Why we should read Part 32

"He fell to musing over the words: 'Now or never!' As he listened inwardly to this despairing appeal of reason and will-power, he consciously weighed the little will-power that was left to him, whither he would carry it, into what he would put that paltry remnant. After having pondered over it painfully, he seized the pen, dragged a book out of the corner, and in one hour wanted to read, write, and think all that he had neglected to read, write, and think in ten years. What was he to do now? To go ahead, or to remain? This Oblmov question was of more import to him than Hamlet's. To go ahead--that would mean at once doffing his comfortable dressing gown, not only from the shoulders, but from the soul and mind; together with the cobweb on the walls to sweep away the cobweb from the eyes, and regain eyesight! What first step should be made for this? Where begin? 'I do not know--I cannot--no, I am begging the question, I do know, and---- And here is Stoltz by my side; he will tell me. What will he tell me? "In a week," he will say, "you must sketch a detailed instruction for your plenipotentiary and send him into the village. Get your Oblmovka mortgaged, buy some more land, send a plan of new buildings, give up your house, procure a pa.s.sport, and go abroad for six months, to get rid of your surplus fat, to throw off the weight, to refresh the soul with the atmosphere of which you have dreamed long ago with your friend, to live without a dressing gown, without Zakhar and Tarantev, to put on your own socks and take off your own boots, sleep only at night, travel where all travel, on railroads, steamboats, and then---- Then to settle in Oblmovka, to find out what sowing and threshing is, why peasants are poor or well-to-do, walk over the fields, go to elections, to the factory, to the mill, the docks. At the same time you are to read newspapers, books, and become excited why the English have sent a warship to the East----" That's what he will say! That's what is meant by going ahead, and thus it is to be all my life! Farewell, poetical ideal of life! That is some kind of a blacksmith shop, not life! There is in it an eternal fire, hammering, heat, din---- But when is one to live? Would it not be better to stay?

To stay means to put on a shirt over all, to hear the patter of Zakhar's feet as he jumps down from his couch, to dine with Tarantev, to think less about anything, never to finish the _Voyage to Africa_, to grow peacefully old in these chambers, at the house of Tarantev's lady friend.'

"'Now or never!' 'To be or not to be!' Oblmov was about to rise from his chair, but his foot did not at once find its way into the slipper, and he sat down again."

The publication of this novel in 1859 produced an instantaneous effect: everyone in Russia who read it recognised something of himself in Oblmov, and felt the disease of Oblmovism in his veins.

It is to miss out quite one of the major characteristics of the nation to discount this inertia which pervades every side of life. It is universal in that it expresses ultra-conservative fights to preserve old customs: Oblmov is remarkable for his inability to put up any sort of resistance to anything; he is frightened of everything, even of love: love is disquieting, restless.

There have been many Oblmovs in real life among even great Russian writers, though it seems paradoxical to think that any man who achieves fame could ever be preternaturally lazy. Krylov is a case in point.

This poet spent most of his days lying on a sofa: one day somebody pointed out to him that the nail on which a picture was hanging just over the sofa was loose, and that the picture would probably fall on his head. "No," said Krylov, "the picture will fall just beyond the sofa. I know the angle."

It must not be forgotten that Oblmov was in all respects save one entirely excellent: he had a heart of gold, a chaste mind and clear soul: it was just that his will was sapped: Olga, even after her marriage with her really splendid husband, continued to love Oblmov till the end. It was simply that he had forfeited her respect.

VIII

DOSTOIEVSKY (1821-1881)

Quite one of the most remarkable things about Dostoievsky is his complete ant.i.thesis to Tolstoy in everything. Tolstoy is healthy, Dostoievsky epileptic. Tolstoy's life was strangely uneventful; Dostoievsky was condemned to death after a youth spent in poverty and misery: he endured four years' hard labour, six years in exile; he was for ever on the verge of financial ruin; his wife, his brother and his best friend all died within a very short time of one another; he was attacked and hara.s.sed on all sides; he wrote under the very worst possible conditions, starving, ill and pressed for time. Tolstoy was a heretic and a materialist; Dostoievsky was a devout believer in Christianity; and a mystic. Tolstoy was narrow, while Dostoievsky was one of the most broadminded men who ever lived. Tolstoy hated the supernatural. Dostoievsky lived as Blake did among the unknown, and seemed to regard this world only as fantastic and unreal. Tolstoy was eaten up with pride; Dostoievsky preached and practised a humility almost Christ-like. Tolstoy hated and did not understand Art; Dostoievsky was superbly Catholic and cosmopolitan in his tastes.

Tolstoy was characterised by a magnificent intolerance, Dostoievsky by a sweet reasonableness. Tolstoy dreamt of giving all to the poor, and did nothing, while Dostoievsky shared every moment of his life with the lowest criminals: and finally Tolstoy was purposely autobiographical from start to finish, whereas from Dostoievsky we learn nothing whatever from his books. He was as objective as Shakespeare. He does not care to talk about himself. This does not mean that he does not reveal himself in his books. He does, and Christ-like indeed is the character that emanates as the result ... but he does not see himself in all his main characters as Tolstoy does. His sufferings did not make him cynical or cruel; once when a gushing young lady accosted him with "Gazing at you I can trace your suffering," he replied: "What suffering?" He drew but little on his personal experiences. He was pa.s.sionately Slavophil, and therefore opposed in that to Turgenev, whose genius none the less he perceived and revered.

He was the son of a staff-surgeon and a tradesman's daughter, born in a charity hospital at Moscow, brought up in the direst penury. He was, like Goldsmith, quite thriftless, and unable to realise the value of money. Of a confiding nature and withal kindly, he was at the mercy of all those who found it worth while to take advantage of him. Tolstoy, as you will remember, was thrifty and domestic, while Dostoievsky was profuse and a houseless vagabond. Yet another point of divergence.

Tolstoy thinks that he hates money, but money loves him. Dostoievsky thinks that he loves money, and money flees from him. As Merejkvski so neatly puts it, all worldly advantages in Tolstoy are centripetal, in Dostoievsky centrifugal. Tolstoy was careful in spite of the apparent pa.s.sionateness of his impulses never to overstep the mark; Dostoievsky was for ever giving rein to irregularities and vices: Middleton Murry suggests that he gave way to these on purpose to show his oneness with man in a world to which he could never accustom himself. His first novel, _Poor Folk_, was a prodigious success, which made the failure of the second, _The Double_, all the more terrible to him. From this time his literary career became a life-long and desperate struggle to re-establish himself in the good graces of his fellow-countrymen. Having allied himself about this time with the Petrachevsky circle of socialists and Slavophils, he was one evening led to declaim Pushkin's _Ode on the Abolition of Serfdom_, and in the discussion that followed is said to have declared that if reform could only come through insurrection, "Then insurrection let it be." This was enough to lead to his arrest, and on 22nd December 1849 he was taken with twenty-one others to the scaffold to be executed. All the prisoners were stripped to their shirts in twenty-one degrees of frost and the death sentence was read out. They were then bound in threes to stakes and prepared themselves for death. Suddenly they were unbound and informed that the Tsar had commuted the penalty of death to that of hard labour. But the strain had been too much. From this moment Dostoievsky looks back on a world that he had so nearly left that he could never quite believe that he belonged to it. His four years in Siberia is turned to magnificent use, as we see in _The House of The Dead_, where we see criminals behave exactly as English Public School boys: we never regard them as miscreants, always as unfortunate victims of adverse circ.u.mstances.

After these terrible times were over he served for three years as a private soldier and was promoted to be an officer. He turned his back on Socialism because of its materialism and atheistic tendency. He had only joined this section of the community because his nature ever made him seek out what was most difficult, disastrous, hard and terrible. During his imprisonment his epilepsy became more p.r.o.nounced and his fits recurred with alarming frequency. But there was something lofty and jubilant, a sort of religious revelation which he experienced when the sacred sickness was on him that coloured all the rest of his life.

Then suddenly it was as if something had been rent asunder before him, an unwonted inward light dawned upon his soul, he says in one of his descriptions. Again we are led to a comparison with Tolstoy, for whom with his superb animal vitality the light of death is thrown on life from without, whereas for Dostoievsky the revealing light comes from within. Life and death are one to him; to Tolstoy they are in eternal antagonism.

The former with the eyes of the spirit world looks on life from a footing which to those who live seems death, while the latter looks at death from within the house of life with the eyes of this world.

From his earliest youth Dostoievsky was an omnivorous reader, revelling in and appreciating not only Homer, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Schiller and Hoffmann, but also all the great French cla.s.sics of the seventeenth century: throughout his life he kept alive his pa.s.sion for universal culture. He is at once that most curious anomaly, the most Russian of the Russians, and yet the greatest cosmopolitan, and herein once more shows his complete difference from Tolstoy, who, trying to become cosmopolitan, ended by living more completely limited by place and time and nationality than almost any other writer we know. The enthusiasm for the distant simply did not exist for him: every fibre and root in him is fixed in the present. He visited Italy and brought therefrom no impressions. He is unable to appreciate either aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Wagner or Beethoven. He even comes to regard all his own work as bad art, with the exception of two tales which are easily his weakest. He was never a man of letters as Dostoievsky was. All his life he was ashamed of literature, while Dostoievsky loved it. He was proud of his calling and counted it high and sacred, though he valued his creations in terms of cash.

"Many a time," he writes, "the beginning of a chapter of a novel was already at the printer's and being set up while the end was still in my brain and had to be ready without fail next day. Work out of sheer want has crushed and eaten me up."

He complains that Turgenev, who has two thousand serfs, gets a hundred and fifty pounds, while he, needy as he was, got only thirty-eight pounds. "Poverty forces me to hurry, and so, of course, spoils my work."

Endlessg rows of figures and accounts, interspersed with desperate entreaties for help, fill all his letters.

He edited a paper, the _Vremya_, which met with some success and promised a regular income. Without warning the periodical was prohibited by the censor for publishing a quite harmless article on Poland.

Undaunted, he started another venture, the _Epocha_, which incurred the wrath not only of the Government but also of the Liberal party. It was at this time that his brother Michael, his dearest friend Grigoviev, and his first wife, Maria, all died.

"And here I am left all alone," he writes, "and I feel simply broken. I have, literally, nothing left to live for." The _Epocha_ failed, its editor became temporarily insolvent, having debts amounting to one thousand four hundred pounds in bills and seven hundred pounds in debts of honour. He starts feverishly on a novel to begin to pay the load off.

In the end, to avoid the debtors' prison, he is forced to fly the country. He spent four years of incredible extremes of want abroad, p.a.w.ning even his "last linen" to keep going.

"They expect literature of me now," he moans. "Why, how can I write at all? I walk about and tear my hair and cannot sleep of nights. They point to Turgenev and Goncharov. Let them see the state in which I have to work."

And yet in spite of all this he takes a pride in his work, recasting cherished chapters again and again, burning what failed to satisfy him, starting afresh times without number. His attacks were in the meantime on the increase and he worked with ever greater difficulty. In spite of all he never lost heart. It is impossible to imagine circ.u.mstances which would have crushed him.

"I can bear everything, any suffering, if I can only keep on saying to myself, 'I live: I am in a thousand torments, but I live. I am on the pillar, but I exist. I see the sun, or I do not see the sun, but I know that it is. And to know that there is a sun, that is life enough.'"

And it is at this time (1865-1869), misunderstood by his readers, hara.s.sed by creditors, overwhelmed by the deaths of his nearest and dearest, in solitude, poverty and sickness, that he wrote _Crime and Punishment_, _The Idiot_ and _The Possessed_, and even planned _The Brothers Karamazov_.

He was not merely a man of letters, he is a true hero of literature, as heroic as any warrior or martyr. He fathomed the most dangerous and criminal depths of the human heart, especially the pa.s.sion of love in all its manifestations. At one end of his gamut he touches the highest, most spiritual pa.s.sion bordering on religious enthusiasm in Alyosha Karamazov, at the other that of the evil insect, "the she-spider who devours her own mate," in Smerdyakov, Ivan, Dmitri, Fedor.

At times he descends to depths which can only be accounted for as autobiographical fragments. As he himself confesses:

"At times I suddenly plunged into a sombre, subterranean, despicable debauchery. My squalid pa.s.sions were keen, glowing with morbid irritability. 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, recognised."

s.e.xual pa.s.sion appears with him at times a cruel, coa.r.s.e, even animal force, but never unnatural or perverted.

To Tolstoy the greatest of human sins is the infringement of conjugal fidelity. On the other hand, we hear self-condemnation on the lips of Dostoievsky in the words, "Live decently I cannot."

He gave way to the vice of gambling, and begs for loans with as much absence of self-respect as his own creation, Marmelador. Tolstoy, who also lost heavily at the tables, is able to pull himself up sharp, give up playing and live with the greatest frugality on sixteen shillings a month. He never lost his sense of proportion. Dostoievsky never had any.

"'Everywhere and in everything I go to extremes: all my life I have overshot the mark.'"

The life of Tolstoy was a pure and virgin water of a spring, that of Dostoievsky is the upgush of fire from elemental depths, mixed with lava, ashes, smoke and sulphur.

When his child dies, Dostoievsky, utterly self-forgetting, loves the child of his flesh, not according to the flesh, but the spirit, as a separate, eternal, irreplacable personality.

"But where is Sonia? I want Sonia."

On 26th January 1881 he died, leaving it to future generations to understand and appreciate the greatness of his genius. And what is the message that he leaves for us to pick up?

"'Love all G.o.d's creation--every grain of sand,'" says Zossima, "'every leaf, every ray of G.o.d, you should love. Love animals, love plants, love everything. Love everything, and you will arrive at G.o.d's secret in things.'"

Every one of his characters shows the conflict of heroic will: he concentrates all the artistic powers of his delineation into his dialogues, which are as fine as Tolstoy's are feeble. All Tolstoy's characters talk so alike that if we did not know who was speaking we should not be able to distinguish them at all by the language, whereas as soon as the first words are uttered in a novel of Dostoievsky we realise at once who it is that is talking. Hence Dostoievsky has no need to describe the appearance of his characters, for by their peculiar form of language and tones of voices they lay themselves bare before us. With Tolstoy we hear because we see; with Dostoievsky we see because we hear.

Then, too, we lose all sense of time in Dostoievsky: in the events of a single day he can make us feel that we have lived through aeons.

Added to this is the strange ethereal quality that marks out his characters from the normal. In Tolstoy we feel that the air is rare; we cannot breathe; it is the stage of calm before the storm: in Dostoievsky we feel the reviving freshness and the freedom of the storm itself.

Of one of Tolstoy's characters we read that "she does not condescend to be clever." Tolstoy seems himself to overlook the existence of the human mind altogether: Dostoievsky is pre-eminently a master of the mental rapier of feeling; he may lack many valuable qualities, but one never doubts his intelligence; all his characters are clever men first and foremost. Dostoievsky shows us how, contrary to popular opinion, abstract thought may be pa.s.sionate: all pa.s.sions and misdeeds in his work are the natural outcome of dialectic. Life is a tragedy to those who feel. And his characters feel deeply because they think deeply. They suffer endlessly because they deliberate endlessly: they dare to will because they dare to think. And the subject of their thought? In the main, G.o.d. They are all "G.o.d-tortured." This insatiable religious thirst is one of the most remarkable traits of the Russian spirit: when two or more Russians meet they immediately begin to discuss the immortality of the soul.

Most uncompromising of the realists, he yet ventures into depths. .h.i.therto undreamt of and unplumbed.

He seems to dwell with morbid intensity on hysterical women, sensualists, deformed creatures, idiots ... there is scarcely a healthy man or woman among his gallery of portraits. In Tolstoy there is scarcely one which does not emanate strength, physical perfection and complete self-control. Of a truth in Dostoievsky by his sickness we are healed. There is a sickness unto life, and this is the sickness that he depicts for us.

"What matter if it be a morbid state?" he writes. "What difference can it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation, when remembered and examined in the healthy state, proves to be in the highest degree harmony and beauty; and gives an unheard of and undreamed of feeling of completion, of balance, of satisfaction, and exultant prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life?"

This is all of a piece with the theory that great pain alone is the final emanc.i.p.ator of the soul. In other words, where Tolstoy has to content himself with the fame of a mere artist, Dostoievsky can look forward to recognition as a prophet.

Another point of divergence presents itself when we try to glean a picture of Moscow or Petrograd from these two writers. In Tolstoy we have only the country, the land, the dark, primitive soul of Russia, whereas in Dostoievsky we actually realise the towns in which he lays his action. And yet of these he draws such a picture that they become strangely fantastic and bizarre.

"I am dreadfully fond of realism in Art," he confessed, "when, so to speak, it is carried to the fantastic. What can be more fantastic and unexpected than reality? What most people call fantastic is, in my eyes, often the very essence of the real."