Russia: Its People and Its Literature Part 10

Such is the effect produced by a thorough reading of Turguenief's works; it is a symphony, a sweet and solemn music like the sounds of the forest. Turguenief is, without exaggeration, the best word-painter of landscape that ever wrote. His descriptions are neither very long nor very highly colored; there is a charming sobriety about them that reminds one of the saving strokes with which the skilful painter puts life into his trees and skies without stopping over the careful delineation of leaf and cloud after the manner of the j.a.panese. The details are not visible, but felt. He rarely lays stress on minor points; but if he does so, it is with the same sense of congruity that a great composer reiterates a motive in music. Turguenief's enemies make ground of this very dexterity, which is displayed in all his works, for denying him originality,--as though originality must need be independent of the eternal laws of proportion and harmony which are the natural measures of beauty.

Ernest Renan p.r.o.nounced quite another opinion, however, when, according to the custom of the French, he delivered a discourse over the tomb that was about to receive the mortal remains of Turguenief, on the 1st of October, 1883. He said that Turguenief was not the conscience of one individual, but in a certain sense that of a whole people,--the incarnation of a race, the voice of past generations that slept the sleep of ages until he evoked them. For the mult.i.tude is silent, and the poet or the prophet must serve as its interpreter; and Turguenief holds this att.i.tude to the great Sclavonic race, whose entrance upon the world's stage is the most astounding event of our century. Divided by its own magnitude, the Sclav race is united in the great soul and the conciliatory spirit of Turguenief, Genius having accomplished in a day that which Time could not do in ages. He has created an atmosphere of beautiful peace, wherein those who fought as mortal enemies may meet and clasp each other by the hand.

It was just this impartiality and universality, which Renan praises so highly, that alienated from Turguenief many of his contemporaries and compatriots. Where ideas are at war, whoever takes a neutral position makes himself the enemy to both parties. Turguenief knew this, and he used sometimes to say, on hearing the bitter judgments pa.s.sed upon him, "Let them do what they like: my soul is not in their hands." Not only the revolutionaries took it ill that he did not explicitly cast his adhesion with them, but the country at large, whose national pride spurned foreign civilization, was offended at the candor and realism of his observations. And Turguenief, though Russian every inch of him, loved Latin culture, and had developed and perfected by a.s.sociation with French writers, such as Prosper Merimee and Gustave Flaubert, those qualities of precision, clearness, and skill in composition, which distinguish him above all his countrymen; yet this was a serious offence to the most of these latter.

Among modern French novelists, those who, to my mind, most resemble Turguenief in the nature of their talents, are, first, Daudet, for intensity of emotion and richness of design, and then the brothers Goncourt in some, though not very many, pages. Yet there is a notable difference in all. Daudet is less the epic poet than Turguenief, because he devotes himself to the study of certain special aspects of Parisian fife, while Turguenief takes in the whole physiognomy of his immense country. From the laboring peasants and the nihilist students to the generals and government clerks, he depicts every condition,--except the highest society, which has been reserved for Leon Tolsto. And everything is vivid, interesting, fascinating,--the poor paralytic of "Living Relics," as well as the courageous heroine of "Virgin Soil,"--everything is real as well as poetical. Truth and poetry are united in him as closely as soul and body. Though he is an indefatigable observer, he never tires the reader; his heart overflowed with sentiment, yet his good taste never permitted him to utter a false note either of brutality or cant; he was a most eloquent advocate of emanc.i.p.ation, moderation, and peace, yet no diatribe of either a social or political character ever ruffled the celestial calm of his muse.

Puchkine and Turguenief are, to my mind, the two Russian spirits worthy to be called _cla.s.sic_.

Those who knew him and a.s.sociated with him speak of his goodness as one speaks of a mountain's height when gazing upward from its foot. Voguie calls him a heavenly soul, one of the poor in spirit burning with the fire of inspiration, one who seemed, amid the hard and selfish world, the vain and jealous world of French letters, a visionary with gaze distraught and heart unsullied, a member of some shepherd tribe or patriarchal family. Every Russian that arrived penniless in Paris went straight to his house for protection and a.s.sistance.

[1] This work is better known to American readers in a translation ent.i.tled "Lisa."--Tr.

II.

Gontcharof and Oblomovism.

The rival and compet.i.tor of Turguenief--not in Europe, but in Russia--was a novelist of whom I must say something at least, though I do not consider that he holds a place among the great masters; I mean Gontcharof. This author's talents were fostered under the influence of the famous critic Bielinsky, who professed and taught the principles promulgated by Gogol,--demanded that art should be a faithful representation of life, and its princ.i.p.al object the study of the people.

Ivan Gontcharof was not of the n.o.bility, like Turguenief, but came of a family of traders, and was born in the critical year of 1812. His life was humble and laborious; he was a tutor, and then a government employee, and made a tour of the world aboard the frigate "Pallas." He began his literary career in the middle of that most glorious decade for Russian letters known as "the forties." His first novel, ent.i.tled "A Vulgar History," attracted public attention, and it is said that a secret notice from the imperial censor in consequence was the cause of the long silence of twelve years which the author maintained until the time when he wrote "Oblomof," which is, to my mind, one of the most pleasing and characteristic Russian novels. I must admit that I am acquainted with only the first volume of it, for the simple reason that it is the only one translated; and I must add that this volume begins with the moment when the hero awakes from sleep, and ends with his resolve to get up and dress and go out into the street! Yet this odd little volume has an indescribable charm, an intensity of feeling which takes the place of action, and incidents as easily invented by the idealist as observed by the realist. In these days the art of story-telling has undergone a great change; the hero no longer keeps a dagger, a cup of poison, rope-ladders, and rivals at hand, but he runs to the other extreme, not less trivial and puerile perhaps, of exaggerating small incidents that are uninteresting, and irrelevant to the subject or the essential thought of the work from an artistic point of view. But in "Oblomof," whose hero does nothing but lie still in bed, there is not a detail or a line that is superfluous to the harmonious effect of the whole. Of course I can only speak of the one volume I have read. One may imagine that the author would like to portray the state of enervation and disorganization to which the essence of autocratic despotism had brought Russian society; or perhaps it is one aspect of the Russian soul, the dreamy indolence and insuperable apathy of the body, which weighs down the active work of the imagination. It is only a study of a psychical condition, yet what intense life throbs in its pages!

Perhaps this admirable and original novel was not translated in its entirety for fear of offending French taste, which demands more excitement, and could not stand a long a.n.a.lytical narrative full of detail, mere intellectual filigree. Turguenief was undeniably a greater artist than his rival; but he never attained to the precision, lucidity, and singular strength of "Oblomof" in any of his novels.

As the character of the hero was drawn to the life, the nation recognized it at once, and the word _oblomovism_ became incorporated into the language, implying the typical indolence of the Sclav. On some accounts I find Turguenief's "Living Relics" more comparable to this novel than any others of his. Both present one single phase or state of the soul; both are purely psychological studies; the chief character of both does not change position, the position in which he has been fixed by the will of the novelist,--I had almost said the dissecting surgeon.

"Oblomof" is in reality a type of the Sclav who chases the b.u.t.terfly of his dreams through the still air. Study he regards, from his pessimist point of view, as useless, because it will not lead him to earthly happiness; and yet his soul is full of poetry and his heart of tenderness; he reaches out toward illimitable horizons, and his imagination is hard at work, but all his other faculties are asleep.

III.

Dostoiewsky, Psychologist and Visionary.

Now let us turn to that visionary novelist whom Voguie introduces to his readers in these words:

"Here comes the Scythian, the true Scythian, who puts off the habiliments of our modern intellect, and leads us by the hand to the centre of Moscow, to the monstrous Cathedral of St. Basil, wrought and painted like a Chinese paG.o.da, built by Tartar architects, and yet consecrated to the G.o.d whom the Christians adore. Dostoiewsky was educated at the same school, led by the same current of thought, and made his first appearance in the same year as Turguenief and Tolsto; but the latter are opposite poles, and have but one ground in common, which is the sympathy for humanity, which was incarnate and expanded in Dostoiewsky to the highest degree of piety, to pious despair, if such a phrase is possible."

Dostoiewsky is really the barbarian, the primitive type, whose heart-strings still reverberate certain motive tones of the Russian soul that were incompatible with the harmonious and tranquil spirit of Turguenief. Dostoiewsky has the feverish, unreasoning, abnormal psychological intensity of the cultivated minds of his country. Let no one of tender heart and weak nerves read his books; and those who cling to cla.s.sic serenity, harmony, and brightness should not so much as touch them. He leads us into a new region of aesthetics, where the horrible is beautiful, despair is consoling, and the ign.o.ble has a halo of sublimity: where guilty women teach gospel truths, and men are regenerated by crimes; where the prison is the school of compa.s.sion, and fetters are a poetic element. Much against our will we are forced to admire a novelist whose pages almost excite to a.s.sa.s.sination and nightmare horrors, this Russian Dante who will not allow us to omit a single circle of the Inferno.

Feodor, son of Michael Dostoiewsky, was born in Moscow in 1821, in a hospital at which his father was a medical attendant. There is frequently a strange connection between the environment of great writers and the development and direction of their genius, not always evident to the general public, but apparent to the careful critic; in Dostoiewsky's case it seems plain enough to all, however. His family belonged to the country gentlefolk from whom the cla.s.s of government employees are drawn; Feodor, with his brother Alexis, whom he dearly loved, entered the school of military engineers, though his tastes were rather for belles-lettres and the humanities than for dry and unartistic details.

His literary education was therefore reduced to fitful readings of Balzac, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and especially of Gogol, whose works first inspired him with tenderness toward the humble, the outcast, and the miserable. Shortly after leaving college he abandoned his career for a literary life, and began the usual struggle with the difficulties of a young writer's precarious condition. The struggle lasted almost to the end of his life; for forty years he was never sure of any other than prison bread. Proud and suspicious by nature, the humiliations and bitterness of poverty must have contributed largely to unsettle his nerves, disconcert his mind, and undermine his health, which was so precarious that he used sometimes to leave on his table before going to sleep a paper with the words: "I may fall into a state of insensibility to-night; do not bury me until some days have pa.s.sed." He was sometimes afflicted with epilepsy, cruelly aggravated later in Siberia under the lashes laid upon his bleeding shoulders.

Like one of his own heroes he dreamed of fame; and without having read or shown his ma.n.u.scripts to any one, alone with his chimeras and vagaries, he pa.s.sed whole nights in imaginary intercourse with the characters he created, loving them as though they had been his relatives or his friends, and weeping over their misfortunes as though they had been real. These were hours of pure emotion, ideal love, which every true artist experiences some time in his life. Dostoiewsky was hen twenty-three years old. One day he begged a friend to take a few chapters of his first novel called "The Poor People" to the popular poet Nekrasof; his friend did so, and in the early hours of the morning the famous poet called at the door of the unknown writer and clasped him in his arms under the excitement of the emotion caused by perusal of the story. Nekrasof did not remit his attentions; he at once sought the dreaded critic Bielinsky, the intellectual chief and lawgiver of the glorious company of writers to which Turguenief, Tolsto, and Gontcharof belonged, the Russian Lessing, who died of consumption at the age of thirty-eight years, just when others are beginning to acquire discernment and tranquillity,--the great Bielinsky, who had formed two generations of great artists and pushed forward the national literature to a complete development. A man in his position, more p.r.o.ne to meet with the sham than the genuine in art, would naturally be not over-delighted to receive people armed with rolls of ma.n.u.script. When Nekrasof entered his room exclaiming, "A new Gogol is born to us!" the critic replied in a bad humor, "Gogols are born nowadays as easily as mushrooms in a cellar." But when the author came in a tremor to learn the dictum of the judge, the latter cried out impetuously, "Young man, do you understand how much truth there is in what you have written? No, for you are scarcely more than twenty years old, and it is impossible that you should understand. It is a revelation of art, a gift of Heaven.

Respect this gift, and you will be a great writer!" The success achieved by this novel on its publication in the columns of a review did not belie Bielinsky's prophecy.

It is easy to understand the surprise of the critic on reading this work of a scarcely grown man, who yet seemed to have observed life with a vivid and deep sense of realism, and an unequivocal minuteness that is generally learned only through the bitter experience of prosaic sufferings, and comes forth after the illusions and vague sentimentalities of youth have been dispelled and practical life has begun. I said once, and I repeat it, that a true artist under twenty-five would be a marvel; Dostoiewsky was indeed such a marvel.

This first novel was the humble drama of two lonely souls, wounded and ground down by poverty, but not spoiled by it; a case such as one might meet with on turning the very next corner, and never think worthy of attention or study, and which, even in the midst of modern currents of thought, the novelist is quite likely to pa.s.s by. Yet the book is a work of art,--of the new and the old art compounded, cla.s.sic art infused with the new warm blood of truth. This work of Dostoiewsky, this touching, tearful story, had a model in Gogol's "The Cloak," but it goes beyond the latter in energy and depth of sadness. If Dostoiewsky ever invoked a muse, it must have been the muse of Hypochondria.

It was not likely that Dostoiewsky would escape the political fatality which pursued the generality of Russian writers. During those memorable _forties_ the students were wont to meet more or less secretly for the purpose of reading and discussing Fourier, Louis Blanc, and Proudhon.

About 1847 these circles began to expand, and to admit public and military men; they were moved by one desire, and what began as an intellectual effervescence ended in a conspiracy. Dostoiewsky was good material for any revolutionary cabal, being easily disposed thereto by his natural enmity to society, his continuous poverty, his nervous excitement, his Utopian dreams, and his inordinate and fanatical compa.s.sion for the outcast cla.s.ses. The occasion was ill-timed, and the hour a dangerous one, being just at the time of the French outbreak, which seemed a menace to every throne in Europe. The police got wind of it, and on the 23rd of April, 1849, thirty-four suspected persons were arrested, the brothers Feodor and Alexis Dostoiewsky among them. The novelist was thrown into a dungeon of the citadel, and when at last he came forth, it was to mount the scaffold in a public square with some of his companions. They stood there in shirt-sleeves, in an intense cold, expecting at first only to hear read the sentence of the Council of War.

While they waited, Dostoiewsky began to relate to a friend the plan of a new novel he had been thinking about in prison; but he suddenly exclaimed, as he heard the officer's voice, "Is it possible we are to be executed?" His friend pointed to a car-load of objects which, though covered with a cloth, were shaped much like coffins. The suspicion was soon confirmed; the prisoners were all tied to posts, and the soldiers formed in line ready to fire. Suddenly, as the order was about to be given, word arrived from the emperor commuting the death-sentence to exile to Siberia. The prisoners were untied. One of them had lost his reason.

Dostoiewsky and the others then set out upon their sad journey; on arriving at Tobolsk they were each shaved, laden with chains, and sent to a different station. During this painful experience a pathetic incident occurred which engraved itself indelibly upon the mind of the novelist, and is said to have largely influenced his works. The wives of the "Decembrists" (conspirators of twenty-five years before), most of them women of high rank who had voluntarily exiled themselves in order to accompany their husbands, came to visit in prison the new generation of exiles, and having nothing of material value to offer them, they gave each one a copy of the Gospels. During his four years of imprisonment, Dostoiewsky never slept without this book under his pillow; he read it incessantly, and taught his more ignorant fellow-prisoners to read it also.

He now found himself among outcasts and convicts, and his ears were filled with the sounds of unknown languages and dialects, and speech which, when understood, was profane and abhorrent, and mixed with yells and curses more dreadful than all complaints. What horrible martyrdom for a man of talent and literary vocation,--reckoned with evil-doers, compelled to grind gypsum, and deprived of every means of satisfying the hunger and activity of his mind! Why did he not go mad? Some may answer, because he was that already,--and perhaps they would not be far wrong; for no writer in Russia, not excepting even Gogol and Tolsto, so closely approaches the mysterious dividing line, thin as a hair, which separates insanity and genius. The least that can be said is, that if Dostoiewsky was not subject to mental aberration from childhood, he had a violent form of neurosis. He was a bundle of nerves, a harp with strings too tense; he was a victim of epilepsy and hallucinations, and the results are apparent in his life and in his books. But it is a strange fact that he himself said that had it not been for the terrible trials he endured, for the sufferings of the prison and the scaffold, he certainly _would have gone mad_, and he believed that these experiences fortified his mind; for, the year previous to his captivity, he declared that he suffered a terrible temptation of the Devil, was a victim to chimerical infirmities, and overwhelmed with an inexplicable terror which he calls _mystic fear_, and thus describes in one of his novels: "On the approach of twilight I was attacked by a state of soul which frequently comes upon me in the night; I will call it _mystic fear_. It is an overwhelming terror of _something_ which I can neither define nor imagine, which has no existence in the natural order of things, but which I feel may at any moment become real, and appear before me as an inexorable and horrible _thing_." It seems then quite possible that the writer was cured of his imaginary ills by real ones.

I have remarked that Gogol's "Dead Souls" reminded me of "Don Quixote"

more than any book I know; let me add that the book inspired by the prison-life of Dostoiewsky--"The Dead House"--reminds me most strongly of Dante's Inferno. There is no exact likeness or affinity of literary style; for "The Dead House" is not a poem, but a plain tale of the sufferings of a few prisoners in a miserable Siberian fort. And yet it is certainly _Dantesque_. Instead of the laurel-crowned poet in scholar's gown, led by the bright genius of antiquity, we see the wistful-eyed, tearful Sclav, his compressed lips, his att.i.tude of resignation,--and in his hands a copy of the Gospels; but the Florentine and the Russian manifest the same melancholy energy, use the same burin to trace their burning words on plates of bronze, and unite a prophetic vision with a brutal realism of miserable and sinful humanity.

"The Dead House" also has the merit of being perhaps the most profound study written in Europe upon the penitentiary system and criminal physiology; it is a more powerful teacher of jurists and legislators than all didactic treatises. Dostoiewsky shows especially, and with implacable clearness, the effect produced on the minds of the prisoners by the cruel penalty of the lash. The complacency of narration, the elaborateness of detail, the microscopic precision with which he notes every phase of this torture, inflict positive pain upon the nervous system of the reader. It is fascinating, it is the refinement of barbarism, but it was also a work of charity, for it finally brought about the abolition of that kind of punishment, and wiped out a foul stain upon the Russian Code. It makes one turn cold and shudder to read those pages which describe this torture,--so calmly and carefully related without one exclamation of pity or comment, and even sometimes painfully humorous. The trepidation of the condemned for days before it is inflicted, his frenzy after it is over, his subterfuges to avoid it, the blind fury with which sometimes he yields to it, throwing himself under the painful blows as a despairing man throws himself into the sea,--these are word-pictures never to be forgotten.

Voguie makes a striking comparison of the different fates awarded to certain books, and says that while "My Prisons," by Silvio Pellico, went all over the world, this autobiographical fragment by Dostoiewsky was unknown to Europe until very recently; yet it is far superior in sincerity and energy to that of the Italian prisoner. The most interesting and moving stories of captivity that I know of are Russian, and chief among them I would mention "Memories of a Nihilist," by Paulowsky. The tone of resignation, of melancholy simplicity, in all these tales, however, is sure to touch all hearts. I will not quote a line from "The Dead House;" it must be read, attentively and patiently, and, like most Russian books, it has not the merit of brevity. But the style is so shorn of artifice and rhetorical pretension, and the story runs along so unaffectedly, that I cannot select any one page as an example of excellence; for the excellence of the book depends on the whole,--on the acc.u.mulated force of observation, on the complete aspect of a soul that feels deeply and sees clearly,--and we must not break the icy ring of Siberian winter which encloses it. It is enhanced by the apparent serenity of the writer, by his sweetness, his half-Christian, half-Buddhist resignation. With the Gospels in his hand, Dostoiewsky at last leaves his house of pain, without rancor or hatred or choleric protests; more than this, he leaves it declaring that the trial has been beneficial to him, that it has regenerated body and soul; that in prison he has learned to love the brethren, and to find the spark of goodness and truth lighted by G.o.d's hand even in the souls of reprobates and criminals; to know the charity that pa.s.ses understanding and the pity that is foolishness to the wise; he has learned, in fact, _to love_,--the only learning that can redeem the condemned.

Although he had been (at the time of writing this) four years released from prison, he delayed still six years longer before returning to Europe to publish his works. When he began his labors for the press, he did not unite himself to the liberal party, but, erratic as usual, he turned to the Sclavophiles,--the blind lovers of old usages and customs, the bitter enemies of the civilization of the Occident. Fate was not yet weary in persecuting him. After the death of his wife and brother he was obliged to flee the country on account of his creditors. His sorrows were not exactly of the sublime nature of Puchkine's and the melancholy poet's; they were on the contrary very prosaic,--lack of money, combined with terrible fits of epilepsy. To understand the mortifications of poverty to a proud and sensitive man, one must read Dostoiewsky's correspondence,--so like Balzac's in its incessant complaints against pecuniary affairs. He exclaims, "The details of my poverty are shameful.

I cannot relate them. Sometimes I spend the whole night walking my room like a caged beast, tearing my hair in despair. I must have such or such a sum to-morrow, without fail!" Gloomy and ill, he wandered through Germany, France, and Italy, caring nothing for the wonders of civilization, and impressed by no sights except the guillotine. He wrote during this time his three princ.i.p.al novels, whose very names are nightmares,--"Possessed with Devils," "The Idiot," and "Crime and Punishment."

I know by experience the diabolical power of Dostoiewsky's psychological a.n.a.lysis. His books make one ill, although one appear to be well. No wonder that they exercise a perturbing influence on Russian imaginations, which are only too p.r.o.ne to hallucination and mental ecstasy. I will briefly mention his best and most widely known book, "Crime and Punishment," of which the following is the argument: A student commits a crime, and then voluntarily confesses it to the magistrate. This seems neither more nor less than an ordinary notice in the newspaper, but what an a.n.a.lysis is conveyed by means of it! It is horrible to think that the sentiments so studiously wrought out can be human, and that we all carry the germs of them hidden in some corner of the soul; and not only human, but possessed even by a person of great intellectual culture, like the hero, whose crime is the result of great reading reduced to horrible sophisms. Those two Parisian students who, after saturating their minds with Darwin and Haeckel, cut a woman to pieces with their histories, must have been prototypes of Rodion Romanovitch, the hero of this novel of Dostoiewsky. This young man is not only clever, but possesses really refined sentiments; one of the motives that lead to his crime is that one of his sisters, the most dearly loved, may have to marry an unworthy man in order to insure the welfare of the family. Such a _sale_ as this poor girl's marriage would be seems to the student a greater wrong than the a.s.sa.s.sination of the old money-lender. The first seed of the crime falls upon his soul on overhearing at a wine-shop a dialogue between another student and an officer. "Here you have on the one hand," says the student, "an old woman, sick, stupid, wicked, useful to n.o.body, and only doing harm to all the world about her, who does not know what she lives for, and who, when you least expect it, will die a natural death; you have on the other hand a young creature whose strength is being wasted for lack of sustenance, a hundred lives that might be guided into a right path, dozens of families that might be saved from dest.i.tution, dissolution, ruin, and vice if that old woman's money were only available. If somebody were to kill her and use her fortune for the good of humanity, do you not think that a thousand good deeds would compensate for the crime? It is a mathematical question. What weight has a stupid, evil-minded old shrew in the social scale? About as much as a bed-bug."

"Without doubt," replies the officer, "the old woman does not deserve to live. But--what can you do? Nature--"

"My friend," the other replies, "Nature can be corrected and amended.

If it were not so we should all be buried to the neck in prejudices, and there would not be a great man amongst us."

This atrocious ratiocination takes hold upon Rodion's mind, and he carries it out to terribly logical consequences. Napoleon sacrificed thousands of men on the altar of his genius; why had he not the right to sacrifice one ridiculous old woman to his own great needs? The ordinary man must not infringe the law; but the extraordinary man may authorize his conscience to do away with certain obstacles in his path.

It has been said that Dostoiewsky's talents were influenced in some measure by the fascinating personality of Edgar Poe. The a.n.a.logies are apparent; but the author of "The Gold Beetle," with all his suggestive intensity and his feverish imagination, never achieved any such tremendous psychological a.n.a.lyses as those of "Crime and Punishment." It is impossible to select an example from it; every page is full of it.

The temptation that precedes the a.s.sa.s.sination, the horrible moment of committing it, the manner of disposing of the traces of it, the agonizing terror of being discovered, the instinct which leads him back to the scene of the crime with no motive but to yield to a desire as irresistible as inexplicable, his fearful visit to the place where he lives over again the moment when he plunged the knife into the old woman's skull,--examining all the furniture, laying his hand upon the bell again, with a fiendish enjoyment of the sound of it, and looking again for the marks of blood on the floor,--it is too well done; it makes one excited, nervous, and ill.

"Is this beautiful?" some will ask. All that Dostoiewsky has written bears the same character; it wrings the soul, perverts the imagination, overturns one's ideas of right and wrong to an incredible degree.

Sometimes one is lost in abysms of gloomy uncertainty, like Hamlet; again one sees the struggle of the evil genius against Providence, like Faust, or a soul lacerated by remorse like Macbeth; and all his heroes are fools, madmen, maniacs, and philosophers of hypochondria and desperation. And yet I say that this is beauty,--tortured, twisted, Satanic, but intense, grand, and powerful. Dostoiewsky's are bad books to read during digestion, or on going to bed at night, when every dim object takes an unusual shape, and every breath stirs the window curtains; they are not good books to take to the country, where one sits under the spreading trees with a fresh and fragrant breeze and a soul expanded with contentment, and one thanks G.o.d only to be alive. But they are splendid books for the thinker who devours them with reflective attention,--his brow furrowed under the light of the student-lamp, and feeling all around him the stir and excitement of a great city like Paris or St. Petersburg.

But there is a drop of balm in the cup of absinthe to which we may liken Dostoiewsky's books; it is the Christianity which appears in them when and where its consoling presence is least expected. Face to face with the student who becomes a criminal through pride and injudicious reading, we see the figure of a pure, modest, pious girl, who redeems him by her love. This unfortunate girl is a flower that fades before its time; it is she who, being sacrificed to provide bread for her family, comes in time to convince the criminal of his sin, enlightens his mind with the lamp of the Gospels, and brings him to repentance, resignation, and the joy of regeneration, in the expiation of his crime by chastis.e.m.e.nt and the dungeon.

There is one marked difference between "Crime and Punishment" and "The Dead House." The novel is feverish, the autobiography is calm.

Dostoiewsky is a madman who owes his lucid intervals to tribulations and torture. Suffering clears his mind and alleviates his pain; tears sweeten his bitterness, and sorrow is his supreme religion; like his student hero, he prostrates himself before human suffering.

The best way of taking the measure of Dostoiewsky's personality is to compare him with his compet.i.tor and rival, and perhaps his enemy, Ivan Turguenief. There could be no greater contrast. Turguenief is above all an artist, almost cla.s.sic in his serenity, master of the arts of form, delicate, refined, exquisite, a perfect scene-painter, an always interesting narrator, reasonable and temperately liberal in his opinions, optimist, or, if I may be allowed the word, Olympic, to the extent that he could boast of being able to die tranquilly because he had enjoyed all that was truly beautiful in life. Dostoiewsky is a rabid psychologist, almost an enemy to Nature and the sensuous world, a furious and implacable painter of prisons, hospitals, public houses and by-streets of great cities, awkward in his style, taking only a one-sided view of character, a revolutionary and yet a reactionary in politics, and not only adverse to every sort of paganism, but hazily mystical,--the apostle of redemption through suffering, and of the compa.s.sion which seeks wounds to cure with its healing lips. Their two lives are correlative to their characters,--Turguenief in the Occident, famous and fortunate; Dostoiewsky in the Orient, a barbarian, the plaything of destiny, fighting with poverty shoulder to shoulder. It was only natural that sooner or later the two novelists should know each other as enemies. It is sad to relate that Dostoiewsky attacked Turguenief in so furious a manner that it can only be attributed to envy and malice.

In his own country, however, and in respect to his popularity and influence with young people, the author of "Crime and Punishment" ranked higher than the author of "Virgin Soil." Just in proportion as Turguenief was attractive to us in the West, Dostoiewsky fascinated the people of his country. "Crime and Punishment" was an event in Russia.

Dostoiewsky had the honor--if honor it may be called--of dealing a blow upon the soul of his compatriots, and on this account, as he himself used sometimes to say, especially after his epileptic attacks, he felt himself to be a great criminal, and the guilt of a villanous act weighed upon his soul; and it happened that a certain student, after reading his book, thought himself possessed by the same impulses as the hero, and committed a murder with the same circ.u.mstances and details.

After writing "Crime and Punishment," Dostoiewsky's talent declined; his defects became more marked, his psychology more and more involved and painful, his heroes more insensate, lunatic, epileptic, and overwrought, absorbed in inexplicable contemplations, or wandering, rapt in delirious dreams, through the streets. His novels are, in fact, the antechamber to the madhouse. But we may once more notice the influence of Cervantes on Russian minds; for the most important character created by Dostoiewsky, after the hero of "Crime and Punishment," is a type, imitated after Quixote, in "The Idiot,"--a righter of wrongs, a fool, or rather a sublime innocent.