A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections Part 17

CHAPTER XI

DOSTOeVSKY

All the writers of the '40's of the nineteenth century had their individual peculiarities. But in this respect, Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky (1821-1880) was even more sharply separated from all the rest by his characteristics, which almost removed him from the ranks of the writers of the epoch, and gave him a special place in literature.

The chief cause of this distinction lies in the fact that while most of the other writers sprang from the country regions, being members of the landed gentry cla.s.s, Dostoevsky represents the plebeian, toiling cla.s.s of society, a nervously choleric son of the town; and in the second place, while the majority of them were well-to-do, Dostoevsky alone in the company belonged to the cla.s.s of educated strugglers with poverty, which had recently made its reappearance.

His father was staff physician in the Marya Hospital in Moscow, and he was the second son in a family of seven children. The whole family lived in two rooms, an ante-room and kitchen, which comprised the quarters allotted to the post by the government. Here strictly religious and patriarchal customs reigned, mitigated by the high cultivation of the head of the family.

In 1837 Feodor Mikhailovitch and his elder brother were taken to St.

Petersburg by their father to be placed in the School for Engineers, but the elder did not succeed in entering, on account of feeble health.

Dostoevsky had already evinced an inclination for literature, and naturally he was not very diligent in his studies of the dry, applied sciences taught in the school. But he found time to make acquaintance with the best works of Russian, English, French, and German cla.s.sical authors. In 1843 he completed his course, and was appointed to actual service in the draughting department of the St. Petersburg engineer corps.

With his salary and the money sent to him by his guardian (his father being dead), he had about five thousand rubles a year, but as he was extremely improvident, bohemian, and luxurious in his tastes, he could never make both ends meet. He was still more straitened in his finances when, in 1844, he resigned from the service, which was repugnant to him, and utterly at variance with his literary proclivities, and was obliged to resort to making translations. In May, 1844, he completed his first romance, "Poor People," and sent it to Nekrasoff by his school-friend Grigorovitch. In his "Diary" Dostoevsky has narrated the manner of its reception by Nekrasoff (who was preparing to publish a collection), and by Byelinsky, to whom the latter gave it. Grigorovitch and Nekrasoff sat up all night to read it, so fascinated were they, and then hastened straight to communicate their rapture to the author. Nekrasoff then gave the ma.n.u.script to Byelinsky with the exclamation, "A new Gogol has made his appearance!" to which Byelinsky sternly replied, "Gogols spring up like mushrooms with you." But when he had read the romance, he cried out, with emotion, "Bring him, bring him to me!"

Even before the romance made its appearance in print (early in 1846), Dostoevsky had won a flattering literary reputation. The young author's head was fairly turned with his swift success, and he grew arrogant, the result of which was that he soon quarreled with Byelinsky, Nekrasoff, and their whole circle, and published his later writings (with one exception) elsewhere than in "The Contemporary." His coolness towards the circle of "The Contemporary" was not a little aided by the difference in opinions which began to make themselves felt. Dostoevsky was carried away by the political and social ideas which reigned in that circle, but at the same time he obstinately upheld his own religious views. The result of this was, that the members of the circle began to regard him as behind the times. He became more and more interested in socialism, and soon went to live with his new friends in quarters where the principles of a.s.sociation ruled. He then entered the Duroff circle of Fourierists, the most moderate of all the Petrashevsky circles, which a good authority declares to have entertained no purely revolutionary ideas whatever. They rebelled against the maintenance of the strict censorship then in force, serfdom, and administrative abuses, but paid little attention to the question of a change in the form of government, and attributed no importance to political upheavals. Dostoevsky himself was, in general, very far from cherishing any revolutionary designs; he enthusiastically declaimed Pushkin's verses about slavery falling "at the wave of the Tzar's hand," and insisted that no socialistic theories had the slightest importance for Russians, since in the commune, and the working unions (_artel_), and mutual guarantee system there had long existed in their land more solid and normal foundations than all the dreams of Saint Simon and his school, and that life in a community and phalanstery seemed to him more terrible and repulsive than that of any galley-slave.

Notwithstanding this, in May, 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested, along with the other followers of Petrashevsky, confined in the fortress, and condemned by court-martial on the charge of having "taken part in discussions concerning the severity of the censorship, and in one a.s.sembly, in March, 1849, had read a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, received from Pleshtcheeff in Moscow, and had then read it aloud in the a.s.semblies at Duroff's, and had given copies of it to Mombelli to copy.

In the a.s.semblies at Duroff's he had listened to the reading of articles, knew of the intention to set up a printing-press, and at Spyeshneff's had listened to the reading of 'A Soldier's Conversation.'"

All the Petrashevskyians were condemned to be shot, and the sentence was read to them on January 3, 1850, on the scaffold, where they stood stripped, in the freezing cold, for twenty minutes, in momentary expectation of their execution. But the death sentence was mitigated in different degrees by the Emperor, Dostoevsky's sentence being commuted to exile with hard labor for four years, and then service as a common soldier in the ranks. He was dispatched to Siberia two days later, which was on Christmas Eve, according to the Russian reckoning.

The wives of the Decembrists (the men exiled for revolutionary plots in 1825, at the accession to the throne of the Emperor Nicholas I.), visited the Petrashevskyians in prison at Tobolsk and gave Dostoevsky a copy of the Gospels. No other book made its way within the prison walls, and after reading nothing else for the next three years, Dostoevsky, according to his own words, "forced by necessity to read the Bible only, was enabled more clearly and profoundly to grasp the meaning of Christianity." In his "Notes from a Dead House" he has described in detail his life in the prison at Omsk, and all his impressions. Prison life produced an extremely crushing and unfavorable impression on him.

He was brought into close contact with the common people, was enabled to study them, but he also became thoroughly imbued with that spirit of mysticism which is peculiar to ignorant and illiterate people. His own view of the universe was that of childlike faith, and prison life strengthened this view by leading him to see in it the foundation of the national spirit and the national life. During the last year of his prison life, under a milder commandant, he was able to renew his relations with former schoolmates and friends in the town, and through them obtain more money, write home, and even come into possession of books.

But his health was much affected, his nerves having been weak from childhood, and already so shattered that, in 1846, he was on the verge of insanity. Even at that time he had begun to have attacks by night of that "mystical terror," which he has described in detail in "Humiliated and Insulted," and he also had occasional epileptic fits. In Siberia epilepsy developed to such a point that it was no longer possible to entertain any doubt as to the character of his malady.

On leaving prison, in 1854, and becoming a soldier, Dostoevsky was much better off. He was soon promoted to the rank of ensign, wrote a little, planned "Notes from a Dead House," and in 1856 married. At last, after prolonged efforts, he received permission to return to European Russia, in July, 1859, and settled in Tver. In the winter of that year, his rights, among them that of living in the capital, were restored to him, and in 1861 he and his elder brother began to publish a journal called "The Times." The first number contained the first installment of "Humiliated and Insulted," and simultaneously, during 1861-1862, "Notes from a Dead House" appeared there also, in addition to critical literary articles from his pen. This and other editorial and journalistic ventures met with varying success, and he suffered many reverses of fortune. In 1865-1866 he wrote his masterpiece, "Crime and Punishment."

His first wife having died, he married his stenographer, in 1867, and traveled in western Europe for the next four years, in the course of which he wrote his romances: "The Idiot" (1868), "The Eternal Husband"

(1870), and "Devils" (1871-72). After his return to Russia he wrote (1875) "The Stripling," and (1876) began the publication of "The Diary of a Writer," which was in the nature of a monthly journal, made up of his own articles, chiefly of a political character, and bearing on the Serbo-Turkish War. But it also contained literary and autobiographical articles, and had an enormous success, despite the irregularity of its appearance.

In June, 1880, he delivered a speech before the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, which won him such popularity as he had never before enjoyed, and resulted in a tremendous ovation, on the part of the public, at the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin. He was besieged with letters and visits; people came to him incessantly from all parts of St. Petersburg and of Russia, with expressions of admiration, requests for aid, questions, complaints against others, and expressions of opinions hostile to him personally. In the last half of 1880 he finished "The Karamazoff Brothers." His funeral, on February 15, 1881, was very remarkable; the occasion of an unprecedented "manifestation,"

which those who took part in it are still proud of recalling. Forty-two deputations bearing wreaths and an innumerable ma.s.s of people walked miles after his coffin to the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

Under the various influences to which Dostoevsky was subjected, he eventually became what is known in Russia as "a native-soiler," in literature--the leader, in fact, of that semi-Slavyanophil, semi-Western school--and towards the end of his life was converted into a genuine Slavophil and mystic. In this conversion, as well as in the mystical theories which he preached in his "Diary," and afterwards in his romances, beginning with "Crime and Punishment," Dostoevsky has something in common with Count L. N. Tolstoy. Both writers were disenchanted as to European progress, admitted the mental and moral insolvency of educated Russian society, and fell into despair, from which the only escape, so it seemed to them, was becoming imbued with the lively faith of the common people, and both authors regarded this faith as the sole means of getting into real communion with the people.

Then, becoming more and more imbued with the spirit of the Christian doctrine, both arrived at utter rejection of material improvement of the general welfare; Count Tolstoy came out with a theory of non-resistance to evil by force, and Dostoevsky with a theory of moral elevation and purification by means of suffering, which in essence are identical; for in what manner does non-resistance to evil manifest itself, if not in unmurmuring endurance of the sufferings caused by evil?

Nevertheless, a profound difference exists between Count Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. In the former we see an absence of conservatism and devotion to tradition. His att.i.tude towards all doctrines is that of unconditional freedom of thought, and subjecting them to daring criticism, he chooses from among them only that which is in harmony with the inspirations of his own reason. He is a genuine individualist, to his very marrow. By the ma.s.ses of the common people, he does not mean the Russian nation only, but all the toilers and producers of the earth, without regard to nationality; while by the faith which he seeks among those toilers, he does not mean any fixed religious belief, but faith in the reasonableness and advantageousness of life, and of everything which exists, placing this faith in dependence upon brisk, healthy toil.

Dostoevsky, on the contrary, is a communist, or socialist. He cares nothing for freedom and the self-perfection of the individual. The individual, according to his teaching, should merely submit, and resignedly offer itself up as a sacrifice to society, for the sake of fulfilling that mission which Russia is foreordained, as G.o.d's chosen nation, to accomplish. This mission consists in the realization upon earth of true Christianity in orthodoxy,[31] to which the Russian people remain faithful and devoted; union with the common people is to be accomplished in that manner alone; like the common people, with the same boundless faith and devotion, orthodoxy must be professed, for in it alone lies all salvation, not only for the world as a whole, but for every individual.

The character of Dostoevsky's works is determined by the fact that he was a child of the town. In their form they possess none of that elegant regularity, of that cla.s.sical finish and clear-cut outline, which impress us in the works of Turgeneff and Gontcharoff. On the contrary, they surprise us by their awkwardness, their prolixity, their lack of severe finish, which requires abundant leisure. It is evident that they were written in haste, by a man who was eternally in want, embarra.s.sed with debts, and incapable of making the two ends meet financially. At the same time one is struck by the entire absence in Dostoevsky's works of those artistic elements in which the works of the other authors of the '40's are rich. They contain no enchanting pictures of nature, no soul-stirring love scenes, meetings, kisses, the bewitching feminine types which turn the reader's head, for which Turgeneff and Tolstoy are famous. Dostoevsky even ridicules Turgeneff for his feminine portraits, in "Devils," under the character of the writer Karmazinoff, with his pa.s.sion for depicting kisses not as they take place with all mankind, but with gorse or some such weed growing round about, which one must look up in a botany, while the sky must not fail to be of a purplish hue, which, of course, no mortal ever beheld, and the tree under which the interesting pair is seated must infallibly be orange-colored, and so forth.

Dostoevsky's subjects also present a sharp difference from those of his contemporaries, whose subjects are characterized by extreme simplicity and absence of complication, only a few actors being brought on the stage--not more than two, three, or four--and the entire plot being, as a rule, confined to the rivalry of two lovers, and to the question upon which of them the heroine will bestow her love. It is quite the contrary with Dostoevsky. His plots are complicated and entangled, he introduces a throng of acting personages. In reading his romances, one seems to hear the roar of the crowd, and the life of a town is unrolled before one, with all its bustle, its incessantly complicated and unexpected encounters, and relations of people one to another. Like a true child of the town, Dostoevsky does not confine himself to fashionable drawing-rooms, or to the educated cla.s.ses; he is fond of introducing the reader to the dens of poverty and vice, which he invests, also, with their own peculiar, gloomy poetry. In his pictures of low life, he more resembles d.i.c.kens than the followers of Georges Sand of his day.

But the most essential quality of Dostoevsky's creative art is the psychical a.n.a.lysis, which occupies the foreground in the majority of his romances, and const.i.tutes their chief power and value. A well-known alienist doctor, who has examined these romances from a scientific point of view, declares himself amazed by the scientific accuracy wherewith Dostoevsky has depicted the mentally afflicted. In his opinion, about one-fourth of this author's characters are more or less afflicted in this manner, some romances containing as many as three who are not normal, in one way or another. This doctor demonstrates that Dostoevsky was a great psychopathologist, and that, with his artistic insight, he antic.i.p.ated even exact science. And much that he has written will certainly be incorporated in psychological text-books. It is superfluous, after such competent testimony, to insist upon the life-likeness and the truth to nature of his portraits. The effect of his books on a reader is overwhelming, even stunning and nerve-shattering.

One further point is to be noted: that notwithstanding the immense number of characters presented to the reader by Dostoevsky, they all belong to a very limited number of types, which are repeated, with slight variations, in all his romances. Thus, in conformity with the doctrine of the "native-soilers," he places at the foundation of the majority of his works one of the two following types: (1) The gentle type of the man overflowing with tender affection of utter self-sacrifice, ready to forgive everything, to justify everything, to bear himself compa.s.sionately towards the treachery of the girl he loves, and to go on loving her, even to the point of removing the obstacles to her marriage with another man, and so forth. Such is the hero of "Crime and Punishment"; such is Prince Mshkinh in "The Idiot," and so on; (2) The rapacious type, the type of the egoist, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with pa.s.sion, knowing no bounds to his desires, and restrained by no laws, either human or divine. Such are: Stavrogin in "Devils," Dmitry Karamazoff ("The Karamazoff Brothers"), and so forth. His women also can be divided into two similar, contrasting types; on the one hand, the gentle--the type of the woman who possesses a heart which is tender and loving to self-abnegation, like Nelly and Natasha, in "Humiliated and Insulted"; Raskolnikoff's mother and Sonya, in "Crime and Punishment"; Netotchka Nezvanoff, in "The Stripling." On the other hand, there are the rapacious types of capricious, charming women who are tyrannical to the point of cruelty, like Polina, in "The Gambler," Nastasya Filippovna in "The Idiot," Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna in "The Karamazoff Brothers," and Varvara Petrovna, in "Devils."

The reactionary tendency made its appearance in Dostoevsky almost contemporaneously with its appearance in Turgeneff and Gontcharoff, unhappily. The first romance in which it presented itself was "Crime and Punishment," the masterpiece in which his talent attained its zenith.

This work, in virtue of its psychical and psychological a.n.a.lyses, deserves to rank among the greatest and best monuments of European literary art in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, it produced a strange impression on all reasonable people, because of the fact that the author suddenly makes the crime of his hero, Raskolnikoff, dependent upon the influence of new ideas, as though they justified crimes, committed with good objects. No less surprising is the manner in which the romance winds up with the moral regeneration of Raskolnikoff under the influence of exile with hard labor.

Dostoevsky, to be fully appreciated, requires--perhaps more than most writers--to be read at length. But the following brief extract will afford a glimpse of his manner. The extract is from the "Notes from a Dead House." Sushiloff was a prisoner who had been sent to Siberia merely for colonization, for some trifling breach of the laws. During a fit of intoxication he had been persuaded by a prisoner named Mikhailoff to exchange names and punishments, in consideration of a new red shirt and one ruble in cash. Such exchanges were by no means rare, but the prisoner to whose disadvantage the bargain redounded, generally demanded scores of rubles; hence, every one ridiculed Sushiloff for the cheap rate at which he had sold his light sentence. Had he been able to return the ruble (which he had immediately spent for liquor), he might have bought back his name, but the prisoners' artel, or guild, always insisted upon the strict fulfilment of such bargains in default of the money being refunded; and if the authorities suspected such exchanges, they did not pry into them, it being immaterial to the officials (in Siberia at least) what man served out the sentence, so long as they could make their accounts tally. Thus much in explanation abbreviated from Dostoevsky's statement.

"Sushiloff and I lived a long time together, several years in all. He gradually became greatly attached to me; I could not help perceiving this, as I had, also, become thoroughly used to him. But one day--I shall never forgive myself for it--he did not comply with some request of mine, although he had just received money from me, and I had the cruelty to say to him, 'Here you are taking my money, Sushiloff, but you don't do your duty.' Sushiloff made no reply, but seemed suddenly to grow melancholy. Two days elapsed. I said to myself, it cannot be the result of my words. I knew that a certain prisoner, Anton Vasilieff, was urgently dunning him for a petty debt. He certainly had no money, and was afraid to ask me for any. So on the third day, I said to him: 'Sushiloff, I think you have wanted to ask me for money to pay Anton Vasilieff. Here it is.'

I was sitting on the sleeping-shelf at the time; Sushiloff was standing in front of me. He seemed very much surprised that I should offer him the money of my own accord; that I should voluntarily remember his difficult situation, the more so as, in his opinion, he had already, and that recently, taken altogether too much from me in advance, so that he dared not hope that I would give him any more. He looked at the money, then at me, abruptly turned away and left the room. All this greatly amazed me. I followed him and found him behind the barracks. He was standing by the prison stockade with his face to the fence, his head leaning against it, and propping himself against it with his arm. 'Sushiloff, what's the matter with you?' I asked him. He did not look at me, and to my extreme surprise, I observed that he was on the verge of weeping. 'You think--Alexander Petrovitch--'[32] he began, in a broken voice, as he endeavored to look another way, 'that I serve you--for money--but I--I--e-e-ekh!' Here he turned again to the fence, so that he even banged his brow against it--and how he did begin to sob! It was the first time I had beheld a man weep in the prison. With difficulty I comforted him, and although from that day forth, he began to serve me more zealously than ever, if that were possible, and to watch over me, yet I perceived, from almost imperceptible signs, that his heart could never pardon me for my reproach; and yet the others laughed at us, persecuted him at every convenient opportunity, sometimes cursed him violently--but he lived in concord and friendship with them and never took offense. Yes, it is sometimes very difficult to know a man thoroughly, even after long years of acquaintance!"

Dostoevsky, in all his important novels, has much to say about religion, and his personages all ill.u.s.trate some phase of religious life. This is nowhere more apparent than in his last novel, "The Karamazoff Brothers,"

wherein the religious note is more powerfully struck than in any of the others. The ideal of the Orthodox Church of the East is embodied in Father Zosim, and in his gentle disciple, Alexyei (Alyosha) Karamazoff; the reconciling power of redemption is again set forth over the guilty soul of the princ.i.p.al hero, Dmitry Karamazoff, when he is overtaken by chastis.e.m.e.nt for a suspected crime. The doubting element is represented by Ivan Karamazoff, who is tortured by a constant conflict with anxious questions. In "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor," which the author puts into Ivan's mouth, Dostoevsky's famous and characteristic power of a.n.a.lysis reached its greatest height.

Belonging to no cla.s.s, and famous for but one book, which does not even count as literature, yet chronologically a member of this period, was Nikolai Gavrilovitch Tchernyshevsky (1828-1889). After 1863 he exerted an immense influence on the minds of young people of both s.e.xes; and of all the writers of the "storm and stress" period, he is the most interesting, because, in his renowned book, "What Is to Be Done?" he applied his theories to practical life. His success was due, not to the practicability of his theories, to his literary qualities, to his art, but to the fact that he contrived to unite two things, each one of which, as a rule, is found in a writer; he simultaneously touched the two most responsive chords in the human heart--the thirst for easy happiness, and the imperative necessity for ascetic self-sacrifice.

Hence, he won a response from the most diametrically conflicting natures.

"What Is to Be Done" is the story of a young girl who, with the greatest improbability, is represented as being of the purest, most lofty character and sentiments, yet the daughter of two phenomenally (almost impossibly) degraded people. Instead of marrying the rich and not otherwise undesirable man whom her parents urge on her, and who is deeply in love with her, she runs away with her teacher, and stipulates in advance for life in three rooms. She is only seventeen, yet she promptly establishes a fashion-shop which thrives apace, and puts forth numerous branches all over the capital. Her working-girls are treated ideally and as equals, she working with them, in which lies the answer to "What Is to Be Done?" After a while she falls in love with her husband's dearest friend, who is described as so exactly like him that the reader is puzzled to know wherein she descried favorable difference, and the husband, perceiving this, makes things easy by pretending to drown himself, but in reality going off to America.

Several years later he returns--as an American--and his ex-wife's present husband, having become a medical celebrity, helps him to a bride by informing her panic-stricken parents (who oppose the match, although they are ignorant at first of any legal impediment to the union), that she will certainly die if they do not yield. The two newly a.s.sorted couples live in peace, happiness, and prosperity ever after. Work and community life are the chief themes of the preachment. He was exiled to Siberia in 1864, and on his return to Russia (when he settled in astrakhan, and was permitted to resume his literary labors), he busied himself with translations, critical articles, and the like, but was unable to regain his former place in literature.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. Describe the early life of Dostoevsky.

2. How were his first writings received?

3. What relation had he to the social agitations of the times?

4. Upon what charge was he exiled to Siberia?

5. How were his views affected by his prison life?

6. Give some account of his literary activities.

7. How did his views resemble those of Tolstoy?

8. How did they differ?

9. What are the characteristics of Dostoevsky's style?

10. What are the chief types portrayed in his novels?

11. What two periods of his life are represented by his "Notes From a Dead House" and his later works?

12. Why has "What Is to Be Done?" achieved such popularity?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

_Buried Alive; or, Ten Years' Penal Servitude in Siberia._ ("Notes From a Dead House.") There are also other translations bearing various t.i.tles.