert to earlier periods in order to restore the glamour of a lost prestige; but the French novelist of the nineteenth century may be said to have rejected the French aristocrat in favour of the French bourgeois, thus con- tinuing the distorted tradition of the French Revolu- tion. For, as Prince Kropotkine has pointed out, the French bourgeois, having failed to manipulate the French Revolution to his own ends, eventually smothered it before Napoleon gave it the coup de grace. In St. Petersburg 29 One French novelist accomplished with the French bourgeois almost what Aschylus accomplished with Greek heroes. Balzac, with whom the young Russian was so preoccupied in these difficult early days, dealt with the money-makers, who had substituted for the uniform and the sword the black coat and the umbrella, but he dealt with them on the Titanic scale. He was the demiurgos of the bourgeoisie as Aischylus was the demiurgos of Greek mythology. The French novelist poured life-blood into the veins of the doctor, the clerk, the notary, into the veins of every unit of the competing swarm of nine- teenth-century France, no less surely than the Greek poet flung life into the crystallised dreams of gods. Balzac, scarcely less than A®schylus, was formidable in the scrutiny that he cast upon mankind. Not in the poetry of Athens, but in often tumultuous, often distorted French prose, he tore at the secrets of the human heart, revealing the resultant of all these confused and entangled forces. But Balzac, who appears to have detected in mankind but one sincerity —the desire for money—was too engulfed by his own monstrous hive of creations to become the type of psychologist who is inwardly remote and detached from those whom he observes and analyses. Such a psychologist, consciously and willingly isolated from the great mass of mankind, was Gustave Flaubert. It is perhaps one of the most curious coincidences in the history of literature that there were born in the same year, 1821, two students of the human soul, 30 A Great Russian Realist who, because of an inner estrangement from the great mass of their fellows, were, in a sense, condemned to study the ordinary man as a zoologist studies a curious specimen. Moreover, both these unfortunate men of genius had certain similarities of heredity and environment. Both Dostoieffsky and Flaubert were born in a hospital. Each was the son of a provincial doctor, and each suffered from a curious form of epilepsy. Over each, too, there seemed always to hover a suggestion of the early associations of the hospital. Each was from time to time haunted by the idea of suicide; but above all, each, at once through his genius and through his physical defect, was conscious of being compelled to view life and mankind as an onlooker. Flaubert, as a boy even, would lose himself in dreams, so as to avoid the crude realities of his teacher and his comrades. ‘“ When I woke up,” he writes, ‘“‘ with gaping eyes, they laughed at me—the greatest idler of all—who never would have a positive idea, who would show no penchant for any profession, who would be useless in this world, where each must take his own share of the cake, and who, in fine, would never be good for anything, or, at the most, merely of becoming a buffoon, an exhibitor of animals, or a maker of books.” Saturated from his youth with the glamour of history, Flaubert reduced to a common level of world- experience its heroes and its criminals: “ Quand on lit histoire, quand on voit les mémes roues tourner In St. Petersburg AY toujours sur les mémes chemins, au milieu des ruines et sur la poussiére de la route du genre humain, ces figures 14 ressemblent aux priapes égyptiens mis A coté des statues des immortels, 4 cété de Memnon, 4 cété du Sphinx. Ces monstres 14 expliquent pour moi Vhistoire, ils en sont le complément, l’apogée, la morale, le dessert. Crois-moi, ce sont de grands hommes, des immortels aussi. Néron vivra aussi longtemps que Vespasien, Satan que Jésus-Christ.” The eyes of Flaubert, cruelly clear in youth, were to become almost monstrous in their withering penetration. On first seeing Victor Hugo, whom he had worshipped in the early days, the author of “Madame Bovary” regarded him “comme une cassette dans laquelle il y aurait des millions et des diamants royaux.” But when the first surprise had passed, the eyes of Flaubert detected only “un homme comme un autre, d’une figure assez laide et dun extérieur assez commun; trés poli et un peu guindé.” But perhaps Flaubert’s attitude of detach- ment is best suggested by his own avowal, that in his youth he was unable to see a bourgeois pass by without experiencing an intense desire to kick him. In this spirit of antagonism he studied the French bourgeois with a merciless minuteness that has never been excelled, a philosophic and suffering scrutiny that had in reality but little in common with those cynical tranches de la vie of his most famous pupil. The creator of Madame Bovary, in spite of the fact that he in no way resembled a Balzacian hero, became 32 A Great Russian Realist in a sense the apotheosis of Balzac. But the very antithesis of Balzac is the author of “Crime and Punishment.” Balzac expressed the habit of thought of the West, with all its pride in competition, and his heroes are men of intense volition, each of whom, with his “a nous deux maintenant,” is ready to shake his fists at Paris. Dostoiefisky, on the other hand, represented the habit of thought of the East, with all its meditative yielding to necessity, and his heroes, more stricken even than those of Turgenev, are always haunted by Ja vie intérieure, and by the peculiar sense of being impelled towards a particular course of action by unseen forces. Balzac appealed to a nation who saluted success; Dostoieffsky saluted suffering. Bal- zac interpreted the pride of life; Dostoieffsky uttered the secrets of the humiliated and the oppressed. Flaubert, however, had at least something in common with the Slav novelist. Years afterwards, in something of Flaubert’s own spirit, Dostoieffsky was himself to analyse the French bourgeois, and to detect in France nothing but the bourgeois spirit, that is to say the spirit of ownership, the spirit of detachment from the great mass of one’s fellows, which seemed to Dostoieffsky, in its arrogant egoism, the supreme sin. Jacques Bonhomme became even- tually his éte noire and he certainly missed in France those ennobling inspirations which he had so early drawn from her literature. The bourgeois, who, in the hands of Balzac, had become a veritable Franken- In St. Petersburg 33 stein’s monster, and in the hands of Flaubert the dwarfed excrescence of M. Homais, was to become for Dostoieffsky the enemy of a national ideal. Not even Flaubert himself observed him with more incredulous minuteness. ‘The bourgeois,” he wrote in his essay on the bourgeoisie, “‘ is a strange man ; he proclaims directly that money is a superior virtue, and the duty of man, and none the less he loves to play at elevated sentiments. All the French have an air of extraordinary nobility. The vilest French- man who would sell you his own father for a twenty- sous piece, and would willingly give you, without your even asking for it, something into the bargain, Maintains a tone so imposing that you become quite uneasy before it.” At the theatre, it seemed to the Russian, only the absolutely disinterested found tolerance in the eyes of the Parisians: ‘‘ Gustave can shine only by nobility, and the bourgeois weeps with sympathy. He would not be able to sleep in peace without ineffable nobility. But to have taken twelve thousand francs instead of fifteen hundred francs, that is even a duty; he has done it through virtue. It is ignoble and base to steal, that leads to the hulks ; the bourgeois is ready to pardon a great deal, but he does not pardon robbery, even if you were to be dying of hunger, you and your children. But if you steal through virtue! All will be forgiven you. You wish then to make a fortune and amass property, that is to say, to accomplish the duty of nature and 3 34 A Great ‘Russian Realist humanity. That is why they have very clearly desig- nated in the Code, cases of robbery with a base inten- tion, that is to say from pure necessity, and robbery from the highest virtue. ‘This last is strongly sup- ported, encouraged, and very solidly organised.” Dostoieffsky was quick to divine that inheritance of the bourgeois of the spoils of the French Revolu- tion which is one of the most ironical incidents in the long imposture of human progress. He knew in his own fashion, just as Balzac knew and Flaubert knew, the real secret of the nineteenth century. But he divined in a sense that neither of the French- men divined, that inevitably the soul of Homais would know fear in the time when the bourgeois, having conquered all things, would be left face to face with his own soul. Now, so far as the Russian novelists in general, and Dostoiefisky in particular, may be said to have had any prejudice at all, it was against this triumphant tiers état, of the Abbé Sieyés’ famous prophecy, this tiers état which was to glow with pride in France and swell with piety in England. All Russian novelists have turned instinctively towards the real people as opposed to the #iers état—Gogol, as an impartial investigator; Turgenev, as a sympathetic artist; Tolstoy, as a humanitarian moralist, seeking to learn rather than to teach. But probably, of them all, Dostoieffsky was the closest to the heart of Russia. It was to become a maxim with Dostoieffsky never to lose touch with the Russian people. “The theorists,” In. St. Petersburg 35 he maintained, “ burying themselves in their doctrin- aire wisdom, not only fail to understand the people, but even despise it; not, be it understood, with evil intention, but almost casually. We are convinced that even the most intelligent among them considers that when occasion offered he would only have to talk ten minutes with the people in order to under- stand it thoroughly, while the people might quite easily not be listening to what he was talking about.” Again, Dostoiefisky insisted : ‘‘ We have said, and we repeat it, that, morally, it is necessary to unite com- pletely with the people, as narrowly as possible.” But Dostoieffsky, as a propagandist, did not preach the gospel of self-effacement, but rather of self- development, though one wholly foreign to the conceptions of the West. ‘ Understand me,” he said years afterwards in that same essay on the bourgeoisie. “Voluntary sacrifice, fully conscious and free from all compulsion, the sacrifice of one’s self for the benefit of all, is, in my opinion, the sign of the highest de- velopment of the personality, the sign of its superiority, of a perfect self-possession, of the greatest free-will.” All through his life, Dostoieffsky was faithful to these ideas, and now, in 1844, while he was engaged in the translation of Balzac, he was in a far deeper sense preoccupied with those broodings on crushed hu- manity which startled the world, even by their sim- plicity, in “ Poor Folk.” Roubles have become more and more necessary, and his occupation more and more distasteful. “The 36 A Great Russian Realist Service,” he writes to Michael, “ disgusts me, like potatoes.” That is exactly the spirit in which Flaubert used to write while he was studying the Digest and the Code. The Frenchman on his side two years before, in 1842, had expressed an opinion which in its essence was absolute Dostoieffsky. “ La justice humaine,” Flaubert wrote on that occasion, ‘est pour moi ce qu’il y a de plus bouffon au monde ; un homme en jugeant un autre est un spectacle qui me ferait pitié, si je n’étais forcé d’étudier maintenant la serié d’absurdités en vertu de quoi il juge.” Flau- bert, too, more consciously than the Russian, recog- nised the necessity of the vie intérieure. The disgust of external life finally led Flaubert, to art as the one sanctuary, and his scorn of the petty dreams of amelioration led him to the theory of L’ Art pour Art. It followed that Flaubert was to repudiate any conscious mission of the artist, and to demand from him impassibility rather than enthusiasm, im- personality rather than faith. In this spirit he protests to Louise Colet: “Il faut toujours pour les femmes que le beau se rattache a quelque chose, 4 un but, 4 une question pratique: elles écrivent pour se satisfaire le ceeur, non par attraction de Art. Je sais trés bien que ce ne sont pas 14 tes idées mais ce sont les miennes.” And more emphatically still he urged: ‘“ Aime l’Art plus que moi; cette affection—la ne te manquera jamais. Ni la maladie ni la mort ne l’atteindront”; and again: “ Aimons nous donc en |’Art comme les In St. Petersburg 37 mystiques s’aiment en Dieu et que tout pilisse devant cet amour; que toutes les autres chandelles de la vie, qui toutes puent, disparaissent devant ce grand soleil.” Needless to say, he failed to make of Louise Colet “un hermaphrodite sublime.” But of the work of another poet, de Bouilhet, he was to express his views in regard to art still more speci- fically: “ Aussi se gardait-il, de Art précheur qui veut corriger, moraliser; il estimait encore “moins PArt joujou qui cherche 4 distraire comme les cartes. . + « Quant a Art officiel il en a repoussé les avan- tages parcequ’il aurait fallu défendre des causes qui ne sont point éternelles.” Such was the artistic creed of one of these curious psychologists ; the other was wholly opposed to it. Dostoieffsky was to lose his almost physical shrinking from the crowd, and was to become passionately anxious to be merged in it, forgotten in it, lost in it. He was to become not the castigator of humanity, but its suppliant. And he was to reject absolutely the final doctrine of the author of “ Salammbé.” Dostoieffsky, no less than Tolstoy, was to demand a religious réle for Art and to reject categorically the formula of L’Art pour PArt. Flaubert broke with the romantics; Dostoieffsky had never joined them. Flaubert’s pessimism lay at the very roots of his temperament. It was no affectation when he con- fessed that he had never seen a child without thinking that it would become an old man, nor a cradle without musing on a tomb. It was no sinister badinage that 38 A Great Russian Realist made. him admit to his mistress that the sight of a woman made him think of a skeleton. His pessimism destroyed the very objectivity for which, with his torment of style, he craved. He, who placed im- personality before all other things, was himself personal to the last degree. Asked from whom he had drawn the personality of Madame Bovary, he answered: “Madame Bovary, c'est moi—d’aprés mot.” Of pessimism in this sense, Dostoieffsky knew nothing, but his pathos had nothing at all in common with the “tendromanie féminine” of Flaubert’s derision, From the moral solitude of Flaubert, the Russian, who knew something of it at first, was at least partially to escape. The creator of Madame Bovary was to become poisoned by his own ego; the creator of Sonia was to find new life through pity. Flaubert, placing Art before life, was to sum up artistic experience in the formula “ Ne pas con- clure.” Dostoiefisky was to interpret the destiny of his country, which, in his own words, “ consists in revealing to the world a Russian Christ, unknown to the Universe, and whose origin is contained in our own orthodoxy. In my opinion, it is there that the source of our future civilising power, and of the resurrection through us of the whole of Europe, and the whole essence of our future force, are to be found.” Nothing could be more antagonistic to the weary irony of Flaubert than such a confession of national faith; yet Dostoiefisky and Flaubert, by reason of In St. Petersburg 39 their weakness as well as of their strength, were in some respects curiously similar. Both watched their fellow-man, often as the doctor watches the patient, sometimes as the patient watches the doctor. The tormented dissatisfaction of each, arrogantly self- centred in Flaubert, expanding and asking for sym- pathy in Dostoiefisky, condemned before all other things the prosperity of the bourgeois soul. Again, Flaubert, the realist, was temperamentally antipathetic to the essential materialism demanded by realism, while of his own realism the Russian once wrote in a letter to A. N. Maikov, from Florence: “Ah! my friend! I have altogether different ideas upon reality and realism from those of our realists and our critics. My idealism. .. is more realist than their realism. My God! If one had to repeat what we Russians have gone through, during these last ten years from the standpoint of intellectual develop- ment, would not the realist cry out that it was pure imagination! But it is indeed realism, only more profound ; theirs is all on the surface. Look at Lubim Tortzov (the hero of a comedy by Ostrovésky). Is he not miserable in reality? And yet that is all that their realism permits itself of the ideal. That realism does not seem to me to have the air of profundity! Their realism would not know how to express the hundredth part of the real facts which have existed.” Both the Russian and the Frenchman delighted 40 A Great Russian Realist in their métier, were absorbed by it to the exclusion of other interests. Turgenev, indeed, might have written to Dostoieffsky what he actually wrote to Flaubert: ‘“ We have hard times to go through, we who are born onlookers.” For the rest, it is not surprising that Dostoieffsky, a typical Russian, born in a period of stagnation, even in the stagnant history of Russia, differed from the French student of men and things. What is sur- prising is that, of the two, the Russian’s glance into the human soul was far the deeper and more search- ing. But Nietzsche, who disparaged Flaubert and saluted Dostoieffsky, realised how this could be. Nietzsche knew that St. Petersburg divined where Paris experienced. But apart from this extraordinary power of divination, Dostoiefisky possessed that Slav incapacity to crystallise his notions of good and bad which seemed to Turgenev the very core of the Russian character. For example, the author of “ Smoke” once said at one of the Magny dinners: ‘‘ We are robbers in Russia, and yet, though a man may have committed twenty robberies that he admits, if it is proved that he was in want, that he was hungry, he is acquitted.” And Turgenev claimed that the Russians and no others were the real hommes de Phumanité. Of all the Russians this might be most truly said of Dostoiefisky, who was essentially a man of hu- manity in spite of his almost mystical belief in the mission of Russia. And because of this all-embracing In St. Petersburg 41 sympathy which always contended with the sense of detachment, Dostoieffsky could read most clearly of all, the naive and at the same time complex, the impulsive and at the same time evasive, soul of the Russian people. Above all, he understood those desperate and exasperated natures who are over- whelmed by the desire to hurl themselves into an abyss. He understood, too, those other despairing people, seized by a yet stranger ecstasy, who wish to abase themselves below the humblest, and to prostrate themselves before the altar of human suffering. But in 1844 he is as yet only sub-conscious of his mysterious powers. He has determined to send in his resignation and to stake all, like the gambler he always was, on his first novel. “I have no re- grets,”” he wrote to his brother Michael. “TI have a hope. I am in the act of finishing a novel of about the length of ‘Eugénie Grandet.’? The novel is rather original. I am re-copying it; towards the 14th, I shall certainly have a reply. I shall place it in the Otetchestvennia Zapiski (I am pleased with my work). I shall get perhaps four hundred roubles; that is all that I can hope for. I would have given you details about my novel, only time is pressing.” In the spring of 1845 there is another allusion to the making of “ Poor Folk.” Dostoieffsky, it seems, had re-written it, and after re-writing it had been exasperated by the inevitable delay caused by the 42 A Great Russian Realist Censor. The distracted young author was deter- mined to print at his own risk. “I have made a desperate decision,” he told his brother. “ Iam going to wait, run once more into debt, and towards the first of September, when everybody is coming back to St. Petersburg, and people are scenting novelties as a sporting dog scents game, I am going to have my novel printed with my last resources, and they perhaps will not be sufficient. When one places something in a Review, one puts oneself under the yoke, not only of the principal hotel-keeper but also of all the underlings, and of all the scullions who nestle in the places where civilisation is propagated. There is not only one dictator—there are twenty of them. Printing oneself, that means digging one’s own hole, and, if the work is good, not only will it not be lost, but it will also deliver me from my troubles and my debts, and will give me bread.” In the same letter he expressed his determination, like Flaubert, never to write to order and continued : ““T have decided to keep my old lodging. Here at least I have a fixed address, and I shall be tranquil for about six months. I shall have to pay for all this with my novel. If the affair does not succeed, I may have to hang myself.” When he was not writing, he occupied himself in reading, and reading renewed in him the capacity to.create: “TI take up something that I have not read for a long time, I read it again, and it seems to me that new power has come to me, I enter into In St. Petersburg 43 everything, I understand better and I draw from it the power of creating.” Gustave Flaubert, the ae Rear who had ab- sorbed most profoundly the questioning spirit of the West, had commenced his literary career as a pupil of Chateaubriand, and he assimilated only too easily the arrogant world-weariness of René. This was to deepen rather than to mellow, until it cul- minated in the calumny of Homais, an indictment of humanity from the standpoint of art, almost as significant as one of Tolstoy’s from the standpoint of morality. Dostoieffsky, the Slav, in whom dreams beyond the questions of the West were already stirring, was commencing his life- work with the uncalculated and incalculable sympathy of ‘“ Poor Folk”? which was to culminate in the world-com- passion of Sonia in “Crime and Punishment.” And now, as always, or at least almost to the very end, he was working not so much for fame as for bread. But he will not write to order even in such menacing moments as that in which he wrote to his brother: “In the Invalide I have read the feuilleton in which they speak of the German poets who have died from hunger, from cold, or else in lunatic asylums. There are at least twenty of them, and what names! I shiver at it at the present instant. One must be a charlatan. ...” But he was never a charlatan, this man who was to experience and to interpret the sombre suffering of Russia! He was never a charlatan, and least of all when he refused to sacrifice himself 44 A Great Russian Realist to a political dream in which he at no time believed. From the beginning, the dream in which he did believe with all his soul, was literature, and to this, like Turgenev, and like Flaubert, he was faithful to the end. CHAPTER III THE FIRST NOVEL Tue beginning of the year 1845 was a difficult period, even in the difficult life of Feodor Dostoieffsky. He had now resigned from the Service, and all his hopes were centred upon the dubious success of a manuscript with which, in its first forms, he himself was dissatisfied. Again and again he alters it and threatens to throw himself into the Neva, if, in its final form, it should prove a failure. In the May of the same year, however, it was complete, and Grigorovitch, his old school-friend, sent it to Nekrassov, who was on the point of editing a new literary review. Nekrassov read it eagerly and that same night came with Grigorovitch to Dostoieffsky’s miserable lodging and hailed him as a great writer. After this they brought the manu- script to Bielinski with the words: “‘ A new Gogol has appeared!” But the Russian critic observed with some acidity: ‘‘ With you, Gogols sprout up like mushrooms!”? When he had read the manu- script, however, he, too, hailed the obscure young officer as the veritable heir of Gogol. ‘“ Bring him to me,” he exclaimed. “ Bring him to me as 45 46 A Great Russian Realist quickly as possible.” It seemed that Dostoieffsky’s success was assured from that moment, and “ Poor Folk ” was published by Nekrassov early the next year, Never was there a book at once more actual with the white light of reality and more irradiated by the delicate mirage of pity. Never was there a more simply-written story, and one at the same time more poignantly suggestive of withheld memories. For, even Makar Djevuschkin, the poor old clerk, has his reservations and his withheld secrets as he scrawls his sordid life’s story to the little seamstress, who, on her side, hides so much, while seeming to tell everything. All that withheld knowledge was of the essence of Dostoieffsky’s art, and as for what was written between Varvara Alexeievna and the old clerk, that was the very stuff of his daily life, almost since childhood. He knew minutely every squalid privation which the old clerk glossed over with such tremulous courage. He himself had harped on boots and buttons just as poor old M4kar harps upon them. It was not from the French novelists, but from his own heart, that the secret of the thing had shaped itself into life. The terrible, imaginative force that he was afterwards to display scarcely shows itself even in embryo in these pages, but each of them is steeped in that essentially Russian pity which has become a sneer among the English, as represent- ing a phase of compassion that denotes sympathy for the criminal, rather than for his victim. In reality this Russian pity springs from no eccen- The First Novel 47 tricity or distortion of judgment, but from a national disinclination to condemn 4 outrance. As Turgenev was to point out at a Parisian dinner-table, the law is not crystallised among the Russians as it is crystal- lised in the West of Europe. Turgenev admittedly shared this national point of view, but his pity was to a large extent that of the artist who has remained at the same time a country gentleman. Tolstoy also understood this national sentiment, but as a moralist who was developing into a Christian philo- sopher. The pity of Dostoieffsky was something different ; it was that neither of the artist nor of the moralist, but of the fellow-sinner. He cannot judge after the English fashion, nor can he precisely codify the complexities of circumstances in the manner of the French. Both the conscientious didacticism of English self-righteousness and the well-worded formule of French logic were remote from him. He cannot even forgive as the English forgive, that is to say from the standpoint of pardoning the guilty. Norcan heat any time utter the rhetorical manifestoes of French clemency. The pity of Destoieff- sky is essentially that of a suffering human being for a fellow-sufferer, and if the Russians are in reality les hommes de Vhumanité, as Turgenev claimed they were, then Dostoieffsky is a Russian of the Russians. And from this Russian standpoint he stood almost alone among the great writers of his race. He was the son of a professional man, while both Turgenev and Tolstoy belonged to the land-owning class. 48 A Great Russian Realist Unlike them again, he was essentially the novelist of cities as opposed to the interpreter of the long, silent steppes. Moreover, in contradistinction to Turgenev, he was to become a religious enthusiast as opposed to an ironical and sombre doubter, and he was at the same time temperamentally incapable of the long-drawn processes of Count Tolstoy’s slow and reasoned “‘ conversion.” But this détragué of genius was disconcertingly practical in his own way. Whilst Tolstoy was framing rules of conduct and Turgenev was elaborating his mocking and compassionate philosophy, Dostoieffsky could write to his brother Michael ; “ You see, brother, from all this, I have drawn up a splendid rule of conduct. The first thing that is very disadvantageous for a talent that is making its start is friendship with the proprietors of reviews, from which springs neces- sarily familiarity, and after that all kinds of dis- agreements.” One cannot too carefully avoid generalising on the subject of this most complex man of genius, who has been too often labelled a mere fanatic, who knew nothing of the world in which he lived. As a matter of fact, he was steeped from childhood in foreign literature, and he travelled several times all over Europe. And he, who so sincerely wished to become one with the mass of the Russian people, was, during his imprisonment in Siberia, regarded always as a noble, and consequently as an alien. Again, this searcher after the sad secrets of cities, reveals The First Novel 49 over and over again an intimate love of Nature. Finally, in spite of his Slavonic self-abandonment to the presentiment of faith, he shows in many of his books a spirit, almost Mephistophelian in its rest- less inquiry, a spirit that analyses ruthlessly the very mysteries that so perturbed the inner life of Count Tolstoy. In short, a certain duality, which reveals itself both in Turgenev and Tolstoy, is undoubtedly to be found in the Christian believer, Dostoieffsky. But at twenty-three Dostoieffsky was conscious of none of these things. He was a young Russian writer, occasionally conscious of immense power and always willing to burn himself out in the glad toil of creation, but he was cramped, curbed, rendered powerless by the want of money. His health, too, was against him, and already he was experiencing the horror of loneliness at night, those desolate moments in which the phantoms of his brain were, in the years to come, to close in upon him, to master him, to obsess him as though, indeed, it were they, and not he, whose haunting secrets were being revealed in the night. “I write to you, at this moment,” he tells his brother in 1845, “ first, because I promised to write to you as quickly as possible, and secondly, because I am sick and must write to you... . Ah! brother, what a sad thing is solitude! I begin to envy you, now. You, brother, are happy, truly happy, without knowing it. I will write to you again by the next post. What troubles me a little, is that I am quite (until the 15th) without resources, 4 50 A Great Russian Realist but it does not trouble me enormously, for at this moment it is impossible for me to think of anything ; besides, all that is merely a bagatelle. I am very feeble, and I wish to go to bed, for here is the night. What will the future have to say to us?” But as yet the deeper terrors of Dostoieffsky’s vision were undefined. As yet his reading of the human soul was mercifully blurred by his compassion, which, on its side, was to deepen and extend even to the suffering of sin. But the Dostoieffsky of * Poor Folk,” no less than the Dostoiefisky of ‘‘ Crime: and Punishment” or the yet deeper Dostoieffsky of ‘The Brothers Karamazov,” is Slav in his presenta- tion of life. He is Slav in his simple directness and in his involuntary avoidance of make-believe. And emotional experience already permeates the facts of poverty as no note-book industry of French realism has ever permeated them. Others have mounted the rostrum to declaim about pity; Dostoieffsky spoke not to the crowd, but from the crowd, and as one of the crowd. With him this genius of pity is uncon- scious, and he is wholly ignorant of that sense of superiority which is the Anglo-Saxon’s national inheritance. Other men of genius of other races have pleaded for the poor and the afflicted, but never in the manner of Dostoiefisky. For, each of these has sought consciously or sub-consciously to ameliorate the material evils which he has detected. Victor Hugo n “ Les Misérables ” has given us a grandiose indict- The First Novel su ment of the impersonal machine that is called Society. The English Dickens, practical in spite of his exuberant creativeness, confines himself to attacking specific grievances with the avowed intention of remedying a definite evil. The Russian had no such clearly defined intention, and it is even more absurd to label him the Russian Dickens than it is to label the author of “Sapho” the French Dickens. In reality this boy of twenty-three, often on the verge of starvation and haunted by the temptation of suicide, drew the raw material of his art from life itself. Life, and life only, taught him the secret of “‘ Poor Folk.” The long days and the long nights had revealed their meaning to him. Memories, suffer- ings, doubts, misgivings, all had converged in the simplicity of compassion. But even in this first book there is present the recognition of the city as an implacable entity, almost an individual, conscious, watchful, malignant. Already he suggests the eyes of staring houses, peering down at little people, scuttling fearfully past them, only to be stared down by yet further thousands and thousands of stony eyes. Already he knew that there were secrets in a city other than the intrigues of palaces. Already he was able to pass up creaking staircases and to open the rotting doors of stifling, brooding rooms. Already he was able to throw light into cellars, where human beings survive as rats, conscious of the city as a Circe, who has brutalised their bodies, while leaving them the souls of men. The boy of twenty-three had 52 A Great Russian Realist divined all this and much more: but in later years he was to pierce through the last barriers of con- cealment and to reveal, not the cellars of the tenement house, but the cellars of the human soul. But from the very first he associated himself instinctively, and without effort, with the ranks of the disinherited and the disgraced. Nothing could be more Russian than “ Poor Folk.” At first glance it seems almost too naive, a mere human document expressing the personal hurt in life and love. But as one reads it more closely, one realises that a psychologist, strangely conscious of the windings and twistings of the human heart, has written one of the simplest masterpieces in the world. For, the book is steeped in those lacrime rerum which link the sad secrets of the humblest lives to the imperial destinies of nations. But there is no conscious idealism in this series of letters between a half-crazed drunkard and a half-starved seamstress.) Ma&kar Djevuschkin is un- conscious of sacrifice and knows nothing of the exaltation that accompanies it. He is just a poor person, a mere fly in the indifferent city, but he will do what he can for a being even more helpless than he. For her sake, he will do without the good things that he understands, such as tea, tobacco, boots, and buttons. Well he knows that such small sacri- fices have no place in the annals of heroes. He knows this, but he also knows that after all he is a human being—not a good specimen perhaps, but a man The First Novel 53 who can copy well, copy as well as any clerk of his standing in the whole Government Service. That is all that he has to say for himself, and yet as he writes down the squalor of his life he unconsciously projects strange fresh dreams, such as the conscious idealists have never dreamed. And the girl is not in the least a heroine of misfortune, a pearl in the gutter to be rescued by a Prince Charming who has divined her worth. She is but one more unhappy little unit, tossed hither and thither by the same muddy waves of life whose buffetings the old clerk knows so well. Almost on the point of drowning though he was, he had thrown her a rope, to which she clings as well as she can. The old man writes and writes, writes his heart out, and gradually in these few letters we learn to know him, as though we had been at his elbow all the time. Nothing can be more natural in spite of the form of presentation. It has been urged that these letters are works of art and not at all the pro- ducts of a poor old clerk and a little seamstress. None the less the illusion easily survives, for, one feels that it is love which has lent its own magic to the old man’s pen. And so he writes and writes and writes the things that he would never dare to stammer out in speech. And Varvara is not at all an ungrateful parasite, who, having fed meagrely on a poor life, goes on her way to batten upon arich one. She is fond of Makar from habit, and because there is really no one else 54 A Great Russian Realist for her to be fond of; but she sees the old clerk as clearly as he sees himself in his worst moments. In the background of even her young life, there had been dreams in which poor old M4kar had had no share. And because there is no one else with whom to discuss these intimate memories of youth, she will write down the past for Makar, just as he writes down the present for her. The narrative lives; the illusion of life, under the vitalising touch of Dos- toiefisky, triumphs over the old faded method. And the realism of Dostoieffsky persists. When the girl writes to M4kar to thank him for his little kindnesses, or to scold him for his weaknesses, she is a cool, com- petent little person enough, even though she is only a waif in the great city. But when she muses on her early youth, on her affection for Petinka, and her pity for his drunken old father, then her own love warms her memories into mellow life in exactly the same sense that Makar’s love for her animates his letters even when they treat upon boots and buttons. No one who has read it can forget the scene of old Pokrovski following Petinka’s funeral, as a dog might follow the corpse of his master: ‘‘ There was no one present, save the father and myself. I could hardly stand through the service. Presently the undertaker’s men closed the coffin, screwed down the lid, put it on the cart, and drove off. I only followed it as far as the end of the street. The driver set off at a trot. The old man ran after him, crying loudly, the effort of running, shaking and interrupting The First Novel 55 his sobs. The poor old fellow lost his hat, and did Rot stop to pick it up. His head was wet with rain, the wind buffeted him, the sleet beat upon his face, but his grief was too great for him to notice the weather as he ran weeping, first on one side of the cart, and then on the other. His old coat-tails waved like wings upon the breeze. Books bulged out of all his pockets, and in his hands he carried another huge volume of which he never let go. Passers-by doffed their hats and crossed themselves. Othets stopped to stare at the poor old mourner. Every now and then a book would fall out of his pocket into the mud. Then. he would be stopped and informed of his loss: he would pick it up and start ‘off again in pursuit of the coffin. At the corner of the street the cart stopped to take up another coffin, that of some poor woman. At last it turned the corner, and was hidden from my eyes.” And when the little seamstress remembers the good country life, birds, boughs, ice, the long quiet fields, all the immediate happiness of childish sensation returns with equal vividness, and one feels that it is not Dostoiefisky speaking through a puppet’s mouth, but that it is really a little seamstress whol is remem- bering with love in her heart. But nakedly simple as these characters are, we meet with, even in this first book, some of those odd twists and reservations that are so conspicuous in the creations of Dostoieffsky. Even poor old Makar has his secret, which he must hide from 56 A Great Russian Realist Varvara, and sometimes there are hints of conceal- ment in his frank, broken utterances. For, some- times, the knowledge that he is a butt even in the rag-heap of humanity where he lives, is too oppressive and he flies to the forgetfulness of alcohol. And then shame seizes him; he must not speak of that, even to her. Whatever sad intimacy of misery he may reveal, he will always gloss over that. Boots, buttons, copecks, tea, sugar, on these things he harps almost cheerfully, but he will not speak, until the facts are dragged from him by the girl who chides him, of the thing that shames him deep down in his heart, far beneath the external squalor of privation which has never soiled his soul. Varvara, also, has her reservations in the present as in the past, but even of them she can speak openly to poor old Makar, who does not count. She is not at all the conventionalised parasite. She is quite willing to share with the old clerk at all times her poor store of copecks. Only she wishes to breathe, and for that a stronger rope is necessary in less muddy waves. Of course there is another man, but he again is not the conventionalised reformed Lovelace, who would contrast obviously and becomingly with the discarded clerk. Varvara is rather dubious about him from the beginning to the end, but she and the old clerk both admit him to be the stronger rope for her. As for Makar, he should be only too thank- ful to help in this fresh floating of a bedraggled life. The old clerk does help as a matter of course, helps The First Novel 57 as a horse pulls between new shafts, helps without realising that this is the last discord of sacrifice. The little seamstress is going to marry a rich man, and so, of course, she requires nice clothes, and even jewellery. It is all very puzzling and complicated, and two heads are better than one; it is not sur- prising that she forgets old Makar’s heart. He must runs errands and see about things, and above all realise the new standard of values to which she herself is quickly rising. Not for an instant does the girl gloat over her triumph; quite the contrary. Only it is a new problem of existence, and Makar, who has always helped her in her little sums of life, must certainly help her in this, the most important of all. Backwards and forwards the old clerk runs to supervise the decking out for another of this girl, who has accepted his heart as the very least of her crumbs of happiness. There is no concealment from old Makar; one need not pose before him. He is obedient, fetching and carrying like a dog, with- out question or reproach. The humour of the thing blends, in the Russian way, with its pathos. It is very different from the healthy, bubbling laughter of Dickens, and more different still from the trained, sophisticated smile of Alphonse Daudet. With the Russian, humour does not commence where pathos leaves off; each is a vibration as it were of the same long-drawn, convulsive sound of pain. Nor has the life-like naturalness of Dostoieffsky anything in common with 58 A Great Russian Realist Maupassant’s “slices of life”? in which the truth is so often uttered as a gibe or even an affront to the reader. At twenty-three, Dostoieffsky had learned the essentials of his art from life, as he himself had ex- perienced it. The most national of the great Russian novelists, he presented characters who were quite foreign and even antipathetic to Western readers. The stricken heroes of Turgenev appeared, from the French standpoint, essentially insignificant, essen- tially lacking in the splendid gestures of the jeune premier. Viewed from the English standpoint, Rudin, Lavretsky, Litvinov, and the rest seem, one and all, lacking in the desire to do things. The heroes of Tolstoy, with their slow, ruminating broodings, are necessarily foreign to the Frenchman’s appreciation of precision, logic, and condensation. ‘To the English- man, Pierre, Levin, and the rest appeal as moralists who have never arrived at practical, definite methods of doing good works in this world of the present moment. But in France and England alike, the characters of Turgenev and Tolstoy are perfectly intelligible. With Dostoieffsky, this is not quite the case, and in this, his first book, as in ‘‘ The Brothers Karamazov,” his last, his characters reveal qualities that are puzzling, even repellent, perhaps, to Western conventionality. Viewed from a Western bias, M4kar, in his utter self-renunciation, almost ceases to be a human being. Compare him, for example, with Tom Pinch, and The First Novel 59 one realises that Dostoieffsky has glanced down into depths of humiliation of which Dickens knew nothing, and of which English readers do not care to learn. But old Makar is absolutely natural. He sheds his own tears, not the author’s, and the poor tatter- demalion of mischance preserves the mirage of great dreams in his sunken eyes. With no thought of self, without pugnacity, without jealousy, incapable of hatred, the unfortunate one experiences the most profound emotion by which the greatest literature of the world has been ever stamped. Genius skips centuries in the evolution of a race, generations in the evolution of a family, and youth itself in the evolution of an individual. At twenty- three, Dostoiefisky was mature by right of divination. Moreover, he was mature in that foreboding of au- tumn as opposed to the anticipation of spring. The young Russian officer was already penetrated by that sense of loss which at one moment or another has come to the world-artists of all races. Homer in the very morning of the world knew well that “as is the race of leaves, so is the race of man.” Sappho, the /Zolian singer of roses, uttered the personal note of the same immense want in a single immortal line: "Hpdpav piv eyo oéOev, “Arh, mddat Tora. Euripides, for all his sceptical modernity, was permeated by the same sense of loss which the im- perial Virgil felt for the dead Marcellus. The 60 A Great Russian Realist worldly Roman mocker utters to Postumus the same intimate regret for the neiges d’antan as Francois Villon. Shakespeare himself, who concentrated the full flame of the Renaissance upon his island, even Shakespeare, the poet of renewed pagan dominance, cannot escape the warning of Ecclesiastes. And the young Russian, wholly unconscious of any kinship with such as these, experienced, in spite of his youth, the knowledge of the last regret which is something deeper than the fatigue of disillusion. Boy as he was, he read the fear of the heart’s emptiness, the fear that escapes like a cry from the old clerk in his last letter. Varvara has gone her way to security, and he has helped her to the very last. He had never thought of acting in any other way, but now that the tie has been finally severed, he understands that he has loved her, that she had been the meaning of all his life, that without her there is nothing at all for him, not even the inner world of dreams. In a moment the crazed old drunkard realises it all, sums it all up, and cries out for the girl who has left him, hope- lessly, helplessly, as age may cry for youth. Nothing can bring her back, and now he knows that he cannot live without her. So long as he had been able to see her from time to time, it had been easy enough for him to obey, to run her errands, to help her even in her escape out of his life. But the instant that he can see her no more, the current between them has been deflected, and the old man knows his im- mense loneliness for the first time. The First Novel 61 Dostoieffsky was to track the human soul to the very core of its isolation, revealing far more sinister secrets than the hurt of poor old Makar, but, had he ended his career with the last letter in ‘ Poor Folk,” he would have proved his right of admission among the few real psychologists of the world. Like the greatest writers, too, the young Russian from the beginning disdained to reveal directly his own personality. In reference to the criticisms on his first book, he writes to his brother: “ Our public has instincts, like all crowds, but no knowledge. They cannot understand how one can have a style like mine. They like to see in everything the face of the author; but I have not shown mine. They cannot understand that it is Djevuschkin who is speaking and not I, and that Djevuschkin would not know how to speak otherwise. They find the novel too long drawn out, and yet there is not one word too much in it. They recognise in me an original note (Bielinski and the others) which consists in the fact that I employ the method of analysis and not synthesis—that is to say, that I descend into the depths, and, in examining the atoms, search for the whole, while Gogol starts with the whole; and it is for this reason that he is less profound than I am.” Bielinski was acting at this time as a mentor to the heir of Gogol, counselling him in regard to his terms with publishers. All kinds of literary schemes are in the air, but none the less, Dostoiefisky writes to his brother Michael: “ Continue to translate 62 A Great Russian Realist Schiller at your leisure, although it is quite impossible to say when one may be able to realise the edition. I shall try to hunt out some translation for you. But you see, the Otetchestvennia Zapiski has three official translators. Perhaps we shall arrange some- thing together. In any case everything is in the future. If I succeed, the drama of Schiller will succeed also—that is all that I know.” The idealism of Schiller was long afterwards to haunt Dostoieffsky side by side with the most per- verse contortions of the human soul, and in almost every one of his books one character at least is steeped in the generous dreams of the German poet whom Turgenev, no less than Dostoieffsky, acknowledged in his youth. CHAPTER IV CONDEMNED TO DEATH Berore the end of 1845 the days of doubt seemed to be over for ever. Fame had found and saluted the young Russian officer, and Fame is always intoxi- cating to youth. Even Dostoieffsky, the novelist of suffering and failure, the novelist of vast stifled crowds, the novelist whose heroes are always under- neath, even Dostoiefisky experienced the surprise and delight of this sudden prestige in the Petersburg from which he had demanded only bread. “ Well, my brother,” he writes in the November of this eventful year, ‘‘ I think that my fame will never reach greater heights than those to which it has soared to-day. I meet everywhere with the greatest respect ; curiosity about me is immense. I have made the acquaintance of a great many people in good society. Prince Odoevsky begs me to honour him with a visit, and Count $ is tearing his hair in despair ; Panaiev has assured him that a talent has made its appearance which will surpass them all. § has been all over the place, and, when at Kraevsky’s, asked him suddenly: ‘Who is this Dostoieffsky ? Where shall I get hold of this Dostoieffsky ?? Kraev- 63 64 A Great Russian Realist sky, who does not mince matters with anybody, and always says things straight out, answers that Dos- toieffsky would not care to honour him with a visit. That is quite true: the aristocrats perch on stilts, and imagine that they will annihilate me beneath the weight of their favours. I am received everywhere as a marvel. I cannot open my mouth without people repeating in every corner ‘ Dostoieffsky has said this, Dostoieffsky wishes to do that.’ ” One would be unwilling to quote this fragment of boyish exultation but for the fact that Dostoieffsky’s period of youthful success was so very brief. Besides this, it illustrates his real attitude towards those in St. Petersburg who had the audacity to patronise him on account of his poverty. Dostoieffsky had his own pride, and Vania, the hero of “ Injury and Insult,” expresses the same arrogant attitude towards the arrogant that Dostoiefisky expresses in this letter to his brother. But at this period at least Ivan Turgenev was not among the number of those who irritated Dostoiefisky. ‘‘ Ah, my brother,” he ex- claims in this very letter, “ what a man!” and he goes on to analyse the future author of “ Smoke”: ““He has a real talent, he is a poet, an aristocrat, good-looking, rich, intelligent, well-read, he is twenty- five years old—I do not know what Nature has been able to refuse him! Finally, he possesses a character that is absolutely honourable, formed in a good school, and a perfect disposition.” But he was very soon to change his mind, or at Condemned to Death 65 least to modify his opinion in regard to his rival. For, it was about this time that Turgenev gave that card-party at which he was unfortunate enough to offend Dostoieffsky, who happened to enter the room just as a burst of laughter greeted some blunder at one of the card-tables. White with anger, Dos- toiefisky left the room at once, and when his host went out to inquire about him, he was informed by his servant that this strange guest had been walking up and down outside the house without his hat for the last hour. ‘Turgenev tried to pacify him, assuring him that no one in his house had been rude enough to ridicule him; but Dostoieffsky refused to listen to reason, and after returning for his hat and overcoat left abruptly. As the years passed, the breach between the two great Russian novelists widened. On the eve of return from his long exile, he was to write in a letter to his brother, Michael, a protest against the dis- crepancy between the payment for his work and the payment for Turgenev’s: “I know very well that I write worse than Turgenev, but my work is not as bad as all that, and besides, I hope to write as well as he does. Why then, when I am in so great need, should I receive one hundred roubles, and Turgenev, who owns two thousand souls, receive four hundred roubles? Necessity compels me to hurry and to write in order to procure money, and consequently to spoil my work inevitably.” Time deepened his dislike of his older rival, and he began to disparage 5 66 A Great Russian Realist his work which he had once so genuinely admired. He ridiculed scornfully “The Execution of Tropp- man,” and greeted “‘ King Lear” with the com- ment: “ He is failing; he is becoming paler and paler.” But it was in “‘ Demons” that he definitely and openly attacked the kindly and generous man of genius, whom it was his misfortune, in spite of all his analytic acumen, never to appreciate. And yet, in this very picture of Karmazinoff, the malicious and unsuccessful novelist, Dostoiefisky shows male- volently, but none the less clearly and amply, his full power of extraordinary and almost ferocious concentration. Karmazinoff withers under his pene- trating watchful eye; but then Karmazinoff was not Ivan Turgenev, for, not even the genius of Dos- toiefisky could make him that. With Bielinski he was now on the best of terms, and he admits to his brother, that both the Russian critic and Turgenev have been taking him to task for the disorder of his life. Like poor old Makar himself, it would seem, Dostoieffsky was having at this time his brief glimpse of Ja vie, and there is a hint in one of the letters at his being in the toils of a certain Madame P——, though the affair was certainly short-lived. ‘ I was very much in love with Madame P——,” he writes to Michael. “‘ That begins to pass, and yet I don’t know. My health is very bad; I suffer from my nerves. I am afraid of a cerebral or nervous fever. I cannot live correctly; I am a complete debauchee. If I cannot take some sea- Condemned to Death 67 bathing this summer, it will be very unfortunate for me.” For the rest, he admits that he is incapable of orderly management, and that though he has re- ceived “a heap of money” it has slipped through his fingers. And in the spring of 1846 he has to acknowledge being once more on the verge of penury. But his belief in himself remained unshaken, and he admitted that he had “an amour propre and an ambition without limit.” It was in this year that Bielinski’s health broke down, and he was compelled to abandon the Otetchestvennia Zapiski, in which so many of the earlier novels of Dostoieffsky appeared. The Russian critic went abroad, and the next year Turgenev, deserting the Viardots, found him at Stettin, and brought him in a dying state to the waters of Salzbrunn in Silesia. Death was to save the critic from the clutch of Siberia ; but Dostoieffsky, in spite of his tendency to epilepsy and his fragile physique, was to live on. In the meantime, it was literature that completely absorbed him, even more than it absorbed his rivals, Turgenev and Tolstoy, who was now a boy of eighteen, and had not as yet appeared among that “ mass of new writers”? of whose appearance Dostoiefisky informs his brother. ‘‘ Among them,” he writes, ‘one must especially pick out Hertzen (Iscander) and Gontcharof. The first has already published ; the second is a beginner and has published nowhere. They are enormously praised. In the meantime, 68 A Great Russian Realist priority belongs to me, and I hope that it will be always so. Generally speaking, literature has never been so productive as at present. So much the better.” It seemed to Dostoieffsky at that.moment, that he was at the very height of his creative power, and he was filled with optimism. His sisters, Varia and Vera, had made suitable marriages, and all the family circle seemed to be happy and contented, and on good terms with Feodor. His interest in the comedies of real life, and his arrangement of them to suit his whim or his need, had already declared themselves, though in the mildest and pleasantest form. In May 1846 he gives this morsel of analysis to his brother: “In front of you are these ladies who have brought you this message. Give them a good reception, I beg you, and if it is possible, it would not be bad to invite them to dinner —Madame Bielinski and her very interesting sister. They asked me to recommend them also to the good graces of Emily Fédorovna. Feed their feminine egotism while interesting yourself as much as you can in them, and, of course, talk literature as little as possible.” Years afterwards in Siberia, Dos- toieffsky analysed systematically how best Todleben might be induced to plead his cause. And even in those desperate straits, the Russian novelist did not neglect the motif of flattery, though few people in the world were more incapable of subserviency than he. Dostoiefisky, with Bielinski and Nekrassov, was a member of the Sovremennik, but his enthusiasm for Condemned to Death 69 religion was antipathetic to the other members, who regarded him as a Conservative. He withdrew from the Association, and, having become a convert to Socialism, came under the influence of the well- known Boutachevitch-Petrachevski, who was the central figure of the political circle known to the world as the Petrachevtsy. The author of “ Poor Folk” gravitated naturally to a little group of followers of Fourier. They were the most moderate of all the Petrachevtsy, and in this group there was, admittedly, “ no revolutionary programme.” Dourov had founded this group of which he was the President. Its aims were practical and included opposition to the Censor, serfdom, and administrative delinquencies, but it aimed at no change whatever in the political government of the country. Fourier himself had been opposed to political changes, considering them useless, and this little group of Socialists were in no sense of the word revolutionaries in the accepted meaning of the phrase. ‘The young novelist, enthusi- astic with his new friends, particularly with Beketov and Ianovski, seems to have had no notion of the serious risks that he was incurring. “I dine,” he wrote to Michael in the autumn of 1846, ‘ at a Club by subscription. Beketov has brought together six friends of whom I am one, and Grigorovitch another. Each pays fifteen copecks (silver) a day, and we have for dinner two good courses, properly prepared, and are very pleased with them. In this way dinner does not cost me more than sixteen roubles a month.” 70 A Great Russian Realist After his quarrel with the Sovremennik in general, and with Nekrassov in particular, the influence of his new friends became the great factor in Dostoieffsky’s life. ‘‘ Never have I had,” he admitted in the winter of 1846, “so much force and so much lucidity, so much evenness of character, so much physical health. For all that, I owe a great deal to my dear friends Beketov, Zalubetzky, and the others with whom I live; they are serious people, intelligent, endowed with nobility of heart and character. Their society has cured me. In the end I proposed that we should live together. We have found a large suite of rooms, and all the expenses in regard to the ménage will not be more than 1,200 roubles (paper) a year for eachperson. How enormous are the benefits of this Association! JI have my own room, and I work the whole day.” At this period, indeed, in spite of his fragile health, his malady, his occasional longing for a more complete liberty, Feodor Dostoieffsky was almost happy. The letters themselves have become comparatively free from the misery which had clouded them in the past and was to make of them a veritable human document in the future. They were at this time simple and intimate, dealing with the most trivial topics, such as his brother’s overcoat, and the advis- ability of avoiding mushrooms. None the less, even at this stage of relative tran- quillity, the Russian novelist was conscious of the danger of allowing la vie intérieure to encroach upon Condemned to Death 1) that world of reality from which he was, in the years to come, to create pictures more terrible and more fantastic than any mere visionary’s dreams. “ You see,” he warned Michael in 1847, “the more of spirituality and of the inner life that we possess in ourselves, the more beautiful our home and our existence become. The discord is certainly terrible ; terrible also is the lack of equilibrium that Society presents to us. The external world ought to be in equilibrium with the inner world. For, if external phenomena do not manifest themselves the inner world would undergo a dangerous development. The nerves and the imagination would take up too much room in the same individual. Every external pheno- menon appears colossal at first, and frightens us. , One commences to be afraid of life.” a Here is a hint of that peur de la vie which long afterwards Gustave Flaubert was to confess to the serene and courageous George Sand. But now, as always, Dostoiefisky’s deep sympathy for his fellow- beings, and his deep interest in all the details of the life of a great city saved him, in spite of his malady, from the curse of introspection. His irritation, however, against this or that presumably ordinary person was almost equal to Flaubert’s at about the same age. ‘‘ Really,” he exclaimed, in one of his letters, ‘when one talks with certain people, one has the sensation of coming out of a police court.” But he struggled against the incurable defects of his temperament, and apologised to his brother for 72 A Great Russian Realist having been difficult and out-of-sorts during a short visit to him at Revel. And as he writes one seems to be listening, not to a retired officer of Engineers, but to one of those strange and disorganised, but at the same time, living creations which Dostoiefisky was to give, in spite of suffering, partly at least, because of suffering, to the world : “ I was ill, brother. I remember that you once said to me that my rela- tions with you excluded mutual equality. My dear brother, that was wholly unjust. But I have such a villainous and repulsive character. I have always regarded you as being better than I and superior to me. I am ready to give my life for you and yours, but sometimes, when my heart is swimming in affection, a good word cannot be wrung from me. My nerves do not obey me at these moments. I am vile and ridiculous, and because of this I must always suffer unjust judgments. They say that I am harsh and without heart.”” And he goes on to express regret for some rudeness, real or imaginary, towards his sister-in-law. ‘‘I cannot show,” he adds, “that I have heart and affection, except when external circumstances or opportunity tear me by force from my ordinary baseness. Until then, I remain vile. I attribute this unevenness of temperament to my malady.” But in spite of everything he is working as eagerly as ever, and is as usual busy with schemes for wringing money from publishers. Nor has he lost interest in his brother’s translation of Schiller which, however, Condemned to Death 73 is still incomplete in the autumn of 1847. Nothing, indeed, shows the innate kindliness of this man of genius more than his relations with his less gifted elder brother. “You understand,” he says in one of his numerous postscripts, “‘ what a partnership is. If we worked separately we should be lost, we should be intimidated and have no more courage. But two together for the same end, that is another thing. Then a man is filled with energy, with courage, with heart; his forces are doubled.” All this time the little group of Fourierists, under the presidency of Dourov, were continuing to meet and to discuss the stupid severity of the Censor, and the possibility of freeing the serfs. But one day while they happened to be talking about the best means of freeing the Russian peasants, Dostoiefisky observed, “‘ Our people will not follow the tracks of European revolutionaries,” to which some one replied: ‘‘ And if there are no other means than Revolution to free the peasants, what must be done then?” “In that case, Revolution,” cried Dos- toieffsky. This answer, given in the excitement of the moment, was absolutely opposed, not merely to the political theories of Dostoieffsky, but to his temperament and disposition. For him the abolition of slavery was to be granted, in Pushkin’s phrase, “by a gesture of the Tsar.” In Russia, he urged, the Mir and the Artel were old-established institu- tions which owed nothing and could owe nothing to the doctrines of Saint-Simon. For these naturally 74 A Great Russian Realist evolved communities the Russian novelist had the greatest respect, but he regarded with abhorrence all those theories of enforced communism which were filtering through Western Europe. In spite, however, of his comparative Conservatism, Dostoieffsky, on April 23, 1849, was arrested, with the whole Society of the Petrachevtsy, and imprisoned in a fortress. He was accused of “having taken part in conversations about the severity of the Censor- ship; at a meeting in March 1849, of having read the letter of Bielinski to Gogol, of having read it afterwards at the house of Dourov, and of having given it to Marbelli to copy; of having listened at Dourov’s house to the reading of various articles ; of having knowledge of the project to install a clandes- tine printing-press,” etc. And so, on these puerile charges, the author of “ Poor Folk ” found himself confined for eight months in a cell within the casemates of the Fortress. There were with him at first in the Fortress thirty-two other alleged conspirators, but twelve of these, including his younger brother André, were soon released. André had been arrested instead of Michael by mistake, but he allowed the error to pass un- noticed—a piece of generosity to which the novelist alluded years afterwards in a letter to his younger brother: ‘“‘ I remember, my dear, I remember when we saw each other (for the last time, I believe) in the famous White Hall. You had only a word to speak in the right quarter and you would immediately Condemned to Death 75 be set at liberty, for you had been mistakenly arrested instead of your elder brother. But you listened to my arguments and my prayers; you understood with generosity that your brother was in a pitiable financial position; that his wife had just become a mother and was not yet restored to health—you understood all that, and you remained in prison in order to give your brother time to prepare his wife and procure for her the necessary means of existence during an absence which might have been long ; in spite of the fact that he knew then that he was in the right, and that in the end he would be set at liberty, he could not tell how and when the affair would end.” For Feodor, who remained in prison, the affair was very much more obscure. It had been obscure from that early morning of April 23, when the novelist divined in his sleep the presence of strange figures in ‘his bedroom. “I heard the clank of swords,” he narrated to Sonya Kovalevsky, “‘ which were hacking at something. What did it all mean? I opened my eyes with an effort, and heard a gentle sympathetic voice say ‘Get up.’ I looked up and saw a police officer with a magnificent beard. But it was not he who had spoken, but an officer in a light blue uniform, with a lieutenant-colonel’s epaulets. The light blue uniform is worn exclusively by gendarmes, a regiment which is always placed at the service of the secret police. ‘What on earth is the matter?’ I asked, as I raised myself in bed. ‘In the Emperor’s 76 A Great Russian Realist name.’ I looked round. It was evidently in the Emperor’s name.” They searched everywhere for incriminating evi- dence, the Commissary of Police even creeping into the stove, and rummaging among the ashes with his pipe-stem. Dostoieffsky was then led into a wretched little cell, lit by one small lamp. This cell was so wet that even the Commandant, when going his rounds the next morning, exclaimed: ‘‘ This is really not proper.” When Dostoieffsky asked him why he had been arrested, he replied: ‘‘ That you will know altogether at the trial.” The first examination, however, did not take place till ten days afterwards, during which time the novelist was kept in complete. idleness. “I had neither paper,” he continues, “ nor books. The only interruption to the monotony was when the cell door opened five times a day: at seven o’clock when they came to bring me water for washing and to dust the room; ten o’clock for the inspector’s round ; twelve o’clock to bring in dinner (two portions of cabbage or some other soup and a bit of veal torn in shreds, as neither knives nor forks accompanied it); seven o’clock for supper; and lastly, when it got dark, they brought the lamp, which after all was superfluous, as they gave me nothing to do. Thus we were kept eight months. After the first two months they gave us books, though only very few ; but we grew so weary that we regarded the days when we were examined as real festivals.” As to how the examination was developing, or how Condemned to Death 77 long it would take, what the definite evidence against them was—of all these things the prisoners were kept in utter ignorance. But Dostoieffsky was already conscious of the fact that in man “ there is a great reserve of endurance and vitality,” and certainly no one ever proved it more abundantly than did this unfortunate young novelist, who had been so ruthlessly cut off from everything in life at the very dawn of his career. ** Already three months have gone by,” he writes to Michael, ‘‘ since we have been in prison; what is going to happen to us? It may be that all this summer we shall not see the green leaves. Do you remember how they took us for a walk in the garden, in the month of May? The verdure was com- mencing to appear then, down there, and I thought of Revel and of the time when I went to pay you a visit about the same time of the year, and of. the garden which was attached to the house of the Engi- neers.” In another letter he speaks with delight of being allowed to walk in this prison garden in which there are ‘‘ almost seventeen trees.” Already the curious physical endurance of this stricken man had begun to show itself. No com- plaints or protests seem to have escaped his lips. His health remained fairly good, and his delight in work continued. It was here, in this cell, within the casemates of the Fortress, that he wrote the last work of this period of his life. It was a study of childhood, entitled “‘ The Little Hero,” one of those 78 A Great Russian Realist deeply sensitive, minutely observed studies of child- character of which there are so many in the novels of Dostoieffsky. He admitted that he had never written more con amore than in the Fortress. Only at night the old nervous terror returned to him with greater intensity. The floor of his cell would seem to him to shake as though he were in the cabin of a steamer, and long, hideous dreams would harass his nerves, that were already so nearly exhausted. And yet, it is to these crises de nerfs and to the actual seizures of epilepsy that much of the extra- ordinary power of Dostoieffsky is undoubtedly due. ‘< When a nervous state like this,”’ he writes to Michael from the Fortress, “‘ used to take possession of me, I would make use of it by writing—in that condition, one writes always better and more—but now I curb myself so as not to finish myself altogether.” Still, after a rest of three weeks, Dostoieffsky con- tinued his study of “‘ The Little Hero,” that pleasant, kindly story that had no hint in it of the actualities of the prison and the ever-nearer menace of Siberia. He read but little in the Fortress, but he was there attracted by one book, which influenced to an extraordinary degree his whole spiritual development. He asked his brother to send him, with one or two other books, a copy of the Bible, the two Testaments, in both the Slavonic and the French text. This book was to become his one source of inspiration for years in Siberia, and ever afterwards the work of Dos- toiefisky was to bear its impress. Dostoieffsky was, Condemned to Death 79 as Merejkowski has noted, essentially a novelist of Christianity, but he was not “converted” suddenly in the popular sense during his imprisonment in the Fortress. Nor, like Count Tolstoy, was he led slowly and unwillingly to the sanctuary of Belief. By temperament, Dostoieffsky only too easily yielded to that presentiment which lies beyond the barriers of human reason. On the other hand this Russian novelist was not at all a being whose thoughts had soared wholly beyond this world. His intelligence, in spite of his preoccupation with psychology as opposed to external incidents, was always alert and critical, and all his life he never failed to interest himself in contemporary literature, and in the changing types of Russian men and women. Even in the Fortress, in thanking his brother for the books, he laid stress, not on the Bible, but on Shakespeare, and, ignorant as he was as to what Fate might have in store for him at any moment, he went on to criticise an obscure comedy in a Russian journal: ‘“ There is no originality in it: it is the old beaten track. All that has been said before him and very much better.” And the letter ends with a recommendation not to be uneasy on his account, which is followed by a request for more books. Some three months later, however, Dostoieffsky told his brother in terse, unemotional sentences of what had happened to him at Semyonovski Square on December 22, 1849. Fastened to posts, blind- folded, the first batch of three prisoners was already 80 A Great Russian Realist waiting to be shot. Dostoieffsky, the sixth of these twenty-one prisoners, was in the second batch, and believed that he had only a few minutes to live. “I remembered you, brother,” he writes, “ immediately after the terrible ordeal, and all your family ; at the last instant, it was you, you alone, who were in my thought; then I understood how much I loved you, my own dear brother!” The detailed description of the whole monstrous scene has been given in Madame Kovalevsky’s Remi- niscences in Dostoieffsky’s own words : ““T was condemned to be shot! Nothing was said about the time, but scarcely an hour had passed when the gaoler appeared and told me to put on my clothes. Under strong escort I was led out into the yard, where nineteen of my companions were waiting. It was seven o’clock in the morning. We were put into carriages, four in each, accompanied by a soldier. ““* Where are we going?’ we asked. ‘I must not tell you,’ the soldier replied. And as the carriage windows were covered with ice we could see nothing outside. ** At last we reached Semyonovski Square. In the middle of it a scaffold was raised, up to which we were led and ranged in two lines. We were so care- fully watched that it was impossible to say more than a few words to those that stood nearest. “‘A sheriff appeared on the scaffold and read out our sentence of death; it was to be executed in- stantly. Condemned to Death 81 “Twenty times the fatal words were repeated : ‘Sentenced to be shot!’ And so indelibly were the words graven into my memory that for years after- wards I would wake in the middle of the night fancying I heard them being read. But at the same time I distinctly remember another circumstance: the officer, after having finished the reading, folded the paper and put it into his pocket, after which he descended from the scaffold. At this moment the sun broke through the clouds, and I thought: ‘ It is impossible, they can’t mean to kill us!’ and I whispered these words to my nearest companion, but instead of answering, he only pointed to a line of coffins that stood near the scaffold, covered with a large cloth. ‘¢ All my hope vanished in an instant, and I expected to be shot in a few minutes. “Tt gave me a great fright, but I determined not to show any fear, and I kept talking to my companion about different things. He told me afterwards that I had not even been very pale. “ All of a sudden a priest ascends the scaffold, and asks if any of the condemned wish to confess their sins. Only one accepted the invitation, but when the priest held‘out the crucifix we all touched it with our lips. ‘“‘ Petrachevski and two others who were con- sidered the most culpable were already tied to the poles and had their heads covered with a kind of bag, and the soldiers stood ready to fire at the com- mand ‘ Fire!’ 6 82 A Great Russian Realist “TI thought I might perhaps have five minutes more to live, and awful those moments were. I kept staring at a church with a gilt dome, which reflected the sunbeams, and I suddenly felt as if these beams came from the region where I was to be myself in a few moments ! ** Then there was a general stir. I was too short- sighted to discern anything, but I felt that something extraordinary was happening. At last I descried an officer, who came galloping across the square, waving a white handkerchief. He was sent by the Emperor to announce our pardon. Afterwards we learned that the sentence of death had only been a threat intended as ‘a lesson not to be forgotten.’ But this lesson had fatal consequences for many of us. When Grigorief was released from the pole, he had become mad through the terror he had undergone whilst waiting for the fatal shot, and he never recovered his reason. Nor do I think that any of us escaped without lifelong injury to his nervous system. “‘ Besides, when we were taken up to the scaffold, they took off our clothes, so that we had spent more than twenty minutes standing in our bare shirts in a cold of 22 deg., Réaumur, below freezing point! When we came back to our prisons, some of us had their ears and toes frozen; one got inflammation of the lungs, which ended in consumption. As for myself, I don’t remember to have had the slightest sensation of the cold. “Our sentence of death had been changed to Condemned to Death 83 eight years’ penal servitude in Siberia, and many years’ subsequent exile.” The black cloth had not concealed coffins, but of all the twenty-one prisoners, only one, Palm, had been pardoned. Dostoieffsky had been standing next Dourov, the President of the group of Fourierists, as they faced that ominous scaffold, and he said “Good-bye”? to him and to Plestcheev as he pre- pared to take his place in the second batch. Long afterwards, in a letter to the famous Russian poet, Maikov, Dostoiefisky inquired about a book of criticism that belonged to a mutual friend of theirs. ‘‘ When I was arrested,” he wrote, ‘this book was taken from me, but afterwards it was re- turned to me; but, being in prison, I could not have it sent back to her, and I knew what value she attached to it. All that caused me a great deal of pain. Two hours before my departure for Siberia, I asked Commandant Nabokov to return this book to its owner.” This forethought, about such a com- parative trifle in such a moment, illustrates admirably the cool spirit of endurance with which the novelist faced eight years’ penal servitude in Siberia in the company of the lowest criminals in Russia. It never occurred to him, even at the beginning, that, as a political prisoner, he should be saved from such associations. ‘‘ The convicts,” he observed on the eve of his long exile, “‘ are not wild beasts, but men probably better, and perhaps much worthier, than myself. During these last months I have gone 84 A Great Russian Realist through a great deal, but I shall be able to write about what I shall see and experience in the future.” In precisely the same spirit, after yet deeper ex- perience, he wrote: “I never could understand the reason why one-tenth part of our people should be cultured, and the other nine-tenths must serve as the material support of the minority and themselves remain in ignorance. I do not want to think or to live with any other belief than that our ninety millions of people (and those who shall be born after us) will all be some day cultured, humanised, and happy. I know and I firmly believe that universal enlighten- ment will harm none of us. I also believe that the kingdom of thought and light may be realised in our Russia even sooner than elsewhere, because with us even now, no one defends the idea of one part of the population being -enlisted against the other, as is found everywhere in the civilised countries of Europe.” Dostoiefisky had travelled very far from the lonely road of Gustave Flaubert, who, in his intellectual arrogance, might well have exclaimed with Théophile Gautier: “ Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, mighty Imperial Romans! O you whom the world so little compre- hends, at whose heels the rabble-rout of rhetoricians is ever barking! I am your fellow-sufferer, and all the pity that is left in me is compassionate towards you!” The condemned Russian was not a fellow- sufferer of the insensate masters of Rome, but of the Condemned to Death 85 lowest and most miserable criminals in submerged Russia. *' Undoubtedly his nervous system, already on the verge of exhaustion, had received a terrible shock on that December day in Semyonovski Square. He never forgot those twenty minutes of momentary expectation of death. “Now with the rack and tortures and so on,” says the hero of “ The Idiot,” ‘you suffer terrible pain of course; but then your torture is bodily pain only (although no doubt you have plenty of that) until you die. But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punish- ment is not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant— your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain ! that’s the point—the certainty of it. Just that instant when you place your head on the block and hear the iron grate over your head—then—that quarter of a second is the most awful of all!” And the hero of * The Idiot,” who is so veritably an incarna- tion of Dostoieffsky himself, goes on to demonstrate that because of this terror of certitude the sentence on a criminal, who knows that there is no hope of reprieve from the death penalty, is a far more terrible. punishment than he has inflicted upon his victim. “ But the great inner calm of Dostoieffsky, which seems to have co-existed with extreme nervous debility, had carried him easily through that test of 86 A Great Russian Realist courage, and it was to carry him through the nameless sufferings of mind and body which awaited him in that country beyond the Frontier where Russian silence ruled. On the Christmas Day of 1849 Dostoieffsky left for Siberia. CHAPTER V SIBERIA Tue long pause in the life of Dostoieffsky had com- menced. No stranger as he was already to hardship, he was to endure for years the kind of life from which the normal imagination recoils in nauseated horror. He, the most hypersensitive of human beings, was to be daily surrounded by the most degrading associa- tions. Yet, from the very beginning, he faced it with a resignation so matter-of-fact and devoid of gestures, that one is apt to overlook its sustained heroism. ‘That attitude towards suffering was of the very nature of Dostoieffsky, and it is well illustrated by an anecdote cited by the late M. de Vogiié from the reminiscences of a brother exile of the novelist named Yastrjemsky. Chance brought them together one night in a prison at Tobolsk. Dourov, the former pre- sident of the little group of Fourierists, was also present. All three prisoners were conducted into a narrow, cold room, in which were plank-beds with sacks stuffed with hay. The thermometer registered a temperature of about forty degrees of frost, and the miserable little room was quite dark. Behind the door, they could hear continually the monotonous 87 88 A Great Russian Realist tramp of the sentry on duty. “ Dourov,” says Yastrjemsky, “stretched himself out on his camp- bed ; I rolled myself up on the floor beside Dostoieffsky. Through the thin partition an infernal uproar reached us: the noise of cups and glasses, the exclamations of people who were playing cards, insults, blasphemies. Dourov had his toes and hands frost-bitten; his legs were wounded by his fetters. Dostoieffsky was suffering from a wound in the face that he had received in the casemate of the citadel at Petersburg. As for me, I had my nose frozen. In this sad predicament I recalled my past life, my youth, passed in the midst of my dear comrades of the University; I thought of what my sister would have said, if she had seen me in this state. Convinced that there was no longer any hope for me, I resolved to put an end to my existence. . , . If I dwell upon this mournful hour, it is solely because it gave me an opportunity of understanding better the personality of Dostoieffsky. His friendly and helpful conversation saved me from despair ; it aroused energy in me. “Contrary to all expectation, we managed to procure for ourselves a candle, matches, and some hot tea, which seemed to us more delicious than nectar. The greater part of the night passed in a brotherly talk. The gentle and sympathetic voice of Dostoieffsky, his sensitiveness, his delicacy of sentiment, his playful sallies, all this produced upon me an impression of appeasement. I abandoned my desperate resolution. In the morning, Dostoieffsky, Siberia 89 Dourov, and I took leave of each other in that prison at Tobolsk, we embraced each other with tears in our eyes, we saw each other no more. “ Dostoiefisky belonged to the category of those beings of whom Michelet has said that ‘ while being the bravest males, they have at the same time much of the feminine nature.’ By this, one whole side of his works, in which one detects the cruelty of his talent and the necessity of causing suffering, can be explained. Having been given this nature, the cruel and undeserved martyrdom that a blind destiny had imposed upon him must have profoundly modi- fied his character. There is nothing astonishing in his having become nervous and irritable in the highest degree. ButI donot think that I am risking a paradox, when I say that his talent benefited by his sufferings, that they developed in him the sense of psychological analysis.” Certainly no record of experience was more actually torn from life than the book in which he related the prison experiences of a certain Alexander Gory4n- tchikoff, in the book entitled “‘ Buried Alive.” This device was made necessary by the Censorship, which permitted the book to pass muster as fiction, but would on no account have permitted a first-hand narrative of life in that “ distant locality ” to make its impassive accusation before the world. But it is undoubtedly such a record of accusation, though from the first page to the last there is scarcely a single note of personal complaint. The book was go A Great Russian Realist not written, but only planned, during this period. For three years he wrote nothing of any kind, and his only book was the Bible. In his own words, it was ‘‘ by reading only the Bible’? that he was able to comprehend the inner meaning of Christianity. This meaning eventually permeated his strange and essentially questioning genius. But in spite of the mysticism which he drew from it, he remained in his presentation of life an artist, who drew from reality. It is as an artist that he related years afterwards with singular calmness his experiences in Siberia. This unfortunate man, whose health, years before his arrest, had been seriously undermined, and who, in 1846, had been on the verge of insanity, never seems to have resented the cruel injustice of his punishment. Afterwards he even went so far as to maintain that he was stronger in mind and body through having endured this long exile. It is difficult to believe that these physical hard- ships can have strengthened the already enfeebled body of the novelist, but undoubtedly his exile in Siberia had the very deepest influence upon his work. For, it was here that he learned, from actual experience, the slow working-out of two of his fundamental conceptions—punishment and expiation merging in atonement. Alexander Goryantchikoff did not con- sider himself a political prisoner, and as such, a being separate and aloof from ordinary criminals. For, unlike other psychologists, Dostoieffsky had met criminals upon absolutely equal terms, and if they Siberia gl shrank from him it was because of the difference in caste, rather than through any sense of personal abasement. Dostoieftsky learned to know the heart of the criminal as perhaps no other writer of fiction has ever learned to know it. At the same time this deeply afflicted and injured man never dreamed of judging the criminal with the censoriousness of our familiar English piety. ‘‘ Buried Alive” is a register not merely of physical endurance and psychical suffer- ing, but also of the curiously alert and observant manner in which Dostoieffsky regarded the dis- inherited of the earth. Chance, or inscrutable Fate, was to snatch Leo Tolstoy from the Fourth Bastion of Sebastopol, so that he might become one of the very few world-novelists. It was perhaps equally merciful of that same Chance or inscrutable Fate to plunge Feodor Dostoieffsky into the bewildering cruelties and shames and outrages of Siberia. The first evening of the new life, as recorded in “Buried Alive,’ was monstrous even to the suave stoic that lay concealed in this victim of epilepsy: “All these figures seemed to pass before my eyes like phantoms in a dream on that first terrible evening of my new life, which was spent amidst foul-mouthed abuse and filthy language, the clanking of chains, cynical laughter, in a mephitic atmosphere. I stretched myself out on the bare boards, put my clothes under my head (for I had no pillow), and, covering myself with my stout fur coat, tried, but in vain, to forget myself and my new surroundings in 92 A Great Russian Realist sleep... . I was broken down, my life shattered and crushed, and yet I seemed to find a cruel pleasure in repeating to myself: ‘I have reached at last the end of my journey—I am a convict! and this wretched place, which fills me with sad and dismal forebodings, is to be henceforth my home! Home! And yet, who knows? Perhaps when I come to leave it after many years, I may even feel sorry to go away !’” But from the beginning Dostoieffsky knew well that “Man is a being who can accustom himself to everything and anything,” and it was with genuine curiosity that he began to observe the widely varying characters and temperaments of the people around him. At all times a Spartan, he was comparatively indifferent to physical privation: “I hardly ever spent more than a rouble a month on my food. My dinner consisted for many years of one pound of meat which Ossip roasted for me every day, and badly enough too, I always ate the prison bread, and if I was exceptionally hungry I would try and over- come my repugnance to the shtshi and eat some. After a while I even began to relish them in spite of the black-beetles.” From the moment that Dostoieffsky started for Siberia, the lighter, Dickens-like element, which shows itself in his earlier work, became subordinate to something very different. Certainly, the element of pity, the all-embracing Russian pity, survived, became intensified even, but always with something else. Dostoieffsky is not only the novelist of pity, Siberia 93 as he is so often described. He is the novelist of curiosity as well. He combined, as perhaps no other writer in the world, sympathy with every phase of physical and mental suffering, and a watchful inquisi- tiveness in regard to the pathology of the human soul. By circumstances, by his temperament, by his malady, by the horrible environment into which he had been thrust with such dull callousness, he had become undoubtedly a student of degeneracy, without, however, becoming in any sense whatever a degenerate. Even Max Nordau, eager as he is to claim the greatest names for his sinister list, does not include that of Feodor Dostoiefisky, but goes | out of his way to pay a tribute to the man who divined _ where others relied on statistics. And the simplicity of Dostoiefisky, so incongruously outlined against the mysterious background of his inner nature, made it easy for him to mix as an equal with the outcasts of mankind. With us of the West, it is scarcely natural to be without affectation. Affectation seems to have been incomprehensible to Dostoieffsky. Even the hypocrites in his books writhe, like Nero, under the necessity of dissimulation. Again, it is difficult for an English writer to realise that he is not required to assign good or bad conduct marks to his characters. He is naturally the school- master of humanity. Dostoieffsky, so far as his rdle is at all definable, is its doctor, whose diagnosis has reference. to the soul. All the greatest Russian writers have understood 94 A Great Russian Realist the necessity of approaching the great mass of the Russian people with sympathy and understanding. The author of “The Annals of a Sportsman” ap- proached the peasants as an artist who has detected the genius of a landscape in which the human beings are really one with external nature. He drew them lovingly and simply, allowing the picture to speak for itself, and if occasionally a vibration of anger ruffled his serenity, like another Tacitus, he continued to speak quietly. That other great artist, who became one of the world’s greatest moralists, imagined that he had discovered the moujik as he was to dis- cover the meaning of faith. In reality the moujik, no less than faith itself, had never been far from Count Tolstoy from his earliest childhood. Still, whereas Turgenev drew the Russian peasant as he seemed to him actually to be—a crushed being, who preserved an immense dignity in suffering and in the face of death, a being starved of happiness, but retaining his own dreams—Tolstoy hailed him as the Socrates of a new Plato. But for Dostoieffsky, the Russian peasant was neither so familiar nor so exalted a person. For the town-bred novelist, he was even comparatively strange; but Dostoieffsky was willing to meet him on equal terms as man to man, not with the deference of exaltation, but merely as a matter of course. In exactly this spirit he approached his fellow- exiles in Siberia, but he was naturally curious as to how he would be accepted by them. “ The reader Siberia 95 will understand,” he writes, “why almost the first question that I had ventilated in my mind on entering the prison had been what would be my position with regard to the other convicts, and how I should behave towards them. I did not know then, nor did I learn till a long time afterwards, that if I had prided myself on my gentle birth, despised them for being plebeians, and given myself airs, they would have respected me much more than they did, for then I should have been a perfect gentleman, according to their ideas. They would, no doubt, not have sneered at me and abused me still, but for all that I should have answered to their conception of a gentleman. Again, if I had tried to flatter them, to win their favour by cringing before them, become hand in glove with them, they would at once have suspected me of cowardice, and despised me still more. On the other hand, I did not like to follow the example of the Poles, my fellow-sufferers, who had assumed towards them that tone of icy politeness which is so intensely galling and irritating. I knew very well that they despised me because I wanted to work like one of them, and did not give myself airs ; and though I was sure that in due time they would be obliged to change their opinion about me, still I could not help feeling grieved at the thought that they almost had a right to despise me now, for was I not in their eyes trying to curry favour with them by working like one of them?” From the first, Dostoieffsky detected in these 96 A Great Russian Realist patients whom he was studying so closely, a simi- larity to children. He discovered in them the curious mixture of destructive cruelty and _ irresponsible kindness which is to be found in children. And it was from the standpoint of one already a little fatigued by the intensified pressure of life that he watched these monstrosities of suffering, among whom, how- ever, he was to detect gentle and elevated souls. Dostoiefisky, it must be remembered, was now twenty-eight years old. The brief gleam of happi- ness and flush of success had already faded and passed. Gone were the days of “‘ Dostoieffsky said this, Dos- toiefisky said that.” Gone was the only too natural exultation of youth at finding the city from which he had sought only bread, compelled to yield him fame. All that was effervescent and accidental— the sediment of success and failure alike—had fallen ‘away from him. Everything artificial had been already burnt out of a nature singularly antipathetic to the artificial No one in the whole world could have approached the unknown life of the convict- prison more free from prejudice and self-complacency than he. Dostoieffsky, indeed, at the commencement of this period of isolation, seems to have reverted to the simplicity of his youth. Often, I think, it is possible to find in the youth of a man of genius a moment which is symbolic of his whole life. Turgenev, for example, in the garden of Spasskoié, watched, when he was a boy, a conflict between an adder and a toad, Siberia 97 and from that moment ceased to believe in the bounty of a protecting Providence. The moment of child- hood’s doubt persisted through the after years, and the most merciful of all writers found it impossible to believe in the ultimate mercy of Nature. Tolstoy, too, as a boy’ experienced another such symbolic moment. He had forgotten his prayers one morning, so he tells us, and endeavoured to say them as he rattled along the country road in an old family coach. But between him and the thought of prayer the sights and sounds of the country life clamoured for recognition. That old coach was, as it were, the life of Count Tolstoy, for whom prayer and the glory of the world were ever conflicting necessities. So, years before this interment in Siberia, there was a moment in the life of Dostoieffsky when he, too, seems to have divined the menace of his destiny. Reading a forgotten feuilleton, which spoke of German poets who had died from hunger and cold, the young novelist had shivered in anticipation. Turgenev had learned in the garden that he must trust nothing. Tolstoy had learned in the old coach that he must pray in spite of the beauty of the world. It was perhaps the final lesson of both these creative writers, a veritable foreshadowing of the future development of each. Some such foreshadowing came also to Dostoieffsky when, reading that old newspaper, he seemed to be glancing across the chasm of the years, and shuddering at the reflection of his own destiny. 7 98 A Great Russian Realist And now, not only youth was recalled, but some- thing of the environment of youth. Dostoieffsky was dragged back, so to speak, into that hospital for the poor in which he had been born. He was once more among patients, and in a sense, to the very end of his life, he was never away from them again. In Siberia they were like monstrous children, monstrously dressed. Even their shaved heads were unnecessarily grotesque, some being shaved length- ways from the forehead to the back of the head, while others were shaved from ear to ear, only half of the head being shaved in either case. The whole atmo- sphere of the place was one of depraved suffering, in which, however, a bewildered pride survived. They were convicts, the victims of Fate, and in their own words, “* The Devil wore out three wooden shoes before he brought us together.” Like children, they would indulge in wordy warfare for the mere love of exchanging insults, while their fellow-prisoners would watch them delightedly, as Roman patricians used to watch the scurre at their banquets. Dostoieffsky neither condemns on the one hand nor idealises them on the other. Nor does he gener- alise about them or make them fit in with any pre- conceived notion of criminology. One generality, however, seems to have held good—the convicts by whom he was surrounded were children in the hideous sense of arrested development. ‘They loved finery and would spend the most precious thing in the world to them—money—on new clothes, which Siberia 99 would very soon be pawned or sold for drink. Drunk- enness was the stage of manhood and freedom of the convict. Then he became an individual eating alone and drinking alone, very rarely, as Dostoieftsky notes, inviting a comrade to share his feast of happiness. A freed serf once told Ivan Turgenev that in the old days of slavery he would always steal whenever he got the chance, because it made him feel free. Apart altogether from any animal delight in de- bauchery, a drunken bout meant a brief spell of freedom for the Siberian convict, and far from being looked down on, he was respected for it by his com- rades. More surprising is the fact that among these outcasts tale-bearing was not condemned. On the contrary, tale-bearers were rather esteemed than otherwise, and it was impossible to explain to the convict that such a person was dangerous to the community. But what was most childish and irre~ sponsible of all about the convict was very often the crime itself. Over and over again, Dostoieffsky noted in the confession of a convict, a confession always given without the slightest suspicion of re- morse, the element of mere chance, as though a child were to toss up to see if he should or should not set fire to a house. In later years Dostoieffsky was to lay great stress upon this innate irresponsibility and childishness, mixed with the greatest acumen, on the part of the criminal. In this obscure corner the tradespeople, and the 100 A Great Russian Realist people of the working classes in general, were always kind to the convicts, whom they regarded as “ unfor- tunates.” “I shall never forget the first time,” writes the author of “ Buried Alive,” ‘ that I ever had a trifle given me as if I were a beggar. It hap- pened soon after my arrival in the prison. I was coming home after my morning’s work, with my escort, and met a woman and her daughter, a lovely little girl of ten years old. I had already seen them once before. The mother was a soldier’s widow; her husband, a young soldier, had been brought up before the court-martial—I do not know the offence—and had died in the prisoners’ ward in the hospital at the time when I was lying there ill. His wife and daughter had come to say good-bye to him, weeping bitterly. When the little girl saw me, she blushed, and whispered something into her mother’s ear, who stopped, and, after looking for some time in her bundle, finally drew forth a quarter of a copeck, and gave it to the girl, who ran after me. ‘ Here, poor man, take this little copeck for Christ’s sake!’ cried she, and put the coin in my hand. I took it, and she ran back to her mother, looking very happy. I have long kept that poor little copeck among my . treasures.” One wonders if the recollection of this or some similar incident occurred to Dostoieffsky when, years afterwards in London, he noticed one day in the street “in the midst of the crowd, a little girl, aged six at the most, in utter rags, dirty, bare-footed, Siberia 101 emaciated, and bruised.”? The child seemed to be quite lost in the London crowd, and nobody paid the slightest attention to her. “ But,” continues Dos- toieffsky, ‘‘ what struck me most, was that she bore in her face the expression of such sorrow, such utter despair, that to see this little being overwhelmed by such misfortune and desolation appeared against Nature and wounded one terribly. She was shaking her dishevelled head from one side to another, as if she were discussing something, she was waving her little arms and gesticulating, then suddenly she brought them together and pressed them against her lean naked breast. I retraced my steps and gave her a ten-shilling piece. She took the coin, then looked at me wita a wild air, with a frightened astonish- ment, and began suddenly to run away, as if she were afraid I would take the money back from her.” On the very first morning of his hard labour Dostoiefisky noted a typical incident of kindness towards the condemned ones: ‘On the road we met a tradesman with a long beard, who stopped and put his hand in his pocket. A convict detached himself from us and, taking off his cap, ran up to him, gratefully received the charitable contribution—five copecks—and came back to us. The man crossed himself and went on his way. The five copecks were spent in katatchi, which the convicts bought and divided among themselves.” Such incidents were common, and in this record of Siberia we have a charming picture of a poor widow who spends her 102 A Great Russian Realist whole life in trying to make the existence of the convicts easier. But the real solace of Dostoieffsky, and of the most abandoned of his fellow-exiles, was work. Almost the first thing that the novelist learned in Siberia was to burn and grind alabaster. This seemed to him easy work, and his passion for any kind of work aroused the scornful derision of his comrades. For hours Dostoieffsky would hammer alabaster into white powder, and in such moments the blood would race more freely through his veins. On other occa- sions he would turn the fly-wheel in the turner’s workshop. At other times he would find himself a member of one of the large parties that were sent to shovel the snow away from the Government buildings after a heavy snow-storm. This form of work appealed to the convicts exactly as it appeals to children: ‘“ A tremendous task was appointed us ; we each had a shovel given us, and we all set to work unanimously, thrusting our shovels deep into the soft fresh snow, which had hardly had time to freeze on its surface, and throwing it over our shoulders in huge white lumps, which turned into a silvery dust as they fell. The fresh wintry air and the exercise always had an exhilarating effect on the men. They laughed and shouted, threw snowballs at each other till the air grew thick with flying masses of snow, and the more sensible members of the party put a stop to the proceedings, and the whole thing ended in a violent quarrel.” Siberia 103 But if his fellow-convicts seemed like children to the strange psychologist who had strayed amongst them, he himself appeared as an infant to them. They stole from him, when they could not borrow, and he was defrauded on every possible occasion. One convict, Petréff, robbed Dostoieffsky even of his Bible and sold it for drink. “I was,” comments the novelist, “in his eyes a mere baby.” Of this dangerous criminal he observes: ‘“ He hardly ever borrowed money from me, and although he subse- quently stole several of my things, he seemed to do this rather en passant, without any premeditated intention on his part.” Petréff professed to be exceedingly attached to Dostoieffsky, but this did not prevent him from being seized by a periodical mania for robbing him. Warned against a particular criminal as being exceptionally dangerous, Dostoieffsky began to observe him with stimulated curiosity, and it is this curiosity which makes the record of Dostoieffsky’s Siberian torments less a human document than a treatise on criminal psychology. One convict, for example, named Lotka, had murdered no less than six people and used to do his uttermost to pose as a terrible fellow in the eyes of his comrades. Yet Dostoieffsky noticed that he was not really feared in the prison. On the other hand, even in a seemingly quiet scene, when scarcely a word was spoken, the convicts were very quick to divine the atmosphere of murder. They 104 A Great Russian Realist knew instinctively, like animals, who was and who was not essentially dangerous. Like children they welcomed anything new. The hospital to them was a welcome change, and in the hospital they were always glad to see some outcast who had been flogged almost to death. Cruelty had no significance for them, and they would laugh as they related their own sufferings. But they had their own grotesque notions of etiquette, and it was the rule not to exhibit too much interest in flogging except in the cases of notorious criminals, Afterwards they would be kind to any flogged comrade, and would nurse him as well as they could, and always without comment. Dostoiefisky studied carefully the officers as well as the convicts, and a certain Lieutenant Jereb 4jtnikoff stands out in these annals of monsters as primus inter pares. This person would pretend to forgive a convict on the ground of his being an orphan, and would then shout out at the top of his voice: “ Beat him! Flog him; strike him harder, harder, harder! Faster, faster! Flog the orphan; flog the scoun- drel! Go at it; go at it! More, more, more! Faster, faster!’ Another officer, named Smek4loff, would ask a convict if he knew a certain prayer, and, when he replied in the affirmative, would order him, quite amiably, to repeat it. When the convict reached the words “in Heaven,” Smek4loff would give the order for the flogging to commence. The grim comedy of this particular officer appealed to the convicts and they were sorry when he left them. Siberia 105 ‘What a good fellow he is! and so jolly, too!” they would say. The doctor in the hospital seems to have been the only person who regarded the convict as a human being, and naturally enough malingering was by no means infrequent. ‘Well, brother!” the doctor would exclaim on such occasions, “I suppose you have been here long enough, and got fairly rested. It is time for you to go.” Dostoiefisky spent some time in this hospital, and he would lie awake night after night, listening to the moanings and mutterings of these condemned ones for whom not even sleep was an escape. Sleeplessness would breed confidences, and Dostoieffsky narrates a story of a convict’s past life, told in the small hours of the morning. Mindless in its savagery, this tale of Akotl’ka’s husband sup- plies, as it were, in hideous perspective the background of the convict’s freedom, often more terrible than his servitude. But even for the most hopeless ones there remained the illusion of hope. At Tobolsk, Dostoieffsky saw prisoners attached to the wall by a chain seven feet long. One of these had been a tchinovik in the old days, and he bore his punish- ment with immense fortitude. Smiling and speaking in a low voice, he showed his visitors how it was possible for him to stretch himself out comfortably on his bed. The prisoners showed their human side by their fondness for pets; and one of the most pathetic scenes in a book which is singularly devoid of sensa- 106 A Great Russian Realist tional pathos is that in which the convicts determined to set an eagle at liberty so that he might be free when he died. “Let him go; give him his freedom —his own sweet little freedom,” clamoured these dispossessed ones of the earth. “The eagle was thrown down from the rampart into the steppe. It was a cold bleak day in the latter part of autumn. The wind whistled across the bare steppe and among the yellow grass. The eagle walked straight away as fast as he could go, flapping his broken wing, the convicts following with their eyes the dark head as it moved quickly through the grass of the steppe.” Never were the prisoners without the idea of freedom. Nomad as he is by nature, it is terrible for the Russian to be cooped up in the midst of the limitless steppes. And when spring came to them, the old life-thirst came back intensified. They grew restless in the season of hope. But on such days their pent-up energy was let loose only upon each other and the promise of summer made a veritable bedlam of this corner of Siberia. At such times life must have been a torture to Dostoieffsky, but he continued to watch minutely, not only the surface life, but the sad under-currents of these miserable ones. They, too, clung to their dreams. ‘ Many a time,” he writes, ‘‘ when we were out at work on the banks of the Irtysh, have I watched some poor fellow looking wistfully across the river towards the immense Kirghise steppe, which begins on the other bank and stretches far away towards the south—farther than Siberia 107 the eye can reach. Many a time have I seen their breasts heaving and heard a deep sigh, as if they, too, longed to breathe once more the free air of the steppe. ‘Ekhma!’ sighs the convict prisoner, and with sudden movements, as if he wanted to shake off the thoughts and dreams which trouble him, he thrusts his spade deep into the earth or snatches up the load of bricks which lies by his side ready to be carried away.” Sometimes these dreams would escape on the balalaika, that instrament which expresses so well the sorrows of prisoners which cannot be conveyed in words. The balalaika seems to have caught the despairing farewells of Russian exiles, so that one can almost see the detachment of prisoners glancing back for the last time at friends for whom they have become already only a memory. And now, as the music grows yet slower and more sombre, they are already farther off, and we have to strain our eyes to see the white set faces across the steppe. Fainter and fainter it grows, until one catches nothing but an ejaculation of stifled pain which will haunt those who have listened to it in the years to come, for it is the frozen farewell of Siberia. And this farewell of Siberia is far more terrible than the fare- well of death. No restless challenge in the presence of death lingers in this music of despair. Siberia has closed over living human beings who have been torn from life and at the same time denied the sanc- tuary of death. All these things the balalaika can 108 A Great Russian Realist tell, and if any human being can at all translate into human speech the secrets of the balalaika, Dostoiefisky has done so in this book. | | But even in the loneliness of Siberia, Dostoieffsky found a friend; it was the dog Sh4rik: ‘“‘ ‘ Heaven has sent me a friend,’ thought I; and all through that terrible time, when I felt so lonely and wretched, I used to look forward every night to our meeting in the yard in the little dark corner behind the prison. I always went there as soon as we came in, followed by poor Sh4rik, who was leaping and whining for joy, and then, when we were quite alone, I would take his head in my hands and kiss it passionately, while at the same time a sweet sad feeling filled my heart. And I remember that I used to feel even a kind of secret exultation at the thought that there was only one being left in the whole world who really cared for me—my faithful dog, Sharik.” It has been urged against Tolstoy that he became the slave of a single idea, the idea of over-simplifica- tion. In the same way it has been urged against Dostoiefisky that he became the slave of a single emotion, that of self-abasement. Each of these strictures is only partially true. The. author of “Anna Karénina” was saved from the idée fixe by his pagan interest in external life; and Dostoieffsky was saved from a somewhat similar obsession by a quality which one must call humour, as there is seemingly no other word to express the fantastic and terrible sense of the grotesque which flashes from Siberia 109 the most sombre pages of his work. It lights up several gloomy and monstrous figures in these pages, and particularly the Jew, Issai Fomitch, against whose nationality the convicts were quite unpre- judiced. Fomitch represented comedy to them, and Dostoieftsky accepted the horrible Jew as comic relief just as he accepted the comic relief of the lieutenant who gave the signal for flogging while a convict addressed a prayer to Heaven for mercy. But even in Siberia there were lighter interludes than these, and at the beginning of Christmas Day something like joviality existed among the convicts. On this day, the serjeant-at-arms wished the men a ‘Merry Christmas’ as he came in to count them as usual. ‘The scene that followed was one of almost normal festivity: ‘‘ Akim Akimytch did not spend much time over his prayers that morning, but hurried off to the kitchen, together with several others, to see how their geese and pigs were getting on, and to superintend the important operation of roasting them. We could see from our snow and ice covered windows the blaze of the kitchen fire as it shone out against the dark winter morning. The convicts were running about the yard and rushing in and out of the kitchens. A very few had already paid the tapster a visit, but these were the most impatient ones. On the whole, they all conducted themselves with great propriety, and neither quarrelled nor swore.” Yet, as the day grew to a close, the old passions re-asserted them- selves, and the old insults and recriminations brought 110 A Great Russian Realist back the usual atmosphere. Christmas Day, the novelist notes, without the suggestion of censure, closed in the familiar pandemonium. At rare intervals, however, the convicts showed the more amiable attributes of children. They gave private theatricals, and they were delighted with the slightest evidence of success. Pleased as children, they strutted backwards and forwards, utterly oblivious for the moment of all suffering and degradation. Minute, matter-of-fact, non-moralising, Dostoieffsky © describes the actors and the audience for whom even this faint whisper of art was the voice of deliverance. “ Poor fellows!” hecomments. ‘‘ They had nothing to look forward to except long years of a life as mono- tonous as the dripping of the rain on a gloomy, chilly autumn day, and to-night they had been allowed to forget their misery for a moment.” But it is not such moments as this that are significant of convict life in Siberia, as Dostoieffsky lived it year after year. If any one scene is significant, it is that one of which Turgenev observed so truly: ‘ Le tableau du bain, c’est vraiment de Dante.” Here, indeed, the grotesque and the horrible converge in a picture of distorted manhood which suggests, perhaps, better than any other, the most monstrous page in all the sad life-book of Feodor Dostoieftsky : “The shelves were covered with convicts who tried to screw themselves into the smallest possible space. Few, however, of the convicts really washed themselves, as the common people care but little Siberia ri for soap and hot water, their idea of a bath consisting in getting up to the highest shelf, whipping them- selves violently with a bundle of birch twigs and then pouring cold water down their backs. About fifty birch rods were in constant movement on the shelves, water was being continually thrown at the hot oven to make more steam, till the heat was almost unbearable. And all this mass of human beings was swaying backwards and forwards, shouting and yelling, and clanking their chains on the floor. Some, in trying to cross the floor, were caught in the chains of those who were sitting down, and, falling on their heads, knocked them down, cursing and swearing. The dirt and filth actually flowed in streams every- where. The men were perfectly wild with excitement and yelled and shrieked like demons. A dense crowd had collected round the window where the cans of hot water were handed in, and carried by the buyers to their respective places, not, however, without spilling half of it over the heads of the bathers who squatted on the floor. From time to time the moustached face of a soldier would look in at the door or window to see if there were no disorders going on. The closely cropped pates and red-hot bodies of the convicts appeared to me more hideous than ever. Their backs were covered with scars from the lash or the stick, which stood out more vividly on the red surface, and looked like so many fresh stripes. I could not help shuddering with horror at the sight of them. More water is being thrown over the 112 A Great Russian Realist hot stones, and a thick cloud of vapour rises from them and fills the whole bath-room, which resounds with maddening shrieks and howls.” But even among these monsters one figure looms hideously as the superman of all this underworld. It is Issai Fomitch, the Jew, and he has climbed on to the highest shelf of the convict-bath. From here, he howls joyfully in a crescendo of horrible happiness. He is, in his own person, the grin of outrage and degradation, the grin of Siberia: “He is nearly beside himself with the heat and whipping, but it seems as if no earthly heat could ever satisfy him. He hires a man for a copeck to whip him, but the latter soon finds the heat too much for him, throws down the rod, and runs away to refresh himself with a cold shower-bath. Issai Fomitch, nothing loth, hires another, then a third—he can be generous at times, and has as many as five men to whip him to-day. ‘Hurrah for Issai Fomitch!’ shout the convicts from below. Issai Fomitch feels that at this moment he is high above everybody else and can look down upon us, and triumphantly shrieks out his pzan, ‘ la, la, la,’ in a shrill voice like a mad- man’s. It struck me that hell must be not at all unlike our bath-room, and I communicated my thought to Petréff, who merely looked around in silence.” But for the gentle and compassionate soul of Dos- toieffsky, the outraged grin of this tableau du bain was not the only memory of Siberia. Even here he Siberia 113 had found simple and good people who had responded to his own deep sympathy. Among these was Alei, the Caucasian, whom he taught to read in Russian. Together they would read the Russian translation of the New Testament, and Alei, like the heroine of “Crime and Punishment,” drew strength and inspira- tion from the Sermon on the Mount. The young Caucasian found in the New Testament the beauty and compassion of Issa, the prophet of hisrace. Then, turning to his brothers, he spoke to them in his own language: ‘‘ They talked long and gravely together, nodding their heads as if in approval of what was said. Then they turned to me, with the quiet digni- fied smile I liked so well, and informed me that Issa was a prophet of God, and had done great miracles, that he had formed a bird of clay, breathed on it, and that it had flown away—all which was written in their sacred books.” And Dostoieffsky, the man of genius, who had already won fame in St. Petersburg, notes without the faintest nuance of irony that the Caucasians thought that they were giving him pleasure by praising Issa, and that his pupil was delighted that his brothers should have been so kind to his teacher. It was not Fomitch the Jew, or Petréff, or any other of these discards of fortune that Dostoieffsky preserved in his memory of Siberia, but rather Alei, the Caucasian, with whom he had read the Sermon on the Mount amid all the din and babel of the convict-prison. Such is the record that Dostojefisky has left of this 8 114 A Great Russian Realist undeserved punishment. It is difficult to imagine a similar narrative from the pen of a Western writer. The author of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” has infused into poetry the very atmosphere of prison, the withheld sunlight, the withheld beauty, the insistent tramp of force. It isa human document and a work of art in one, but it is not a picture from which the individual souls of prisoners escape; nor did the author of that astonishing poem attempt in prose any such canvas as that. The whole attitude of a Western writer would be hopelessly antipathetic to Dostoieffsky’s almost unimaginable naturalness. For the Frenchman the sinister facts of the case would have grouped themselves in a precise and logical sequence. The individual convicts them- selves would have become facts to be arranged in due order. Petréff, Fomitch, and the rest of them would have been mere bricks in an edifice of accusa- tion. The picture would have been drawn coldly and remorselessly, and he who viewed it would have been filled with hatred of the whole Russian penal system and particularly of the Russian treatment of political prisoners. But the reader of such an indictment would have known little or nothing of the inner natures of Petrdéff and his fellow-victims, each one of whom would have been made to fit in with a general scheme from which the most precise and definite conclusions were to be drawn. On the other hand, one knows well how a certain familiar type of English novelist would have gone Siberia 115 to work. One sees the English hero, or at the best the Anglicised Russian, in the centre of this convict- prison. He would take his bearings in the objective English fashion and wait for his moment to assert authority. One can see him watching his man, the supreme bully, for example, determined to read him a swift practical lesson in the English way. Cowed by the English hero, the convicts would then sullenly begin to realise their master, who would become gradually a new and noble tradition, which even the brutalised prison officers would recognise with some- thing approaching awe. And then, when the English- man had gone, his memory would survive as a legend. His lightest words would be repeated and his prowess with his fists extolled in whispers. All this, of course, would be stimulating reading, and one would doubt- less receive a more or less vivid impression of the central figure; but of the convicts, such treatment would leave us profoundly ignorant. But French logic and English devotion to muscular Christianity were equally far removed from Dostoieff- sky’s method. He possessed, however, his own clarity of vision and his own high moral qualities. Gory4n- tchikoff’s scrutiny was singularly clear, and never more so than when, in the early days of his imprisonment, his life was threatened by a fellow-convict and saved only by the merest accident. But Dostoieffsky’s courage was of the tranquil, impassive order, and he was perhaps too philosophic, as well as too devoid of the instinct for authority, for any attempt at leader- 116 A Great Russian Realist ship as the Anglo-Saxons understand it. At once through his sympathy and through his intellectual curiosity, this suffering man expressed in his record, not so much his own personality as the individualities of many submerged lives. The book is, of course, not fiction at all, but its method became the actual foundation of all Dos- toiefisky’s most important work. ‘Young man,” the Russian Sainte-Beuve had asked after reading “Poor Folk,” ‘do you really understand all the truth of what you have written?” Bielinski was dead when these annals of Siberia were written, but had he been alive no one would have realised more quickly how Dostoieffsky had passed beyond any such question as that. Dostoiefisky understood that suffering which the Greeks realised as action, if any human being in the world has understood it. He was an artist of suffering, but he was also something more. Over and over again, either in actual autobiography or in some other phase of self-revelation, an artist has disclosed certain depths which arouse the abhor- rence of good citizens. The artist appears to them to have betrayed secrets that are a disgrace to human nature, and they condemn him for having endeavoured. to acknowledge the naked truth. But the artist is not really so far beneath the level of the good citizen, only he sees down into depths into which the good citizen has wisely refused to peer. Those stagnant depths of remote atavism are common to all hue Siberia 117 manity, but it is only the artist whose curse it is to understand himself. Dostoieffsky, however, went beyond the self-revelations of the artist. He showed that, within the very lowest strata of humanity, human souls are to be found with the attributes and the instincts which are for ever hidden, though they are latent, in the natures of comfortable, ordinary people. He showed, too, that the real punishment of a crime is to be a criminal. His great thesis was that crime and punishment are one and the same, each being a manifestation of an inner suffering; and it was this exile in Siberia that made him understand. After being for four years in the convict-prison, Dostoieffsky entered the Army as a common soldier. He accepted his new duties as impassively as he had accepted the hard labour of the prison. In July 1854 he writes from Semipalatinsk to his brother Michael on the subject of a private soldier’s routine: “I scarcely knew anything about service in the ranks, and yet in the month of July I passed muster like the rest, and I knew as much as the rest. How much that tired me, and what it cost me, is another matter ; but they are pleased with me, thank God! Certainly, all this cannot interest you very much; but you will understand at least how exclusively occupied I have been. Whatever one writes, one can explain nothing by letter. Strange as all this may appear to you, I think that you will understand that it is no joke being a soldier, that the life of a soldier, with all a soldier’s duties, is not too easy for a man endowed 118 A Great Russian Realist with health like mine, and one who is so unused to, or rather who is so totally ignorant of, these occupa- tions, One must undergo a great deal to become used to it. I do not complain: it is my cross, and I have deserved it.” He goes on to speak of his imprisonment, saying that it destroyed many things in him and developed others. Among these others was undoubtedly epilepsy, but even now Dostoieffsky is not sure of that, though he alludes to “ strange attacks which resemble those of epilepsy.” In the November of the same year, after ten months as a private soldier, he sums up his impressions of a convict’s life in a letter to his brother, André: ‘“ As for those other four years, I regard them as an epoch during which I was buried alive and shut up in a tomb. What a terrible period it was! I have not the strength to tell you the story of it, my friend. It was a nameless suffering, an interminable one, for every hour, every minute weighed upon my soul. During all those four years, there was not a single instant in which I did not feel that I was in prison.” And he goes on to speak of the happiness of family life and of the horror of being dragged from place to place, as he seems to have been all his life. His brother, André, has married, and Dos- toieffsky writes the same day to his new sister-in-law, whom he may never live to see. But his life has become somewhat easier, as, on the first of October, he had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant in his old battalion. He had Siberia 11g commenced to write again, and it was in Siberia that he wrote “ Uncle’s Dream,” and “ Stepanchikovo Village.” As yet, however, he did not set down his terrible experiences in prison, but contented himself with mapping them out in his mind. In the meantime, another book of experience, which was afterwards to take the form of a novel, was being unconsciously lived in Siberia. For, even in this desolate region, romance, difficult as all else in this convulsed and broken life, had found its way to Feodor Dostoieffsky. CHAPTER VI A DIFFICULT ROMANCE A FELLOW-EXILE of Dostoieffsky, named Alexander Ivanovitch Issaev, died in the summer of 1855. He died in the greatest distress and left his young widow and only son in a state of destitution. Dostoiefisky wrote to his old friend, Baron A. E. Wrangel, on their behalf, sketching the miserable funeral, for which strangers had provided the necessary funds. Dostoiefisky implores his friend to come to the rescue as soon as possible, and at the same time adds this characteristic caution: “One must be prudent in regard to any one who is under an obligation to oneself ; he always has an idea that by negligence, by familiarity towards him, one wishes to make him repay the service that has been rendered.” The money was duly sent, and the widow and her son, Paul, thus rescued from destitution. ‘The mother imagined that it was from Dostoieffsky, and he had the greatest difficulty in persuading her that it had come from another source. But this incident was only the commencement of a self-sacrificing attachment which, contrary to all expectation, ended in 120 A Difficult Romance 121 marriage. At this period of his life, Dostoiefisky had become fully conscious of the variations of emo- tional experience which even Siberia had been power- less to withhold from him. At the beginning of 1856 he wrote to the Russian poet, Maikov, a letter which hints at a preoccupation quite beyond the duties of a private soldier. In this letter he also speaks of the suffering caused by being unable to write in prison. But though he had not actually written, his brain had been seething with creative ideas, and when he became free he seemed to be ready for work. But on leaving prison he was still unable to write: ‘A circumstance, the work of chance, which had been late in my life, came at last, whirled me away, and absorbed me completely. I was happy; I could not work. Then grief and sadness came to me. I lost what was every- thing for me. Hundreds of versts kept us apart.” He excuses himself for not explaining more fully, and passes on to the subject that was nearly always upper- most in his mind—Russian literature, and the national character of the Russians. ‘“‘I have always been a true Russian,” he exclaims, and he goes on to speak of the great réle of Russia, “‘ our Sacred Mother,” who is to become the saviour of Europe. “I assure you,” he says in this letter, “that I, for example, am so near to everything that is Russian, that the convicts themselves did not alarm me; they were Russians, my brothers in adversity, and I had more than once the good fortune of meeting with greatness of soul in the 122 A Great Russian Realist. heart of even a brigand, for the sole reason that I was able to understand him, being myself Russian.” Misfortune in life and in love, imprisonment, his malady, his severance from the common ties of ordinary people, now filled him, not only with a sense of loss, but also with a sense of power. The period of unconscious psychical development had passed into a definite recognition of a knowledge beyond the compass of happier mankind. And with this recognition came a terrible desire for expression, for the permission to publish and to mingle once more in the free world of ideas. Wrangel must help him to attain his liberty. He believed passionately in his own strange genius, and he pleaded for it as he had never pleaded for his life. The Crimean War was over, and Todleben was the acknowledged idol of Russia, the ‘ veritable hero of Sebastopol.” His brother was an old friend of Dostoieffsky’s childhood, and the novelist urged Wrangel to enlist the sym- pathies of the defender of Sebastopol in his favour. Cut off from all help and advice, Dostoieffsky then arranged one of his curious comedies of reality for the benefit of his friend, Wrangel, whom he urged to go at once to Todleben. ‘Go and see him your- self,” he writes, “(I hope that he is in St. Peters- burg), and hand him my letter when you are alone. You will see at once by his expression how he takes it. If he is not well-disposed, there is nothing to be done; explain the situation to him in a few words, and say something in my favour, take your leave and A Difficult Romance 123 go out of the room, after having asked him to keep your application a secret. He is an excessively polite man (of a somewhat chivalrous disposition) ; he will receive you and take leave of you very politely, even if he says nothing to satisfy you. But if you see by his face that he is interested in me, and that he shows much kindness and sympathy, oh! then be alto- gether frank with him; talk to him of this matter wholeheartedly, quite simply ; speak to him of me, and tell him that one word from him has a great importance, that he would be able to intercede for me with the Monarch, guaranteeing (since he knows me) that henceforth I shall be a good citizen, in which case he certainly will not meet with a refusal.” In the same letter he alluded to the fact that his brother, Michael, had not written to him for the last seven or eight months. Dostoieffsky was afraid that he had lost interest in him, as he was said to have remarked on one occasion: ‘‘It would be better for him to remain in Siberia.” Dostoieffsky felt that he would never be able to forget this. It was not money that he desired, but his brother. “I have a bad disposition,” he writes, “ but when serious issues are at stake, I defend my friends. When we were arrested, it seems to me that in the first moment of panic it might be permissible to think of oneself. Well, I thought only of him, of the blow that his arrest would be to his family, how his poor wife would be struck down; I implored my third brother, who had been arrested by mistake, not to explain this 124 A Great Russian Realist error to those who had arrested him, for as long as possible, and to send money to my brother, supposing that he had none. Has he forgotten all the past? and does he bear me a grudge? because I ask money from him, and at what a moment! the most critical moment of my life!” There was, however, no rupture between the brothers, and the next month Dostoieffsky wrote to Wrangel to express his delight at finding himself wrong in his suppositions about Michael. ‘‘ How glad I am,” he exclaims, “ that he is always the same and that he loves me.” In this letter he referred again to the visit to Todleben and implored Wrangel on no account to inspire him with false hopes in order to pacify him. Dostoieffsky believed in the new Tsar, Alexander II., and he tells his friend that he has been writing verses in honour of the Corona- tion. To the revolutionaries, Dostoieffsky’s attitude towards the Tsar was one of apostasy. This, however, was not the case. Dostoieffsky was not, either by temperament or through resentment at an unjust punishment, a revolutionary in the Western sense. He believed in Russia, and in the Russian habit of thought: He had, like Gogol, an almost mystical belief in the indefinable réle of his country. And with this implicit belief it would have been incon- sistent of him to rebel against the national tradition of endurance and obedience that was congenial to one side at least of his nature, which was at once extremely simple and extremely complex. Dostoieff- A Difficult Romance 125 sky was opposed neither to the autocracy of the T'sar, nor to the rule of Christianity. At this very moment, after ten years’ reflection, he was writing “ Letters on Art,” showing the réle played by Christianity in art, and now, as always, he was opposed to the theory of “L’Art pour PArt.” Neither Western innovator nor Slavophil, Dostoieffsky believed in Russian progress, but only upon national lines. In his own words: ‘‘ No country will renounce its own life; it will consent rather to live in poverty, but at all events to live, rather than to live in the fashion of other nations, which is not to live at all.”? Dos- toieffsky. insisted that reformers must have an organic link with the Russian people. In brief, he taught positively the negative lesson of Ivan Turgenev’s “ Virgin Soil.” And now, submerged as he was, with vague hopes of changing Siberia for the Caucasus, it seemed to him as the veritable mercy of Heaven that he should receive pardon for the crime that he had never com- mitted. Dostoieffsky was sincerely grateful for the very possibility of the Tsar’s interesting himself in his case. He wished to have a poem of his pre- sented to the monarch, and again he amplified the comedy that he had drawn up with such minute analysis on behalf of his friend, Wrangel. He was desperately anxious to return to Russia, where he would be able to consult doctors, and earn his bread by publishing his novels. At the very best, he main- tained, he could only be 4 mediocre officer, and his 126 A Great Russian Realist health was seriously against him. “If I desire to return to Russia,” he assures Wrangel, “‘it is solely in order to embrace my people and to consult doctors capable of telling me what is the malady by which I have been attacked (epilepsy), what are these attacks which repeat themselves, and after which my memory fails as well as all my other faculties, and which, I fear, will end by driving me mad.” But in the face of everything the courage of the man persists: the menace of death within twenty minutes had not cowed him; years of imprisonment in Siberia had not broken him; the new menace of madness did not frighten him, did not even preoccupy him or detach him from other interests—above all, it did not damp his eagerness as an artist. Never did he believe more exultantly in the creations of his brain. If they would only let him live in his world of ideas in St. Petersburg. His brain teems with life, if only these life-butchers will not massacre him before his ideas have sprung into life. They should let him enjoy bread and a garret after these years in Siberia, and then his ideas will be born; and that for him is the larger part of life. But for Dostoieffsky the authorities are not life-butchers at all, but only people who do not understand, people with rich, warm uniforms, looking for advancement, and for ever clustering between him and the compassionate Tsar, who will understand. Some of the political prisoners have received pardon; surely the Tsar will remember the unfortunate ones who have been A Difficult Romance 127 forgotten. Atlast, in a direct request to the Emperor, Dostoiefisky gives a cold résumé of his life in Siberia : ‘**T was condemned in 1849, at Petersburg, for a political crime. Degraded, deprived of my civil rights, I was sent to prison, in Siberia, for four years ; after hard labour I was to be drafted into the Army as a common soldier. “In 1854, after leaving the prison of Omsk, I entered as a common soldier the 7th Battalion of the Line of Siberia. “In 1855 I was promoted to the rank of non- commissioned officer, and in 1856 your Majesty honoured me with his Imperial pardon, and I regained the rank of Officer. In 1858 your Majesty deigned to grant me the right of hereditary nobility. This same year I handed in my resignation, for I was suffering from epilepsy, which had attacked me during the first year of my life in prison. “ After my resignation I installed myself in the town of Tver, where I am now living.” Tver had been Dostoieffsky’s first sanctuary from Siberia, but he considered it a thousand times worse than Semipalatinsk, in which corner of Siberia his tortuous romance with Issaev’s widow had ended at last in marriage. He had from the first behaved like one of the heroes in his own novel. His self- sacrifice was actually sketched in “ Injury and Insult.” In spite of his own troubles, Dostoieffsky devoted himself to the necessities of this widow, who for some time was on the verge of marrying another man. 128 A Great Russian Realist She had a claim of some 285 roubles on the death of her first husband, and Dostoieffsky implored his friend Wrangel to obtain the money for her as quickly as possible. ‘I tremble,” he writes from Semipala- tinsk in the summer of 1856, “‘ lest, weary of waiting for this money, she may marry again. Then it is possible (I suppose) that it may be refused to her. He has nothing; she has nothing either. Marriage will cause expenses ; at least two years will be necessary for them to right themselves.” Dostoieffsky deplores this new suffering for the unhappy woman, and urges the Baron again and again to do what he can for her. At the end of the same year, however, Dostoiefisky has himself become the central figure of this difficult romance: ‘‘ Now, my friend,” he writes to the Baron, “I wish to tell you of a matter which has a serious importance for me. I ought to tell it to you, since you are my friend. Briefly: I} @ circumstance does not prevent me from doing it, before the Carnival, I intend to marry, you know whom. She loves me up to the present. She has told me so herself. Yes. What I wrote to you about her in the summer has had very little influence on her attachment to me. She loves me. I am sure of it. I knew it, even at the time that I wrote my letter to you this summer. She soon lost her illusions about her new affection.. I knew it, even in the summer, from her letters. Everything was known to me. She has never had any secrets from me, Qh, if you knew what a woman she is}” A Difficult Romance 129 No intervening circumstance having taken place, Dostoieffsky determined to marry, and entered into particulars with his friend Wrangel on the subject of furniture, debts, cost of the ceremony, and the travelling expenses which would be necessary when the day of freedom arrived. Finally, on March 9, 1857, Dostoiefisky announces his marriage at the very time when his health was almost at its worst : ** First of all,” he says in this letter, ‘‘ my marriage, which took place at Kouznetzk on 6th February, and the return to Semipalatinsk took up a great deal more time than I had expected. At Barnaoul I had an attack, and remained there for four days more. The attack broke me down physically and morally ; the doctor told me that I had real epilepsy, and warned me that if I did not take immediate precautions, that is to say, a regular treatment, which is only possible in complete liberty, the attacks would take a turn for the worse, and that in one of them I might choke from a spasm in the throat, which always happens to me in my attacks.” But Dostoieffsky does not dwell at any length upon this malady which threatens his reason and his life, and a little later in this same letter he proceeds to analyse the character of Wrangel’s father, whom he has never met. In conclusion, he urges his friend to fight against an excess of sensibility. “I was a hypochondriac of the worst kind,” he admits, “ but I was cured by the rude upheaval of my destiny.” Paul Issaev, in whose career Dostoieffsky had 9 130 A Great Russian Realist interested himself ever since the death of his father, was now his step-son. Even in his request to the Emperor he asks that Paul may be admitted into a Lycée of St. Petersburg as a Foundation scholar. In this request he also speaks of his health: “ My malady grows worse from day to day; each new attack sensibly weakens my memory, my imagination, my moral and physical strength. The result will be exhaustion, death, or madness. I have a wife and a step-son to support. I possess no private means; I have no resources other than literary work—crushing and difficult work in my state of health. However, the doctors give me hope of being cured, basing this hope on the fact that my malady is not hereditary but accidental. But I can be seriously and effica- ciously treated only at Petersburg, where there are doctors who specialise in nervous maladies.” And he goes on to urge Alexander II. to allow him to return to the capital so that he can be cured of his malady. He may become useful to his family, and “ perhaps in something” useful also to Russia. But even when his desire was at last granted, and he and his wife were established at St. Petersburg, towards the beginning of 1860, Dostoieftsky was still restless. “I think that spring will revive me,” he writes to a friend, “Tf one could leave this accursed St. Petersburg, if only for one week! My journey to Moscow, with my brother, will perhaps be realised.” Still, the novelist had escaped with his sanity. More than ten years had passed since he had stood A Difficult Romance 131 shivering from the cold in Semyonovski Square. He was thirty-eight years old now, but in experience he was far older. Isolation had deepened a mind singu- larly receptive of impressions. Always sensitive, there had been stamped upon his memory such moments as would for ever recall the fantastic atmosphere which was so necessary to the genius of Dostoieffsky. On the other hand, there had been a certain tran- quillity of long endurance in this exile, during which he had learned to know the Bible. His wonderful brain had become stored with the associations of atonement during his long punishment. It had been very quiet “under the water,” where news of the coronation of Alexander IJ. and the Peace of Paris arrived as vibrations from another planet. Every- thing had seemed hopelessly far off, but sometimes Dostoiefisky would see something of the work of his two great rivals. Both pleased him; but Turgenev now struck him as lacking weight, while the young hero of the Fourth Bastion, afterwards so voluminous, appeared to Dostoieffsky as likely to write but little. The very sight of their work, however, must have been a stimulus to Dostoieffsky, who had commenced to regard himself as a complex machine, ruined through want of use. It is no wonder that he had set himself passionately to tear down that resistance of inertia which, with sluggish irony, was condemning to death, not only a man, but the wonderful unborn children of his brain. Dostoieffsky had borne his punishment, but the 132 A Great Russian Realist people with gold-lace traditions must be induced, by one means or another, not to stand any longer between. him and the merciful Tsar. Never afterwards, even in the most realistic of his novels, was he to construct a scene with more minute attention to the analysis of character than the scene in which his friend Wrangel was to plead for him with the defender of Sebastopol. Such scenes as these—comedies of despair—had been to a certain extent familiar to Dostoiefisky in his youth, had even appeared in ‘Poor Folk,” but Siberia had given the novelist the raw material for two books as well as the foundation of his whole system of writing. ‘The first of these was naturally the book that describes his prison life, but before this was given to the world Dostoiefisky had narrated that difficult and equivocal romance which had ended in his marriage to his fellow-exile’s widow. And now, at the commencement of this second period of Dostoieffsky’s work, it would be well to examine this method of analysis which had so pro- foundly deepened since the gentle pathos of ‘ Poor Folk”? had touched St. Petersburg. There is no doubt that Dostoieffsky, after leaving Siberia, had become less a teller of stories in the ordinary sense, than an observer of special cases. Externally, his treatment was crude in the extreme. Dostoieffsky availed himself of any and every means at hand, from the most hectic melodrama to the most long- drawn and clumsy digressions of explanation. Some-. how or other, the patient of one ward was to be A Difficult Romance 133 introduced to the patient of another, so that Dos- toiefisky might watch the action and reaction upon each other of two tormented souls. Until these conditions were established, until, in short, the “ fan- tastic’? atmosphere was reproduced, Dostoieffsky did what he himself most dreaded, that is to say he wrote what anybody could write. But as soon as the battery of that extraordinary brain commences to play in earnest, then all the heavy, cumbersome accessories are forgotten. At once the action becomes swift, actual, concrete; the truth of the thing almost sears the reader’s brain. A single convulsive exclama- tion of rage, or pain, or lust, betrays the very core of a creation of Dostoiefisky more unquestionably than pages of Tolstoy’s accurate observation. And though they were patients in a sense, these characters of Dostoieffsky were not mere abstractions, illustrating a particular infirmity, but actual men and women, living, not at a lower, but at an increased, pressure. The creations of Dostoieffsky do not illustrate an abstract quality as Pecksniff illustrates hypocrisy, or Tom Pinch, meekness. On the con- trary, they are filled with contradictions, and Dos- toiefisky produces the illusion of not inventing them, but of merely registering their states of mind. Nor does he improvise incidents for them, so that they may be judged by what they do. Actions with them have primarily the value of symptoms through which the state of the mind may be dimly divined. Dostoieffsky himself lived under mental and physical 134 A Great Russian Realist pressure, and as he developed, he became in a sense cruel, cruel through curiosity as to how a particular human soul would endure a particular phase of increased pressure. Both his pity and his cruelty alike were manifestations of his two great qualities— pity and intellectual curiosity. Through his pity he was to become the confessor of the Russian soul. Through this cruelty of the psychologist he was to become, to a certain extent, its vivisector. From the beginning his method had been from within outward, as he stated in that letter written after the triumph of “ Poor Folk.” But Siberia had sharpened it, until it became a cruelty of inquisition, compared with which Tolstoy’s realism is as the horse- play of an ordinary English novelist. Siberia had added the scalding wisdom of experience to that sensitive intuition. Dostoieffsky had been buried alive, and when he was disinterred, he remembered. Like Dante, he had been in the dark places, but without Virgil for his guide. He had descended to the last lurking-places of despair, but without the saving memory of Beatrice. He had been alone with tormented souls, who had whispered to him the secrets that he had been almost afraid to divine. Henceforth, he could never be as those other artists, who obtained so serenely the effects of a storm which they had never felt, and which they would never imagine. But, on the other hand, no artist is less suscept- ible of arrangement than Dostoieffsky. He can be A Difficult Romance 135 labelled neither optimist nor pessimist by the most anxious. His sympathy bred cruelty as well as pity. His presentiment of immortality was coloured all his life by the recognition of the reasonableness of doubt. His very faith in Russia, and in the réle of Russia, was charged by a very clear reading of the Slav age in youth. But beneath all contradictions the qualities of Dostoieffsky are intimately related and interdependent. His own suffering had deepened his sympathy with suffering; his introspection, the result of suffering, developed his curiosity in regard to his fellow-sufferers ; pity itself passed into scien- tific cruelty ; the confessor passed into the vivisector of human souls. But not for a moment was the kindness of sympathy suppressed in the heart of Dostoieffsky, who was so far now from the arrogant isolation of Gustave Flau- bert. Art was not a sanctuary from the common herd to Dostoieffsky, but rather an organic function. It had become his tormefit to observe accurately the travail of human souls, just as it became Flaubert’s to render to art the homage of the mot juste. What- ever tie had existed between them was now severed, but each of them continued to suffer. Merejkowski has noted the absence of culture in the heroines of Tolstoy. In a sense, this is almost equally significant of the heroines of Dostoieffsky and of the other great Russian novelists. Culture belongs to the dilettante of intrigue, rather than to the victim of a great passion. Petronius and Aspasia 136 A Great Russian Realist answer each other’s shibboleths across the centuries, but it is only Villon who can respond to the exalta- - tion of Sappho. Feeding upon genius, but impotent to reproduce it, culture evades the whirlpools of emotion. Culture, that illusive renewal of world-old desires, that imaginative tasting of what has passed through the crucibles of the dead, to be renewed as the seasons are renewed, that decomposition of all individual censoriousness and caprice, belongs by right to the Latin heirs of antiquity. The German circles hungrily round it in his passion for the pursuit of new ideas. The Anglo-Saxon would make of it, as it were, a new mental colony, duly labelled, like English taste and English comfort. Both of them are at once above and beneath any reincarnation of Petronius. But the Slav? The Slav, in his youth, strangely detects the old savour through the new masks. Rest- less and insatiable, he seems to possess something of that Latin power of absorption, but only as an imitator, only as an experimenter in new sensations, only as a precocious child who has overheard the whispers of his elders. ‘‘’The barbarian with the lizard’s eyes” neither selects nor rejects, but em- braces everything, only to pass on, torn by his own passions, bewildered by his own desires. And the culture of the West falls away from him, forgotten as a language that he has learned as a child with too great ease. Even Turgenev, steeped as he was in this culture A Difficult Romance 137 of the West, was often suspicious of it with reference to his own countrymen. Tolstoy, less capable of absorbing it, utterly rejected it. Turgenev’s Irinna and Tolstoy’s Anna are in this one respect sisters, though their creators differed profoundly in their attitude towards culture. Each of these heroines is alike alien from the heroine of Bourget’s ‘“ Les Mensonges.”” For, the door of passion, as opposed to intrigue, opens into a new and individual world in which its victims are stripped bare of all accessories, as were Lucian’s ghosts beside the Styx. But Dostoieffsky, who, unlike Turgenev, valued Europe, because Russia was, in his opinion, European, and who, unlike Tolstoy, possessed a wholly unreason- ing and unreasoned presentiment of faith, introduces us to far more complex characters than either of his rivals. It is not, however, culture that he com- municates to them, the seasoned emotional experience that belongs to even the slightest character of M. Anatole France. It is something even alien from this, a mental complexity springing from the acute sensation of mental and physical suffering—his own suffering. But these projections of Dostoieffsky are singularly acute. Rudin and Lavretsky, Pierre and Levin, would one and all be ill at ease in their com- pany. Dostoieffsky’s heroines, too, preserve com- plexity in passion, but it is the complexity of suffering, of perverseness even, rather than the acquired com- plexity of culture. In reality, all his life, Dostoiefisky was haunted by 138 A Great Russian Realist the Demon, who says to Ivan Karamazov: “ There exist for me two truths, one up yonder, Theirs, which is quite unknown to me, and another which is mine.” Dostoieffsky, who passed through “a great furnace of doubt,” was in reality too great a doubter to believe in the doctrine of materialism. ‘Tolstoy’s recognition of the two truths was quite distinct from that of his rival. Beginning with the reality of the body, Tolstoy groped after the soul, whereas Dostoieffsky was primarily obsessed by the soul, but was from time to time haunted by the terrible grimace of atavism. ‘Tolstoy arrived at the faith of the soul in spite of the aggressive insistence of the body. Dostoiefisky was over and over again dragged down from his spiritual elevation through his curiosity in regard to the atavistic gropings and animal mutterings of a lower plane. Dostoiefisky, who believed passionately in the God- man, was all his life haunted by the Man-god. His duality was far deeper than that exploited duality of Tolstoy, for whom the conflict between the two truths became the equation O=O. Tolstoy fled from this sinister negation to the sanctuary of faith. From the very first, however, he had struggled, as the natural man struggles, against the natural claims of the flesh which the pagans accepted so tranquilly. But of the Man-god, as an ideal of reason, he took no heed whatever at any period of his life. Turgenev, too, paid but little heed to the twin truths of Dostoieff- sky’s dilemma. The stoical artist accepted Nature A Difficult Romance 139 once and for all as Ja grande indifférente, and inter- ested himself in her suppliants. Again, Dostoieffsky, essentially the novelist of pity, was, as Merejkowski has called him, “ the great delineator” of the passions of the mind as distinct from those of the heart. His intellectual curiosity was to reach down to the last hiding-place of the ego. From him nothing was hidden. He is the novelist of individualities who are developed remorse- lessly, monstrously, as it seems to many. Dostoieffsky must drag each of his characters through the furnace of his own suffering, so that at last he may find life for his soul. But Tolstoy’s message is wholly different, is even antagonistic. ‘Tolstoy’s Natasha, for example, is the inevitable sacrifice of the species to the genus, of the individual to the race. Underneath the compelled faith of Tolstoy there continued from the first to sound the old cry—“ As is the race of leaves so is the race of man.” Tolstoy was confessing all his life, but there are hints in Dostoieffsky of a far darker side than anything suggested by the self-indictment of the author of “Anna Karénina.” But he is secretive compared with Count Tolstoy, secretive even when compared with the reserved Turgenev. It seemed to him enough that he should reveal the degradation of his prison life, the gloomy romance of his marriage, his malady, his want, his passionate beliefs. Beyond that, let none pry too closely in search of that inner inferno from which the Christian in Dostoieffsky was to win _ 140 A Great Russian Realist his way with an infinitely more complex painfulness than did the pagan in Count Tolstoy. In most of his books, however, there is the recogni- tion of this darker side in the human soul, and so far as his art is concerned, Dostoieffsky shrank from no revelation. Without the objectivity of Shake- speare, without the robust health of Shakespeare, this Russian questioner had at least one quality in common with the creator of Hamlet, of whom Ruskin has said so truly: “It was necessary he should lean no way ; that he should contemplate, with absolute equality of judgment, the life of the court, cloister, and tavern, and be able to sympathise so completely with all creatures as to deprive himself, together with his personal identity, even of his conscience, as he casts himself into their hearts. He must be able to enter into the soul of Falstaff or Shylock with no more sense of contempt or horror than Falstaff or Shylock themselves feel for or in themselves. He must be utterly without anger, utterly without purpose, for if a man has any serious purpose in life, that which runs counter to it, or is foreign to it, will be looked at frowningly or carelessly by him.” The “fantastic” patients of Dostoieffsky were not the full-bodied, ample creations of Shakespeare; but no one, not even Shakespeare himself, has looked more impartially into the human heart than this novelist of the disinherited, whose “Injury and Insult’ was part of his own life-story. It is the story of that difficult romance in Siberia in which A Difficult Romance 141 Dostoiefisky had done everything in his power to help another man to marry the woman whom he himself loved with all his heart. He is, as regards this almost unimaginable unselfishness, the “ Vania” of “ Injury and Insult,” but the book is a record of other equally complicated cases. Here, nobody falls into the cut line of routine. The plot is even more cumber- some than that of “Crime and Punishment,” and melodrama is freely used, but the characters stand out with all the curious vitality of Dostoieffsky’s creations, the individual vitality of the soul. Natasha is almost a Russian Phedra; she is almost clairvoyante of impending catastrophe. She loves the gentle, boyish egotist, Alioscha, with that single- minded passion that belongs to the great themes of tragedy. But in the very midst of her passion her mind works almost as feverishly as her heart. She knows that they will try to tear this boy from her. She knows that she must fight for him, and that she must lose, because of his own inner weakness. She recognises at once in the Prince, his father, the real enemy, who will steal the boy from her, in spite of all his fair words. For, the Prince’s attitude towards this girl, who has stolen his son, and is preventing him from making a rich marriage, is not at all that of traditional Western comedy. The Prince never suggests for a moment that his son should not marry this young girl, whom he has taken from her parents and her home. Only things must be done gently and in order; Alioscha 142 A Great Russian Realist must do what is right. His son must sacrifice him- self, and do his duty by Natdsha. It sounds well on the surface, but the girl understands that she is being mocked, and made to appear a burden to this boy, who is not shaped for the burdens of life. They are trying to rob her of Alioscha. Even in the throes of her passion the Russian Phedra analyses every convolution of the Prince’s brain. In spite of the odds against her, she matches her brain against his, her love for Alioscha against his worldly ambition. But all the time she knows that she is playing a losing game, that Alioscha is unstable, that he has only the will to will instead of volition. Swayed like a child by the emotions of the moment, Alioscha has one quality for which Natd4sha forgives him every defect. He is absolutely sincere, sincere when he is faithless as much as when he is faithful. It is the Russian sincerity, the sincerity of youth, the sincerity of quick laughter, and quicker tears. And it is so natural, that all the conventions seem to dissolve into mist as one reads these fragments that are as surely torn from memory as are the pages of “‘ Buried Alive.” At first, it would seem that one character at least, the Prince, would refuse to lend himself to Dos- toieffsky’s treatment, and would evade the “‘ fantastic ” atmosphere of the hospital. At first, he seems to respond to the call of melodrama alone, to be a mere wicked figure, gliding as it were from ward to ward, but not a patient of Dostoieffsky. But even he must tear off his mask and disclose his soul. It is the A Difficult Romance 143 soul of Polichinetti, and he enjoys exposing it in its nudity, ‘There is a voluptuous pleasure,” he tells Vania, “in throwing off the mask like this before somebody. I'll tell you an anecdote about a madman in Paris; they put him into a lunatic asylum after- wards, but one day when he first went mad, it occurred to him to amuse himself like this: He undressed at home, all but his boots, threw a long cloak over him- self, wrapped it well round him, and went out with great dignity into the streets. Well, to look at him, you would suppose he was just like any ordinary man out for a walk in a big cloak; but whenever he saw anybody coming along alone, without any one else near, and in a quiet place, he would march up with a solemn air, apparently in deep thought, and, stopping suddenly before the astonished pedestrian, would throw open his cloak and reveal himself in all the dignity of nature’s own garb. This would last a minute or so, and then silently he would wrap himself round once more, and, without moving a muscle of his face, pass by the amazed spectator, solemnly and slowly, like the ghost in ‘Hamlet.’ He did this with every person he met—man, woman, or child— and found the greatest satisfaction in the proceeding. Well, some sort of pleasure of this kind is to be found in getting hold of a Schillery sort of a person, and, having shocked him suddenly, in sticking out your tongue at him when he least expects it.” Over and over again, in the novels of Dostoieffsky, among the shivering, shuddering figures of the disinherited, one 144 A Great Russian Realist meets some such restless Polichinetti, who cannot retain his hideous and tormented secret. It is the spirit that escapes from “The Underground Spirit,” it is the spirit that lurks in the chuckle of old Kara- mazov, the spirit that strangles Stavroguine and sends Svidrigailoff to an equally lonely death. It is of the very essence of the duality of Dostoieffsky, this interruption of the grin of a Polichinetti in the midst of the solemnity of the Sermon on the Mount. A very different case is that of Nellie, the little girl, whom Vania rescues from a house of evil repute in St. Petersburg. The child’s character is drawn with the most minute fidelity. There is no melo- drama here. Nellie is a veritable patient, and Dos- toiefisky’s diagnosis is marvellously acute. The child knows that her rescuer is in love with Nat&sha, and she becomes jealous, now giving way to irritation, now affectionate, now morose, becoming everything in turn, as though she were able to divine everything that Natasha is enduring. And it is Natasha who understands that Nellie is consumed by her own malady. Dostoieffsky’s Nellie has often been compared with Dickens’ creation, but she is wholly Russian, and the pathos that permeates her is not the pathos of Dickens. Surrounded on all sides by the machinery of melodrama, the child retains her own intense individuality. Her treatment, indeed, illustrates ad- mirably the habitual method of Dostoieffsky. Nellie, a real child studied minutely, known through and A Difficult Romance 145 through, must be brought into the zone of unknown people. Well, the familiar, external machinery is set at work, just as it is set at work in “ Crime and Punishment,” and Nellie is brought into the story under the protection of melodrama. But the poor irritable, loving, contradictory little waif of destiny becomes instantly a true picture in a false setting, in the same sense that Sonia herself is absolutely true to life, in spite of every suggestion of external melodrama. The little Russian child differs wholly from the heroine of “‘ The Old Curiosity Shop.” In an inner sense, Dostoieffsky was incapable of melodrama, and the study of Nellie is realistic in Dostoiefisky’s sense to the very end. When Dickens’ heroine dies, the pathos is mainly external, and springs less from the tragedy of the child than from the self-indulgence of those who watch her. The Russian novelist does not invite us ‘‘ to have a good cry” over the death of his sombre little heroine; he is content with drawing her as she is, and being faithful to her incon- sistencies until the end. Dostoieffsky was profoundly sympathetic with all children, and particularly with this waif of St. Petersburg, but none the less, she is a case, as well as a protégée, and the diagnosis must be exact, and the actual facts of the development duly registered. Vania, the unselfish hero of this novel, who sacri- fices himself without the capacity for phrases, is undoubtedly the true Dostoiefisky, the Dostoiefisky in 19 146 A Great Russian Realist whom curiosity itself is lulled by pity, the Dostoiefisky who has forgotten even to question his own “ ape,” Peter, his double, who was at once his butt and his despair. But even Vania, with all his noble sim- plicity, had in his heart the seeds of curiosity, He, too, wished to know and to fathom the secrets of more complex souls, the secrets, even of a Polichinetti, for they, too, have their own accent of pain. Dostoieffsky’s epilepsy continued to trouble him more and more, and he determined to leave for Europe again. ‘I start alone,” he tells his brother, André; “ my wife remains at St. Petersburg.” As a matter of fact, there was not enough money for her to accompany him, and in any case Paul, who was preparing for his entrance examination to the Gymnase, could not be left alone. On June 7, 1862, the novelist left for Berlin on his first visit to Europe. CHAPTER VII A YEAR OF MISFORTUNE DosrotgFrsKxy was not a sympathetic traveller, though, for different reasons, he was almost as much drawn towards Europe as was his rival, Turgenev. Berlin seemed to him disagreeable and he remained there only forty-eight hours. Paris bored him, and of his old enemy, Jacques Bonhomme, he writes to Strakhov from Paris: ‘‘ The Frenchman is suave, honourable, polite, but he is false, and for him money is everything —no ideal, no convictions; do not demand from him even reflection.” He admits, however, that the conditions have been against him. The weather has been horrible, and of the marvels of Nature he has seen only the Rhine and its banks, the charm of which he acknowledged. But he longs for Italy. ‘ When shall I descend from the Alps,” he writes to Strakhov, “into the plains of Italy? Ah! if we could do that together! We should see Naples, we should walk about in Rome, perhaps we would caress a young Venetian girl in a gondola (ah! Nicolas Nicolaie- vitch !}; but nothing, nothing, silence, as Popristchine says in a similar case.” But, generally speaking, Dostoieffsky is preoccupied 147 148 A Great Russian Realist with Russia and the Russians during his travels in Europe. He is anxious about the Vremya and he comments upon the influence of Europe, upon the civilisation of his country. What does Europe mean to Russia? Can Russia resist this alien influence? Should she try to resist it? These are the questions by which he is constantly preoccupied. For the rest, he preserves always the “‘lizard’s eye” of his race. He contrasts, for example, the curious blend of eagerness and boredom on the part of his country- men, with the attitude of other foreigners: “It is not the satisfied and quite mechanical curiosity of the English tourists of both sexes, who look at the guide rather than at the objects, who expect nothing new, nothing remarkable, and merely verify the information of the guide, and find out the measure- ments or the weight of the particular object. Oh, no, our interest is something savage, nervous, very eager, and at the same time quite convinced that nothing can ever happen.” Dostoiefisky undoubtedly shared the opinions that he expressed on the publication for the first time of the Vremya. Neither Western nor Slavophil, he regarded Russia as at once European, and at the same time distinct from the rest of Europe: “ We are convinced, finally, that we are a nation apart, original in the highest degree, whose problem it is to create for itself a new manner of life, suitable to it, having its roots in our own soil, in the spirit and the principles of the people.” And.he goes on to A Year of Misfortune 149 maintain that it is. not for nothing that Russians speak every language and comprehend every civilisa- tion: “It is not in vain that we have shown so much force in pronouncing judgment against our- selves, a fact which astonishes foreigners. They have reproached us with it; they have called us ‘ beings without personality’ and ‘ without Fatherland,’ not understanding that the capacity for tearing oneself for an instant from one’s own soil, so as to look at oneself without prejudice or favour, is the indication of a very strong personality, and at the same time, that the capacity for regarding the foreigner with indulgence is one of the greatest and most noble gifts of Nature, of which few nationalities are capable.” Again and again Dostoieffsky was to repeat his great national tradition, that Russia was to remain Russian, but to condemn no other nation, that she was neither “to scoff, nor criticise, nor condemn, but to love.” In the autumn of 1863 he was in Rome, and was forced to confess to his friend, Strakhov, that he expected to find himself absolutely penniless at Turin in a few days. He was now at work on “The Gambler,” that curious short novel which has so much of actual auto- biography in its pages. It isa minute study of roulette, but it is also the study of an interesting case, “I take a simple nature,” writes Dostoieffsky to his old friend, Strakhov, ‘“‘ but a man who is very cultivated, and yet one who is incompletely developed, a man who has lost faith, and who does not dare to believe, 150 A Great Russian Realist who revolts against the authorities, and at the same time fears them. In order to give himself change, he tells himself that there is nothing to do in Russia, which leads me to a severe criticism of those people who root up the Russians. But I cannot tell every- thing here. He is a living creature. (I see him as if he were in front of me.) You must read the whole when it is written. The principal point is, that all his vital forces, his courage, his manhood, are ex- pended on roulette.” This book, however, was not actually written until three years later, though from time to time Dostoiefisky was living its sombre pages. All through the correspondence of Dostoiefisky, except during the last few years of his life, there sounds the cry of irritated necessity, as though year after year he were to be half-strangled by the burden of poor old Makar, as though he, the lord of Russian dreams, were to be for ever mocked by boots, and clothes, and the humiliations of shamed poverty. But, just as in the old clerk’s correspondence, there are occasional hints as to why this state of things so constantly recurs, hints about a certain disorder of life, against which Dostoieffsky struggled in vain. Tolstoy may be said to have dragged himself slowly and patiently from the earth towards the stars; but Dostoieffsky was being repeatedly dragged, as it were, from the stars to the earth. One phase of this “disorder” was his passion for roulette, and in ‘‘ The Gambler” he gives us the psychology of gambling, as though no one had evey A Year of Misfortune 151 written about roulette before. At first glance the situation would seem that of farce: an impoverished Russian family are expecting hourly to hear of the death of a rich aunt, when she suddenly springs upon them in excellent health, and with the very keenest interest in roulette. She cares nothing for the waters of this German spa, but goes at once to the tables, accompanied by her nephew’s tutor, who, incidentally, has just been dismissed. In the back- ground an equivocal Frenchman, and a still more equivocal Frenchwoman, have also been waiting for “Grannie’s”’? death, with the intention of further plundering her nephew, the poor, weak, old General. Still further in the background, a young Englishman, Mr. Astley, watches this desperate little comedy, and, more particularly, Paulina, the General’s daughter, with whom the Russian tutor is hopelessly in love. Paulina, on her side, seemed to find amusement in treating the young Russian tutor as though he were literally her slave. She would make him do absurd things for the sake of testing her power over him, and finally it occurred to her, that he might be useful to her at the roulette-tables. As for him, he was willing to commit suicide at a moment’s notice to save her from momentary ennui. “She under- stands all this wonderfully well,” he notes in his memoirs, “and the thought that I fully and thor- oughly recognise her inaccessibility and the utter hopelessness of the ultimate realisation of my wild longings for her—this thought, I am quite sure, is a 152 A Great Russian Realist source of the greatest possible pleasure to her; other- wise, could she, the careful and intelligent girl that she is, allow herself to live upon this footing of fami- liarity and intimacy with me? I think she has looked upon me, up till now, with much the same feeling as prompted a certain empress of old to begin un- dressing before her slave, scarcely looking upon him as a man at all. She has very often treated me as though I were less than a man. However, here was her commission: I must be off to the roulette-table and win at any cost.” In the meantime, “ Grannie” has become the central figure of the Vauxhall, and seems determined to gamble away the entire fortune upon which all the hopes of plundered and plunderers alike had been centred. But all that is just the external comedy of Dos- toiefisky. Underneath, there are the old fierce currents of emotion, without which his genius seems powerless. Paulina, herself, the proud, self-willed Russian girl, is not in the least whatsheseems. Here, as so often in the work of Dostoiefisky, we seem to read the unwritten parentheses, to hear unuttered whispers, to divine concealed heart-throbs. Paulina possesses that mixture of complexity and simplicity which was inherent in Dostoiefisky himself, and in the young Russian tutor, whose memoirs form this short novel. She, too, is essentially noble in that inner sense which seems able to defy any alien con- tamination whatsoever. And in this society of half- ruined and equivocal people the proud young girl A Year of Misfortune 153 seeks what is noble, and, like so many others, accepts the mask for the reality. The Frenchman fastens upon her with all his predatory fascination, and she cannot understand the concealed emptiness beneath the outer surface. The Russian tutor, who shares to the full Dostoieffsky’s unreasonable prejudice against the French, sums up the situation to the Englishman, who also loves her: ‘“‘ The typical Frenchman became the type of beauty to us Russians while we were still bears. Any Frenchman may now (since the Revolution) have the airs, and the manners, and the expression of the typical form of beauty—it is his inheritance. He may be in himself the most stupid or scoundrelly individual under the sun. Well, Mr. Astley, again, there is no more ingenuous and simple and kind-hearted creature than a Russian girl. De Grier, assuming any character, appears under a mask, and can lay siege to her heart with the utmost ease. De Grier has a graceful figure, and she will accept that figure and face as typical of the soul within, and of the heart; not as a mere garb, inherited from his forefathers! To your intense disgust I’m afraid I must add that Englishmen are as a rule angular and inelegant! and Russians are very sharp about distinguishing personal beauty and worshipping it ; but to distinguish between beauty of soul and originality of person, one must have a good deal more experience, and fitness, and practice, than our Russian ladies have.” In his turn, Mr. Astley, the representative of one 154 A Great Russian Realist of the very few foreign races who seem to have been congenial to the novelist, makes this penetrating comment upon the Russian character: ‘“ Yes, you have ruined yourself! You possessed certain good traits, you were animated, and—well you were not a bad fellow; you might even have been of some service to your country—which so sadly needs good men; but—you will stay here—and your life is ended. I do not blame you; in my opinion all you Russians are like this, or capable of becoming so; if it be not roulette, it will take some other form. Exceptions are very rare.” But the Englishman understands and appreciates the mingling of the wise and the ecstatic with cynicism in the Russian character, and observes very truly: “ Only Russians could combine in themselves so many inconsistencies at one and the same time.” But to return to the Russian gambler, many of whose experiences Dostoiefisky had learned at first- hand at Wiesbaden. From the moment that the tutor begins to gamble for himself, he is seized by a mania that withers up everything else in his nature. He had started out with the intention of winning fifty thousand francs, which Paulina owed to the Frenchman, but as he played, he forgot everything but the game itself. He was seized by that passion for hurling oneself forward, even: into an abyss, that Russian otchaianié which Dostoieffsky has defined as “‘the sensation of a man who, from the summit of a high tower, leans over the yawning abyss and A Year of Misfortune 155 experiences a shudder of pleasure at the idea that he may hurl himself from it headlong.”” Dominated by this chaotic impulse, he determined to stake upon the red, in spite of the fact that it had been up seven times in succession. “I feel sure that vanity played a great part in my feelings and actions during this period; I longed to astonish the spectators by my wild risks and strange daring. I remember quite well how a sort of thirst for risking largely, got possession of me. Perhaps the mind passing from sensation to sensation, and only becoming more excited with its bee-like visits, grows more and more thirsty for further sensations—each one more vivid and keener than the last—until it has satisfaction and sinks, as it were, tired, to rest. And—and this is no lie, but pure truth—if the laws of the game had permitted me to stake fifty thousand at a time, instead of four thousand, I should most assuredly have done so. So I continued to stake upon red.” In the end he returned to Paulina with the sum of two hundred thousand francs. The girl was almost hysterical, as she clung to him sobbing and laughing by turns. She had compromised herself with him, and yet he could not realise that she cared for him. He could not realise that the old slavery was over for ever, that they two were man and woman now. Something had come between him and his old life- passion, an indefinable something, which the girl divined, even though she was on the brink of a serious illness. In her turn, she began to implore him to 156 A Great Russian Realist love her, to love her always. And from time to time she reminded him that the slow, patient Englishman was walking silently in front of the window in the darkness. The next morning Paulina left him, and even then he did not understand. But the Englishman knew, the Englishman with whom the distracted girl had taken refuge, and with whose mother and sisters she lived for some time in the north of England, he understood that the new passion had driven out the old. ‘ You will go to Paris,” he told him, and truly enough the man who had loved Paulina with all his soul started for Paris a few hours later, with the French adventuress, who had discarded the old General. The money was spent carefully and metho- dically enough by the Frenchwoman upon herself, and in about a month the little Russian tutor, as she called him, was started off again to win another two hundred thousand francs at roulette. Of course, he sank to the very dregs, becoming a flunkey, a waiter, anything, that he might have a gulden to throw on black or red. An unknown friend had him released from imprisonment for debt, but, like a moth, he fluttered back to the old lights. And even now, he did not understand the meaning of his immense loss. At the very end, when he was ruined in mind and heart, the Englishman, humiliated by his own hopeless love, told him frankly the whole truth. It was he, the little Russian tutor, that Paulina had loved and loved still. But between him and this A Year of Misfortune 157 beautiful, ennobling love, there sounded and would always sound the click of the roulette-table. Even as a boy Dostoieffsky had anticipated the lessons of experience, and had fathomed many of the grey places of memory, the places in which no echo vibrates, and where the flush of lost happiness has faded for ever. But in ‘“‘ The Gambler” there is something that almost hurts, an intensity, so to speak, of helplessness, that carries in it the sting of self-knowledge. It.is no wonder that the author remarked of his hero: ‘‘ He is a gambler, but not a mere gambler.” Yet, short as the novel is, it was not actually written until 1866, in which year Dostoiefisky -was again in the most desperate difficulties. In the meantime his wife’s health gave him the gravest anxiety, and in February 1864 he tells Michael that he will be detained for a long time in Moscow, on her account. The next month he writes to tell his brother that she is dying: ‘‘ My nerves are bad, and I cannot regain my strength. I have so many torments, that I do not wish to speak of them. My wife is dying! Every day there are moments during which we expect her death. Her sufferings are atrocious and are reflected in me for...” The novelist’s position has become more unbearable than ever. “Just at present,” he writes to Michael, “ my situation is so pitiable, that I have never found myself in a similar position before. My life is sombre; my health is still very feeble; my wife is dying; in 158 A Great Russian Realist the night, after having passed a horrible day, my nerves are irritated. I must have air, movement, and I have neither the time to take walks, nor the possibility of doing it. (There is too much mud.)” He has no summer overcoat, it seems, and the same year he speaks about being compelled to wear his winter boots in the Russian summer. But all these little miseries are nothing compared with his anxiety for his wife—“ the most honourable, the noblest, the most generous of all the women that I have known in my life.” Money must be obtained by one means or another, and Dostoieffsky urges his brother to procure some from his aunt, of whom he gives a precise psychological study exactly in the manner of his novels. And he goes on to sketch the actual scene of this borrowing transaction, exactly as he had anticipated in Siberia, Wrangel’s pleading for him with Todleben. ‘‘ Gener- ally speaking,” he observes, “one should not be too mucha suppliant, one should not tremble and humiliate oneself, one should not employ the ‘ cut-and-dried ’ tone of a commercial man; nor will the serious air of a man of affairs be of much use. It is necessary to act morally on the sentiments, and not to act upon them pathetically, but with inflexibility and precision. It is that which will affect her most surely.” And yet, in spite of these miserable comedies of necessity, Dostoiefisky maintained his own pride, the pride of the artist, and over and over again he protests in these letters, that even in his most A Year of Misfortune 159 desperate straits he will not sell himself to the publishers. It is about this period that Madame Kovalevsky’s impressions of the novelist were formed. Her elder sister, it seems, contributed to the Epoch, while Dostoieffsky was editing it, and when the sisters arrived at St. Petersburg from the country, the elder sister immediately asked the famous novelist to call, in spite of the prejudice of the General, her father. The first visit was a failure, as Sonya’s mother had insisted on two old German aunts being present: ‘“‘ Dostoieffsky felt awkward and ill-at-ease in the constrained atmosphere among all these old ladies, and he, too, was annoyed. He appeared that day to be sick and old, which was always the case when he was not in a good temper. The whole time he kept fingering his thin yellow beard and biting his lips, and thus contorted his whole face.” Five days later, however, the novelist called when the girls’ mother and aunts were all out. Sonya thought that he looked quite different, a man of genius, who was also simple and good. ‘Can he be really forty-three ?”’ she mused. “‘ Can he be three times older than I am, and more than twice as old as Anyuta? And he is into the bargain a great author, and yet one can really converse with him as with a friend.” Hours went by, and suddenly the girls’ mother returned from shopping, and was any- thing but pleased at seeing the novelist so much at home. Her daughters, however, disarmed her by ee 160 A Great Russian Realist their own happiness, and Dostoieffsky was then and there asked to dinner. From that moment, the most pleasant and friendly relations were established, and Dostoiefisky would speak openly to these charming girls of his past life. He would speak of the clock striking four on a bright May morning in St. Peters- burg just as he reached his miserable lodgings, and of Nekrassov and Grigorovitch rushing up to hima little later, to tell him that they had just finished “Poor Folk”! ‘There are many who have suc- ceeded, who have won fame, and who have been congratulated; but only think! they came rushing to me at four in the morning, with tears in their eyes, to wake me—because it was worth more than sleep.” He would tell them, too, about the young and (“gifted Petrachevski and his followers, and of those harmless meetings of his own little group of Fourier- ists. He told them about that terrible February morning when he had waited in front of the scaffold, and when one of his comrades had gone mad from the strain. He even spoke to them about his malady. ‘You strong people,” he added, “ have no idea of the bliss which epileptics experience in the moments preceding their attacks.. Mahomet assures us in his Koran that he had seen Paradise and had been there. All sensible folk mock, laugh at him, and call him a liar and a deceiver. But he did not lie. He had veritably been in Paradise in an attack of epilepsy, from which he suffered as I do. I do A Year of Misfortune 161 not know if this bliss lasted a second, an hour, or a month, but, believe my word, I would not exchange it for all the happiness life could give me.” Dos- toieffsky concluded in so peculiarly passionate a whisper, that both sisters were seized by the idea that he was on the verge of another attack. The novelist read their thoughts. “Do not be afraid,” he said ; “ I always know beforehand when it is coming over me.” The sisters were naturally distressed that he should have interpreted their thoughts, but the _ next day he told them that he had had a severe attack that very night. As their stay in St. Petersburg drew to a close, Sonya’s mother gave a farewell party, to which the novelist was invited. ‘One can imagine,” writes the author of ‘The Sisters Rajevsky,” ‘ how out of countenance Dostoieffsky would be in such company. Both by manners and position he was cut off from the others. In honour of the great occasion he had sacrificed his coat for evening dress. His clothes fitted him badly, and made it difficult for him to move, so that he felt beside himself. Besides, he was put out from the instant he crossed the threshold of the drawing-room. Like all nervous people, he experienced a feeling of irritation when he was in a strange circle. The more superficial, commonplace, and uncongenial the company was, the more uncom- fortable he became. He was vexed, and at last sought some circumstance on which to vent his bitterness. His hostess hurried up to him and introduced him II 162 A Great Russian Realist to the other guests; but Dostoieffsky merely growled out something, and turned his back on them.” “The worst was,” continues Sonya Kovalevsky, “ he evidently intended to absorb Anyuta for his own exclusive benefit. He led her to a corner of the room with the evident intention of not letting her go. This was naturally at variance with every social idea of what was proper. Into the bargain, his manner towards her was not at all comme il faut; he took her hand and whispered several times into her ear during the course of the conversation.” Eventually, his hostess lost patience with the novelist and told him plainly that her elder daughter must attend to the other guests. Dostoieffsky was deeply offended at this, and retired sullenly into a corner of the drawing-room. He was particularly exasper- ated against a young officer of Cuirassiers, who was paying attention to Sonya’s sister. The author of the autobiography entitled “‘ The Sisters Rajevsky ” imagined that Dostoiefisky was then and there busying himself with the plot of a novel : “‘ Dostoieffsky glared at the two. His head immediately conjured up a whole romance. Anyuta hated and despised that idiot, that self-conceited whipper-snapper; but her parents wished to marry her off to him, and brought them together thus. The whole party was naturally made up for the purpose. After thinking out this romance, Dostoieffsky thought himself much injured.” Presently the conversation turned upon an English book that suggested a parallel between the Greek and A Year of Misfortune 163 Protestant churches. The hostess, who was a German, observed that Protestantism possessed one advantage at least, insomuch as Protestants more habitually read the Gospels. Instantly, Dostoieffsky, who had been sitting silent, plunged into the conversation, exactly as his own Prince Myshkine would have plunged into it, heedless of the conventionalities of time and place. ‘‘Is the Gospel written for women of the world?” he asked. “In one place it is written, ‘In the beginning God made male and female,’ and in another place, ‘A man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife.’ This is what Christ says of marriage. But what is to be said of those mothers whose only thought is to get their daughters married as advantageously as possible?’ Of course this outburst produced a scandal, and after staring at him for a few moments in silence, the other guests endeavoured to talk away the impression of this curious outburst. When Dostoieffsky next visited the house, there was a slight coolness between him and this charming family, but it very soon evaporated, and the novelist was again received on the old footing. Now, though Dostoiefisky may or may not have been elaborating a romance, of which the elder sister and the young officer of Cuirassiers were the central figures, quite another romance was silently developing around him without his in the least suspecting it. Tanja, the younger of the two sisters, that is to say, Sonya Kovalevsky herself, then only a little 164 A Great Russian Realist girl, became absolutely devoted to Dostoiefisky, just as Nellie became devoted to Vania in “ Injury and Insult.” But the end of their visit to St. Petersburg was now approaching, and when the novelist came to say good-bye to the sisters, he was still wholly unsuspicious of the temporary trouble that he had caused: ‘‘ Dostoieffsky came once again to say fare- well. He did not stay long, but his behaviour to Anyuta was kindly and natural, and they promised to write to each other. He took a very tender fare- well of Tanja, kissed her at parting, but certainly had not the remotest idea of what kind of feeling she had for him, or how much suffering he had caused her.” About six months afterwards Anyuta received a letter from Dostoieffsky in which he told her that he had been fortunate enough to meet a charming young girl, with whom he had fallen in love, and to whom he was now engaged to be married. This was his stenographer, Anna Grigorievna, who afterwards became his second wife. ‘If any one had told me this six months ago,” observed Dostoiefisky at the very end of this letter, ‘1 would have given him my word of honour that I did not believe him.” As for little Sonya herself, it is interesting to know that this childish romance very quickly faded, and by the time the journey home from St. Petersburg was ended, her romantic impression of the novelist had already yielded to a kindly memory. The year 1864 was a most tragic one for the novelist, whose first wife had died on April 25, and whose A Year of Misfortune 165 favourite brother, Michael, died only three months later. The same year he lost also his best friend, Grigorief. One after the other, too, his journalistic ventures with Michael had failed. An article on Polish affairs had led to the suspension of the Vremya, and the Epoch, which followed it, also incurred the displeasure of the authorities. From the very com- mencement the Epoch had been edited by Michael Dostoieffsky at a loss, and its suspension overwhelmed him. ‘“ This blow,” wrote Dostoieffsky to Wrangel, “finished him; he added debt to debt, his health began to fail, As for me, at that moment I was not near him; I was at Moscow, at the bedside of my dying wife. Yes, Alexander Egorovitch, yes, my dear friend! You wrote to me, you sympathised with me in the cruel loss that I experienced in the death of my angel, my brother Michael, and you did not know at the time how heavily Destiny had crushed me! Another being who loved me, and whom I loved infinitely, my wife, died of phthisis in Moscow, where she had been living for a year. I came to her, and all through the winter of 1864 I did not leave her bedside, and on the 26th of April of last year she died, fully conscious, remembering every one and sending them a last adieu; she did not forget you.” Immediately after the death at Moscow, the novelist had hurried to Petersburg to live with his brother and help him in his desperate difficulties ; but Michael, after an illness of one month, died, 166 A Great Russian Realist leaving the novelist lonely, in ill-health, and crushed by his own liabilities and those of his dead brother. It is no wonder that he appeared often a sombre and incongruous figure, even in the kindly and sympathetic atmosphere of the future mathematician’s home in St. Petersburg. CHAPTER VIII DOSTOIEFFSKY’S CASES In 1865 Dostoieffsky was utterly alone in the world. Even he, inured as he was to every stab of mis- fortune, acknowledged himself a broken man. He had loved his wife, Maria, and the more they suffered in common, the deeper his attachment had grown. “And here I am, alone,” he writes to Wrangel, “and I feel afraid. It has become terrible! My life is broken in two. On one side, the past, with everything for which I had lived; on the other, the unknown, without a single heart to replace the two that have left me. Literally, there is no reason left to me for continuing to live. To create for oneself new ties, to invent a new life, the very thought of it fills me with horror.” There is no one in the world to take the place of his dead wife and his dead brother, and his health is still bad, and he is almost penniless. Besides this, he had his brother’s family to support, and his brother’s debts to pay. ‘‘ His family,” he writes in another letter to Wrangel, “was left literally without re- sources, like beggars. I am their one hope. The widow and the children surrounded me, hoping that I would save them. I was devoted to my brother; 167 168 A Great Russian Realist could I abandon them?” Placed in this position he had to choose between two courses, the first of which was to surrender the Epoch to the creditors and take his brother’s family to live with him, sup- porting them as best he could by writing. The other course was to continue publishing, in spite of every- thing; and Dostoiefisky made a desperate effort to accomplish this impossibility. The Censor did not allow his name to appear on the review, either as editor or director, and yet he himself was doing everything. ‘I, alone,” he writes, “‘ managed every- thing, I read the proofs, settled terms with authors, arranged with the Censor; I corrected articles, I procured money; I remained up until six in the morning, and slept only five hours altogether. At last I succeeded in establishing order in the review,. but it was too late.” The Epoch came utterly to grief, and Dostoieffsky found himself, in his own words, ‘‘ temporarily insolvent.” ‘‘ Oh, my friend!” he exclaims to Wrangel, “ willingly would I return to prison for so many years, if only my debts might be paid, and I might feel myself a free man!” No position, apparently, could be more hopeless. “IT saw him,” says a critic, “‘in the thick of his troubles. After the suppression of his paper, after his brother’s death, and while being hunted for debt he never lost heart. It is impossible to imagine circumstances which would have crushed him. His terrible susceptibility made self-control difficult, and he generally gave full play to his feelings. Perhaps this made life possible.” Dostoieffsky’s Cases 169 " In spite of all these misfortunes, the almost demonic energy of the novelist persisted, and he continued to work on a book, the plot of which he had conceived two years before. Without in the least realising it, this despairing man of genius was on the eve of the most creative period of his life. It did not seem to him that he had anything in the world in his favour, but in reality he had much. In spite of himself, he had learned men and things in several hard schools. Siberia had deepened the knowledge of the sub- lieutenant of Engineers who had found fame through a pathetic novel. Travel, and his work as an editor of a Russian journal, had at once shown in perspective and deepened in sympathy his attitude towards the Russian people. He understood the Russian char- acter now in a sense that he had never understood it before. He grasped both its naiveté and its dis- ‘concerting cynicism, while at the same time he continued to believe unhesitatingly in the semi- mystical goal of Russian advancement. In short, he was, without knowing it, singularly well equipped for expressing in a great book all that the distorted sufferings of his life had burned into him with a far deeper brand than that of ordinary experience. In the meantime his creditors became more and more threatening, and Stellovski, the publishing bookseller, threatened him with imprisonment. ‘“ The broker’s assistant,” he writes, “has already arrived for an execution.” In the end Dostoieffsky was compelled to save himself from prison by going 170 A Great Russian Realist abroad. He had been already in Germany, Switzer- land, France, and Italy, and his health had been always better abroad. He was not, then, quite with- out hope when towards the end of June he started on his third visit to the Continent. But only too soon his old passion for gambling seized him, and in September he found himself in great straits at Wies- baden. “ Do not tell anybody,” he cautions Wrangel, “about what I am mentioning to you, for I feel that it does not speak in my favour. But as phrases are | quite useless and miserable in this case, I confess to you frankly—although I am ashamed of confessing it—that, through my stupidity, fifteen days ago, I lost everything at play, that is to say, I lost every- thing that I had with me.” As there was, through a mischance, no immediate reply to this appeal for money, Dostoieffsky was forced a few days later to confess to a still more hopeless position: “Ihave spent everything, I am in debt at the hotel, I have no credit here, and I am in the most pitiable situation. That has been going on up to the present, with this difference, that it is twice as bad now. Furthermore, I have to go to Russia, I have business there which permits of no delay ; I can neither pay my debts, nor leave through want of money for travelling expenses, and I am in utter despair. A little more, and I shall be seriously ill. What to do, I don’t know !” Under these conditions he is at work on the manu- script of “Crime and Punishment,” the greater Dostoieffsky’s Cases 171 part of which, in its first form, he had burned before going abroad. “I wrote to you,” he continues in this second letter to the Baron, “and implored you to send me a hundred thalers. This money will not be a radical cure for my misfortunes, but it will help me greatly, and save me from dishonour. And so, if you can help me, if you are always the same, always my good friend, do not refuse these hundred thalers. My novel is worth, according to our actual prices, at least one thousand roubles, silver, and in a month I shall certainly repay you.” Six days afterwards Dostoiefisky wrote to his old friend thanking him for having come to the rescue. In this letter he speaks of ‘‘ Crime and Punishment ” as being perhaps the best book he had ever written, “if only they will give me time to finish it!” In the same letter he again alludes to his family diffi- culties. He has already sacrificed ten thousand roubles to his dead brother’s family, besides taking up all his liabilities, and it seems to him that he will have to endure many more years of prison—and he understands prison so well! And now his brother, Nicolas, is ill, and there is his poor Paul. What is to become of them all, if he has to go to prison? At the beginning of the winter he was once more in St. Petersburg, where he was seized by an unusually severe attack of his old malady. It was often said that Dostoieffsky brought his brother Michael to ruin, after having borrowed large sums of money from him. This is wholly 172 A Great Russian Realist unjust. Dostoieffsky told Maikov that Michael cer- tainly sent him money in Siberia, but not much. He had received in Siberia two thousand roubles for the two novels written there, and his brother had not helped him all the time. Nor had Dostoieffsky induced his brother to desert a prosperous business as a tobacco merchant for the hazards of journalism. The business had been on the verge of failure, and it had been of his own free will that Michael Dostoieffsky had embarked on the first journalistic experiment, which, as a matter of fact, saved him from bankruptcy. It was the suspension, Dostoieffsky insists, that had ruined his brother. It was not any sense of obligation then, but solely his own kindness of heart, that made this shipwrecked man sacrifice himself to the support of his brother’s family. Dostoieffsky loved his brother, and would willingly have gone to prison for him. He certainly proved the truth of his assertion, that he was a man who stood by his friends. But even Dostoieffsky was human, and _ these were no easy circumstances for the production of a masterpiece. ‘‘ Crime and Punishment,” indeed, is the very reverse of a masterpiece from the standpoint of conventional construction, but it illustrates, as perhaps no other single book of his, the singular characteristics of Dostoieffsky’s power. In “ Crime and Punishment” one can discern this power in regard to the analysis of suffering, the interpretation of the inner workings of the criminal’s mind, and the belief in Christianity inextricably blended with the Dostoieffsky’s Cases 173 belief in the réle of Russia. In this book, too, can be found evidence of Dostoieffsky’s knowledge of the psychology of cities, as well as of his sensitive sympathy with young children. In many things this strange novelist may have rivals, but in these five respects he stands alone. It has been claimed that the work of Dostoieffsky was that of the crowd, that it was democratic fiction, that is to say, a fiction without individual heroes. It is true that Dostoieffsky’s work was democratic, but his characters are intensely individual, whereas such fiction usually subordinates the hero to the mass, the individual to the type. Even Tolstoy’s heroes and heroines, in spite of all their ample contours in youth, tend to become mere colourless types in middle age. urgenev’s characters yield gracefully to the pressure of life, as the seasons yield, and it is the laughter of a new generation that adds the last touch of irony to the regret of the old. But the intense individuality of Dostoieffsky’s slightest characters persists to the very end. Again, it is the habit of this democratic fiction to attack institutions instead of interpreting life. Dos- toiefisky did not do this. In one sense he knew instinctively that there was no formula in the world which could serve as a touchstone for the right and wrong of life. Dostoieffsky divined long before Ibsen that the only formula of life is that there is no formula at all. But in another sense Dostoieffsky accepted the law just as he had accepted it in Siberia. 174 A Great Russian Realist By temperament he was no rebel against society. He was in fact too preoccupied by his interest in concrete human beings ever to formulate a: precise indictment of that abstraction. But he knew nothing of our Anglo-Saxon religion of the front pews, of our policeman morality, of our insurance-policy piety. Dostoieftsky knew well that he was a sinner, and that the sinner must atone because of that inner prompting towards atonement which is at the bottom of the sinner’s heart. The punishment of the law, Dos- toiefisky realised, supplied only the outer husk of punishment. Long before the machinery of the law had been put in motion, the punishment, Dostoiefisky knew well, had most surely commenced. Crime and punishment, in short, are manifestations of the same long-drawn process. Only this is no conscious thesis. Dostoiefisky wished to prove nothing, to establish nothing, to teach nothing, but merely to write down the results of exact knowledge, arrived at through the sympathy of his heart and the intel- lectual curiosity that had prompted him to probe the minds of criminals at first hand. He did not deal with problems in Ibsen’s manner. Ibsen, like another Euripides, shows us the gods mocking alike those who break and those who keep the law. The Greek questioned the reality of the gods ; the Scandinavian the wisdom of the laws. Each relied upon an audience who were prepared to examine old questions with new eyes, and each relied upon the interest of dialectic as opposed to the Dostoieffsky’s Cases 175 interest of characterisation. Now Dostoieffsky, ad- mittedly, revelled in dialectic, but it is always sub- ordinate to the interest claimed for his patients as individual men and women. Raskolnikoff’s thesis on murder, for example, bears the same proportion to the interest of “Crime and Punishment” as Hamlet’s thesis on suicide does to Shakespeare’s tragedy, Dostoieffsky’s dialectic in this case, as in all others, is interesting mainly because of the searchlight that it throws upon character. Dostoieffsky did not approach even the initial problem of Raskolnikoff in Ibsen’s manner. The poor half-starved Russian student does not really imagine himself a Napoleon, a superman, who is above the ordinary laws of mankind. He was never in earnest about that, and consequently he was never deceived. His dialectic would scarcely have deceived a child, and it certainly never deceived him. But it did something else; it planted the zdée fixe in a receptive brain that, through want and illness, was singularly a prey to auto-suggestion. Raskolnikoff was not unlike the descriptions that Dostoieffsky has often given of himself. This is how he appears to Razoumikhin, one of the few characters in the book, who cannot be described as a patient at all: ‘* T have known Rodion for the last eighteen months ; he is gloomy, morose, proud, and haughty. Of late (though the germs may have been brooding in him previously) he has become suspicious and hypo- chondriacal. He is kind and generous, but cannot 176 A Great Russian Realist bear to show his feelings, and would sooner appear brutal than expansive. Sometimes he does not appear hypochondriacal in the least, but simply cold and absolutely unfeeling. One might almost say that there exist in him two natures, which alternately get the upper hand. Sometimes he is extremely taciturn; everything and everybody seem against him, and he will lie in bed and do nothing! He never indulges in raillery, not because he is not of a sarcastic turn, but rather because he disdains to waste his words. He never cares to hear what any one has to say, and takes no interest whatever in what is occupying the attention of every one else at the time. He has a high opinion of his own ability, not altogether without justification, I will own.” Like Dostoiefisky, too, Raskolnikoff, without any wealth or external prestige, had a curious personal distinction and dignity. He is a veritable Russian Hamlet, whose intelligence cuts like a knife beneath the surface of appearance. When his sister speaks to him of her approaching marriage to a rich man he cries out, assassin though he is: ‘* You are false, sister! You cannot have any esteem for Looshin; T have seen and heard him. You must therefore be marrying him for interested motives; your conduct is sordid, to say the least of it, and I am glad, at all events, to see you blush for it!” _ But when he speaks of crime in the abstract, he talks like anybody else, and what he says has value Dostoieffisky’s Cases 177 only as showing how the mind of the criminal or potential criminal works. Relieved of his idée fixe, the heart of Raskolnikoff was as good as his intelligence. He spent almost his last farthing to pay the funeral expenses of a drunkard whom he had met by chance. In spite of all his brusqueness, his love for his mother and sister was sincere. At the University he had almost starved himself to support a consumptive, and after his friend’s death he did what he could to help his family. On yet another occasion he had shown his compassion in a much stranger form, for, he had desired to marry a young girl merely because she was suffering and unhappy. He was a brave man, and had once risked his life in saving two children from a fire. Raskolnikoff was a concrete example of the conflict .between the two truths, that of the Man-god, and that of the God-man, the conflict between the pride of the intelligence and the humility of the heart. In reality, from the beginning his pride was unnatural to him, and his tendency to grasp Sonia’s lesson of humility, wholly natural. A slave to the idée fixe, itself produced by the pressure of environment, Dos- toiefisky’s strange hero became a murderer through curiosity. He wished absolutely to be honest to his own soul, but there was nearly always a half-thought behind the spoken words, a mental equivocation at the back of appreciable motives. Casuistry, he admits himself, failed him and was dismissed as mere 12 178 A Great Russian Realist verbiage. “I wished to commit murder,” he tells Sonia, “ without casuistic argument—to do so only for myself, and nothing else! Even in so terrible a thing, I scorned beguiling my conscience. When I committed murder, it was not to relieve my mother’s misfortunes, nor to devote to the well-being of humanity the power and wealth which, in my opinion, such a deed ought to help me to acquire. No, no; such thoughts were not mine. At that moment, I did not in any way care to know if I should ever benefit any one, or if I should continue for the re- mainder of my life a social parasite! Neither was money the main factor in the deed—no, another reason induced me to commit it. I see that now. Understand me, if the past could be recalled, I should most probably not do so again. But at that time I longed to know if I was vermin, like the majority —or a Man, in the full acceptance of the word— whether, in fact, I had the power to break through obstacles. . . .” Raskolnikoff, in short, was curious, as to whether he had or had not the right to transgress the ordinary laws of man, or rather he wished to experiment with himself in a world of untried sensation and’so discover the inner meaning of his own individuality. With somewhat the same vague notions of the wber-mensch, Prince Andrei, in ‘“ War and Peace,” had studied Kutusoff, and asked himself if that general had or had not the right to condemn to death thousands of his fellow-beings. Tolstoy’s hero was satisfied that Dostoieffsky’s Cases 179 the Russian general had the right of the superman; Dostoieftsky’s hero was to convince himself that he at least had no such right. Whether Raskolnikoff was an inevitable criminal in Lombroso’s sense, or a criminal of the wdber-mensch order, is of little consequence. What is of consequence in this book, is its astounding knowledge of the work- ings of a disordered mind. And here, again, it is in the concrete, and not in the abstract, that Dostoieff- sky is convincing. He had learned at first-hand in Siberia the workings of the criminal mind. He had learned how the convicts shrank from any reference to that. The very phrase repeats itself again and again in this book. When the crime is a mere sup- position, it has become that to Razoumikhin, and towards the very end Raskolnikoff’s sister, Dounia, who knows the truth, and is anxious about her mother, exclaims to the murderer: ‘‘ But, tell me, you surely cannot have told her that!” Again and again, Raskolnikoff reviews minutely every detail of that, the nameless horrible thing that continues to haunt him just as the idea of it had haunted him while he was yet free and innocent in the world of men. The amazing analysis of Porphyrius Petrovitch is the result of Dostoieffsky’s exact knowledge. This tracker of criminals, who is like no other detective in any literature, is not an abstraction of the brain, but a person of flesh and blood, whose external appearance might have been presented by Tolstoy : 180 A Great Russian Realist “ Porphyrius Petrovitch was in morning costume— dressing-gown, slippers down at heel, speckless linen. He was a man of thirty-five, below medium height, stout, and even somewhat corpulent. He had neither beard nor moustache, and his hair was cut short. His large round head was particularly fleshy in the. nape of the neck. His bloated, round, and slightly flat face was not wanting in vivacity or cheerfulness, although his. complexion, of a darkish yellow, was far from indicating sound health. Had it not been | for the expression of his eyes—which, hidden under almost white lashes, seemed to be continually blinking, as if to make signs of some kind or other—one might have taken his face for a good one. But it was this expression which singularly belied the rest of the countenance. At first sight one could not help noticing the more or less rustic physique of his frame, but an attentive observer was soon undeceived as to that.” That is Porphyrius at the beginning, but even he, in the hands of Dostoiefisky, becomes fantastic and terrible. A consuming passion of the intelligence absorbs him as step by step he reconstructs the scene of murder through his exact reading of the murderer’s mind. But it is not a case for him of discovering a criminal, but one of completely dominating an intelligence. He knows the particular kind of criminal with whom he is dealing, and he says to himself: “That man will make me a call, he will come of his own accord, and that before very long! If he is Dostoieffsky’s Cases 181 guilty, he will be bound to come. Other kinds of men would not do so, but this one will.” But there was another influence at work upon the murderer; it was the influence of Sonia, the un- fortunate, who is also the redeemer. The impulse to confess has now mastered Raskolnikoff precisely as the impulse to murder had mastered him. On the one side he is attracted towards Porphyrius as a moth is attracted towards a flame. On the other, the compassion and the suffering of Sonia appeal to him as something wonderful and new in his stricken life. Porphyrius appeals to his curiosity, and he wishes to match his intelligence against the lawyer’s, to find out, above all, how much he suspects, how much he knows. But he is attracted to Sonia through his heart, and it is his pity that leads him towards her. In either case the results of pity and curiosity are the same. He must confess. The inner workings of the brain that made of him a murderer, are now reproduced so that confession itself has become an idée fixe. But even before the acknowledgment of his guilt was consummated, even in the moment when he challenges the existence of the Deity, Sonia has become for him the symbol of broken humanity, and, bending down, he kisses her feet. The poor girl is startled, and the murderer explains: “I did not bow down to you personally, but to suffering humanity in your person.” At last the moment of actual confession arrives, and it is not made to Porphyrius through curiosity, 182 A Great Russian Realist but to Sonia through pity. What is to be done? It is Sonia, the representative of the disinherited, and not Porphyrius, the representative of law and order, who shall decide. Sonia, who loves him, does not hesitate for an instant. ‘‘‘ What must be done?’ ex- claimed the girl, rushing up to him, whilst her eyes, which had hitherto been filled with tears, brightened up all of a sudden. ‘Rise!’ (Saying which, she seized Raskolnikoff by the shoulder; he rose slightly, looking at Sonia with astonishment.) ‘Go forthwith, go this very moment to the nearest public place, prostrate yourself, kiss the earth you have stained, bow down in every direction, and proclaim at the top of your voice to the passers-by, ““I ama murderer!” and God will give you peace again! Will you go? Will you go?’ she asked trembling, whilst seizing his hands with tenfold strength, and fixing on him a burning glance.” That is the voice of the true Dostoieffsky, who, besides peering into the hearts and minds of criminals, had read humbly the Sermon on the Mount with his brother convicts in Siberia. The Man-god might torment him with whispers of negation, but it was the voice of compassion and atonement that claimed him in the end. The moral awakening had com- menced for Raskolnikoff, and it was to complete itself in Siberia. It is outwardly almost the same process of regeneration that was accomplished in the soul of Tolstoy’s Nekhlidoff in “Resurrection.” But inwardly the cases are wholly different, Nekhli- Dostoieffsky’s Cases 183 doff is slowly and gradually convinced of the necessity of atonement; his reason succumbs to faith. He has been compelled to learn himself through a know- ledge of his own profound injustice. With Raskolni- koff it is quite otherwise. Sonia has accompanied him to Siberia, but he turns away from her like an untameable wolf. The duality in his nature resists the very kindness for which it craves. But at last the moment of final atonement arrives, the moment of utter humility, and it comes to him when he returns to the full the compassionate and despairing love of Sonia, who had bidden him to save his soul through the punishment of his body. Such is the case of Raskolnikoff, the murderer, which is not in the least degree a thesis on murder. In much the same spirit, Dostoiefisky presented the beautiful and touching picture of Sonia. She, too, is one of Dostoieffsky’s patients, and he does not approach her with any thesis in the Ibsen fashion to prove that a prostitute may remain a good woman. That is not the method of Dostoieffsky, but he knows very well how to discriminate between the different wards of his strange hospital. Sonia differs from Raskolnikoff because her sin is wholly through self- sacrifice, untinged by pride, and because, having sinned and while sinning, she clings unfalteringly, like Dostoieffsky himself, to the “slave morality” of the Christian faith. Raskolnikoff at once believed and disbelieved according as the God-man or the Man-god mastered him; but Sonia had no doubts 184 A Great Russian Realist as to the one salvation. Questioned by the murderer as to her prayers, the sad prostitute answers: ‘‘ What could I be? What should I be without God?” This is the realism of Dostoiefisky, who knew so well the depths of the human heart that underlie the fustian of reality. Sonia is not an illustration of an academic thesis to the effect that a sinner may still sin, and at the same time remain within the pale of Christianity. Sonia is rather the symbol of all the despairing ones on earth, who are waiting to be understood. Even poor Marmeladoff, the drunkard, believed that some day all would be understood. Marmeladoff, in the tavern, stammering out every secret of his ignoble existence, keeping back nothing, explaining even the details of his daughter’s shame—the shame of Sonia, whom he loves; Marmeladoff acknowledging aloud everything from which human nature shrinks,— it is he who utters the veritable message of this book: “** Why should any one have pity on me?’ rejoined he, in an excited tone. ‘“‘Why?” say you. Youare right; there is no reason why they should. The proper thing is to crucify me, nail me toa cross and show no pity! Crucify me, judge, but pity me as you do it! I will go to meet my punishment, for I thirst not for pleasure, but for sufferings and tears. Do you think, publican, that your half-bottle has given me any pleasure? It was sadness, sadness and tears, that I sought and tasted at the bottom of this flagon; but He who has had pity on all men Dostoieffsky’s Cases 185 and sees all hearts will have pity on us; He alone is Judge. Atthelast day He willcomeandask: ‘‘ Where is the girl who had compassion on her earthly father, and did not turn away in disgust from the habitual drunkard ? Where is the girl who sacrificed herself to an unkind, consumptive step-mother, and children who were not of her own flesh and blood ?”” And He will say: ‘‘ Come, I have forgiven thee once, once already, and now all thy sins are remitted because thou hast loved much.” He will forgive my Sonia, He will forgive her, I know. I felt convinced of it when I was with her just now. We shall all be judged by Him, and He will forgive us all; the evil and the just, the wise and the gentle. And when He has finished with the rest, our turn willcome, too. ‘* Draw nigh,” He will say to us, ‘draw nigh, ye drunkards, ye cowards, ye dissolute men.” And we shall draw nigh without trembling. And then He will say unto us: ‘Ye are sots! Ye bear the mark of the beast on your foreheads, yet come unto Me.” And the wise and intelligent will say: ‘‘ Lord, wherefore dost thou receive these?”? And He will answer: “I receive them, O ye wise and intelligent men, because not one of them thought himself worthy this favour.” And then He will hold out His arms, and we shall throw ourselves into them; and we shall burst into tears; and then we shall understand everything. All the world will understand, and Catherine Ivanovna also, “Thy kingdom come, O Lord 39 ! 999 186 A Great Russian Realist What can be said of Marmeladoff, who has said everything of himself? The platitudes of Justice pass over him harmlessly. He has confessed after the fashion of Dostoiefisky, and not after the fashion of Tolstoy. And before this laying bare of a human soul in all its hurt infamy, criticism is abashed. Who shall withhold pardon from such as he? from such as Sonia the unfortunate, from such as Raskolnikoff the murderer? But “Crime and Punishment” is not a general elaboration of the maxim, Tout com- prendre, c’est tout pardonner. The enigmatic and questioning mind of Dostoieffsky realised that there are some for whom the naiveté of atonement is im- possible. Such a case is that of the saddest patient of all, Svidrigailoff, though he is a concrete human being as opposed to an abstraction of evil. Raskolnikoff the murderer, Sonia the unfortunate, Marmeladoff the drunkard, were patients, but in a different sense. Svidrigailoff imagines that he sees in Raskolnikoff a kinship with himself. He believes that they are on the same road, only that he has travelled ever so much further. But Dostoieffsky knew that this was not the case. Svidrigailoff was a sinner, who had worn out the capacity for human tears. Lust had isolated him from all human companionship. He experi- ments with good as well as with evil deeds, but both are to him lifeless distractions. ‘The man’s soul is burned out, and for Dostoieffsky he is already dead. The great Russian realist preaches no sermon on the Dostoieffsky’s Cases 187 cold hopelessness of this sinner, who has come to the end of himself. Only he sees that the mercy of _ the Sermon on the Mount may be claimed by Ras- kolnikoff, Sonia, and Marmeladoff, but is without meaning for such as Svidrigailoff, who has for ever severed his ties with the God-man. And just as in a single scene the whole life of the poor drunken father of Sonia flashes before the reader, so the whole life of Svidrigailoff is reproduced in the description of his last night on earth. In his dreams on that last night, he had rescued a beaten waif, had taken her up in his arms, and placed her between the blankets of his bed, after which he prepared to leave the house, but cast a final glance at the little thing to see that she was sleeping com- fortably : *“‘ He carefully raised the coverings which hid her head. The child was sound asleep. She had become warm in bed, and her pale cheeks had already regained their colour; and yet, how strange! the colour of that complexion was much redder than is usual with children in a normal state. ‘It is the flush of fever,’ thought Svidrigailoff. ‘Can she have been drinking ? These purple lips seem burning.’ Suddenly he fancies he sees the long black lashes of the little sleeper gently move ; beneath the half-closed eyelids there seemed a tendency to some cunning, sly, in nowise childish twinkle. Can the child be awake, and only pretend to sleep? Yes, her lips smile—they quiver as with desire to check a laugh. But now she throws 188 A Great Russian Realist aside constraint—she merrily laughs—there is, in that small face, a bold, brazen, luring look, without one trait of youth, for it is the face of a French harlot. Suddenly she opens both eyes wide—they gaze on Svidrigailoff with a lewd and amorous look—they ask, they smile. Nothing so repugnant as this childish face whose youthful traits betoken lust. ‘What! at such an age?’ he cries, a prey to horror. ‘Can such things be?” And now she turns on him her painted face with outstretched arms. ‘ Accursed thing!’ exclaims Svidrigailoff with a cry of horror; he raises his hand to strike her, and at the same moment wakes.” The nightmare is symbolic of the man’s whole life, and in the morning he dies by his own hand, as Raskolnikoff had refused to die. Both were patients, but in the strange hospital of Dostoieffsky there was a ward of incurables. But lest one may appear to be guilty of the un- forgivable stupidity of attempting to label even the cases of this astounding psychologist, whose diagnosis is always so unerring, one must point out that in none of his books are the hints of secretiveness, evasive- ness, and withheld information more suggestive. One must remember, for example, that Dounia, Raskolni- koff’s sister, whom Svidrigailoff has persecuted with his attentions, more than once defends him. Ques- tioned by Raskolnikoff as to Svidrigailoff’s alleged cruelty to his dead wife, Dounia protested in his favour. “On the contrary,” she said, “he always Dostoieffsky’s Cases 189 showed great patience, and behaved most politely to her—indeed, he was often far too indulgent, and so matters went on for seven years—then suddenly he lost all patience.” Charged with defending him, however, the young girl shuddered as she replied: “Oh, he is a terrible man! I cannot conceive anything more dreadful!” In reality the man’s whole personality was so horrible to this pure young girl, that she evaded realising him to herself. So horrible was he to her, that when he had trapped her in a lonely house she could not kill him with the revolver at a distance of four paces. The man had been waiting for death, but Dounia threw the revolver away. But even in that moment, when she was absolutely in his power, Svidrigailoff realised the limitations of his slavery of the flesh. No human force could plant love for him in this girl’s heart. He tells her to go, and in that instant he knew that he was at the very end of the long weary road of lust: ‘“‘ Svidrigailoff remained another three minutes near the window. At last he slowly turned round, looked about him, and passed his hand across his brow. His features, which a strange smile had. distorted, revealed the most heartrending despair.” Dounia had taught him the lesson that he had been afraid to learn, the last lesson of the loneliness of lust. The flesh, for which he had sacrificed every- thing—the flesh itself escaped him as a mirage of beauty that mocks the pursuer. Then comes a 190 A Great Russian Realist night of horror, after which he shoots himself like a dog. Here, as in so many of the books of Dostoieffsky, madness seems to hover very close to these over- strained characters. Raskolnikoff is considered on the verge of madness by his associates, and he, in his turn, half thinks that Sonia and Svidrigailoff are mad. ‘They are not mad, however, only “ fantastic ” beings who belong to the atmosphere of Dostoieffsky, real creations of that strange realism which is so alien from the traditions of the French naturalists. And one must be on one’s guard against a slightly patronising attitude towards these patients, as one follows Dostoieffsky from ward to ward of his “ fan- tastic ’ hospital. It is so easy to take up the attitude, that he cannot draw normal human beings as illus- trated by the typical clean-limbed, clean-minded, healthy young Englishman of to-day. It is so easy to demand from him, for example, Henry V. as well as Hamlet, to reproach him with never having given the equivalents of Falstaff, and Tom Jones, and Tom Tulliver. Dostoieffsky, for reasons of environment and here- dity that I have tried to indicate, worked in his own special atmosphere, which was one of a higher pressure than that which belongs to normal life as we under- stand it. But in that atmosphere, and in his own special sense, there is something of the universal in the genius of Dostoieffsky. He is not a protagonist of particular views, spoken through the mouths of Dostoieffsky’s Cases 191 mere puppets. He is a creator of individual cha- racters as intense as even those of the ancient Greeks. Cumbersome and difficult as is the external working of his construction, his characters hurl themselves forward towards catastrophe with an eagerness and an exaltation that is only to be found in the works of the highest genius. As soon as one human soul is brought into contact with another the action becomes simple, direct, inevitable, sug- gesting that avalanche of calamity which belongs to Greek tragedy, rather than to modern fiction. And though one may speak of the hospital of Dostoieftsky, that hospital is also the world, and it excludes none through prejudice, and none through scorn. The humour of Dostoieftsky is perhaps as different from the humour of such novelists as Dickens as his pathos is different from theirs. The humour of Dostoieffsky, indeed, invades scenes that would seem to be essentially sombre to any Western novelist. This humour, as distinct from the espiéglerie of the Russian novelist, is scarcely a relief from tragedy, since it always has its roots in the same origin of tragic action, that is to say, in the deep misfortunes of mankind, at which it is perhaps as well to laugh, since one can do nothing to temper them. There is a scene in ‘‘ Crime and Punishment ” that illustrates this humour, which is only the humour of “Poor Folk” deepened. Briefly, Marmeladoft’s widow spends the greater part of the money given to her by Raskolnikoff for the funeral, on a dinner 192 A Great Russian Realist at which she entertains the other lodgers of the house. As one reads it, one cannot help realising with how much lighter and surer a touch Alphonse Daudet would have sketched in this misplaced and incongruous tribute to the dead drunkard. Then, as din passes into insult, one thinks of Dickens, and — one. admits that the English novelist would have lit up the whole miserable scene with that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. The kindly, sunny humour of Dickens would have played mercifully round these acrid guests, softening re- criminations, softening even the memory of the dead derelict. Dickens would have done it much better, if he had done it at all, one,thinks. But as one reads on, one changes one’s mind. All of a sudden, these people become “fantastic.” ‘The widow ceases to be a foolish figure, loud-voiced and rude, a butt even in this miserable assembly. Sonia, her step-daughter, has been wrongfully accused of stealing, and all the nature of Marmeladoff’s widow, all the secrets of her relations with Sonia, and of Sonia’s relations with her children, rush into words—words. that have in them the very tears of life. ** Sonia, Sonia, I do not believe it! You see that I do not believe it!’ repeated Catherine Ivanovna, blind to the evidence. These words were accompanied by a thousand caresses, whilst showcring kisses on the girl, seizing her hands, and straining her in her arms like a child. ‘You to have stolen something? But how stupid these people are! Good Heaven! Dostoieffsky’s Cases 193 You are idiots, idiots, every one of you!’ she cried out to those present. ‘You do not as yet know this loving young heart! She rob! She? I tell you, she would sell her last garment, she would go barefooted rather than leave you without help, if you were in need—she has sold herself for us, that is what she is! She even accepted the yellow ticket because my children were dying with hunger—she has sold herself for us! Oh, my poor husband, my poor dear husband! Great God! But why don’t you defend her, you, all of you, instead of remaining impassive ? Rodion Romanovitch, why don’t you take up the cudgels for her? Do you think her guilty? You, every one of you here, are not fit to be compared to her! Great God! come to her help!’ ” Sonia is proved innocent, but that does not prevent the demented widow from dragging her children hopelessly through the streets of St. Petersburg, still clinging to her poor threadbare pride in being “ the daughter of a colonel, the descendant of a noble, if not aristocratic, family.” Death comes mercifully to her. But the children live on, and over all there continues to hover the mysterious, silent menace of St. Petersburg. That menace pervades the book as it does almost all the work of Dostoieffsky. The horrible secrets of the city oozing out of fetid cellars, escaping through gratings, permeating the very sun- light, the ice of the Neva, the sweep of the north wind—these are what poison the minds and bodies of Dostoieffsky’s patients. These are what blend 13 194 A Great Russian Realist with the last hideous thoughts of Svidrigailoff, as in his dream he hears two cannon-shots signalling the rising of the Neva. These are what make of Raskol- nikoff, the student dreamer, a murderer who is afraid. But from the very depths of this environ- ment sounds the imploring voice of Sonia, telling of the resurrection of Lazarus and the Redemption for all time of the human soul. The book appeared in the Rousski Viestnik in January 1866, and the next month Dostoieffsky married his stenographer, Anna Grigorievna Swit- kine. This marriage, like the former one, was happy, but it commenced, as the former one had commenced, under the cloud of epilepsy. He is unable to write, and complains of being worried by family disagree- ments, and by various other difficulties of his dead brother’s family. “I have become nervous,” he tells Wrangel, “irritable; my character is spoilt. I do not know how far that will go.” He speaks of not having been out the whole winter, of having seen nobody and nothing, and of having been only once to the theatre. He was still haunted by the fear of imprisonment, and very soon afterwards went with his young wife abroad. “TI left,” he writes to Maikov, in August 1867, from Geneva, “ but I carried death in my soul. I had no faith in Europe, or rather I believed that the moral influence of the Continent would be very bad; alone, without provision for the future, with a young being who looked forward with a naive joy to sharing my wandering life; but Dostoieffsky’s Cases 195 I saw that in this naive joy there was much inexperi- ence and primitive emotion, and that troubled and tormented me a great deal. I was afraid that Anna Grigorievna would be bored, all alone with me. For, up to the present, we have been absolutely alone. I did not rely upon myself. My character is ailing, and I foresaw that she would suffer with me.” The letter, however, goes on to show, in the analytic manner of Dostoiefisky, that the girl-wife possessed a far deeper character than the novelist had at first suspected. Then comes the inevitable postponed confession: ‘‘ Finding myself quite near Baden, I had the idea of visiting it.” The result of this temptation was that Dostoieffsky won no less than four thousand francs. ‘‘ Anna Grigorievna,” he continues, “‘ begged me to be content with the four thousand francs, and to leave at once. But there was a chance, so easy and so possible, to remedy everything. And the examples? Besides one’s own personal winnings, one sees every day others winning 20,000, 30,000 francs (one does not see those who lose). Are there saints in the world? Money is more necessary to me than to them. I staked more and I lost. I began to lose my last resources, enraging myself to fever point. I lost. I pawned my clothes, Anna Grigorievna has pawned everything that she has, her last trinkets. (What an angel!) How she consoled me, how she wearied in that accursed Baden! in our two little rooms above the forge, where we had to take refuge! At last, no more, everything 196 A Great Russian Realist was lost. (Oh! how. those Germans are vile! They are all, without exception, usurers, scoundrels, and rascals! the proprietor, knowing that we had nowhere to go to until we received money, raised his prices.) At last, we had to save ourselves and leave Baden.” In spite of the fact that his Russian creditors are hundreds of miles away, Dostoieffsky feels in a worse position than ever, and admits that he is on the verge of drowning himself. He detests being abroad, and he detests Geneva. “Here,” he writes to Maikov, in the October of the same year, “ everything is bad, everything is rotten, everything is expensive. They are always drunk here; there are not even in London so many brawlers and noisy drunkards.” There are allusions to Paul in this letter. His step- son is growing up, and, like everything else in the life of Dostoieffsky, is by no means wholly satisfactory, though the novelist is very fond of him. But it is Russia herself from which Dostoiefisky feels cut off. Everything Russian interests him passionately, and it is not surprising that, in the novel that was pub- lished the following year, Dostoiefisky gave the incarnation of the symbolic Russian, the Russian of the future, who was to be the saviour of this old world, which had outgrown its destiny in losing its faith. CHAPTER IX THE IDEAL RUSSIAN DosrotgerFsky was still in Geneva when, in the spring of 1868, he lost his little daughter, Sonia. The novelist was inconsolable. All his passionate love for children had been concentrated upon this little being of three months old, and he pours out his heart about her to Maikov. She had commenced to know him, to love him, to smile at him when he came near her, to listen to his songs, to cease from crying when he amused her. The psychologist’s preoccupation with all the complexities of human character seems to have utterly vanished, and he reveals nothing beyond the broken heart of a father. ‘“‘In order to console me,” he writes, “‘ they tell me that I shall have other children. But where is Sonia? Where is that little being for whom I tell you boldly, that I would willingly be crucified if only she might be alive.” His wife was ill, and he himself was writing day and night, haunted always by Sonia: “I shall never forget her, and I shall never cease from suffering at the memory! Even if I had another child, I do not understand how I could love it; where should I know how to find affection? It is Sonia who is necessary to me. I cannot grasp that she is here 197 198 A Great Russian Realist no longer, and that I shall never see her again.” It is under these conditions that he is finishing “ The Idiot,” the book of all others which was intimately close to his own personality. His malady was that of Prince Myshkine, and the details are recorded with all the accuracy of painful experience. His friend, Strakhov, was once present at one of Dos- toiefisky’s attacks: “It was, I fancy, in 1863, just before Easter. Late in the evening, about eleven o’clock, he came to see me, and we had a very animated conversation. I cannot remember the subject of it, but I know that it was important and abstruse. He got very excited, and walked about the room, while I sat at the table. He said samething lofty and jubilant, and when I confirmed his opinion by some remark, he turned to me a face which positively glowed with the most transcendent inspiration. He paused for a moment, as if looking for words, and had already opened his mouth to speak; I looked at him, all expectant of fresh revelation. Suddenly from his open mouth there issued a strange, pro- longed, and inarticulate moan. He sank senseless on the floor in the middle of the room.” In “ The Idiot” this description of the “ sacred sickness” is practically reproduced: ‘‘ At that moment the face—especially the eyes—suddenly became distorted, convulsions and tremors came over the whole face and body. An inconceivable sound like no other sound broke from his throat. All that was human vanished. A by- stander could scarcely imagine but that some one The Ideal Russian 199 else was crying out from within the man. There was something mystical in the terror caused by that sight.” Dostoieffsky preferred this novel to any other of his works, and the personality of the Prince was particularly close to his heart. Many correspondents shared this preference, and towards the end of his life Dostoiefisky told a friend that he had heard this work pronounced the best of his books at least fifty times. “I am speaking of ‘The Idiot,’” he continued, “ because all those who spoke to me about it, as being my best work, had something particular in the organisation of their intelligence, which struck me and gave me a great deal of pleasure.” Dostoieff- sky maintained in this novel that though certain cells of the brain, considered essential, may be weakened in an individual, his brain as a whole may remain in spite of this disability, perhaps even because of it, at once morally and intellectually superior to the intelligences of those who mock at him and condemn him. Prince Myshkine is an ideal Russian, as Dos- toieffsky understood him, an ideal Russian, as Dostoiefi- sky was himself tending more and more to become. Possibly, had ‘‘The Brothers Karamazov” been actually finished, its hero might have developed into the final ideal of Dostoieffsky. As it is, however, Prince Myshkine remains for us, on the evidence of Dostoieffsky himself, the chosen figure among all his strange patients. Over and over again, in this book, the personal 200 A Great Russian Realist reminiscences of the author appear, scarcely disguised. The Prince speaks more than once of that twenty minutes in Semyonovski Square, during which Dos- toiefisky had waited for death. Speaking of that ordeal, the Prince told how the sufferer had found what he expected to be his last five minutes on earth,a great fund of time, so that each minute had a wholly subjective value. Of this fund, he had determined to reserve two minutes for examining himself: ‘“‘ He remembered having divided his time like this quite well. While saying good-bye to his friends, he recollected asking one of them some most usual everyday question, and being much interested in the answer. Then, having bade farewell, he embarked upon those two minutes which he had allotted to looking into himself; he knew beforehand what he was going to think about. He wished to put it to himself, as quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living, thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and where? He thought he would decide this question once for all in these last three minutes. A little way off there stood a church, and its gilded spire glittered in the sun. He remembered staring stubbornly at this spire and at the rays of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from these rays of light ; he got the idea that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would become one of them, amalgamated somehow with them.” Constantly, one feels that the Prince sees with The Ideal Russian 201 Dostoieffsky’s eyes, that it is Dostoieffsky himself who has only “ to look out of the window and jot down what he sees,” that it is Dostoieffsky himself who had mused by the Swiss waterfall watching “a lovely thin streak of water, like a thread, but white and moving,” that it is Dostoieffsky who had dreamed of a great city where life might be more ample and splendid than ours, and that it is the novelist and no other who had realised that, even in a prison, life might yet be noble. It is certainly the “nobly simple’ novelist who is recalling the sight which impressed him more than anything else in Europe—the execution at Lyons. It is from his own memory that he tells Adelaida Epanchin to draw the face of a criminal who is waiting for the fall of the guillotine. He himself had realised every instant of that obscure criminal’s waiting, and he knew the abnormal activity of the brain at such a time. It is from the very heart of Dostoiefisky that the Prince speaks: ‘‘ How strange that criminals seldom swoon at such a moment! On the contrary, the brain is especially active and works incessantly—probably harder, hard, hard—like an engine at full pressure. I imagine that various thoughts must beat loud and fast through his head—all unfinished ones, and strange, funny thoughts very likely !—like this, for instance: ‘That fellow there has a wart on his forehead! and the executioner has burst one of his buttons, and that lower one is all rusty!” and mean- while one notices and remembers everything. There 202 A Great Russian Realist is one point that cannot be forgotten, round which everything else dances and turns about, and because of this point, he cannot faint or swoon; and this lasts until the very final quarter of a second, when the wretched neck is on the block and the victim listens and waits and knows—that’s the point, he knows that he is just mow about to die, and listens for the rasp of the iron over his head. If I lay there, I should certainly listen for that grating sound, and hear it too! There would probably be but the tenth part of a little instant left to hear it in, but one would certainly hear it. And imagine, some people declare that when the head flies off it is conscious of having flown off! Just imagine what a thing to realise; fancy if that consciousness were to last for even five seconds.” It is Dostoieffsky himself who is talking of the children who came to him, like birds, in the little Swiss village, for long ago he had learned that only children can “ soothe and cure the wounded heart.” All this is from personal memory; but in a deeper sense the Prince is the gentle confessor, which was one side at least of the Russian novelist. And the Prince, whom at first glance every one takes for an idiot, is not only good, but exceedingly interesting. He takes possession of everybody, from Rogojin in the third-class railway carriage, to Madame Epanchin and her daughters in the General’s house. He is a distant connection of the General’s wife, and had arrived at the house in a sleeveless coat, and with an The Ideal Russian 203 absurd little bundle, which was all he had, to the best of his knowledge, in the world. But he talks to Madame Epanchin and her daughters in the wonderful way of Dostoieffsky, telling them all about himself, and his life in the Swiss village, where he had been taking a “cure.” It is not of the results of foreign culture and erudition that he speaks, but he tells them how terribly the thought of finding himself in a foreign country had weighed upon him at first: ‘I recollect I awoke from this state for the first time at Basle, one evening ; the bray of a donkey aroused me—a donkey in the town market. I saw the donkey and was extremely pleased with it, and from that moment my head seemed to clear.” And then he tells them about a poor Swiss peasant-girl whom he had kissed out of compassion, and how the children had at first flung mud at her because she was in disgrace, and how afterwards he had taught them the great lesson of pity. It has all been very simple, but mother and daughters dimly suspect the power of genius in the simplicity, “Well,” exclaimed Madame Epanchin, at the end, “we have ‘put him through his paces’ with a ven- geance. My dears, you imagined, I believe, that you were about to patronise this young gentleman, like some poor wretched protégé picked up somewhere, and taken under your magnificent protection. My word, what fools we were, and what a specially big fool is your father. Well done, Prince; I assure you the General actually asked me to put you through 204 A Great Russian Realist your paces, and examine you.” From that instant the Prince became, as a matter of course, the central figure in the family drama that was beginning to unfold itself. The eldest daughter, it seemed, was going to marry a rich man, named Totski, provided that an old scandal in his life was not revived; the General was very anxious for the marriage, and was particularly anxious that the heroine of the scandal, the beautiful Nastasia Philipovna, should be married off quietly to his protégé, Gania, to whose house the Prince was recommended as a lodger. The external machinery of Dostoieffsky is now in full swing, and the Prince is that very day brought into contact with all the principal characters of this drama, including Nastasia herself. ‘The Prince is the veritable touchstone of character in others. He is not only good himself, but he appeals instantly to anything good in any human being. He preaches no sermons, but is absolutely natural always, chattering out his thoughts spontaneously as he had chattered them out at Madame Epanchin’s luncheon-table. Even Gania, whose reputation is that of a man who would crawl across St. Petersburg for three roubles, takes to the Prince after his earlier bursts of hatred against him. ‘ You don’t know, perhaps,” he ob- serves, “that blackguards like honest people, and, being one myself, I like you. Why am Ia blackguard ? tell me honestly now. They all call me a blackguard because of her, and I have, got into the way of think- ing myself one. That’s what is so bad about the The Ideal Russian 205 business.” Gania was constantly being taunted about his approaching marriage, and about the seventy-five thousand roubles which was his price. But even in him “the Idiot” had detected some instinct not wholly unspoiled. Rogojin, too, the man who loves Nastasia like a madman, and from whom she has fled on the very eve of marriage, lured by the strange spiritual love of the Prince, cannot resist the person- ality of his rival: “When you are not by, I always hate you, Lef Nicolaievitch,” he exclaims. “I have loathed you every day of these three months since I last saw you; by Heaven I have! I could have taken and poisoned you at any minute. Now you have been with me but a quarter of an hour, and all my malice seems to have melted away, and you are as dear as ever. Sit here a bit longer.” In Nastasia herself, the Prince had instantly de- tected, not an adventuress, but a woman who had been cruelly wronged, when she was too young to understand the meaning of wrong. And just as years before he had kissed the poor Swiss peasant out of compassion, so now he pities this brilliant and beautiful woman upon whom her inferiors are showering swinishly their roubles and diamonds, The real adventuress, the shallow parasite of the flesh, scarcely ever appears in Dostoieffsky’s novels. Such a character seemed to him un-Russian, and even Blanche, the Frenchwoman, in “ The Gambler ” ceases to be whole-heartedly a parasite at the end. Nastasia, from the beginning, had been 206 A Great Russian Realist something wholly different. Nastasia is one of those strange beings who wish to take vengeance upon themselves. ‘‘ This unhappy woman,” says the Prince to Aglaya Epanchin, “is persuaded that she is the most helpless, fallen creature in the world. Oh, do not condemn her! Do not cast stones at her! She has suffered too much already in the consciousness of her own undeserved ignominy! And wherein is she guilty—oh God! every moment of her life she bemoans and bewails herself and cries out that she does not admit any guilt, that she is the victim of circumstances—the victim of a wicked libertine. But whatever she may say to you, remember that she does not believe it herself—remember that she will believe nothing but that she is a guilty creature.” Of course the external machinery of Dostoieffsky brings about the inevitable meeting of the two types of women—the young girl who wishes to understand, and the woman who knows too much. Just as in “The Brothers Karamazov,” the two types meet, and the hesitating analysis of Aglaya throws one more searchlight upon the soul of Nastasia: ‘I began to be sorry for Prince Lef Nicolaievitch on the very day I made his acquaintance, and when I heard—after- wards—of all that took place at your house in the evening, I was sorry for him, because he was such a simple-minded man, and because he, in the simplicity of his soul, believed that he could be happy with a woman of your character. What I feared actually took place ; you could not love him, you tormented The Ideal Russian 207 his heart and threw him over. You could not love him because you are too proud—no, not proud, that is an error on my part; but because you are too vain—no, not quite that either; too self-loving ; you are self-loving to an insane degree; your letters to me are a proof of it. You could not love so simple a soul as his, and perhaps in your heart of hearts you even despised him and laughed at him; all you could love was your shame and the perpetual thought that you were disgraced and insulted. If you were less shameful, or had no cause for shame, you would be still more unhappy than you now are.” But there are other things beyond these in the self-condemning soul of Nastasia, the typical Dos- toiefisky heroine, who, no matter what her actions may be, turns instinctively towards the noble, as others turn towards happiness. She wishes the Prince to be happy, to marry Aglaya, and to forget her own craving for redemption through the love of the spirit. It is only when she is stung by the dry scorn of the young girl that she binds the Prince to his promise of pity, and tells Rogojin to go: “‘ I won’t let you go again now that she has insulted me, before your very eyes, too, and have you turn away from me and lead her away arm in arm. May you be accursed too, because you were the only one I trusted among them all. Go away, Rogojin, I don’t want you,” she con- tinued, blind with fury, and forcing the words out of her chest with dry lips and distorted features, evidently not believing a single word of her own 208 A Great Russian Realist gibberish, but at the same time doing her utmost to prolong the moment of self-attempted deception.” From the first instant that he had seen even her photograph, the Prince had detected that the keynote of Nastasia’s character was not passion but suffering. He knew instinctively that a menace was hanging over her, and that, for all her youth and beauty, she was doomed. Nastasia can breathe only in the “ fantastic” atmosphere of Dostoieffsky. Passion and self-sacrifice, the whim of the moment, and the steadfastness of love, there is everything in Nastasia, who flutters now from, and now towards, the knife of Destiny, like some predestined Greek victim, centuries ago. She divines partly what is to come, just as Rogojin himself partly divines; but it is the Prince who, in spite of himself, knows. One almost sees Dostoiefisky in the very act of creation, as one reads the pages that describe the Prince’s walk just before he is seized by an epileptic fit. Suddenly he was seized by the desire to look for something, without knowing the object of his search. Then, for half an hour or so, he would forget, and just as suddenly begin to search again. Then some- thing definite stamped itself upon his memory, and he recalled having looked at a particular object quite recently in the window of a cutler’s shop. He wished now to know whether he was or was not a victim of hallucination. Walking back, he found the shop, and the article marked sixty copecks, and then sud- denly he remembered that it was just here that the The Ideal Russian 209 terrible, doomed eyes of Rogojin had fastened upon him. Horrible thoughts take possession of him, always circling round a concrete object—a knife. The menacing evil of the whole city seems to oppress the dreamer, who is caught by a dream within a dream, and whose “‘ Demon” is master of him now. And now, just as Rogojin, his face twisted into a smile of insanity, is on the very point of assassinating him, watching him with a glittering something, held in his right hand, the Prince cries out: “ Parfen, I won’t believe it!” The next instant his whole soul seems strangely illumined: “‘ This lasted perhaps half a second, yet he distinctly remembered hearing the beginning of the wail, the strange, dreadful wail, which burst from his breast of its own accord, and which no power or effort of will on his part could suppress.” The Prince had fallen down in an epi- leptic fit, by which he had been saved from the assassin’s knife. ‘‘ As is well known,” continues Dos- toiefisky, who knew so well, “ these fits occur instan- taneously. The face, especially the eyes, becomes terribly disfigured, convulsions seize the limbs, a terrible moan or wail bursts from the breast of the sufferer, a wail in which his whole being seems to disappear and be blotted out, so that it is impossible to believe that the man who has just fallen is the same who emitted the dreadful cry. It seems more as though some other being, inside this stricken one, had cried. Many people have borne witness to this impression; and many cannot behold an epileptic fit 14 210 A Great Russian Realist without mysterious terror and a feeling of mysticism and dread.” All the terror and suffering of Dos- toieffsky ring in that dehumanised cry of the epileptic, which had followed so closely the moment of enraptured illumination. And as one follows the Prince in that strange walk, during which his ‘‘ Demon” came to him again and again, one begins to realise the objectivity, so to speak, of Dostoieffsky’s duality. One begins to understand also his realism, which is like that of no other writer. In this atmosphere, impressions become fantasies, and memories torments. Here, people do not listen to each other’s voices, but to each other’s souls. Here, the very thoughts of the great city hover like bats in mildewed air. Greek tragedy itself is not more impregnated with the already divined menace of swiftly approaching calamity. This is the natural atmosphere in which such heroes and heroines draw breath. Only the Prince is sorry for them, with the compassion of the confessor. He does not judge even their spasmodic whispers of death; he does not condemn, since sin is the supreme suffering of all. It is Aglaya, the Russian young girl, simple, and exceedingly acute, with the heart of a child and the intuition of a woman, who best of all understands this duality of Feodor Dostoieffsky: ‘I consider you,” she says to the Prince, ‘‘the most honest and upright of men—more honest and upright than any other man ; and if anybody says that your intellect is—that your wits are—sometimes affected, you know The Ideal Russian 211 it is unfair. I always say so and uphold it, because even if your surface intellect be a little affected (of course you will not feel angry with me for talking so —I am speaking in all good faith), yet your real intellect is far better than all theirs together; such an intellect as they have never even dreamed of, because you have, as it were, two intellects—a real one and an unreal one.” And Rogojin, the man whose passion is like fire, he, too, has that underneath double within him that prompts him to kill the being he loves. From the very beginning one knows that the idée fixe has been implanted in his brain, just as it had been implanted in the brain of Raskolnikoff. Nothing can withstand the idée fixe. Only death can allay that furnace of passion, and Rogojin plays with the idea of death as the Prince plays with the idea of beauty redeeming the world. And in the end the old magnetism of Dostoieffsky that draws one human being to another, however alien and antipathetic, comes into play. Rogojin, in his turn, has stolen Nastasia from the Prince, who comes to him in the silent dismal house, and asks, panting: ‘‘ Where is Nastasia Philipovna ? ” Rogojin motioned to him to pass behind a curtain so that he might see for himself. The Prince stared in the faint light at the figure lying upon a bed, covered from the “head down, in a white sheet”: ‘ The gazer could just make out by the elevation of the sheet, that a human being lay outstretched beneath it. All around, on the bed, on a chair beside it, on 212 A Great Russian Realist the floor, were scattered the different portions of a magnificent white silk dress, bits of lace, and rich ribbon. On a small table at the pillow glittered a mass of diamonds, torn off and thrown down anyhow. From under a heap of lace at the end of the bed peeped one small white foot, which looked as though it had been chiselled out of marble; terribly still and white it seemed. ‘The Prince gazed and felt that the more he gazed, the more deadly became the silence. Suddenly a fly awoke somewhere and buzzed across the room, hovered over the bed, and settled in silence on the pillow. The Prince shuddered.” The thing that all three of them had feared was now accomplished. The murderer and the sinless reader of souls remained side by side in the atmosphere of death. The Prince wept over Rogojin, who had brought such hideous suffering upon his soul. And all through the night they waited, guarding the beautiful dead woman, whose life had swayed so restlessly between them as though they had been the veritable spirits of good and evil. Dostoieffsky had written actual autobiography in “Buried Alive” and in “Injury and Insult”; he had most certainly expressed many curious results of introspection in “‘ The Gambler ” and “‘ The Under- ground Spirit”; but in ‘‘ The Idiot” he wrote the merciful book of his heart, the book that, for many reasons, was far more to him than “ David Copper- field” to Dickens or “ Le Petit Chose” to Daudet. For, this book was one of suffering beyond the range The Ideal Russian 213 of either of those novelists, while self-revelation is almost equally stamped upon it. The book is per- vaded by personal memories, quite apart from those of his malady and of Siberia. Dostoieffsky’s peculiar love of nature, his fondness for trees, his gentle sym- pathy with animals, these and many other personal touches light up the sombre foreboding of this book. Here, also, in a personal sense we find the same mani- festations of genius that we find in “Crime and Punishment ”’—the analysis of suffering, the inter- pretation of criminal motive, the belief in national Christianity, the psychology of St. Petersburg, and the familiar love of young children. All these things are to be found in “ The Idiot,” but here they are not, as it were, distributed among the “ cases,” but are all concentrated in the heart and brain of this ideal Russian of Dostoieffsky’s creation. It is the confessor, of the Russian soul who exclaims : ‘© We Russians no sooner arrive at the brink of the water, and realise that we are really at the brink, than we are so delighted with the outlook, that in we plunge and swim to the furthest point we can see. Why is this? You say you are surprised at Pavlischefi’s action; you ascribe it to madness, to softness of heart, and what not, but it is not so.” And a little later, speaking of the national flexibility, the Prince continues: “Oh, it is not from vanity alone, it is not from wretched feelings of vanity that Russians become Atheists and Jesuits; but from spiritual thirst, from anguish of longing after higher things, ‘dg A Great Russian Realist after dry firm land, and anguish for the loss of foot- hold on their own terra firma, which they never be- lieved in, because they never knew it. It is so easy for a Russian to become an Atheist, far more so than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian ‘become an Atheist,’ but he actually believes in Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving that he has pinned his faith to mil. Such is our anguish of thirst.” For Dostoiefisky, ‘‘ The Idiot ” was, so far as the spiritual part of his nature was concerned, the one finished book of final experience. Prince Myshkine is, in his own person, the answer to those dispossessed ones in “ Demons.” He is the embodiment of a personal and a national ideal, and through him we arrive at an interpretation of what Dostoieffsky meant by that traditional faith in Russia, the Russian people, and the Russian God. Yet, while he was finishing even this book, Dos- toiefisky wrote: “I am dissatisfied to repulsion with the story. Now I am making a last effort over the third part. If I put things right, I shall get myself right; if not, I am done for.” ‘That, however, was not his real verdict, and ‘ The Idiot ” may be accepted as the book which he loved best of all, and which expressed his personality most intimately. But in this almost personal confession of idealism there is no hint or trace of what the English mean by cant. Prince Myshkine speaks in season and out of season on the subjects by which he is preoccupied, just The Ideal Russian 215 as Dostoieffsky had spoken about them years before in Sonya Kovalevsky’s home. On the contrary, poor Prince Myshkine is always anxious to adapt himself as well as he can to the world around him, and to speak the small thought in the small way so that nobody’s feelings may behurt. But, like Dostoieftsky, he cannot curb himself for long, and he continually interrupts general conversation by such difficult and alien topics as beauty redeeming the world. Russians, however, forgave him all that, and it may be said that they accepted Prince Myshkine in the same sense that they afterwards accepted Feodor Dos- toleffsky. Dostoieffsky became more and more dissatisfied with his life in Switzerland. From Vevey he wrote saying that all his letters were opened by the St. Petersburg police, and that he had received an anony- mous letter stating that he was among the “ suspects ”” in Russia. “God knows why!” is Dostoieffsky’s comment; and a little later, writing from Milan, he urges that a Russian review should be wholly imbued by the Russian spirit, and should not be “ purely Slavophil.” Years before, indeed, Dostoieffsky had maintained that the réle of his country was ‘‘Pan-human and not merely Pan-Slav.” Perpetually his thoughts returned to Russia, and not even the memories of Florentine genius lured him to other themes. Like Tolstoy, he had detected that the great force of Russia lay in her peasants. Like Tolstoy, he approached the moujik, but not in Tolstoy’s manner. For Dos- 216 A Great Russian Realist ‘ toiefisky, the moujik was not so much a teacher of the present as a type of the future. “It is not,” he adds, “‘ the absolute type of the coming Russia, but certainly it is one of the Russians of the future.” But even this preoccupied Slav was compelled to acknowledge the glories of Florence, and to become ecstatic about “The Virgin in the Chair, whom, in 1863, I regarded for eight days, and whom I have only seen now.” But, generally speaking, these letters from Italy are filled with comments on Russia and Russian journalism, with notes on Bielinski and Tolstoy and Turgenev, with analyses of the Russian general reader, and of the Slav mission throughout the world; and then through it all, permeating it all, the old, sad rhythm of the rouble: “I demand, first of all, immediately in advance three hundred roubles.” Starvation itself, however, would not for an instant have turned Dostoieffsky’s thoughts away from Russia. ‘* You ask in your letter,’ he writes from Florence in the spring of 1869 to Strakhov, “what I am reading. I read Voltaire and Diderot all the winter. Undoubtedly that gave me pleasure and was useful to me, but I should have liked to have had something dealing with actual Russian life.” The autumn of the same year found him at the last gasp of penury in Dresden. He and his wife had been reduced to pawning their linen, and Dostoiefisky appealed to Kachpiriev, the Russian publisher, to come to the rescue with two hundred roubles. In The Ideal Russian 217 the same letter the novelist asked for seventy-five roubles to be sent by return of post. A month passed and no money came. His wife, Anna, was nursing a new-born daughter, Lubov, whose christening had to be postponed through want of money. Dos- toiefisky had to pawn his clothes in order to procure two thalers for a telegram. He was desperate, and it seemed to him that Kachpiriev was deliberately insulting him, laughing at his poverty, mocking the admissions of penury that were being wrung from him in his letters: “Does he imagine,” he writes to Maikov, “that I wrote to him about my misery in order to illustrate my beauties of style? How can I possibly write when I am starving, when I am obliged to pawn my clothes in order to procure two thalers for a telegram? To the Devil with me and my hunger! But she is nursing her child, and she is going herself to pawn her last woollen winter petticoat! And for the last two days it has been snowing here (this is no exaggeration, you can see by the newspapers), she may catch cold; but how can he realise that I am ashamed to explain to him all that?’ Neither the nurse nor the landlady had been paid, and it seems to the novelist that Kachpiriev has insulted not only himself, but his wife, about whom he has written in his letters. ‘‘ Do they expect me to give them literature under these conditions?” he asks. “I walk up and down, tearing my hair, and at night I cannot sleep a wink! I am always thinking and waiting and raging! My God! I swear 218 A Great Russian Realist to you, that I cannot depict to you my misery in all its details: I am ashamed to write it down.” And yet they expect artistic perfection from him, and taunt him with Turgenev and Gontcharof! In the end, it seemed that Kachpiriev had been in the greatest monetary difficulties himself, and was in no way to blame in this matter. Now that the affair is over, Dostoiefisky writes to Maikov: “I do not speak of the past, especially if he is in difficulties himself! I tell you frankly, that I was never really angry, even while I was writing to you.” And in the same letter he goes on tranquilly to comment on Russian history, after which he speaks of having been almost arrested for debt in 1865. An official, it seems, had visited Dostoieffsky with the intention of arresting him, but the novelist had made friends with him and had learned from him a great many details, which he had used in ‘‘ Crime and Punish- ment.” Dostoieffsky was furious with his old enemy, Stellovski, in regard to the contract concerning his famous novel, and he is anxious about the rights of publication of ‘‘ The Idiot ” and another novel entitled ““The Permanent Husband,” which, typically the work of Dostoieffsky as it is, none the less sheds comparatively little light on his biography. CHAPTER X DEMONS Tue commencement of 1870 found the novelist hopelessly waiting for money from Kachpiriev. He is, he confides in Maikov, at the very end of his re- sources, in spite of the fact that he had made some fifteen hundred roubles during the preceding four months. Moreover, his attacks of epilepsy, after a long interval, have recommenced. He is none the less preoccupied by Russian literature, and particularly by the work of Turgenev and Tolstoy. As usual, he himself is working against time, and mortgaging his work in advance. He is a man of letters, pure and simple, he maintains, and if they want his work they must pay for it. The letters become more insistent than ever on the subject of roubles, and the novelist repeats to his friend Strakhov, as though it were not obvious enough: “All my life, and always, I have worked for those who pay me in ad- vance.” [But he is already at work on perhaps the greatest theme of his whole life, the theme which was never finished. He tells Strakhov that the general title of this book will be “‘ The Life of a Great Sinner,” but that there will be a separate title for each volume. 219 220 A Great Russian Realist It is the story of Dostoieffsky’s inner life. ‘The principal question which will run through all the parts is the same from which I have suffered con- sciously and unconsciously all my life: the Existence of God.” In the same letter he states that he has known the Russian monastery from his childhood, and that he understands thoroughly the monastic life. The book appeared shortly before Dostoieffsky’s death, under the title “‘ The Brothers Karamazov.” | The personality of Tolstoy interested his exiled rival, and he is anxious to learn if Strakhov knows him personally. “If you know him,” he writes, “ tell me, I beg of you, what sort of man he is. It would interest me very much to know something about him. I have heard very little about him or his private life.” Turgenev he considers a writer who has exhausted himself, and he ridicules “The Execution of Tropp- man.” Dostoieffsky had witnessed an execution at Lyons, and had been profoundly struck by it, as though the guillotine were the central wonder of this old Europe from which he longed so to return. “Ah! Nicolas Nicolaievitch!”? he exclaims, in a letter to Strakhov, “‘ how unbearable it is for me to live abroad, I cannot express to you.” The Franco-Prussian War deceived him, as it did Turgenev, who believed that the French would win. “You assert,” writes Dostoiefisky to Maikov in December, “ that the spirit of the whole nation is now rising in France against brute force! But I have never doubted it from the beginning, and if Demons 221 they make no blunder by concluding peace, and if they wait for about three months, the Germans will be driven out, and then what a disgrace!” Dos- toieffsky, observing the Germans in Dresden, noted that the professors, the doctors, and the students were enthusiastic for the war, but that the people were almost indifferent to it. As time passed, Dostoiefisky became almost as eager to leave Dresden as he had been to leave Siberia. “Demons ”’ had commenced to appear in the February number of the Rousski Viestnik, 1871, but Dostoieftsky, who had found fame as a boy of twenty-three, who was the author of “Crime and Punishment,’ was now asking himself, in his fiftieth year, the old question, “Shall I arrive?” Maikov had written a critique of the first part of ‘‘ Demons,” in which he used the phrase: ‘‘ These are the heroes of Turgenev in their old age.” This extraordinary book, however, hardly suggests to Western readers the old age of any Tur- genevian hero from Rudin to Bazaroff. In “Buried Alive”? Dostoieffsky had given the story of his life asa convict. In “ Injury and Insult” he had sketched the romance in Siberia which led up to his marriage with the young widow of his fellow-exile. In “Crime and Punishment” he had revealed the results of his psychological studies of criminals in a book that is admittedly useful to students of criminology. He was now to give in an extra- ordinary novel his mature attitude towards the Nihilists, as they were termed, since the publication 222 A Great Russian Realist of Turgenev’s “ Fathers and Sons.” ‘ Demons” is an answer to “‘ Fathers and Sons,” which had appeared to Russians to ridicule two generations. Outwardly, the plot of ‘‘ Demons” somewhat resembles that of Turgenev’s “Virgin Soil.” It describes a conspiracy in a provincial town and the utter detachment of the whole mass of the people from the conspirators. Here, however, all com- parison with Turgenev ends, for Bazaroff himself becomes almost pale before the monstrous creations of this book, which is so well named ‘‘ Demons.” [ The book, from first to last, is permeated by that sense of duality which is so persistently to be found in the work of the great Russian realist. It is here that Dostoiefisky has specifically indicated the conflict between the two truths, that of the God-man and that of the Man-god. The conflict is fought out in the souls of these possessed ones, who deny and believe in the same breath. The provincial town is peaceful, almost sleepy, until Stavroguine and his companion, Peter, return from abread. Stavroguine, the terrible hero, is himself devoured by the conflict. ‘If Stavroguine believes,” says Kiriloff, the engineer, “‘ he does not bélieve that he believes. If he does not believe, he does not believe that he does not believe.” Stavro- guine can believe wholly in nothing. “I have experimented in debauch,” he writes in his last confession, “on a grand scale, and I have exhausted my, strength; but I do not care for it, and it was not Demons 223 my aim.” Nor can he believe single-mindedly in an idea, least of all in that of universal negation. But Peter, the enthusiastic Nihilist, is certain. Stav- roguine calls him his “ape,” and Peter does not protest, for to him Stavroguine is a substitute for an ideal, the better part of himself. ‘I am a buffoon,” he exclaims to Stavroguine, ‘‘ but I do not wish that you, who are the better part of myself, should be one also.” Peter does not feel the Man-god stirring within him, but leans on Stavroguine as the brute leans on its master, even when it guides him. Kiriloff, the engineer, the semi-madman, who is “tortured by God,” clings to the idea of a superman, beyond the dreams of Peter. ‘The man of the present,” he reasons, “‘is not yet what he ought to be! There will come a new man, happy and proud. He who will be indifferent as to living or not living, he will be the new man. He who will conquer suffering and fear, he will be God. And the other god will no longer exist.” Questioned as to his belief in the present existence of this other god, Kiriloff replies: ‘‘ He exists without existence. In the stone, there is no suffering, but there is suffering in the fear of it.” And he goes on to divide all history into two periods, the one ranging from the gorilla to the annihilation of God ; and the other ranging from the annihilation of God until that time when “ Man shall be God and change physically.” Finally, this Nietzschism without Nietzsche is speci- fically formulated in this dialogue between Kiriloft 224 A Great Russian Realist and Stavroguine, in which the engineer is the first speaker : “He who will teach men that they are good, he will finish the world.” “ He who did teach them it, Him they crucified.” “He will come, and his name will be the Man- god.” “The God-man ?” “The Man-god: there is a difference.” Even as he is asserting the supreme development of the superman, Stavroguine reminds him of the lamp that he keeps burning in front of the Icon. But underneath the conflict of Kiriloff there is a passionate wish for the discarded truth to be restored. ‘‘ Listen,” he cries out to the “ape,” Peter. ‘ Listen! a great idea: there was a day when three Crosses were erected in the middle of the earth. One of the crucified had such faith that He said to the other: ‘ You will be with Me to-day in Paradise.” The day ended, both died, and they found neither Paradise nor Resurrection. The prophecy was not fulfilled. Listen; this Man was the greatest of all the earth, it owes to Him what makes it live. The whole planet, with all that covers it—without this Man—is only madness. Neither before nor after Him has His like been met with, and that itself is a miracle. Yes, it is a miracle, the solitary existence of this Man in the flight of ages. If it is so, if the laws of Nature have not even spared Him, if they have not had pity even on their Masterpiece, but have made Him also Demons 225 live in the midst of a lie, and die for a lie, then the planet is a lie, and rests on a lie, on a stupid derision. Consequently the laws of Nature are themselves an imposture and a diabolical farce.” (Bue it is Chatoff the Christian, who almost doubts, and not Kiriloff, searching for the Man-god, yet almost believing in the God-man, who expresses what was to Dostoieffsky the great national truth. “ With every people,” he reasons, at every period of its existence, the end of the whole national movement is only the search for God, of a God for it, in whom it may believe as the one true God. God is the synthetic personality of a whole people, considered from its origin until its end.” Yet, asked by Stavro- guine to answer yes or no as to whether he believes in God, he stammers out: ‘I believe in Russia, I believe in her orthodoxy. . . . I believe in the Body of Christ. . . . I believe that a new Advent of the Messiah will take place in Russia. . . . I believe ad Whereupon Stavroguine interrupts, “ But in God? In God?” to which Chatoff answers: ‘‘ I—I—shall believe in God.” But Chatoff had embraced fully those sides of Christianity which were as the breath of life to Dostoieffsky from the beginning. He had preserved, among these Demons who threatened him, the qualities of sympathy and infinite compassion. Years before, his wife had deceived and deserted him, but when / she returned to him for shelter, he received her|~ humbly and thankfully. Nobody in the world, per- 15 226 A Great Russian Realist haps, but Dostoiefisky could have drawn this scene, which, so impossible from the standpoint of convention, is at the same time so profoundly truthful in its naturalness. Chatoff experienced the sensation of a new life now that this woman had returned to him, and he was willing to support her and the child of Stavroguine. But the possessed ones, dominated by the “ape” Peter, have decreed the death of Chatoff, whose murder is described with powerful and un- emotional minuteness of detail. And just as there are in this terrible novel two gods, two forms of faith, and two demons who dominate over all, so there are two loves, between which Lisa, the fiancée of Maurice Nicolaievitch, is swayed. Her fiancé knows of this horrible conflict in the girl’s heart, and urges Stavroguine to marry her if he is free. ‘‘ Beneath the incessant hate,” he tells him, “sincere and profound, that she bears you, there pierces every instant an immense love, love the most sincere, the most excessive, and—the most insane. On the other hand, beneath the love, no less sincere, that she feels for me, there pierces every moment the most violent hatred.”? From this conflict there arises yet another tragedy. Lisa, torn between the two loves, that of a lifetime and that of an hour, goes to Stavroguine, only to learn, when it is too late, that he cannot love her. Questioned by him as to why she has ruined her life in this mad fashion, she answers: “And so that is Stavroguine, the “drinker of blood, Stavroguine,’ as a lady of this Demons 227 place, who is in love with you, calls you! Listen. I have already told you: I have placed my life in an hour, and I am content. Do the same..... Or rather—no, for you it is useless, you will still have so many different ‘hours’ and ‘moments.’” And a little later the girl analyses the duality of her own impressions of this man: “I ought to confess to you that in Switzerland I was already persuaded that you had something horrible upon your conscience: a mélange of mud and blood, and—and, at the same time, something profoundly ridiculous. If I am not deceived, refrain from making your confession to me; it would excite only my laughter.” Even the lame, half-witted wife of Stavroguine detects the double in her husband, as though the “ape”? Peter peeped out through the mask of fulfilled manhood. She reads the menace of murder in the heart of her hero, and she refuses to believe that it is really he : “‘ As for resembling him, yes, you resemble him a great deal, you might be even his relation— crafty fellow! But my one is a falcon with piercing eyes and a prince, while you are a screech owl and a merchant! My one does not allow himself to walk ; as for you, Chatouchka (he is very nice, I like him very much!), Chatouchka struck you a blow; my Lébiadkine told me about it. And why were you afraid that day when you entered the room? whois it that frightened you? When I saw your miserable face, at the moment that I fell, and when you picked me up, I felt as though a worm were gliding into my 228 A Great Russian Realist heart—‘It is not he,’ I said to myself; ‘it is not he!’ My falcon would never have blushed for me before a young girl in society! My God! For five whole years my solitary happiness has been to think that my falcon was somewhere yonder, behind the moun- tains, that he was living, that he was flying and facing the sun. . . . Speak, Impostor; have they paid you well for playing this réle ?” Nearly all his life Dostoiefisky seems to have been haunted by this idea of a double, and his second book was actually called “The Double.” In “ Demons” the idea of duality goes so far as to suggest, not only the Man-god in opposition to the God-man, but the European God in opposition to the Russian God. Karmazinoff, the acknowledged caricature of Turgenev, admits that he no longer believes ‘‘at all in the Russian God,” and when Peter asks if he believes in the European God, he replies: ‘I believe in no God. I have been calumniated in the eyes of the Russian youth.” Of course the picture does not in the least resemble the stoical artist of ‘“‘Smoke’’; at the same time, there is no better example of Dostoieffsky’s espiéglerie than this presentation of a fatuous author from abroad endeavouring to mollify these Demons whom he fails even faintly to recognise. Very different had been Turgenev’s picture of the typical Nihilist and of the contrast between two generations. Bazaroff is a normal type, easily understood in Europe as well as in Russia, compared with these dispossessed ones. The delicate and gentle art of Turgenev had evoked Demons 229 a quiet country house suddenly invaded by a rough young doctor, who is a devotee of science, and who believes in the closely observed fact as opposed to the sentiment of an older generation. But Bazaroff, that “figure, sombre, untamed, only half-emerged from barbarism, brave, wayward, and honest,’ is essentially constructive, a man of the future, when he shall have compelled the past to make way for him. These creations of Dostoiefisky are veritable demons, suffocated and convulsed, whose resting- place should not be the hearts of either one generation or the other, but rather the bodies of swine. Dostoieffsky will have none of them in this book, which contains some curiously personal notes, that might have appeared word for word in an autobio- graphy of the great Russian novelist. Kiriloff, for example, speaks of certain moments in which he experiences an ecstasy of feeling almost unbearable in its intensity. ‘If this state were to last more than five seconds,” he tells Chatoff, ‘‘ the soul would be unable to resist it, and would disappear. During these five seconds, I live through a whole human existence, and for these seconds I would give all my life, and it would not be paying too dearly for them. To endure that for ten seconds, one would have to be physically transformed.”’ Chatoff asks him if he is not an epileptic, and, when he answers in the negative, warns him that he is in danger of becoming one: “Take care, Kiriloff; I have heard it said that this is precisely how it begins. A man subject to that 230 A Great Russian Realist malady has given me a detailed description of the sensation which precedes the attack, and while listening to you, I seem to be hearing him. He also spoke to me of the five seconds, and told me that it was im- possible to bear this state for any longer time.” In this book, too, Dostoieffsky returns to his old appeal to the Russian against becoming detached from the soil of Russia. ‘‘ When one is no longer attached to one’s country,” admits Stavroguine in the words of Chatoff, “one has no more gods, that is to say, no more aims in existence.”” And the Arch-Demon, who could only half-deny, adds: ‘One can discuss infinitely on everything, but from me there has only issued a negation, without grandeur and without force.” Dostoiefisky’s whole message is a denial of this negation, and his final comment on the possessed ones is that of the New Testament: ‘ ‘And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain : and they besought Him that He would suffer them to enter into them. And He suffered them. Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked. When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country. Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the’ man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid. They also which Demons 231 saw it told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils was healed.’ ” And there is in this book another message from Dostoiefisky, this time from the Apocalypse. It is of the very essence of Dostoieffsky’s inner faith. It speaks of him who is neither cold nor hot, but only tepid, of him who believes that he is rich and has need of nothing, of him who cannot understand that he is wretched and unhappy and poor, and blind and naked. The whole heart of Dostoieffsky, so merciful to every type of sinner, protested against this tepidness of temperament, which in Western countries is so often confused with virtue. And even in this book, in which he condemns @ outrance the excesses of the possessed ones, he at the same time makes it plain that if he regards the Nihilist as a monster, he also refuses to exalt the tepid person who, without faith, believes himself to be without sin. Dostoiefisky became more and more a prey to nostalgia. His step-son, Paul, had grown up now, and was on the eve of marriage. The exile longed to meet his old friends and to come into touch once more with modern Russians in his own country. He was particularly enthusiastic about the Zaria, of which he said, in a letter written towards the end of 1870: “Alone, almost alone among the reviews, it defends the opinions that I place above my life, and to which, in my opinion, the future belongs.” The author of “Demons” was naturally shocked by the Commune, which seemed to him the concrete illus- 232 A Great Russian Realist tration of the futility of Positivism. It seemed to him always the repetition of the same distorted dream, the dream of Rousseau, the dream of reshaping the world through the lessons of experience, the dream that in its last result leads one back to that “ spirit of Euclid,” to which Dostoiefisky was so opposed. The Russian novelist clung passionately to his old belief in the Russian people, with its goal in the new Byzantium and its strength in the old Faith. He believed that there must be no divorce from the moujik: ‘“‘We come directly from him, from the people, as from an independent point @appui, from the people as they exist now, savage, after two cen- turies of a sombre servitude, but we believe that they carry in them all the means of their own develop- ment. We have not gone back to the ancient Moscow to search for ideals. We have not said that it is necessary to commence by changing everything, in the German fashion, before considering our people as an element fitting for the future eternal edifice.” The burning of Paris did not make him change the conservative views which he believed so earnestly to belong to the future. It was not for him “to coquet,” as Turgenev was so foolishly charged with coquetting, with the youth of Russia, those jeunes whom ‘Turgenev was supposed to have insulted through Bazaroff, and to whom Dostoiefisky could only offer Stavroguine and his “ ape,” Peter. Russia could never be changed by all this Western violence foolishly raging in Paris. Dostoiefisky had Demons 233 grasped that long ago, when he was a Fourierist in St. Petersburg. Imprisonment in Siberia had never changed his attitude towards that. The change must come tranquilly from within, and not forcibly from without. It must be a change of the heart, and not a mere change in political institutions. His life broken, his nerves shattered, his whole career as a novelist apparently at an end for ever, Dostoieffsky, the convict, had never dreamed of the Western tradition that force can be met only by force. And in this other long exile, broken only by surreptitious visits to the Russian capital in order to obtain money, Dostoiefisky’s old convictions had deepened. From 1865 to 1871 he had been almost constantly abroad, and during this time he had written ‘Crime and Punishment,” “‘’The Gambler,” “The Idiot,” “ The Permanent Husband,” and ‘“ Demons.” In every one of these books, even in “‘ The Gambler,” there is a deep belief in the Russian character, and in the salvation of Russia, and eventually of Europe, through the development of the Russian national soul. His country had been asked to join the Socialist movement, and, only a few months before his death, Dostoieffsky said: “Russia ought not to do it; she ought to preserve her own advantages; Socialism will fall at her feet.” The personality of the West seemed to him now to be expressing itself in the brute force of the Germans and in the mad rage of the Commune. That did not seem to be the goal for him whose national ideal 7 \ “ 234 A Great Russian Realist was that of sympathy and the great comprehension of self-sacrifice. Dostoiefisky opposed his own national mysticism to the “spirit of Euclid,” and he believed from the very beginning that the old Russia would slowly, and by an _ incalculable process of her own, accomplish her destiny in the regeneration of Europe. Turgenev seemed to him to have lost utterly his touch with Russia and his sensitiveness to Russian aspirations. But it was not in the nature of things that the author of “The Brothers Karamazov”? should be quite just to the author of “Smoke.” How could he who may be said to have accepted the guillotine as the symbol of Europe be appreciative of him who gratefully accepted the croupier as the lowest symbol of the old civilisation ? He is utterly weary of Europe, but he is afraid that his creditors will spring upon him the moment that he arrives in St. Petersburg. ‘‘ Consider,” he writes to Maikov. ‘If I come at once to Petersburg, my creditors will not allow me to return to Dresden. In that case I shall be in Petersburg and my wife in Dresden, for, not only with a hundred roubles, but even with four hundred, it would be impossible for us to leave, with the child, debts, etc.” He asks in a postscript to this letter if the Literary Fund will give him a hundred roubles, and speaks of the diffi- culties which certain people are creating by spreading a report that he had ceased to be a member of the society. As a matter of fact, Dostoieffsky had only Demons 235 received relief from the Fund once in his life. That was on July 24, 1863, when he borrowed from the Fund for six months the sum of fifteen roubles at five percent. This sum, with the interest, was repaid in full. It is no wonder, then, that Dostoiefisky remarks that the Committee of the Fund ought to be ashamed to refuse him a loan of one hundred roubles. In June the Dostoieffskys left Dresden and returned to St. Petersburg. CHAPTER XI UNDERGROUND AnD now, in the very year that Ivan Turgenev settled down at No. 50 Rue de Douai, to commence the Parisian period of his life, his rival was thankfully establishing himself in the Russian capital. Peace had come to him during these last years of his life. He lived with his family in St. Petersburg, only leaving it to spend the summers at Staraia Roussa. And while Turgenev and Flaubert were discussing psychological problems at the Magny dinners, the author of “Crime and Punishment” was being accepted at last by the Russian people as their chosen one, the real Grand Inquisitor, who inquired only to understand, and who understood only to forgive. Old age had commenced to creep on, but the novelist was happy and contented with his wife and his two surviving children. People had commenced to consult him from all over Russia as though he were an official confessor. “* So you really believe,” he writes to a correspondent, “that I am in the number of those who save hearts, who deliver souls, and who expel grief! A great many people write to me, but I am certain that ] am 236 Underground 237 far more capable of inspiring disenchantment and disgust. I am scarcely clever at soothing, though I am sometimes charged with it. And a great many people only ask to be soothed.” But in actual fact he was far more amiable in his sympathy than this fragment suggests, and he was particularly interested in certain new types of Russian women, for he had as yet studied Russian feminism only in its political manifestations. Here is a note on two young girls who insisted on making his acquaintance: ‘“‘ My wife received them at first, and then I came into the room. They told us that they were students of the Academy of Medicine, where there are already nearly five hundred women, and that they had ‘entered the Academy in order to receive a superior education,’ after which they would ‘make themselves useful.’ I had not met this type of young girl before (as for the old Nihilists, I know quantities of them. I know them personally and have studied them carefully). I have rarely, believe me, spent my time more agreeably than during my two hours with these young girls.” He detected in them at once “the most sincere earnestness and the most sincere gaiety,” but a little later he was to detect, in a man, what he calls the reverse of the medal. This person had discovered a prohibited book in the possession of a tutor, and had reported the fact to his employer, who immediately dis- missed the tutor. When the informer was told that he had committed the action of a coward, Dostoiefisky noted that he did not even understand the accusation. 238 A Great Russian Realist Dostoieffsky, as counsellor to the youth of Russia, was on the whole conservative. ‘‘'To be a good wife,” he writes to another correspondent, “ and especially a good mother, that is the highest aim for a woman. You will understand yourself that I can tell you nothing about the young man of whom you speak to me. You call him pusillanimous, but if he backs you up in this way, and is ready to back you up in everything, he is no longer pusillanimous. Besides, I know nothing about that. The principal thing is that he should be good and generous.” There is neither Prince Myshkine on the one hand, nor the “ape” Peter on the other in these simple, reasonable letters, and Dostoieffsky showed, in at least one of them, that he understood and appreciated the benefits of European progress. In this letter he warns a young girl who wishes to study medicine, that even “the greater number of our specialists are people who have been superficially instructed. It is different in Europe, where you will meet Humboldt and Claude Bernard and others, men of universal range of thought, thoroughly educated, and with a knowledge of sub- jects that have no reference to their particular speciality.” His readers were particularly interested in ‘‘ The Diary of a Writer,” which he commenced to edit in 1876, and which was exceptionally successful. This journal, expressing the individual convictions of Dos- toiefisky, gave him a peculiar position among the Russian people, which certainly contrasted with the Underground 239 isolation of the greater part of his life. For, even in the hard life of Russian men of letters, over which there has hovered so repeatedly the menace of prison and exile, even in this life, Dostoieffsky was to a large extent cut off from his fellow-men. One opens at random that very different journal of the Magny dinners, to which Turgenev was still contributing fragments of life. It is another world, this Paris of the Goncourts, Alphonse Daudet, and Flaubert, a world at once of continuance and of transformation, a world which, without perhaps outgrowing Musset, most certainly anticipated M. Anatole France. It is a world which, realising the second Empire—M. de Camors, and what he stood for—retained its associations with the Parisian myth-fashioner in Balzac, and with the world-attitudes of Chateau- briand, and thence, bridging easily the abyss, retained some phases of unity with those traditions of old France that the bourgeoisie had so nearly killed. For, they, the “‘ hissed authors,” were Latin, and, for all their scorn of the bourgeois public, knew well that there would be in France always an audience, “ clever”? as that Greek house, at which not even Aristophanes could gibe. But it is a world of dis- illusion and fatigue, a world of irritated, mocking searchers after new ideas, sensations, experiences, a world in which all is tolerated except the intellectually false, but a world in which emotion dwindles and dies, like a wild-winged thing, oppressed by prying eyes. 240 A Great Russian Realist One turns to England and glances at this or that biography of a typical Englishman of letters during the nineteenth century. One follows him from the selected house of the selected public school up to the traditional college of the chosen University. One reads, perhaps, a fragment of his prize poem, and one learns how he obtained his First or the precise reasons of his failure. Afterwards, in any case, it will be all so smooth. Perhaps he will take Holy Orders, and accept a Fellowship, or perhaps there will be a secretaryship, followed by a Government appointment. Compared with such a life as Dos- toiefisky’s, his life will be what an English lawn is to the Russian steppe. And he will be always conscious of continuing his tradition of being the very best, according to the highest standards, of setting an example on the one hand, and of telling the truth on the other. He will be always urbane, and if he is not strictly orthodox, his “infidelity” will not greatly depress a Bishop’s dinner-party. He will, perhaps, betray an intellectual complacency a little too obvious. His books may possibly be stamped by a too great compassion for the heads of his readers to make a very lasting appeal to their hearts. But that is such a very little thing, and in spite of his modern ideas he will inevitably be accepted as a good influence. For, he will have hugged doubt itself into the enclosure of English comfort. Poor Dostoieffsky would have been a welcome guest at the Magny dinners in spite of that scornful Underground 241 “C'est du Dostoieffsky” of his compatriot. He would have been at home in this atmosphere of the vivisec- tion of human impulses. In the analysis of motive on the one hand, and of sensation on the other, the Parisians had nothing to teach this Russian of Russia. But he, the “ barbarian with the lizard’s eyes,” was something else as well as a vivisector of human souls, and it would have seemed to him that these Parisians, in spite of the wide range of their interests, and the sincerity of their intellectual curiosity, had retained only the grimace of death in their hearts, while he himself, in spite of his faults, his savagery, his dis- order, his want of balance, had preserved the tears of life. One can perhaps imagine him “ translated’ into the atmosphere of that essentially English table-talk of the last century, which has been so religiously pre- served for us. How silently the Russian would have sat, pulling, doubtless, at that thin yellow beard of his, while famous men discussed the tone of the different English public schools, the problem of whether such and such a divine was or was not “ broad church,” the advisability of so-and-so retaining his Fellowship, the mis-quotations of exact scholars, the deplorable apathy on the Continent towards this or that English thinker, and so on. And then, towards the end, perhaps, a great English statesman might have touched lightly and fittingly, but none the less didactically, upon the sense of sin. A Bishop might have illustrated this by an anecdote concerning 16 242 A Great Russian Realist two English thinkers, after which he might have asked the Russian visitor, quite pleasantly, if this sense of sin was at all known in his country. Then, possibly, Dostoiefisky might have found his voice, but it would assuredly have been quite for the last time at that English dinner-table. His isolation was not due to environment alone, but was to no small extent innate. Though he had lived for years in Europe, he could never have made himself at home in that Parisian circle of which Tur- genev and Flaubert were the central figures. Nor, on the other hand, could he have ever settled down comfortably “on the side of the angels” in the English manner. In no European society could-he have found balm for that inner hurt in his life which seems to find expression in the pages of “‘ The Under- ground Spirit.” . It is, of course, absurd to read a personal confession into a work of art. But over and over again, in this book, one reads the personal opinions and re- flections of Dostoieffsky, and, so far, it must be accepted as a study in introspection written by an author who certainly has probed the most secret depths of his own consciousness. A somewhat similar work is Turgenev’s “The Diary of a Superfluous Man,” though the abyss between the two temperaments separates them as works of art. The sombre Tur- genev reveals the intimate secrets of hurt pride, of unrequited love, of disillusion, of the last accept- ance with comparative tranquillity of failure. His rival Underground 243 stabs at you with his confidences, but only after he has wounded himself with every sentence. But, like Tolstoy, he sometimes escapes from his own inten- tion. The author of “ Anna Karénina” constantly forgets to moralise on a prepared thesis, and evokes joyfully the glow and variety of external life. And Dostoieffsky, in this, perhaps, the most personal book that he ever wrote, sometimes escapes from the pain of self-mockery and becomes an impassioned advocate of the causes he loved best. Ordinov, the self-tormented hero of these pages, regarded himself as exiled from the world and cut off from light, liberty, and life. ‘* He lived, in fact,” says the author, “‘in a sort of spiritual under-world, he possessed an underground spirit, always busying itself with obscure problems, always sounding the darkness of thought, always sinking deeper and deeper into the mysteries of consciousness: ‘ Consciousness, this malady,’ he writes somewhere.” In short, it was the curse of Ordinov to know himself in a deeper sense, perhaps, than ever the Greek divined. Com- pared with the normal man of action, Ordinov is a rat, rather than a man—“ a rat gifted with an intense consciousness, whereas the other is a man.” Now, the normal man yields at once to impossibility, that is to say, to the “wall,” but the rat recognises no obstacle whatever in his free world of ideas. Only, in the world of action, the subterranean type is futile and meaningless. He cannot translate the great dream into the little, concrete action. He, the 244 A Great Russian Realist exception, is as a shadow among the living, and yet it is he who alone understands that humanity with which he can never mingle. Less than a man, Ordinov is a philosopher who, here at all events, is speaking the actual mind of Dostoieffsky : ‘“ Everybody knows this truth: it is by that especially that we are dis- tinguished. from foreign countries. We are very little ethereal, we are not pure spirits. Our own romanticism is wholly opposed to that of Europe; and theirs and ours cannot be reduced to the same terms. (I say romanticism ; excuse me. It is a little word, which has humbly performed its duties, it is old, and everybody understands it.) Our romanticism understands everything, sees everything, and often sees with a clarity incomparably more living than that of the most positive intelligences... . Self-mockery and mockery of Russia creep into the next sentences ; but when Ordinov wrote that criticism he was speaking for Dostoiefisky. And in that strange scene in which Ordinov works upon the feelings of Lisa, the unfortunate, he is also speaking with the voice of the Grand Inquisitor. She will die of phthisis, he warns her, if she does not abandon her sinister calling, and he sketches her shallow grave, and the rough jokes of those who bury her, as they swing the bier into the symbolic mud. ‘From mud to mud,” he warns her, and then the time will come when she will realise in her despair that she has never lived at all. Already he had told her of the happiness of family life, of the Underground 245 secret love of husband and wife, of the adoration of a father for his child, of all those simple and intimate joys which seemed to the complex Dostoiefisky the greatest blessings in the world. He tears at the woman’s heart, as his voice rises and falls in this strange rhetoric of appeal. Other novelists, however, from Victor Hugo to Dumas fils, might have accom- plished similar effects. What is extraordinary and typical about this scene is the emotional effect of the woman’s silence. M. Maeterlinck, who has himself instilled into French prose the mysterious secrets of silence, has observed of French tragedy, that after its heroes have ceased speaking they cease toexist. This is undeniably true of the whole tendency towards declamatory rhetoric on the part of the French, but it does not seem to me true of the poetry of Racine. For, in Racine there is, as it were, an aroma of, contamination, of menace, of loss, which survives long after the spoken word. And the terror of Nero’s sin, and of his most secret potentiality for evil, communicate themselves between the most tranquil lines of the “ Britannicus.” It is this recognition of sinfulness that permeates the silences of Dostoieffsky, and never more so than in this lonely scene of exasperated compassion. For, the man is exasperated against himself, as he pleads with Lisa to leave the “ape” life, in which he, himself, is partially submerged. But she scarcely speaks a word, and sometimes she says nothing at all. Only, far more than in his generalities of rhetoric, 246 A Great Russian Realist the whole life of the woman is conveyed to us in her cowering silence. Never can he condemn her as she is condemning herself. No rough joke of tavern loungers can hurt with the scald of her own inner sense of sin. Lisa listens all through the dreary night as Ordinov tells her of herself. Of course the reaction sets in inevitably. Ordinov’s mood changes soon after he has left the house, in spite of the fact that he has induced poor Lisa to come to him, her rescuer, the man who has redeemed ‘her from herself. Back in his lonely lodging, he Jeannot feel in the very least a rescuer. The old rat-feeling is upon him again, now that he has been dragged into the zone of reality. In the make-believe world of emotion he had risen to great heights. In the actual analysis of the girl’s temperament, her state of mind, the way in which she would regard this or that phase of special pleading, the way in which she would receive absolute sincerity, the way in which she would realise, as she cowered in that dark squalid room, how they would jest obscenely even over her grave—all these things he had under- stood with wonderful penetration. But now some- thing very different was demanded from him. The exaltation of the moment had evaporated, and he was asked to bear the weight of a human responsibility. _ That was beyond him. He dreaded coping with this young girl. He dreaded, above all, her seeing his . shabbiness, his poverty, his miserable underground ) life in which only his dreams were great. And when ae Underground 247 she comes to the man who has veritably saved her from the horrible things that his imagination had communicated to hers, he can only greet her with derision and with the deeper pain of self-derision. | But she understands. Precisely because he is poor and wretched, it is easier for her to read his sincerity beneath this false mockery. She knows how and why it hurts him to see her there, and she forgives. But there is the Russian anti-climax even to this, and Ordinov is very quickly cut off from this other shipwrecked being, who, in her turn, might have saved him from himself. This anti-climax is characteristic of Dostoieftsky’s work. Judged, indeed, from the conventional stand- point of action, his characters are often so incapable of coping with reality as almost to cease to have dramatic value. Great moments are constantly fol- lowed by the mockery of insignificant hours. The woman over whom Mitia Karamazov and his father have quarrelled so fiercely learns suddenly that her ‘Polish lover has returned to her. Instantly she determines to abandon the Karamazovs, father and son, and to begin a new life with the man who had taught her love. But only too quickly she is un- deceived. The Polish lover means nothing, and never could mean anything to this volcanic woman. And, because of the absence of what the English call ‘‘ character” in so many of Dostoieffsky’s creations, his most powerful scenes lack that stamp of finality which Western readers have been so long taught to 248 A Great Russian Realist expect. In other words, the anti-climax is not introduced as an ingredient of the machinery of comedy, but because Dostoieffsky considered it as something inevitable in a far deeper sense than any magnificent gesture of any jeune premier in the world, Judged, however, from the standpoint of motive, intention, the secret processes of the brain, the con- cealed emotions of the heart, Dostoieffsky’s creations are always consistently interesting. Melodrama has no place in his psychology. Lisa does not gesticulate to Ordinov upon the wrongs that Society has done to her, but merely shows him a poor faded letter from a young medical student who had loved her with respect. And in this inner “ fantastic’? world des nerfs et des larmes, as De Vogiié has phrased it, there are no parasites. A character of Dostoiefisky may eat another’s bread, but his feelings will be honest, even when he lies with his lips. They are almost always natural, and even the hypocrites find it almost impossible to deny themselves the luxury of tearing off the mask. And they are fearless in speculation, questioning people who cannot be put off with the platitudes of authority. None theless, they are, most of them, “‘ cases” of Dostoiefisky, people who, in spite of their gifts of brain and heart, can never find them- selves at home, any more than Ordinov himself, in the world of reality. But whereas the other books, even those of actual autobiography, such as “ Buried Alive” and “ Injury Underground 249 and Insult,” may be said to deal with Dostoieffsky’s cases, “ The Underground Spirit” suggests at least the case of Dostoieffsky himself, and reminds one irresistibly of that early kinship between the Russian novelist and Gustave Flaubert. The Frenchman had strayed so far into this inner world as to become, what Turgenev acknowledged himself to be, “an onlooker,” and Maupassant has noted that it irritated the master to see people moving carelessly backwards and forwards in a world less real to him than that of “Madame Bovary ” and ‘‘Salammbé.”’ Both of these novelists were pre-eminently artists in their tempera- ment, who suffered in the act of creating, and whose nervous systems were still further undermined by epilepsy. Modern science would suggest a strange kinship between their genius and this external symptom of degeneration. It may be so; but the lives of these two suffering men of letters, differing as they did so profoundly in external circumstances, suggest this question: May not the terrible concentration of genius be the cause of a reaction in which some of the ordinary symptoms of degeneration are produced ? At all events, the life and work of Dostoieffsky appear to prove that genius may be followed by degeneration, but never degeneration by genius. All the cases of this curious hospital would seem to illustrate this thesis, concerning which Dostoiefisky had nothing to learn from Lombroso. What the Italian gathered from without, the Russian knew from within. He realised, more, perhaps, than even Flaubert, that the 250 A Great Russian Realist most dangerous, the most paralysing, knowledge is that of one’s own soul. And as one studies this case of Ordinov, one begins to realise what Dostoiefisky meant by asserting that he was better in mind and body for his exile in Siberia, in spite of the fact that it was there that he had developed definite epilepsy. One remembers, too, that on another occasion he admitted an extreme tendency to hypochondria prior to his imprisonment. From this he was saved by his undeserved ordeal. The discipline of the convict-prison, horrible as it | was, may quite possibly have saved him from the ‘underground ” life of Ordinov. Whatever his in- clinations were, Dostoieffsky had been compelled to ' cope with reality, and one cannot overestimate the value of these rough actual experiences in the fashion- of this complicated psychologist. Burning and grinding alabaster, breaking up rafts, turning a fly- wheel, shovelling snow, clattering along the Siberian trails with his brother convicts, learning hurriedly the different duties of a private soldier—these were the things that stood for ever between Dostoieffsky and the motionless serenity of Gustave Flaubert. Doubtless, his inner life had been unperturbed, and the Bible had meant for him more than all the other experiences in Siberia combined. But, even admitting this, it is none the less true that Dostoieffsky acquired in Siberia what one may call the habit of the real outer world, and that, for him personally, reality, and the men and women Underground ast fashioned by reality, could never more be wholly strangers, = But in any case Dostoieffsky was saved from a) paralysis of introspection by his deep and genuine ‘ ie sympathy, by his love for children, by his compassion for his fellow-sufferers. He was not Ordinov, his life was not of the “ underground,” but it is perhaps due only to these two things—his all-embracing sympathy, and his exile in Siberia—that he did not become one of those brooders who search so deeply into the recesses of the human soul, that they are cowed by its enigmatic vistas. send During the early years of this last decade of his life Dostoieffsky was already acknowledged as the idol of a large section of the Russian youth. The late M. de Vogiié, who knew him well, has given us this admirable picture of him: “ Petit, gréle, tout de nerfs, usé et voiité par soixante mauvaises années ; flétri pourtant plutét que vieilli; Vair d’un malade sans Age, avec sa longue barbe et ses cheveux encore blonds, et malgré tout respirant cette ‘ vivacité de chat’ dont il parlait un jour. Le visage était celui d’un paysan russe, d’un vrai moujik de Moscow: le nez écrasé, de petits yeux clignant sous l’arcade brillant d’un feu tantét sombre, tantdt doux; le front, large bossué de plis et de protubérances, les tempes renfoncées comme un marteau; et tous ces traits tirés, convulsés, affaisés sur une bouche doulour- euse, Jamais je n’ai vu sur un visage humain pareille expression de souffrance amassée.”” The author of 252 A Great Russian Realist “Le Roman Russe” compares Dostoiefisky in these last years with Jean Jacques Rousseau in his final stage. But though it is true that, like Rousseau, Dostoieffsky combined inner idealism with external brusquerie, and compassion for humanity with ill- humour towards individuals, he was utterly without that predisposition to pose, which the great Burke so quickly detected in the Genevan philosopher. Dostoieffsky’s irritability was intimately connected with his health, and his rancour, such as it was, did not last long, as is shown over and over again in his correspondence. But a poseur, in any sense of the word, he was not. Once, at a soirée, after his return from Siberia, a lady came up to him with the avowed intention of reading the suffering in his face. The author of ‘“ Poor Folk ” turned irritably away ; and it was characteristic of him that he wrote and said comparatively little about what he had endured in Siberia. “It will be observed,” he writes in “‘ The Diary of a Writer,” “that up till now I have scarcely ever spoken of the years that I spent in prison. The recollections of ‘ Buried Alive,’ which I published some fifteen years ago, are apparently the work of an imaginary person. I gave them as though they had been written by a Russian noble who had assassinated his wife... . I may add in this connection that a great many worthy people imagine to-day that I was sent to Siberia for the murder of my wife.” For the rest, these diaries of 1875, 1876, and 1877 are not personal, but rather Underground 253 express the general views of Dostoieffsky upon men and things, repeating the central ideas of his life, which run through all his novels, and, indeed, through all his correspondence. Everything that he said or wrote, however, seems to accentuate the deep injustice of his punishment. He was in no sense an intimate friend of Petrachevski, though he believed in him, and in after years continued to believe in him, as a just and honourable man. During these last years Dostoieffsky became more and more a prey to what he himself acknowledged to be a kind of frayeur mystique. This curious phase of his ‘malady would become almost unbearable in the evening: ‘It was the sombre fear of something that I was unable to define, something that I cannot conceive, which does not exist in the order of things, but which can certainly make itself realised every instant, as an irony opposed to every argument of the reason; this fear presents itself to me and ranges itself in front of me as a fact irrefutable, frightful, deformed, and inexorable ; it amplifies more and more, in spite of the evidence of one’s judgment, in such a way, that in the end the mind, although it may acquire perhaps during these moments more lucidity, none the less loses every means of resisting these sensations. It is no longer obeyed, it is useless, and this division into two parts proceeds still further to augment the fearful misery of the attack.” There is little doubt that these extraordinary seizures increased the psychological power of the 254 A Great Russian Realist novelist until, in the tracking of motive, he was almost a clairvoyant. In his book, “ Les Passions Crimi- nelles,”? M. Bérard des Glajeux, President of the Paris Assize Court of Appeal, cites a French judge as stating that the book by which he had most profited in his study of criminology was “‘ Crime and Punish- ment.” And M. des Glajeux adds: ‘‘I should say emphatically to young magistrates: ‘Read Dos- toieffsky.’’ The novelist himself preserved much the same attitude towards the criminal in real life as he did in fiction. On one occasion he was knocked down in St. Petersburg by a beggar to whom he had refused alms. A policeman demanded his name and address, but he refused to prosecute. None the less he was called to the police-court, but he again refused to prosecute, on the ground that as the man had struck him without any provocation whatever, the assailant must have been out of his mind. The accused interrupted the incredulous protest of the magistrate with the shrewd observation: “‘ He who has eaten, cannot understand the hungry.” Dos- toiefisky admitted the truth of this argument, and urged that the blow had been struck in the exaspera- tion of despair, and that he had chanced to be the passer-by who had received it. The magistrate, however, sent the man to prison for a month, where- upon Dostoiefisky handed him three roubles to be kept for the prisoner until he was discharged. In a reply to a letter from the students of Moscow, Dostoiefisky spoke his mind very frankly in regard Underground 255 to what he called their rupture with the Russian people: “Instead of living their life, our young people do not understand them, and on the contrary, utterly disdaining their foundation, such as faith, approach the people, not in order to instruct them- selves, but in order to teach, to teach with arrogance, with scorn—a purely aristocratic amusement, the mere game of a sezgneur.” And the Grand Inquisitor goes on to insist on the necessity of abandoning utterly disdain towards the Russian people, and to inculcate belief in God after the Russian fashion, although he admits that the Deity is still wor- shipped in Europe. Dostoiefisky believed that in simplicity, and in simplicity alone, lay personal and national salvation. ‘‘ The axiom,” he wrote almost at the end of his life, ‘‘ twice two are four, has the air of a paradox, and the tortuous and the contra- dictory has the air of a truth.” CHAPTER XII THE GRAND INQUISITOR Tue end was very near for Dostoieffsky without his having the slightest apprehension of it. Continuing to trust in his “ vitality of a cat,” he worked feverishly on the book that he had commenced ten years before. Without yielding to the whispers of the Man-god,. he believed that mankind had far more knowledge of art and science than it was able to express. “ The same thing,” he wrote in a letter, “ takes place with me; I feel that there are a great many more secret things in me than I have been able to express up till now as a writer”; and he goes on to protest against the tone of Russian criticism towards his works, on the ground that it dealt casually and superficially with what had been veritably torn from his soul. In the same letter he refers to the existence of that double nature, which not only appears frequently in his work, but is at least suggested occasionally in his life. ‘It is a trait common to human nature in general,” he writes to a lady in St. Petersburg, “ but one which is very far from being found in every nature in a degree so developed as with you. ‘That is why you become sympathetic to me, because this 256 The Grand Inquisitor 257 double is in you exactly as in me, as it has been in me all my life. It is a great torment and at the same time a great source of joy. It is a strong con- sciousness, the necessity of analysing oneself, and of accomplishing one’s moral duty towards oneself, and towards humanity. If you were less intellectually de- veloped, more limited, you would be less conscientious, and this double nature would have no existence.” Undoubtedly, this intense preoccupation, with the moral law as interpreted by the New. Testament became the central motive of the novelist’s life, but there had been periods in which he had been com- pelled to fight against the lower double, the “‘ ape” that had haunted Stavroguine. Intellectual curiosity lured him to comprehend the basest instincts as well as the noblest emotions. The ‘‘ape” double cul- minates in the hero of “ The Underground Spirit,” who confesses secrets beyond the candour of Tolstoy’s intimate revelations: ‘‘ At times I suddenly plunged into a sombre, subterranean, despicable debauchery, or semi-debauchery. My squalid passions were keen, glowing with morbid irritability. The outbursts were hysterical, accompanied by tears and convulsions of remorse. Bitterness boiled in me. I felt an unwholesome thirst for violent moral contrasts, and so I demeaned myself to animality. I indulged in it by night, secretly, fearfully, foully, with a shame that never left me, even at the most degrading moments. I carried in my soul the love of secretiveness; I was terribly afraid that I should be seen, met, recogr.ised.” 17 258 A Great Russian Realist Certainly Dostoieffsky was able to divine much that most human beings are powerless to comprehend even through experience ; but such revelations of character are certainly disconcerting. ‘‘ Could he have learnt,” asks Merejkowski, who is profoundly sympathetic towards him, “all this merely from objective experi- ence of others, from observation? Is it the curiosity only of the artist?’ Of course, as his compatriot urges, it was unnecessary for him to commit murder in order to comprehend the soul of Raskolnikoff. But it was necessary for him to search to the very bottom of the human heart beyond the very last evasion before he could present the convolutions of this particular murderer. And before he could comprehend the duality of Stavroguine, before he could realise the “ ape” stirring within the man, he must have known that in every human being in the world there lies hidden in embryo, as it were, this monstrous double. Dostoiefisky differed from such artists as Turgenev, who reveal the emotional experiences of men and women so far as they may be said to be fully conscious. Dostoieftsky differed from such moralists as Tolstoy, who reveal the moral struggles of men and women, whom the need of confession has made minutely introspective. Dostoiefisky went beyond that, and revealed the sub- -conscious, the hidden. potentialities of human nature, which only rise to the surface under the most violent stimulus, the potentialities which, from birth to death, are, in most human lives, =x, gram MTT The Grand Inquisitor 259 fortunately unrealised. He who had fathomed the heart of Francis of Assisi also understood the grin of Asmodeus. He who had fathomed the agony of Gethsemane also comprehended that other agony of Faust. He had become a confessor because of the sympathy of his heart; he_had become an in- quisitor by reason of the terrible. curiosity of his brain. The deep human kindness of his nature “Tesponded to that noble challenge of Terence, but the questioner within him understood the twisted truth of the Devil’s paraphrase t to Avan Karamazov— “Satan sum -et nihil humani a me alienum puto.” : Without such comprehending complexity of divina- tion and experience he could never have written that strange book which had obsessed him for so many years. ‘ You cannot imagine,” he writes to Askakov, ** how busy I am, day and night, as at penal servitude!” He is concluding that story of a sinner, which was never really finished as he had conceived it. “I conclude my novel and I am unable to finish it,” he admits in another letter. Dostoiefisky, so far as the Russian people were concerned, was at the zenith of his fame. His rival, Turgenev, had received an ovation when he visited Moscow for the inauguration of the statue of Pushkin, but it was nothing to the enthusiasm with which Dostoieffsky was greeted. The Russians had recog- nised at last the man of genius who was nearest to them of all, and as he spoke in commemoration of the Russian poet whom he had loved from boyhood, 260 A Great Russian Realist the audience sobbed at the words of this man, who, even more than Pushkin, knew every depth, every revolt, every tenderness, every despair of the Russian soul. He was carried home in triumph, a triumph that was a national tribute, and one that was to be only too soon repeated at the younger capital. In the meantime the book of Dostoiefisky’s final experi- ence was being hurried to its conclusion as though he had guessed that he would never be allowed to prolong it in accordance with his original plan. In this story of great sinners every side of the inquisitor— _reveals itself.” | “““Externally, as he glanced backwards over the years, Dostoieffsky’s life must have appeared to him muti- lated, as were so many of the lives of his creations. All his life he had been tossed about like so much flotsam. Externally it seemed that they had been allowed to mangle his life, like apes playing with a masterpiece. The sensitive, brooding boy had been in want of the necessities of life, even at the School of Engineers. As a sub-lieutenant he had disliked the routine of his duties and longed to devote his whole life to literature. ‘‘ Liberty and a vocation” had been his blind goal as he struggled with the precarious chances of hack work in St. Petersburg. “Liberty and a vocation,” and for that the rouble —always the rouble. He had asked so little, just enough to preserve life, while he wrote down what existence had meant to him at twenty-three. And somehow or other, through hunger and through the a En oat cepa ner eemneitcomm A The Grand Inquisitor 261 temptations of suicide, he had achieved the book of pity which was called “ Poor Folk.” Then there had been for Dostoieffsky his little hour of prestige, only too short, as he lets us know, in “ Injury and Insult.” Certainly, it had not lasted long, that period when “ Dostoieffsky said this; Dostoieffsky said that,” was a matter of the slightest consequence. He had hurled himself headlong into the exuber- ance of ‘‘la vie’ during that short period, and had been lectured by Turgenev, who was no puritan, on the disorder of his life. But poverty was soon at his elbow again, and then, with grimacing irony, destiny closed in upon this Christian opponent of revolution, and allowed him to be arrested as a revolutionary. Experience had deepened for Feodor Dostoieffsky as he waited, stripped to his shirt, in the Semyonovski Square on that 22nd of December. Experience had deepened during those twenty minutes, in which he had not changed colour, while waiting in the second batch after Petrachevski and two others had been already lashed to those sinister posts. Second by second he had waited for death; and there were so many reasons why he should live. Imprisonment in that “distant locality” had stamped its slower and more festering impress upon the novelist’s youth. In Siberia he was to learn from suffering in the sense that Dante learned. But externally also there had been much experience. The sub-lieutenant of Engineers and already famous au- thor had busied himself in such various occupations 262 A Great Russian Realist as grinding alabaster and shovelling snow. The duties of a private soldier had followed, and then he had become once more a commissioned officer. Con- victs, private soldiers, exiles, all had imparted to him the stories of their lives. He had learned by com- pulsion the lessons of reality at first hand. And somehow or other he had scrambled out of it all alive, and had returned thankfully to St. Petersburg to work. But this external Odyssey of disaster was by no means ended by the anchorage of St. Petersburg. Dostoiefisky, the sufferer, was to continue to suffer. His wife’s death, his brother’s death, his best friend’s death, the necessity of supporting his dead brother’s family, and of satisfying his dead brother’s creditors— all these things began to impair even the “ cat-like ” vitality, more mental than physical, of Dostoieffsky. Once more he was an exile, once more he was in the depths, hunted from place to place, pawning his wife’s clothes, unable to find two thalers for a telegram. Roulette had regained its old spell over him, and it seemed as though this unfortunate man, who had endured so much through no fault of his, must cease- lessly endure every phase of humiliation by reason of his own weakness. And it is only by realising these intimate personal humiliations of Dostoieffsky that one can begin to understand the strained and con- vulsed humour of his novels. It is the grotesque external results of poverty, contrasting with the inner suffering, that Dostoieffsky notes with a laughter The Grand Inquisitor 263 at once sombre and pitying. But neither in his letters nor in his work was he at any time a senti- mentalist, asking others to share his self-pity. Only, he was exasperated against the morass of difficulties, over which he had no control, and which always closed over him as soon as he struggled out of his own disorder of life, which he had confessed to his brother in the early days of his literary fame. But a period of peace had come to him on returning to St. Petersburg for the last time. The Russians had commenced to acknowledge his strange sympathetic power, and to regard him as the national representative of the Russian temperament. ‘The confessor and the vivi- sector had merged as it were into the réle of the Grand Inquisitor of the Russian people, whose homage culminated in that sobbing and tempestuous ovation that greeted him at Moscow. Such is the outline of his external life. His inner life was at once far more complex and less varied. The tendencies of his youth had been little changed by all these vicissitudes. Siberia had but deepened his intense natural bias towards the inner meaning of Christianity, and though it had furnished him with exact knowledge of all sorts and conditions of men it had not modified, but rather deepened, the inner life of his soul. Fetters, the uniform of a private soldier, the ban of exile, the insults of creditors, the hundred and one concrete stings of poverty, his per- sonal shame at his own weakness for roulette, the difficulties that he himself brought upon his young 264 A Great Russian Realist wife, even the whispers of whatever apish double attended him—all these things meant little or nothing compared with the presentiment of faith beyond reason that stood for Dostoieffsky as the meaning of life. The culture of Europe, its restless progress, its belief in human reason, its delight in competitiveness, left him strangely indifferent. He, who had borne so tranquilly the degradations of the convict-prison in Siberia, complained bitterly of the associations of Geneva. Always, he turned from Europe to his own country, rejecting unconsciously, as Tolstoy had re- jected consciously, the glamour of European esthetics. It was natural for him to turn to the laggard among the nations with love and confidence, for it was his central belief that the Russians were veritably les gens de Vhumanité. ‘To Russians no one is utterly an outcast, and that is why it is so impossible for Dostoieffsky to regard the very lowest of his patients as Colonel Newcome, for example, regarded Costigan. His ideal remained always that of Sonia in “ Crime and Punishment,” and of Prince Myshkine in “‘ The Idiot,” while he preserved the confidence of the sinner, the hope of Marmeladoff, that some day all would be understood. Even as a boy he had divined much that is hidden as a rule from maturity. In “ Poor Folk” he had interpreted that sense of final loss, which even old age seeks to hide from itself. He had been a great psychologist when he wrote his first novel, but his after experiences had endowed him with an extra- The Grand Inquisitor 265 p ordinary knowledge of human nature in general, and of the Russian character in particular. He became, indeed, not merely a novelist who registered as it were his self-development, but one who registered the national development of his country. From the standpoint of Western culture and Western progress- iveness, there is, perhaps, as little difference between Prince Myshkine and Alioscha Karamazov as there is between the Pierre and Levin of Count Tolstoy. But in depth, in the revealing of the almost inde- finable, in the sensing of what lies beyond the barriers of logic, in the divination of unuttered and unutter- able secrets, Dostoieffsky became the veritable seer of Russia, whose final utterance was “‘ The Brothers Karamazov.” But before glancing at this-strange book of criminals it would be well to realise that Dostoieffsky was not a psychologist only in his novels. In the autumn of 1876 a certain Catherine Kornilov was condemned by a Russian jury for having thrown her step-daughter, aged six, out of a fourth-story window, in spite of the fact that she was enceinte at the time. Dos- toieffsky refused to believe that this was an act of ordinary murder, and wrote an article on it, entitled “A Simple but Complicated Affair.” His friend, K. Maslénikov, wrote to him on the subject of this article, assuring him that he agreed absolutely with the psychological analysis contained in it. Dos- toieffsky visited the woman, after which he wrote to his friend: ‘I have seen her in the prison hospital. ating 266 A Great Russian Realist Five days ago she became a mother. I confess to you that I was extraordinarily struck by the result of the interview. In my article I had almost divined everything literally.” Dostoieffsky asked her why she had committed such an act, and she answered gently: “I don’t know myself. It was as though a will outside of myself impelled me”; and she added in the course of con- versation this curious fact: ‘ When I had dressed myself, I had no wish to go to the police-station ; I went out like that into the street, and I don’t know how I found msyelf at the station.” After this, Dostoiefisky had a talk with the wardress of the prison, and learned that, on her arrival, the prisoner had been “rough, insolent with everybody. She was almost out of her mind.” But since the birth of her daughter there had been a very great change. “‘ She has become,” said the wardress, ‘‘ so simple, so intelligent, so gentle.” ‘Through the efforts of the novelist there was a second trial of the accused, during which the President of the Court warned the jury to be on their guard against “‘ certain talented littérateurs.” In spite, however, of this warning, a verdict of “‘ Not guilty” was returned. It was not until 1880 that the book in which all the outer and the inner experience of Dostoiefisky seemed to converge was concluded, without being actually finished. It was now sixty-eight years since Madame de Staél, driving over the Russian steppes, had mused sympathetically upon the possibilities of The Grand Inquisitor 267 there arising Russians who would interpret the national soul of Russia. It had seemed only a vague pre- sentiment then, but one after another they had sprung into life, and at the same time quickened the life- pulses of their country. In the truly Russian and national sense, Dostoieffsky was perhaps, not only the real heir of Gogol, but the first of all the inter- preters of the Russian soul, the one to whom, of them all, the inquisitive Western spirit, incarnate in Madame de Staél, would have listened with the most be- wildered eagerness. He was the real interpreter, because he was in his own person the very embodi- ment of that wayward and restless, and at the same time stricken, character which passes so swiftly from convulsive action to the coma of listlessness. Only, with him, the waywardness and restlessness had been charged by the electricity of genius, and the tranquillity of faith had alleviated the tendency to depression. Circumstances, too, had hardened his potentiality for endurance, and his belief in his own creations had held him passionately to life, so that one day Raskolnikoff and Prince Myshkine and the Brothers Karamazov might live. It is curious how, from the first moment, this obscure Russian family sweeps upon the stage as though it were of the house of QC£dipus or Lear. Father and sons alike, all monstrous, with the excep- tion of the redeeming Alioscha, live with the intensity of tragic figures. Hate broods over them; their own hate of heredity hovers over them like the shadow 268 A Great Russian Realist of the ancient necessity. Their horrible desires almost convulse their souls, so that sometimes their speech escapes them in broken, strangled words, and they are unable to guess at what they will do next. “Ha!” grunts Feodor Karamazov to his sons, “Ha, my children, my little pigs, for me there never was such a thing as a woman to be let alone; that’s my creed, if you understand it? No, you can’t understand it; your veins are still full of milk; you haven’t completely broken your shell yet. There is, according to me, in every woman something special which one does not find in any other, but that something one must know how to find.” Thus he talks to his sucking pigs, with his little, atavistic eyes twinkling in apish shamelessness. “One is better in the mud,” he exclaims in a moment of reflection. But with Dostoigfisky,the mud becomes menacing, terrible, already impregnated with the odour of approaching death. Feodor and his son Mitia upbraid each other in the presence of the Starets, the soul of the Russian monas- tery. Father and son love the same woman, and the uproar in the monastery was becoming intolerable, when it was brought to this unexpected conclusion : “The Starets rose suddenly from his place. Terror- stricken as he was, Alioscha preserved presence of mind enough to sustain him on his arm. The Starets advanced towards Dimitri Fédorovitch, and knelt down quite close to him. Alioscha thought at first that the old man had fallen down through weakness, The Grand Inquisitor 269 but such was not the case. On his knees the Starets saluted Dimitri Fédorovitch, prostrating himself to the ground and touching the floor with his fore- head. Alioscha remained so stupefied that he did not even think of supporting the old man when he rose to his feet. A slight smile scarcely wrinkled the lips of the Starets.”” Long afterwards the sinless Alioscha asked the dead Starets, in a dream, why he had bowed down before his brother Mitia, to which the holy man answered: “ Do not ask me. I had foreseen in him something terrible, I had read the whole of his destiny in his glance. Oh! that look overwhelmed me. Once or twice in my life I have met with that expression in the faces of certain men : it _presaged crime, and the prophecy, alas! has bee) has_been Verified. Crime was in Mitia.” And Mitia himeel? knew that crime was in him, because he was a Karamazov. ‘The terrible passions have closed in upon him, but even through them he faintly detects the gleam of a withheld beauty. He is a Karamazov, but he cries out to Heaven: “ Yet, Lord, I am not less Thy son, and I love Thee”; and turning to his brother Alioscha, he exclaims: ‘“ Let me weep. Can’t you understand, that we are all of us sensualists, we Karamazovs? ‘The beast sleeps in you, brother, angel though you are. It is a terrible mystery.” And the tortured one, who has already murder in his heart, goes on to speak of the duel between God and the Devil that takes place in the hearts of the brothers Karamazov. Memories return 270 A Great Russian Realist to him, salt with the sting of old passions. Half- ashamed, half-resigned, he describes himself as he is, as he tells his brother, that he has not only deserted, but robbed his fiancée in order to buy champagne for the woman for whom his father is waiting. On the surface it is a sordid, miserable tory: of gleam of idealism. But the figures are real. Feodor Karamazov, the father, is as ample a figure in his way as Tolstoy’s Uncle Eroshka. Feodor at fifty-seven has the thirst for life of a boy of twenty. He must have pleasure, the obvious, tangible pleasure of the flesh. He smacks his lips at life. He will drink out of the river and not out of the cup of happiness. Sensuality is as natural to him as the air he breathes. He has as little hypocrisy as Uncle Eroshka himself, and one sees and hears him just as plainly. Only Tolstoy’s creation is almost wholly pagan, content with the day’s life in the forest, content with the sunshine and the fruits of the earth, permeated by no regret for the past, and untroubled by any appre- hension of the future. No creation of Dostoieftsky, it would seem, could be ever quite like that. There is a crescendo of ferocity in Feodor’s cry for pleasure, which differs wholly from Uncle Eroshka’s easy tran- quillity, as he blends naturally with the wood life of bird and beast. The “ fantastic” enters into the sensuality of this old man, as he ties up a package of money with a ribbon, seals it, and writes in his own The Grand Inquisitor 271 hand: “ For my angel Grushenka, if she wishes to come.” Three thousand roubles are in this package—a sordid bargain, it would seem, this purchase of the flesh, were it not stamped by the menace of death. Feodor knows that Mitia is his rival, but it is not he, but his brother Ivan, whom he fears—Ivan the Kara- mazov, who can think, in spite of the old clogging sensualit ty that almost chokes him. He’ i is the brain of this family, and he is the most lost of all. It is is to Ivan that the Devil ‘appears, and speaks of those | two truths by which Dostoieffsky himself was haunted all his life. It is to Ivan that, on being asked whether God does or does not exist, the Devil answers: “ don’t know.” Tt is to Ivan that the Devil explains and amplifies the 4 full significa “ everything is permitted.” And it is to Ivan that there comes the “vision of the Grand Inquisitor who understands men so well that he condemns the returned Jesus to death because _of their weakness. They cannot follow the zeal God, and so the Grand Inquisitor has permitted them the luxuries of weakness and sin. But tha: Grand Inquisitor understands his own imposture. He is lonely in his secret. ‘‘ And we,” he nee “who, for their happiness, have assumed the weigh of their sins, we shall stand before Thee, saying: ‘Judge us, if Thou canst, and if Thou darest!’ I do not fear Thee. I have gone into the desert, I also; I also, I have lived on locusts and roots; I also have blessed the liberty that Thou gavest to man, and 272 A Great Russian Realist I have dreamed of being counted among the strong. But I soon abandoned this dream, and I renounced Thy madness to go and join the groups of those who corrected Thy work. I have left the proud to go and make the happiness of the humble.” Alioscha points out that from the standpoint of reason_this dreamed poem is an absurdity, seeing that it is a eulogy and not a condemnation of Jesus from the lips of the Grand Inquisitor, who_understood Him best of all. And Ivan, who is called the Sphinx, is the most tormented of them all. In Ivan the crime of the soul, the crime of intention, is more developed than in his elder brother, and after saving his father on one occasion from Mitia’s violence, he exclaims, with concentrated hatred in his face : “‘ And why save him 2 It is best that reptiles should devour each other.” For Ivan “ everything is permitted,” and yet he, too, fears the shadowy unknown, which warns him that _-between this pride of the Man-god and the fear of his own thoughts, of himself, which clings to him from the old belief in the God-man, Ivan Karamazov goes_mad. Alioscha, who divines always the un- spoken thought, trembles for the soul of Ivan as the Starets had trembled for the soul of Mitia. He, too, in his innocence is tortured sometimes by the apprehension of what he may 2 For, upon all these Karamazovs there weighs that necessity of heredity which is but the new reading of the old The Grand Inquisitor 273 Até of the Greeks. Even Feodor’s mind has an undercurrent of brooding and torment which differ- entiates him from the farmyard sensualists of so many of Zola’s novels. But it is in Smerdiakov, Feodor’s illegitimate son, that this inverted tragedy culminates. “‘ Born in a “bath-room,” according to the tradition of the Kara- mazovs, this stunted being has retained not even the semblance of manhood which belonged to Stavro- guine’s “ ape,” Peter. Smerdiakov, condemned before birth, is the failure of thé’flesh, its xictim, its monster. And it is by the compelled _irony of justice that it is this being, the most_wronged of all, and neither Mitia nor Ivan, who gives death to the swine-like diakov,in whom Ivan hasimplanted the idea of murder, has his fears of something beyond the safe flesh and blood of a Karamazov. While talking alone with : es ae Ivan he speaks of a third person hovering between them. Questioned about this by Ivan, he answers, as Chatoff mig : “It is God, Provi- dence; God is here, close to us; but do not look for Him, for you will not find Him.” “Everywhere in this book, beneath the doomed sensuality of the Karamazovs,one finds the hint of aspiration and the suggestion of atonement. The sinless Alioscha will not be dragged into the old vortex, but will triumph over this calamity of heredity. He, in this world of duality, chooses always instinc- tively the side of the God-man and he detects in- ene Ane nisin aC 18 274 A Great Russian Realist stantly that the Grand Inquisitor of Ivan’s dream loved. the ‘God-man, even while condemning Him to death. And in this atmosphere of double truths, double laws, and double loves, the young monk, who has absorbed as it were the soul of St. Francis of Assisi, is scarcely momentarily perturbed, in spite of his heredity, by the temptations of St. Anthony. And always in this sin-steeped atmosphere there lingers the sensitive recognition of evil, the sense of . Cc 7. ° sin, which is so conspicuous] contented “comfortable minds. Even in spite of their proclivities, these brothers Karamazov are not lost in the search for little, concrete acquisitions. They respond to general ideas, and after their own fashion they search| for the God whom they outrage. The ferocious sensualist in Mitia. acknowledges God_in_his heart. / The cold sensualist in Ivan searches for God in_his brain. Even Smerdiakov, the actual parricide, trembles; ‘in the presence of the third something that hovers too close tohim, Nowhere in Dostoieffsky’s work, not even in “ Crime and Punishment,” is his knowledge of the actual work- ings of the criminaf mind more cléarly exemplified. The Public Prosecutor at Mitia’s trial for murder gives one thesis on criminology, and Mitia’s advocate gives another. But Dostoiefisky for his part gives no thesis at all. Well he knows that “ the spirit of Euclid” will never explain the half-distracted, childish aberrations of the human race. Almost every word that Mitia speaks condemns him, and when that is The Grand Inquisitor 275 pointed out to him, he says at once, that he has been . lying. Questioned as to why he brought a weapon with him that night when he had watched his father through the window, he answers that he took it on the impulse of the moment. Other things, too, had been done on the impulse of the moment, and not at all by calculation, as the Public Prosecutor was proving with such laboured incisiveness. Dostoieffsky had learned long ago in Siberia the state of mind, and habit of thought, of such desperate people as Mitia, and he was able to detect instantly what was a mere series of haphazard lies and what was the truth of exasperated sincerity. But it was not Dos- toieffsky who was defending Mitia; and the man of the stronger thesis, the man with “the spirit of Euclid,” was victorious. _ The prisoner was condemned to Siberia, but only to be rescued by his brother, Alioscha, through the influence of roubles and vodka. Here again the first-hand knowledge of Dostoiefisky lends a peculiar significance to the story. He himself had known the ignominy of being stripped of his clothes, searched, fettered, herded in a convoy of prisoners. He himself had studied the characters of officers and non-commissioned officers in charge of prisoners. He knew the price of escape, how it could be managed, and what outpost would offer the most favourable chance. Every detail was familiar to him, and the external side of this narrative is presented with a minute precision of detail which 276 A Great Russian Realist suggests the English Defoe rather than the Russian Dostoiefisky. Yet even here the essential preoccupation with the inner as opposed to-the outer life reveals itself, and Alioscha, who might have escaped with his brother, elects to take his place. Alioscha, had the book con- tinued, would doubtless have been a development of Prince Myshkine, in a sense far more significant than that in which Levin in “ Anna Karénina” is a development of Pierre in “ War and Peace.” But the Svidrigailoff of ‘‘ Crime and Punishment,” whose idea of Eternity was ‘‘a chamber some- thing like a village bath-house, long neglected, and with spiders’ webs in all its corners,” has been left behind. No one of the Karamazovs is a duplicate in any sense of Svidrigailoff. Over each the instinc- tive national belief in the Russian God has settled “4 too firmly, “he firm: belief of mankind in the contact with other worlds,” for any such isolation as that, though even Svidrigailoff had fought like a doomed soul against his inner self-condemnation. But in this book Smerdiakov himself, born from the mud of a bath-room, though he is, perceives the shadowy third, when he is talking alone to Ivan Karamazov. Even Ivan, obsessed as he is by the “ everything is permitted ” theory of happiness, dreams of the Grand Inquisitor, and talks to the Devil hungrily about God. This dialogue between Ivan and the Devil was ridiculed as superstitious and out-of-date, but a well-known doctor complimented Dostoieftsky upon The Grand Inquisitor 277 the minute exactness of his description of the psychical malady from which Ivan Karamazov was suffering at the time of the hallucination. Apart, however, from such pathological studies, “The Brothers Karamazov”? shows an almost in- exhaustible knowledge, not only of the habit of “RougEt, but alo of the manner of lie oF The Rassion people. The heroine of “ Demons” asked Chatoff on one occasion to co-operate with her in bringing out a sort of annual register of Russian life. They were to deal with the facts one after the other, but in such a way. as to make them, not a dull record of statistics, but a human document of Russian life. Such a document is the book which Walizewski has called a “ most invaluable treasury of information concerning the contemporary life of Russia, moral and intellectual, and social.” The memories of Ivan Karamazov alone are in- exhaustible. ‘‘ I am a dilettante,” he tells Alioscha. “TI get together certain details, everything that I to me; and all that has already made a fine collection.” | He goes on to tell his brother about an execution of an assassin named Richard, which had taken place at , Geneva. The incident is worth quoting, because it shows once more Dostoiefisky’s attitude towards | the logic of the West, which shocked Turgenev as , well as Tolstoy. ‘‘ Ah!” exclaimed Ivan, “they are | not sentimental in Europe! In the prison, priests, © congregationalists, charitable ladies, get hold of him. } - ; f find in the newspapers, and everything that is told | 278 A Great Russian Realist They teach him to read and write, they explain the Bible to him, and at last he solemnly confesses his crime. Then he addresses himself to the Tribunal ; he writes ‘that he is a monster and that God has illumined him.’ The whole of Geneva is in a fer- ment; bigots, members of charitable societies, rush into his prison. They embrace him, they clasp his hands. ‘You are our brother; the light has been revealed to you!’ Richard weeps. ‘ Yes, the truth has come down to me; my youth was nourished on the acorns of swine, but I am going to die in the bosom of God.’ The last day arrives. Richard, enfeebled, begins weeping again, and says: ‘ The most beauti ul day of my life has arrived, I am going to God.’ ‘ Yes,’ cry the priests, the judges, and the charitable ladies; ‘it is the most beautiful day of your life, for you are going to God!’ All repair to the scaffold. ‘ Die, brother,’ they cry out to Richard. ‘Die in the bosom of God!’ And brother Richard mounts the scaffold, they place him under the guillo- tine, and cut his head off, the head of that good brother, whom holiness had entered. I find that very characteristic.” Turgenev, too, had recoiled from that, and Tolstoy, who witnessed an execution at Paris, has written: ** When I saw the head divided from the body, and heard the sound with which they fell separately into the box, I understood, not with my reason, but with my whole being, that no theory of the wisdom of all established things, nor of progress, could justify such The Grand Inquisitor 279 an act; and that if all the men in the world from the day of creation, by whatever theory, had found ‘this thing necessary, it was not so; it was a bad thing, and that therefore I must judge of what was right and necessary, not by what men said and did, not by progress, but by what I felt to be true in my heart.” Such is the Russian point of view, and Dostoieffsky, who stood midway between the Slavophils and the advocates of European culture, shared it with Tolstoy and Turgenev. The brothers Karamazov are among the most extraordinary of the individual patients of Dostoieffsky’s hospital, but the book is far more ‘the work of a consciously national novelist than was “Crime and Punishment” or even ‘‘ Demons.” \When endeavouring to prove that Mitia had medi- tated suicide immediately after killing his father, the Public Prosecutor observed: ‘‘ As for the Beyond, I do not know if Karamazov can think like Hamlet about those things. No, Gentlemen of the Jury, the occident possesses Hamlet, we have only Karamazovs!” Well, be it so; but the Karamazovs also have life. For all the mud that chokes them, for all the spider memories that obscure their vision, they too, in the very atmosphere of parricide, with the mark of the beast stamped upon their race, stumble falteringly after the Russian God. And it is this survival of aspiration in the midst of the miasma of sensuality, this persistence of a mystical peering into the unknown in the midst of 280 A Great Russian Realist purely animal gratifications, that makes the psychology of the Karamazovs curiously national. One feels that they, too, in their own fashion, will eventually « rise from the mire, and that even Smerdiakov leads up to Alioscha. It is as though Russia herself were being symbolised in this savage family of sinful idealists, of whom none the less Alioscha the pure in heart is dominant. It is Russia herself who, half-sunk in the Byzantine dreams of the past, can yet peer forward beyond others into the inscrutable future. It is Russia herself, with her rage and her coma, her curses and her tears, her barbarism and her infinite compassion—it is Russia herself ; and Dostoieffsky has seen in her future, not Smerdiakov the parricide, but Alioscha the chosen of the Russian God. All the extremes of Dostoieffsky meet in this un- finished book. Never before had the seeming contra- dictions of his work been more obvious. He has been derided for bringing the Devil en scéne, but a man of science acknowledged the scientific accuracy with which Dostoieffsky had described the hallucination. He has been derided for slavishly following the ‘slave morality” of the Christians, and yet Nietzsche, the propagandist of the very opposite theory of life, hailed him as a master, the one psychologist who could teach him anything. He has been derided for badly balanced and melodramatic expositions of abnormal life, and yet he is the one novelist that students of criminology have been officially, as it were, invited to study. He has been called old- The Grand Inquisitor 281 fashioned and retrograde, and yet the most advanced of Western writers are veritable Liliputians in psy- chology compared with this Gulliver of the hospital. It was claimed that he dealt only with exceptions, but his multitude of readers felt near to him in the same intimate sense that English readers felt near to the author of “ David Copperfield.” Denounced by the revolutionaries, his answer was, or rather might have been, that he had endured eight years of Siberia for a cause in which he did not believe. His very physique was a contradiction, for though he was an epileptic, small and apparently frail, he was possessed of “‘ the vitality of a cat.” “And in an inner and far deeper sense the contradiction was even more apparent, for'the man who sought even consciously the suffering of Gethsemane, was a prey to that quite alien suffering of Gehenna. He’ was at one and the same time Prince Myshkine in “ The Idiot,” and Stavroguine in “‘ Demons,” and his hope was that of Alioscha Karamazov and of poor old Marmeladoff. In short, until we rid ourselves of our particular conventions, the character of Dostoieffsky, like that of his creations, in its heights as well as in its depths, will appear inexplicable. But when we have relaxed the pursed lips of our prepared piety, we shall find that, before all other things, Dostoieffsky was natural, and drew by preference—even in this strange hospital of his—natural men and women. He combined in an exceptional degree the simplicity of the heart with an intuition of the mind’s most 282 A Great Russian Realist secret lurking-places, and experience of life deepened and intensified both qualities. If the nineteenth century was essentially that of the novel, so far as literature is concerned, it was for many reasons natural that the novel should mean most to Russians, who were most in need of intel- lectual life. Here it was not the fiction of the bourgeoisie; here it belonged to no class and ex- pressed no formula of well-being. It is not strange, then, that the Russian novel should be the greatest of all, and Dostoieffsky, because he was closest of all to the Russian people, w will probably be accepted finally as the Russian voice of the nineteenth century. Turgenev had caught as an artist the want of the vast silent country; Tolstoy had reasoned upon it, and explained it; but the want was in the heart of Dostoieffsky. He, more than any other Russian writer, gave utterance to this sense of want, and for this he may be accepted as interpreting the very “ life-force ”’ of his country. Weak as an artist, by no means a moralist in our Western sense, this sufferer, who believed himself to be a sinner, understood, as few in the whole world have understood, the kinship of suffering and sin. And because of this com- passion and understanding, this union of divination with experience, Dostoieffsky, with all his faults and all his weaknesses, will be finally enrolled among the life-givers of humanity. He has never written the confession that Tolstoy has written. He has never revealed explicitly and The Grand Inquisitor 283 implicitly his gropings and stumblings between the two truths that haunted him. But unquestionably, from the purely Christian point of view, the conflict of Dostoieffsky was more terrible than that of Tol- stoy. For Tolstoy, the process of moral development, when it had gradually detached itself from the tangled world of youthful sensation, was to no small extent orderly and even logical. ‘ Know thyself” had been the maxim of each; but for the mastery of self- knowledge, Tolstoy had primarily to silence the pagan clamour of the body, whereas Dostoieffsky had to silence the subtle and mocking whispers of the mind. Tolstoy had to subdue the natural man, but Dostoiefisky had to banish the “ ape” Peter. We in England are apt to cling so blindly to our half-truths as to consider the statement of the other half-truths a mere joke, which may or may not be amusing. It seems-to us impossible that any one can express these ‘‘ paradoxes ” without having his tongue in his cheek. And so the fermentation of new ideas, or rather the readjustment of perspective in regard to old ideas, is only tolerated in this country under the mask of light comedy. Now, the most curious contradiction of all in regard to Dostoieffsky is that he, the supposedly retrograde conservative and pan- Slav, discerned these new half-truths and even antici- pated their exploitation. And yet, in his own fashion, he, too, was ‘on the side of the angels.” He who had searched the dangerous depths of consciousness be- lieved that progress lay with the unconscious move- 284 A Great Russian Realist ment of a whole people, rather than with the applica- tion of logical formule to the needs of human nature. To the clever, reasonable demands of a handful of enlightened units Dostoieffsky opposed the vast re- serve of inarticulate emotional force that was the unconscious inheritance of the Russian people. He, who would seem to have believed implicitly in a personal national God, a Russian God, none the less accepted the implacable intention of Nature as opposed to the passionate caprices of her children. In this one respect, he, the antithesis of Turgenev, shared, if not the belief, at least the scepticism, of the author of “Smoke.” Like Turgenev, he believed that clever talkers could never kindle the fire of Russian hearts. Like Turgenev, he knew that the change must spring up from within, and not. be implanted from without. But here all resemblance between these two novelists ends, for, just as Turgenev knew nothing of the spiritual thirst of Dostoiefisky, so the author of ‘‘ Crime and Punishment ”’ knew nothing of the alleviations of civilisation, or of that merciful and forgiving irony which permits human beings to love one another even when they understand each other too clearly. And clinging as he did to the ideal of the God-man, in spite of the whispers of reason which anticipated the Man-god, Dostoieffsky knew nothing of that stoical negation of his rival, who.saw in Nature the indifferent one, whose only warmth is from the tears of her suppliants. And Dostoieffsky. knew nothing of the conscious The Grand Inquisitor 285 aims of Count Tolstoy, asceticism, simplification, and union with the great mass of the Russian people. For Dostoieffsky, all such conscious searching after righteousness was alien. Such as his light was, it came from within, and he was so unconscious of any severance from the great mass of the people as to have no need of any conscious return to them. Each may be said to have arrived at the moujik as a solution of the national problem, but, whereas Tolstoy ap- proached him as a newly discovered teacher, Dos- _toieffsky had always known that the Russians were the most unspoiled of European peoples, and that the moujiks were the most unspoiled of the Russians. Dostoiefisky and not Tolstoy divined mystically the symbolic force of the new Byzantium that was to become the core of a spiritually awakened Russia. It was this spiritual thirst, individual and national at the same time, which made Dostoieffsky the dis- ordered man of letters, the representative of the Russian people, rather than the cosmopolitan artist, Turgenev, or the world-famed moral instructor, Count Leo Tolstoy. In the whole range of Dos- toiefisky’s creations there is scarcely a type, however -debased, that has not its moments of this spiritual thirst, which Prince Myshkine knew so well. And when it has wholly dried up in the heart of any one, as in the heart of Svidrigailoff, then, and not till then, is the final self-condemnation of suicide. The saving grace of this spiritual thirst was always in the heart of Dostoieffsky ; he had no need to grope after 286 A Great Russian Realist it to acquire a need that was of his very being. What it meant to him he probably could never have wholly expressed. He has spoken of that “sediment” which is left over after the whole truth has been apparently torn from the heart. Even Dostoieffsky, who uttered the secrets that few dare to recognise, retained this sediment, and one can only guess at his final solution of the two truths—the unio iritual growth and _intel. nthesis between the God-man and the Man- What we séé everywhere in his work is the worship of innocence combined with a penetrating intuition of the soul’s most secret sin. Suffering had intensified these attributes until he _became nationally represen- tative of the Russian_people, their Grand Inquisitor, whose knowledge had been won by pain, and whose sympathy lay ‘deeper than words. ~ Born in a hospital, he preserved always something of its suffering, its compassion, its despair, its dreams. Never did he wholly shake off the early impressions of naked walls barring the destinies of outcasts. That had been his world at the beginning, and to no small extent it remained so to the end. But his hospital was also the world, and his patients humanity. Others had uttered the merely subjective plaint of the sick- bed. Others had given utterance ‘to individual and even national suffering. But Dostojeffsky did more than this; his hospital was ca by right of his profound knowledge of the human soul. And in the face of this Grand Inquisitor, which of us shall The Grand Inquisitor 287 dare to turn contemptuously aside, assuming care- lessly that the hospital is not for him? Which of us is quite certain that within him also the “ ape” is not grimacing furtively ? Which of us is quite certain that the curse of Cidipus has not renewed itself in the curse of Karamazov? Assuredly, in those wards each one of us may yet find place. We, too, all of us who shall have dared to know ourselves, have need of this compassion, this understanding, this forgiveness, and it is not for us to deride this extraordinary world-stage of suffering. Those only who are wholly ignorant of themselves can indulge in the luxury of derision, They only may look askance at this hospital as not for them. But as- suredly, to them also, the Grand Inquisitor would have uttered words of warning, words of the Apoca- lypse, reminding them that, though they know it not, they, too, are wretched and unhappy and poor, and blind and naked. To the Russians, however, Dostoieffsky became a national figure. While remaining one of themselves, he had become in turn their confessor, their vivi- sector, their Inquisitor, but he had never ceased from interpreting Russian life from the standpoint of realism. He, too, was among the life-givers of art, and in the whole world of modern literature there have been but few. Rabelais gave life through laughter, ringing through the stagnation of a world that had outgrown its dreams. Shakespeare gave life as Prospero gave life, and made his island the 288 A Great ‘Russian Realist microcosm of the Renaissance. Cervantes gave life through the tender irony that re-created what it seemed to destroy and linked the wind mill-tilter to the lords of old-world chivalry. Dante gave life through the suffering that drew the ideals of lost generations into the furnace of his own heart, linking the world of the dead for ever with the world of the living. Goethe, the Olympian, gave life as Zeus gave life—through the brain. The Russian’s inclusion among these, the august ones of the earth, seems incongruous to Western prejudice, which is inclined to repeat the Public Prosecutor’s gibe: Abroad they have Hamlet, but Russia has only Karamazov. But sympathy leaps all boundaries, and compassion knows nothing of frontiers. ‘‘ Not in ‘ Faust,’” as Dr. A. Briickner has said, “‘ but rather in ‘ Crime and Punishment,’ does ‘ the whole woe of mankind’ take hold of us.” Gustave Flaubert died at Rouen in May 1880, and in this year Turgenev endeavoured rather uselessly to collect subscriptions in Russia for a monument to his old friend. Turgenev had made his peace with his compatriots at the inauguration of the statue of Pushkin, but his reception had not been anything like that accorded to his rival. Dos- toiefisky’s speech on that occasion seems to have stamped once and for all the impress of his personality upon the Russians, and when early in 1881 the last number of “ The Diary of a Writer” appeared, the interest in it was extraordinary. That number was The Grand Inquisitor 289 to appear on January 31; but four days before, Dos- toiefisky had ceased to exist. At the very beginning of the New Year, Dos- toiefisky suffered from an attack of emphysema. Shortly afterwards, on January 26, he was seized by a hemorrhage in the throat. He divined that death was near, and determined to make a last confession, and to take the Sacrament. Then he took up the New Testament which he had with him in prison in Siberia, and asked his wife to read aloud. Opening the Testament at random, she read: “ But John held him back and said, ‘It is I that should be baptized by Thee, and dost Thou come to me?’ But Jesus answered and said unto him, ‘ Detain Me not, for thus it behoves us to fulfila great truth.’” After he had listened to this, Dostoieffsky said : “‘ You hear? ‘Detain Me not’; that means I am to die.” And only a few hours later the great novelist did die, from the rupture of the pulmonary artery, without pain, practically instantaneously. Dostoieffsky, the elected of the humble and the disinherited, lay in state in the Russian capital; no official funeral in official Russia could have assumed the proportions of popular mourning that expressed itself spontaneously at the death of this man of letters. They understood him now from whose heart they had never been separated. He, the exceptional man among exceptions, had chosen always to remain one with this suffering mass of humanity. What Tolstoy had accomplished somewhat laboriously, had been 19 290 A Great Russian Realist the natural and inevitable réle of Dostoieffsky, And Tolstoy knew that the secret of his own ideal had lain in the heart of the dead novelist. “I never saw the man,” he wrote, on hearing of his death, “and never had any direct relations with him, yet sud- denly, when he died, I understood that he was the nearest and dearest and most necessary of men to me. Everything that he did was of the kind that, the more he did of it, the better I felt it was for men. All at once I read that he is dead, and a prop has fallen from me.” That prop had fallen from count- less obscure units, who thronged eagerly to see the dead body of this small, frail man, now so incongruously lying in state. To the very few Dostoieffsky will appeal as a novelist who seemed to have divined the most per- plexing secrets of criminology. To a few he will survive as the psychologist who realise to the fullest extent, those two opposing truths—that of the God-man, and that other of the Man-god. But to the great mass, not only of Russians, but of all mankind, he will survive as the novelist of pity, of compassion, of inalienable tenderness towards all those from whom the world turns arrogantly away. Not Hugo, for all his splendid rhetoric, but Dos- toieffsky is the real interpreter of Jes misérables. And his characters will live after him, when conditions have changed and become strange to those who remember the poor students, outcasts, drunkards, and derelicts of Dostoieffsky’s St. Petersburg. The The Grand Inquisitor 291 hospital will be remembered in cleaner, brighter days. The glow of genius and suffering, strangely blended, will preserve Raskolnikoff the murderer, who was redeemed by the tears of an unfortunate. And Sonia shall assuredly hold her place in that long gallery of heroines who sought the nobler right, beyond the immediate law, the gallery which, begin- ning with Antigone, stretches luminously through all the centuries. The world-hospital would survive, but now the Grand Inquisitor was dead. From twenty to thirty thousand people followed him to the Monastery of St. Alexander Nevsky, and a hundred thousand more lined the funeral route. He left behind him a widow and two children, and it is no exaggeration to say that the Russian people mourned intimately with them for him who had understood them best of all. CHRONOLOGY 182r. Born in Moscow. 1860. Returns to St. Petersburg. 1837. Enters Military School of 1861. Publishes “Injury and Engineers. Insult.” 1843. LeavesMilitary School with i Publishes ‘‘ Buried Alive.” tank of Sub-Lieutenant. 1862. Visits the Continent for 1844. Leaves the Army. the first time. 1846. Publishes ‘‘ Poor Folk.” 1864. Death of his wife. 1849. Arrested. 1866. Publishes ‘‘Crime and Ss Reprieved from the scaf- Punishment,” fold and sentenced to PA Marries Anna_ Grigori- Siberia. evna Switkine. 1854. Becomesacommonsoldier. 1867. Publishes ‘‘ The Gambler.” .1855. MadeaNon-Commissioned 1868, Publishes ‘‘ The Idiot.” Officer, 1871. Publishes ‘‘ Demons.” 1856. Regains the rank of Of- Returns to St. Petersburg. ficer. 1876. Commences “‘ The Diary 1857. Marries Madame Issaev. of a Writer.” 1858. Rightof hereditary nobili- 1880, Finishes ‘‘The Brothers tyrestored. Leaves the Karamazov.” Army. 1881. Death in St. Petersburg. HIS WORKS “Poor Folk. “Buried Alive. The Double. »Crime and Punishment. Mr, Prokharchin. The Gambler. The Landlady. ~The Idiot. A Weak Heart. The Permanent Husband. Stepanchikovo Village. Demons. Sleepless Nights. The Hobbledehoy. The Honest Thief. The Underground Spirit. The Friend of the Family. The Diary of a Writer. Uncle’s Dream. -The Brothers Karamazov. -Injury and Insult. In addition to the Vitzetelly translations, the author is indebted to the following works : “Correspondance de Dostoievsky.’’ Traduit du Russe. Par J. W. Bienstock. (Paris: Société du Mercure de France.) X“ Dostoievsky.’? By Dimitri Merejkowski. (Constable.) “Crime and Punishment.’ By Feodor Dostoiefisky. (Scott Pub- lishing Co.) “Les Possédés.”’ Traduit du Russe par V.Derély. (Paris: Plon, Nourrit.) “Les Fréres Karamazov.” Traduit et adapté par E. Halpériné- Kaminisky et Ch. Morice. (Paris: Librairie Plon.) ‘Journal d’un Ecrivain,’”’ Traduit du Russe par J. W. Bienstock et J. A. Nau. (Paris: Bibliothéque-Charpentier.) ** Poor Folk.”” Translated from the Russian by L. Milman. (Elkin Mathews & John Lane.) “L'Esprit Souterain.”” Traduit et adapté par E. Halpériné-Kaminisky et Ch. Morice. (Paris: Librairie Plon.) ‘La Psychologie des Romanciers Russes du XIX Siécle.” Par Ossip-Lourié. (Paris: Alcun.) ‘Flaubert: Sa Vie, son Caractére, et ses Idées avant 1857.’ Par René Descharmes. (Paris: Ferroud.) “The Sisters Rajevsky.” By Sonya Kovalevsky. (Unwin.) 292 INDEX “A SimpLz but Complicated Affair,’’ 265 . Academy of Medicine, 237 ZEschylus, 29 Aglaya Epanchin, 206; 207, 210 Akim Akimytch, 109 Akofl’ka, 105 Alei, 113 Alexander II., 124, 127, 130, 131 Alioscha, 141, 142, 265, 268, 269, 272, 276 Alps, 147 Andrei, Prince, 178 “Anna Karénina,” 25, 108, 137, 139, 243, 276 “ Annals of a Sportsman,” 94 Anthony, St., 274 Antigone, 291 Anyuta, 159, 162, 164 “Ape” Peter, 146, 223, 224, 226, 228, 283 Apocalypse, 231, 287 Arch-Demon, 230 Aristophanes, 239 Army, 117 Artel, 73 Askakov, 259 Asmodeus, 259 Aspasia, 135 Assisi, St. Francis of, 259, 274 Astley, Mr., 151, 153 Até, 273 Atheist, 213, 214 Aunt Kareline, 21 Baden, 195, 196 Balalaika, the, 107, 108 “‘ Ballad of Reading Gaol,” 114 Balzac, 27, 29, 31, 32, 34, 239 Barnaoul, 129 Bazaroff, 221, 222, 228, 232 Beketov, 69 Berlin, 146, 147 Bernard, 238 ; Bielinski, 25, 61, 66, 67, 68, 74, 116, 216 Bielinski, Mme., 68 Blanche, 205 Bonhomme, Jacques, 32, 147 Bourget, Paul, 137 Boutachevitch-Petrachevski, 69, 81, 160, 253, 261 “ Britannicus,” 245 Brickner, Dr. A., 288 “ Buried Alive,”’ 89, 91, 100, 142, 212, 221, 248, 252 Burke, 252 Byron, 22 Byzantium, 232, 280, 285 Caligula, 84 Camors, M. de, 239 Caucasian, 113, 125 Chateaubriand, 43 Chatoff, 225, 226, 229, 230, 273, 277 Chatouchka, 227 Colet, Louise, 36, 37 Corneille, 22, 28 Coronation, 124 Costigan, 264 “Crime and Punishment,” 32, 43, 50, 133, 145,170, 171,172, 175, 186, 21g; 218, 221, 236, 254, 264, 276, 279, 288 Crimean War, 122 Dante, 110, 134, 261 Daudet, 57, 212, 239 “ David Copperfield,’ 212, 281 ‘Dead Souls,’”’ 12, 16 Defoe, 276 De Grier, 153 Demon, 138, 209, 210 “Demons,” 66, 214, 221, 222, 228, 231, 233, 277, 281 Devil, 98 “Diary of a Superfluous Man,” 242 “Diary of a Writer,” 238, 252, 288 Dickens, 12, 51, 57, 59, 144, 145, IQI, 212 Diderot, 216 Djevuschkin, Makar, 20, 46, 61 Dostoieffsky, André, 74, 118 Dostoiefisky, Feodor Mikhailo- vitch, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 Dostoieffsky, Lubov, 217 Dostoieffsky, Michael, 14, 16, 18, 20, 48, 61, 74, 157, 165 Dostoieffsky, Sonia, 198 Double,’’ ‘‘ The, 228 Dounia, 179, 188, 189 Dourov, 69, 73, 74, 83, 87, 88 Dresden, 216, 221, 234, 235 Dumas, 28, 245 Ecclesiastes, 60 Egorovitch, Alexander, 165 Emperor, the, 127 Epanchin, Adelaida, 201, 202, 204 293 ef 294 Epilepsy, 78, 129, 146, 160, 208, 219, 229, 281 Eroshka, Uncle, 270 “Eugénie Grandet,” 27, 41 Euripides, 59, 174 Europe, 146, 234, 255, 277 “Evenings at the Farm of Di- kanka,” 11 Falstaff, 190 “Fathers and Sons,” 222 “Faust,” 259, 288 : Fédorovitch, Dimitri, 268, 269 Fédorovna, Emily, 68 Flaubert, 29, 30, 31, 34, 36, 40, 44, 71, 135, 236, 239, 242, 250, 288 Florence, 216 Fomitch, Issai, 109, 112, 113, 114 Fourier, 1, 69 Fourierists, 87, 160, 233 France, Anatole, 137, 239 Franco-Prussian War, 220 Frankenstein, 32 French literature, 19, 32 French Revolution, 15, 28, 34 Gambler,” ‘‘ The, 150, 157, 205, 212, 233 Gania, 204, 205 Gautier, Théophile, 84 Gehenna, 281 Geneva, 194, 197, 264, 277, 278 Germany, 170 Gethsemane, 259, 281 Glajeux, Bérard des, 254 God-man, 222, 223, 224, 225, 272, 273, 284, 287, 290 Goethe, 19, 288 Gogol, Nicolai Vasilievitch, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,25, 34, O1, 74, 124, 267 Goncourts, the, 239 Gontcharof, 67, 218 Gory4ntchikoff, Alexander, 89, 90, II5 Grand Inquisitor, 236, 255, 263, 271, 272, 273, 274, 284, 285, 286, 287, 291 Greeks, 116, 174, 190, I9I Grigorievna, Anna, 164, 194, 195 Grigorovitch, 25, 45, 69, 160 Grushenka, 271 Gulliver, 281 Hamlet, 140, 143, 279, 288 “ Hernani,’”’ 11, 12 Hero,” “‘ The Little, 77, 78 249, Index Hertzen, 67 Homais, 33, 43 Homer, 59 Hugo, 12, 22, 50, 245, 290 Humboldt, 238 Ibsen, 174, 175 Idiot,”’ “‘ The, 85, 198, 199, 205, 212, 213, 214, 218, 281 “ Injury and Insult,” 64, 127, 140, I41, 164, 212, 221, 248-9, 261 Irinna, 137 Irtysh, 106 Iscander, 67 Issa, 113, Issaev, Alexander Ivanovitch, - I20,-127 Issaev, Madame, 127, 128 Issaev, Paul, 120, 129 Italy, 216 Ivanovna, Catherine, 185, 192 ‘Jena, 9 Jerebjatnikoff, 104 Jones, Tom, 190 Kachpiriev, 216, 217, 218 Karamazov, Ivan, 138, 259, 271 Karamazov,” ‘‘ The Brothers, 50, 58, 199, 206, 220, 234, 247, 265, 267, 274 Karamzine, 18 Karmazinoff, 66, 228 Kirghise, 106 Kiriloff, 222, 229 Koran, 160 Kornilov, Catherine, 265 Kostomarov, 18 Kovalevsky, General, 159 Kovalevsky, Sonya, 75, 80, 161, 162, 163, 215 Kraevsky, 63 Kropotkine, Prince, 28 Kouznetzk, 129 Kutusoff, 9, 10, 178 223, 224, 225, Lavretsky, 58, 137 Lear,” ‘‘ King, 66, 267 Lef Nicolaievitch, Prince, 205, 206 “Le Petit Chose,’’ 212 Lisa, 226, 244, 245, 248 Litvinov, 58 Lombroso, 179, 249 Lomonossov, 18 London, 100, 101 Lucian, 137 Lyons, Execution at, 201, 220 Index Maeterlinck, M., 245 Magny dinners, the, 23, 40, 236, 240 Mahomet, 160 Maikov, A. N., 39, 83, I21, 172, 194, 197, 217, 221, 234 Makar, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 150 Man-god, 138, 177, 182, 183, 222, 223, 228, 256, 284, 290 Marbelli, 74 Marcellus, 59 Marmeladoff, 184, 186, 264, 281 Maslénikov, 265 Maupassant, 58, 249 Memnon, 31 Merejkowski, Dimitri, 79, 135, 139, 258 Michelet, 89 Milan, 215 Misérables,’”’ ‘“‘ Les, 50, 290 Mitia, 268, 269, 271 Moscow, 130, 157, 165, 254, 259, 263 Musset, Alfred de, 239 Myshkine, Prince, 163, 198, 214, 215, 238, 265, 281 Nabokov, Commandant, 83 Naples, 147 Napoleon, 9, 28, 175 Nastasia Philipovna, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 211 Natasha, 139, 141, 144 Nekhlidoff, 182 Nekrassov, 25, 45, 46, 68, 160 Nero, 84, 93, 245 Netchaiev, 16 Neva, 193, 194 Nevsky, St. Alexander, Monastery, 291 Newcome, 264 Nicolaievitch, Maurice, 226° Nicolas Nicolaievitch, 147, 220 Nietzsche, 16, 40, 223, 280 Nihilist, Peter the, 221, 223, 228, 231 Nordau, Max, 93 Odoevsky, Prince, 63 “ Odyssey,’”’ 262 CEdipus, 267, 287 “‘ Old Curiosity Shop,” 145 Olympian, 288 Olympus, 27 Omsk, 127 Ordinov, 243, 244, 247, 248, 250 Ostrovésky, 25, 39 295 Otchaianié, 1547 Otetchestvennia Zapiski, 41, 62, 67 Panaiev, 63 Paris, 147, 156, 232, 239, 278 cee 19 aulina, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156 Pavlischeff, 21 2 aca Peace of Paris, 131 Pecksniff, 133 Permanent Husband,” ‘‘ The, 218, 235 Peter, Nihilist, 223 Petersburg, St., 130, 132, 160, 164, 233,234, 235, 236, 254,256, 262, 263 Petinka, 54 Petrachevski, Boutachevitch-, 69, 81, 160, 253, 261 Petrachevtsy, 69, 74, Petr6ff, 103, 112, 113, 114 Petronius, 135, 136 Phzdra, the Russian, 141, 142 Pierre, 58, 137, 265 Pinch, Tom, 58, 133 Plato, 94 Plestcheev, 83 Pokrovski, 54 Polichinetti, 143, 144, 146 “Poor Folk,’ 26, 35, 41, 50, 51, 69, 116, 132, 134, 160, 252, 261, 264 Popristchine, 147 Porphyrius Petrovitch, 179, 180, 181, 182 Positivism, 232 Postumus, 60 President of the Assize Court of Paris, 254 Prince, 141, 142 Prospero, 287 Psychologist, 24, 134, 158 Pushkin, 22, 73, 259, 260, 288 Rabelais, 287 Racine, 22 Rajevsky,” 162, 163 Raskolnikoff, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182, 183, 188, 190, 211, 258, 267, 291 Razoumikhin, 175, 179 Réaumur, 82 Reminiscences, Kovalevsky, 80 Renaissance, 13, 14, 60, 288 René, 43 “ Resurrection,” 182 “The Sisters, 161, 296 Revel, 72, 77 Rhine, 147 Richard, 277, 278 Rodion Romanovitch, 175, 193 Rogojin, 202, 205, 207, 208, 209, 211 Rome, 147 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 252 Rousskt Viesinth, 194, 221 Rudin, 58, 137, 221 Ruskin, 140 Saint-Simon, 73 Salammbé, 37, 249 Salzbrunn, 67 Sand, George, 27-8, 71 Sappho, 59, 136 ‘* Sartor Resartus,” 24 Schiller, 21, 22, 62, 72 School of Engineers, 18, 21 Scott, Walter, 18 Sebastopol, 91, 122 Semipalatinsk, 117, 127, 129 Semyonovski Square, 79, 80, 85, 131, 200, 261 Shakespeare, 60, 79, 140 Siberia, 48, 67, 68, 78, 83, 86, 90, 94, 98, IOI, 106, 108, 132, 158, 169, 228, 233, 250, 252, 261, 263, 281 Sieyés, Abbé. 34 Silesia, 67 Slav, 43, 50, 136 Slavophil, 125, 215, 279 Smekaloff, 104 Smerdiakov, 273, 274, 276, 280 “ Smoke,” 25, 64, 228, 234, 284 Socrates, 94 Sonia, 43, 177, 178, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 264, 291 Sovremennik, 68 Spasskoié, 96 Staél, Mme. de, 10, 24-5, 266, 267 Staraia Roussa, 236 Starets, the, 268, 269, 272 Stavroguine, 144, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 230, 257, 258, 281 Stellovski, 169, 218 Stettin, 67 Strakhov, 147, 198, 216, 219, 220 Styx, 137 Svidrigailoff, 144, 186, 187, 188, 189, 276 Switkine, Anna Grigorievna, 194 Switzerland, 215, 227 Tacitus, 94 Index ‘ Tarass Boulba,”’ 12 Tchermak, 17 Terence, 259 Thackeray, 15 Tiberius, 84 Tobolsk, 87, 89, 105 Todleben, 68, 122, 124, 158 Tolstoy, 19, 25, 26, 34, 37, 48, 49, 58, 67, 79, 91, 94, 97, 133, 137, 138, 139, 150, 178, 179, 215, 216, 219, 243, 257, 258, 265, 270, 277, 282, 283, 285 Toula, 17 Troppman,” ‘‘ Execution of, 66, 220 Tsar, 73, 124, 127, 132 Tulliver, Tom, 190 Turgenev, Ivan, 20, 25, 26, 32, 34, 40, 44, 47, 58, 62, 64, 67, 96, 99, IIO, 131, 136, 137, 138, 216, 218, 219, 232, 242, 249, 258, 261, 277, 272, 283, 284, 285 Tver, 127 Ulm, 9 ‘“Uncle’s Dream,’ 119 Underground Spirit,” ‘‘ The, 144, 212, 242, 249, 257 Vania, 64, 141, 144, 145, 16 Varia, 68 44,145, 104 Varvara, 46, 56, 60 Vauxhall, 152 Vera, 68 Vespasian, 31 Vevey, 215 Viardots, 67 Villon, 60, 136 Virgil, 59, 134 “ Virgin Soil,’ 125, 222 Vivisection, 134 Vogiié, M. de, 87, 248, 251 Voltaire, 18, 216 Vremya, 165 ‘‘ War and Peace,’ 178, 276 White Hall, 74 Wiesbaden, 154 Wrangel, Baron A. E., 120, 122, 124, 125, 126, 129, 158, 165, 167, 168 Yasnaya Polyana, 25 Yastrjemsky, 87, 88 Zaria, 231 Zeus, 288 Zola, 273 Printed by Hasell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury, England, a ey Aa hbay xe Phi i ha mp “he > Sy rp eh rd wha it Bide aie nies eed ee ee Sena pantn tte See aes Sous ee as ar i Ha A LR aR yt Hin ie, i ‘ i Abate! ny ae } oe Ny at tr hy 1 ay i o , Nat oe noe A ij aH) Ny shh ab a ie tess 4 it) Hate a ee Bh Waenity Hy ae heen ig bi CaN lt aon Ss ose ae = Mea eetieN it Uaiischet eae — SS betty “9: ne Fe: ee ee Siew — Sau ae ne = 7 = Rohe presen a — Se = She a oo = Eudaty ret tt