Landmarks in Russian literature

by Maurice Baring

FOOTNOTES:

[15] See, for instance, Mr. Frank Harris in his Shakespeare the Man: His Tragedy. See footnote, p. 124.

[16] The most striking instance I have come across lately of the cult for Tourgeniev in England is in Mr. Frank Harris’ remarkable book on Shakespeare. He illustrates his thesis that Shakespeare could not create a manly character, by saying that Shakespeare could not have drawn a Bazarov or a Marianna. Leaving the thesis out of the discussion, it is to me almost incredible that any one could think Tourgeniev’s characters manly, compared with those of Shakespeare. Tourgeniev played a hundred variations on the theme of the minor Hamlet. He painted a whole gallery of little Hamlets. Bazarov attains his strength at the expense of intellectual nihilism, but he is a neuropath compared with Mercutio. And Bazarov is the only one of Tourgeniev’s characters (and Tourgeniev’s acutest critics agree with this,—see Brückner and Vogüé) that has strength. Tourgeniev could no more have created a Falstaff than he could have flown. Where are these manly characters of Tourgeniev? Who are they? Indeed a Russian critic lately pointed out, à propos of Tchekov, that the whole of Russian politics, literature, and art, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, suffered from the misfortune of there being so many such Hamlets and so few Fortinbrases. I am convinced that had Mr. Harris been a Russian, or had Tourgeniev been an Englishman, Mr. Harris would not have held these views.

CHAPTER VI
DOSTOIEVSKY

“In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life; and this emotion is very variously provoked. We are moved when Levine labours in the field, when André sinks beyond emotion, when Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony, not cowardly, puts off his helmet, when Kent has infinite pity on the dying Lear, when in Dostoiefsky’s Despised and Rejected, the uncomplaining hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. These are notes which please the great heart of man.”

R. L. Stevenson, Across the Plains

“Raskolnikoff (Crime and Punishment) is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years.... I divined ... the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of to-day which prevents them from living in a book or a character and keeps them afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified....

“Another has been translated—Humiliés et offensés. It is even more incoherent than Le Crime et le Châtiment, but breathes much of the same lovely goodness.”[17]

R. L. Stevenson, Letters

I
Introductory

In the autumn of 1897 I was staying in the South of Russia at the house of a gentleman who has played no unimportant part in Russian politics. We were sitting one evening at tea, a party of nearly thirty people round the table, consisting of country gentlemen, neighbours and friends. The village doctor was present: he was an ardent Tolstoyist, and not only an admirer of Tolstoy’s genius, but a disciple, and a believer in his religious teaching. He had been talking on this subject for some time, and expressing his hero-worship in emphatic terms, when the son of my host, a boy at school, only seventeen years of age, yet familiar with the literature of seven languages, a writer, moreover, of English and Russian verse, fired up and said:

“In fifty years’ time we Russians shall blush with shame to think that we gave Tolstoy such fulsome admiration, when we had at the same time a genius like Dostoievsky, the latchet of whose shoes Tolstoy is not worthy to unloose.”

A few months after this I read an article on Dostoievsky in one of the literary weeklies in England, in which the writer stated that Dostoievsky was a mere fueilletonist, a concocter of melodrama, to be ranked with Eugène Sue and Xavier de Montépin. I was struck at the time by the divergence between English and Russian views on this subject. I was amazed by the view of the English critic in itself; but the reason that such a view could be expressed at all is not far to seek, since there is at this moment no complete translation of Dostoievsky’s works in England, and no literary translation of the same. Only one of his books, Crime and Punishment, is known at all, and the rest of them are difficult even to obtain in the English language.

However this may be, at the present time Dostoievsky’s fame in Russia is every day becoming more universally and more emphatically recognised. The present generation are inclined to consider him the greatest of all their novelists; and although they as a rule, with the critic Merejkowski, put him equal with Tolstoy as one of the two great pillars which uphold the Temple of Russian literature, they are for the most part agreed in thinking that he was a unique product, a more startling revelation and embodiment of genius, a greater elemental force, than Tolstoy or any other Russian writer of fiction. In fact, they hold the same view about him that we do with regard to Shelley in our poetical literature. We may not think that Shelley is a greater poet than Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge or Byron, but he certainly is a more exceptional incarnation of poetical genius. We can imagine poets like Keats arising again,—one nearly akin to him and almost equally exquisite did appear in the shape of Tennyson. We can imagine there being other writers who would attain to Wordsworth’s simplicity and communion with nature, but Shelley has as yet been without kith or kindred, without mate or equal, in the whole range of the world’s literary history. He does not appear to us like a plant that grows among others, differing from them only in being more beautiful and striking, which is true even of poets like Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe, who reveal in the highest degree qualities which other poets possess in a lesser degree, and complete and fulfil what the others aim at and only partially achieve; but Shelley is altogether different in kind: he aims at and achieves something which is beyond the range and beyond the ken of other poets. It is as though he were not a man at all, but an embodiment of certain elemental forces.

So it is with Dostoievsky. And for this reason those who admire him do so passionately and extravagantly. It must not be thought that they do not discern his faults, his incompleteness, and his limitations, but the positive qualities that he possesses seem to them matchless, and so precious, so rare, so tremendous, that they annihilate all petty criticism. The example of Shelley may again serve us here. Only a pedant, in the face of such flights of genius as “The Cloud,” the “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Sensitive Plant,” or that high pageant of grief, fantasy, of “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,”—“Adonais,”—would apply a magnifying glass to such poems and complain of the occasional lapses of style or of the mistakes in grammar which may be found in them. These poems may be full of trivial lapses of this kind, but such matters are of small account when a poet has evoked for us a vision of what dwells beyond the veil of the senses, and struck chords of a music which has the power and the wonder of a miracle.

With Dostoievsky the case is somewhat but not in all respects similar. He possesses a certain quality which is different in kind from those of any other writer, a power of seeming to get nearer to the unknown, to what lies beyond the flesh, which is perhaps the secret of his amazing strength; and, besides this, he has certain great qualities which other writers, and notably other Russian writers, possess also; but he has them in so far higher a degree that when seen with other writers he annihilates them. The combination of this difference in kind and this difference in degree makes something so strong and so tremendous, that it is not to be wondered at when we find many critics saying that Dostoievsky is not only the greatest of all Russian writers, but one of the greatest writers that the world has ever seen. I am not exaggerating when I say that such views are held; for instance, Professor Brückner, a most level-headed critic, in his learned and exhaustive survey of Russian literature, says that it is not in Faust, but rather in Crime and Punishment, that the whole grief of mankind takes hold of us.

Even making allowance for the enthusiasm of his admirers, it is true to say that almost any Russian judge of literature at the present day would place Dostoievsky as being equal to Tolstoy and immeasurably above Tourgeniev; in fact, the ordinary Russian critic at the present day no more dreams of comparing Tourgeniev with Dostoievsky, than it would occur to an Englishman to compare Charlotte Yonge with Charlotte Brontë.

Dostoievsky’s fame came late, although his first book, Poor Folk, made a considerable stir, and the publication of his Crime and Punishment ensured his popularity. But when I say “fame,” I mean the universal recognition of him by the best and most competent judges. This recognition is now an accomplished fact in Russia and also in Germany. The same cannot be said positively of France, although his books are for the most part well translated into French, and have received the warmest and the most acute appreciation at the hands of a French critic, namely, M. de Vogüé in Le Roman Russe.[18] In England, Dostoievsky cannot be said to be known at all, since the translations of his works are not only inadequate, but scarce and difficult to obtain, and it is possible to come across the most amazing judgments pronounced on them by critics whose judgment on other subjects is excellent.[19] The reason of this tardy recognition of Dostoievsky in his own country is that he was one of those men whose innate sense of fairness and hatred of cant prevent them from whole-heartedly joining a political party and swallowing its tenets indiscriminately, even when some of these tenets are nonsensical and iniquitous. He was one of those men who put truth and love higher than any political cause, and can fight for such a cause only when the leaders of it, in practice as well as in theory, never deviate from the one or the other. He was between two fires: the Government considered him a revolutionary, and the revolutionaries thought him a retrograde; because he refused to be blind to the merits of the Government, such as they were, and equally refused to be blind to the defects of the enemies of the Government. He therefore attacked not only the Government, but the Government’s enemies; and when he attacked, it was with thunderbolts. The Liberals never forgave him this. Dostoievsky was unjustly condemned to spend four years in penal servitude for a political crime; for having taken part in a revolutionary propaganda. He returned from Siberia a Slavophil, and, I will not say a Conservative, as the word is misleading; but a man convinced not only of the futility of revolution, but also of the worthlessness of a great part of the revolutionaries. Nor did the Liberals ever forgive him this. They are only just beginning to do so now. Moreover, in one of his most powerful books, The Possessed, he draws a scathing picture of all the flotsam and jetsam of revolution, and not only of the worthless hangers-on who are the parasites of any such movement, but he reveals the decadence and worthlessness of some of the men, who by their dominating character played leading parts and were popular heroes. Still less did the Liberals forgive him this book; and even now, few Liberal writers are fair towards it. Again, Dostoievsky was, as I shall show later, by nature an antagonist of Socialism and a hater of materialism; and since all the leading men among the Liberals of his time were either one or the other, if not both, Dostoievsky aroused the enmity of the whole Liberal camp, by attacking not only its parasites but its leaders, men of high principle such as Bielinsky, who were obviously sincere and deserving of the highest consideration and respect. One can imagine a similar situation in England if at the present time there were an autocratic government, a backward and ignorant peasantry, and a small and Liberal movement carried on by a minority of extremely intellectual men, headed, let us say, by Mr. Bernard Shaw, Lord Morley, Professor Raleigh, and Sir J. J. Thomson. I purposely take men of widely different opinions, because in a country where there is a fight going on for a definite thing, such as a Constitution, there is a moment when men, who under another régime would be split up into Liberals and Conservatives, are necessarily grouped together in one big Liberal camp. Now, let us suppose that the men who were carrying on this propaganda for reform were undergoing great sacrifices; let us likewise suppose them to be Socialists and materialists to the core. Then suppose there should appear a novelist of conspicuous power, such as George Meredith or Mr. Thomas Hardy or Mr. H. G. Wells, who by some error was sent to Botany Bay for having been supposed to be mixed up with a revolutionary propaganda, and on his return announced that he was an Anti-Revolutionary, violently attacked Mr. Shaw, wrote a book in which he caricatured him, and drew a scathing portrait of all his disciples,—especially of the less intelligent among them. One can imagine how unpopular such an author would be in Liberal circles. This was the case of Dostoievsky in Russia. It is only fair to add that his genius has now obtained full recognition, even at the hands of Liberals, though they still may not be able to tolerate his book, The Possessed. But considering the magnitude of his genius, this recognition has been, on the whole, a tardy one. For instance, even in so valuable a book as Prince Kropotkin’s Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature, Dostoievsky receives inadequate treatment and scanty appreciation. On the other hand, in Merejkowsky’s Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, Merejkowsky, who is also a Liberal, praises Dostoievsky with complete comprehension and with brilliance of thought and expression.

II
Dostoievsky’s Life

Dostoievsky was the son of a staff-surgeon and a tradesman’s daughter. He was born in a charity hospital, the “Maison de Dieu,” at Moscow, in 1821. He was, as he said, a member of a stray family. His father and five children lived in a flat consisting of two rooms and a kitchen. The nursery of the two boys, Michael and Fedor, consisted of a small part of the entrance hall, which was partitioned off. His family belonged to the lowest ranks of the nobility, to that stratum of society which supplied the bureaucracy with its minor public servants. The poverty surrounding his earliest years was to last until the day of his death.

Some people are, as far as money is concerned, like a negative pole—money seems to fly away from them, or rather, when it comes to them, to be unable to find any substance it can cleave to. Dostoievsky was one of these people; he never knew how much money he had, and when he had any, however little, he gave it away. He was what the French call a panier percé: money went through him as through a sieve. And however much money he had, it was never he but his friends who benefited by it.

He received his earliest education at a small school in Moscow, where a schoolmaster who taught Russian inspired him and his brother with a love of literature, of Pushkin’s poetry and other writers, introduced him also to the works of Walter Scott, and took him to see a performance of Schiller’s Robbers. When his preliminary studies were ended, he was sent with his brother to a school of military engineers at St. Petersburg. Here his interest in literature, which had been first aroused by coming into contact with Walter Scott’s works, was further developed by his discovery of Balzac, George Sand, and Homer. Dostoievsky developed a passionate love of literature and poetry. His favourite author was Gogol. He left this school in 1843 at the age of twenty-three, with the rank of sub-lieutenant.

His first success in literature was his novel, Poor Folk (published in 1846), which he possibly began to write while he was still at school. He sent this work to a review and awaited the result, utterly hopeless of its being accepted. One day, at four o’clock in the morning, just when Dostoievsky was despairing of success and thinking of suicide, Nekrasov the poet, and Grigorovitch the critic, came to him and said: “Do you understand yourself what you have written? To have written such a book you must have possessed the direct inspiration of an artist.”

This, said Dostoievsky, was the happiest moment of his life. The book was published in Nekrasov’s newspaper, and was highly praised on all sides. He thus at once made a name in literature. But as though Fate wished to lose no time in proving to him that his life would be a series of unending struggles, his second story, The Double, was a failure, and his friends turned from him, feeling that they had made a mistake. From that time onward, his literary career was a desperate battle, not only with poverty but also with public opinion, and with political as well as with literary critics.

Dostoievsky suffered all his life from epilepsy. It has been said that this disease was brought on by his imprisonment. This is not true: the complaint began in his childhood, and one of his biographers gives a hint of its origin: “It dates back,” he writes, “to his earliest youth, and is connected with a tragic event in their family life.” This sentence affords us an ominous glimpse into the early years of Dostoievsky, for it must indeed have been a tragic event which caused him to suffer from epileptic fits throughout his life.

In 1849 came the most important event in Dostoievsky’s life. From 1840 to 1847 there was in St. Petersburg a group of young men who met together to read and discuss the Liberal writers such as Fourier, Louis Blanc and Prudhon. Towards 1847 these circles widened, and included officers and journalists: they formed a club under the leadership of Petrachevsky, a former student, the author of a Dictionary of Foreign Terms. The club consisted, on the one hand, of certain men, followers of the Decembrists of 1825, who aimed at the emancipation of the serfs and the establishment of a Liberal Constitution; and, on the other hand, of men who were predecessors of the Nihilists, and who looked forward to a social revolution. The special function of Dostoievsky in this club was to preach the Slavophil doctrine, according to which Russia, sociologically speaking, needed no Western models, because in her workmen’s guilds and her system of mutual reciprocity for the payment of taxes, she already possessed the means of realising a superior form of social organisation.

The meetings of this club took place shortly after the revolutionary movement which convulsed Western Europe in 1848. The Emperor Nicholas, who was a strong-minded and a just although a hard man, imbued with a religious conviction that he was appointed by God to save the crumbling world, was dreaming of the emancipation of the serfs, and by a fatal misunderstanding was led to strike at men whose only crime was that they shared his own aims and ideals. One evening at a meeting of this club, Dostoievsky had declaimed Pushkin’s Ode on the Abolition of Serfdom, when some one present expressed a doubt of the possibility of obtaining this reform except by insurrectionary means. Dostoievsky is said to have replied: “Then insurrection let it be!” On the 23rd of April 1849, at five o’clock in the morning, thirty-four suspected men were arrested. The two brothers Dostoievsky were among them. They were imprisoned in a citadel, where they remained for eight months. On the 22nd of December, Dostoievsky was conducted, with twenty-one others, to the public square, where a scaffold had been erected. The other prisoners had been released. While they were taking their places on the scaffold, Dostoievsky communicated the idea of a book which he wished to write to Prince Monbelli, one of his fellow-prisoners, who related the incident later. There were, that day, 21 degrees of frost (Réaumur); the prisoners were stripped to their shirts, and had to listen to their sentence; the reading lasted over twenty minutes: the sentence was that they were to be shot. Dostoievsky could not believe in the reality of the event. He said to one of his comrades: “Is it possible that we are going to be executed?” The friend of whom he asked the question pointed to a cart laden with objects which, under the tarpaulin that covered them, looked like coffins. The Registrar walked down from the scaffold; the Priest mounted it, taking the cross with him, and bade the condemned men make their last confession. Only one man, of the shopkeeper class, did so: the others contented themselves with kissing the cross. Dostoievsky thus relates the close of the scene in a letter to his brother:

“They snapped swords above our heads, they made us put on the long white shirts worn by persons condemned to death. We were bound in parties of three to stakes to suffer execution. Being third in the row, I concluded that I had only a few minutes to live. I thought of you and your dear ones, and I managed to kiss Pleshtcheev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell.”

The officer in charge had already commanded his firing party to load; the soldiers were already preparing to take aim, when a white handkerchief was waved in front of them. They lowered their guns, and Dostoievsky and the other twenty-one learned that the Emperor had cancelled the sentence of the military tribunal, and commuted the sentence of death to one of hard labour for four years. The carts really contained convict uniforms, which the prisoners had to put on at once, and they started then and there for Siberia. When the prisoners were unbound, one of them, Grigoriev, had lost his reason. Dostoievsky, on the other hand, afterwards affirmed that this episode was his salvation; and never, either on account of this or of his subsequent imprisonment, did he ever feel or express anything save gratitude. “If this catastrophe had not occurred,” said Dostoievsky, alluding to his sentence, his reprieve and his subsequent imprisonment, “I should have gone mad.” The moments passed by him in the expectation of immediate death had an ineffaceable effect upon his entire after-life. They shifted his angle of vision with regard to the whole world. He knew something that no man could know who had not been through such moments. He constantly alludes to the episode in his novels, and in The Idiot he describes it thus, through the mouth of the principal character:

“I will tell you of my meeting last year with a certain man; this man was connected with a strange circumstance, strange because it is a very unusual one. He was once led, together with others, on to the scaffold, and a sentence was read out which told him that he was to be shot for a political crime. He spent the interval between the sentence and the reprieve, which lasted twenty minutes, or at least a quarter of an hour, with the certain conviction that in a few minutes he should die. I was very anxious to hear how he would recall his impressions. He remembered everything with extraordinary clearness, and said that he would never forget a single one of those minutes. Twenty paces from the scaffold round which the crowd and the soldiers stood, three stakes were driven into the ground, there being several prisoners. The first three were led to the stakes and bound, and the white dress of the condemned was put on them. This consisted of a long white shirt, and over their eyes white bandages were bound so that they should not see the guns. Then in front of each stake a firing party was drawn up. My friend was No. 8, so he went to the stake in the third batch. A priest carried the cross to each of them. My friend calculated that he had five minutes more to live, not more. He said that these five minutes seemed to him an endless period, infinitely precious. In these five minutes it seemed to him that he would have so many lives to live that he need not yet begin to think about his last moment, and in his mind he made certain arrangements. He calculated the time it would take him to say good-bye to his comrades; for this he allotted two minutes. He assigned two more minutes to think one last time of himself, and to look round for the last time. He remembered distinctly that he made these three plans, and that he divided his time in this way. He was to die, aged twenty-seven, healthy and strong, after having said good-bye to his companions. He remembered that he asked one of them a somewhat irrelevant question, and was much interested in the answer. Then, after he had said good-bye to his comrades, came the two minutes which he had set aside for thinking of himself. He knew beforehand of what he would think: he wished to represent to himself as quickly and as clearly as possible how this could be: that now he was breathing and living, and that in three minutes he would already be something else, some one or something, but what? and where? All this he felt he could decide in those two minutes. Not far away was the church, and the cathedral with its gilded dome was glittering in the sunshine. He remembered that he looked at the dome with terrible persistence, and on its glittering rays. He could not tear his gaze away from the rays. It seemed to him somehow that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would be made one with them. The uncertainty and the horror of the unknown, which was so near, were terrible. But he said that during this time there was nothing worse than the unceasing thought: ‘What if I do not die? What if life were restored to me now? What an eternity! And all this would be mine. I would in that case make every minute into a century, lose nothing, calculate every moment, and not spend any atom of the time fruitlessly.’ He said that this thought at last made him so angry that he wished that they would shoot him at once.”

Dostoievsky’s sentence consisted of four years’ hard labour in the convict settlement in Siberia, and this ordeal was doubtless the most precious boon which Providence could have bestowed on him. When he started for prison he said to A. Milioukov, as he wished him good-bye: “The convicts are not wild beasts, but men probably better, and perhaps much worthier, than myself. During these last months (the months of his confinement in prison) I have gone through a great deal, but I shall be able to write about what I shall see and experience in the future.” It was during the time he spent in prison that Dostoievsky really found himself. To share the hard labour of the prisoners, to break up old ships, to carry loads of bricks, to sweep up heaps of snow, strengthened him in body and calmed his nerves, while the contact with murderers and criminals and prisoners of all kinds, whose inmost nature he was able to reach, gave him a priceless opportunity of developing the qualities which were especially his own both as a writer and as a man.

With the criminals he was not in the position of a teacher, but of a disciple; he learnt from them, and in his life with them he grew physically stronger, and found faith, certitude and peace.

At the end of the four years (in 1853) he was set free and returned to ordinary life, strengthened in body and better balanced in mind. He had still three years to serve in a regiment as a private soldier, and after this period of service three years more to spend in Siberia. In 1859 he crossed the frontier and came back to Russia, and was allowed to live first at Tver and then at St. Petersburg. He brought a wife with him, the widow of one of his former colleagues in the Petrachevsky conspiracy, whom he had loved and married in Siberia. Until 1865 he worked at journalism.

Dostoievsky’s nature was alien to Socialism, and he loathed the moral materialism of his Socialistic contemporaries. Petrachevsky repelled him because he was an atheist and laughed at all belief; and the attitude of Bielinsky towards religion, which was one of flippant contempt, awoke in Dostoievsky a passion of hatred which blazed up whenever he thought of the man. Dostoievsky thus became a martyr, and was within an ace of losing his life for the revolutionary cause; a movement in which he had never taken part, and in which he disbelieved all his life.

Dostoievsky returned from prison just at the time of the emancipation of the serfs, and the trials which awaited him on his release were severer than those which he endured during his captivity. In January 1861 he started a newspaper called the Vremya. The venture was a success. But just as he thought that Fortune was smiling upon him, and that freedom from want was drawing near, the newspaper, by an extraordinary misunderstanding, was prohibited by the censorship for an article on Polish affairs. This blow, like his condemnation to death, was due to a casual blunder in the official machinery. After considerable efforts, in 1864 he started another newspaper called the Epocha. This newspaper incurred the wrath, not of the Government censorship, but of the Liberals; and it was now that his peculiar situation, namely, that of a man between two fires, became evident. The Liberals abused him in every kind of manner, went so far as to hint that the Epocha and its staff were Government spies, and declared that Dostoievsky was a scribbler with whom the police should deal. At this same time his brother Michael, his best friend Grigoriev, who was on the staff of his newspaper, and his first wife, Marie, died one after another. Dostoievsky was now left all alone; he felt that his whole life was broken, and that he had nothing to live for. His brother’s family was left without resources of any kind. He tried to support them by carrying on the publication of the Epocha, and worked day and night at this, being the sole editor, reading all the proofs, dealing with the authors and the censorship, revising articles, procuring money, sitting up till six in the morning, and sleeping only five out of the twenty-four hours. But this second paper came to grief in 1865, and Dostoievsky was forced to own himself temporarily insolvent. He had incurred heavy liabilities, not only to the subscribers of the newspaper, but in addition a sum of £1400 in bills and £700 in debts of honour. He writes to a friend at this period: “I would gladly go back to prison if only to pay off my debts and to feel myself free once more.”

A publishing bookseller, Stellovsky, a notorious rascal, threatened to have him taken up for debt. He had to choose between the debtors’ prison and flight: he chose the latter, and escaped abroad, where he spent four years of inexpressible misery, in the last extremity of want.

His Crime and Punishment was published in 1866, and this book brought him fame and popularity; yet in spite of this, on an occasion in 1869, he was obliged to pawn his overcoat and his last shirt in order with difficulty to obtain two thalers.

During all this time his attacks of epilepsy continued. He was constantly in trouble with his publishers, and bound and hampered by all sorts of contracts. He writes at this epoch: “In spite of all this I feel as if I were only just beginning to live. It is curious, isn’t it? I have the vitality of a cat.” And on another occasion he talks of his stubborn and inexhaustible vitality. He also says through the mouth of one of his characters, Dimitri Karamazov, “I can bear anything, 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 pillory, but I exist! I see the sun, or I do not see the sun, but I know that it is there. And to know that there is a sun is enough.’”

It was during these four years, overwhelmed by domestic calamity, perpetually harassed by creditors, attacked by the authorities on the one hand and the Liberals on the other, misunderstood by his readers, poor, almost starving, and never well, that he composed his three great masterpieces: Crime and Punishment in 1866, The Idiot in 1868, and The Possessed in 1871-2; besides planning The Brothers Karamazov. He had married a second time, in 1867. He returned to Russia in July 1871: his second exile was over. His popularity had increased, and the success of his books enabled him to free himself from debt. He became a journalist once more, and in 1873 edited Prince Meschtcherki’s newspaper, The Grazjdanin. In 1876 he started a monthly review called The Diary of a Writer, which sometimes appeared once a month and sometimes less often. The appearance of the last number coincided with his death. This review was a kind of encyclopædia, in which Dostoievsky wrote all his social, literary and political ideas, related any stray anecdotes, recollections and experiences which occurred to him, and commented on the political and literary topics of the day. He never ceased fighting his adversaries in this review; and during this time he began his last book, The Brothers Karamazov, which was never finished. In all his articles he preached his Slavophil creed, and on one occasion he made the whole of Russia listen to him and applaud him as one man. This was on June 8, 1880, when he made a speech at Moscow in memory of Pushkin, and aroused to frenzy the enthusiasm even of those men whose political ideals were the exact opposite of his own. He made people forget they were “Slavophils” or “Westernisers,” and remember only one thing—that they were Russians.

In the latter half of 1880, when he was working on The Brothers Karamazov, Strakhov records: “He was unusually thin and exhausted; his body had become so frail that the first slight blow might destroy it. His mental activity was untiring, although work had grown very difficult for him. In the beginning of 1881 he fell ill with a severe attack of emphysema, the result of catarrh in the lung. On January 28 he had hæmorrhage from the throat. Feeling the approach of death, he wished to confess and to receive the Blessed Sacrament. He gave the New Testament used by him in prison to his wife to read aloud. The first passage chanced to be Matthew iii. 14: “But John held Him back and said, ‘It is I that should be baptized by Thee, and dost Thou come to me?’ And Jesus answered and said unto him, ‘Detain Me not; for thus it behoves us to fulfil a great truth.’”

When his wife had read this, Dostoievsky said: “You hear: Do not detain me. That means that I am to die.” And he closed the book. A few hours later he did actually die, instantaneously, from the rupture of an artery in the lungs.

This was on the 28th of January 1881; on the 30th he was buried in St. Petersburg. His death and his funeral had about them an almost mythical greatness, and his funeral is the most striking comment on the nature of the feeling which the Russian public had for him both as a writer and as a man. On the day after his death, St. Petersburg witnessed a most extraordinary sight: the little house in which he had lived suddenly became for the moment the moral centre of Russia. Russia understood that with the death of this struggling and disease-stricken novelist, she had lost something inestimably precious, rare and irreplaceable. Spontaneously, and without any organised preparation, the most imposing and triumphant funeral ceremony was given to Dostoievsky’s remains; and this funeral was not only the greatest and most inspiring which had ever taken place in Russia, but as far as its inward significance was concerned there can hardly ever have been a greater one in the world. Other great writers and other great men have been buried with more gorgeous pomp and with a braver show of outward display, but never, when such a man has been followed to the grave by a mourning multitude, have the trophies and tributes of grief been so real; for striking as they were by their quantity and their nature, they seemed but a feeble and slender evidence of the sorrow and the love to which they bore witness. There were deputations bearing countless wreaths, there were numerous choirs singing religious chants, there were thousands of people following in a slow stream along the streets of St. Petersburg, there were men and women of every class, but mostly poor people, shabbily dressed, of the lower middle or the lower classes. The dream of Dostoievsky, that the whole of Russia should be united by a bond of fraternity and brotherly love, seemed to be realised when this crowd of men, composed of such various and widely differing elements, met together in common grief by his grave. Dostoievsky had lived the life of a pauper, and of a man who had to fight with all his strength in order to win his daily bread. He had been assailed by disease and hunted by misfortune; his whole life seemed to have rushed by before he had had time to sit down quietly and write the great ideas which were seething in his mind. Everything he had written seemed to have been written by chance, haphazardly, to have been jotted down against time, between wind and water. But in spite of this, in his work, however incomplete, however fragmentary and full of faults it may have been, there was a voice speaking, a particular message being delivered, which was different from that of other writers, and at times more precious. While it was there, the public took it for granted, like the sun; and it was only when Dostoievsky died that the hugeness of the gap made by his death, caused them to feel how great was the place he had occupied both in their hearts and in their minds. It was only when he died that they recognised how great a man he was, and how warmly they admired and loved him. Everybody felt this from the highest to the lowest. Tolstoy, in writing of Dostoievsky’s death, says: “I never saw the man, and never had any direct relations with him, yet suddenly 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. And all at once I read that he is dead, and a prop has fallen from me.” This is what the whole of Russia felt, that a support had fallen from them; and this is what they expressed when they gave to Dostoievsky a funeral such as no king nor Captain has ever had, a funeral whose very shabbiness was greater than any splendour, and whose trophies and emblems were the grief of a nation and the tears of thousands of hearts united together in the admiration and love of a man whom each one of them regarded as his brother.

III
Dostoievsky’s Character

Such, briefly, are the main facts of Dostoievsky’s crowded life. Unlike Tolstoy, who has himself told us in every conceivable way everything down to the most intimate detail which is to be known about himself, Dostoievsky told us little of himself, and all that we know about him is gathered from other people or from his letters; and even now we know comparatively little about his life. He disliked talking about himself; he could not bear to be pitied. He was modest, and shielded his feelings with a lofty shame. Strakhov writes about him thus:

“In Dostoievsky you could never detect the slightest bitterness or hardness resulting from the sufferings he had undergone, and there was never in him a hint of posing as a martyr. He behaved as if there had been nothing extraordinary in his past. He never represented himself as disillusioned, or as not having an equable mind; but, on the contrary, he appeared cheerful and alert, when his health allowed him to do so. I remember that a lady coming for the first time to Michael Dostoievsky’s (his brother’s) evenings at the newspaper office, looked long at Dostoievsky, and finally said: ‘As I look at you it seems to me that I see in your face the sufferings which you have endured.’ These words visibly annoyed Dostoievsky. ‘What sufferings?’ he said, and began to joke on indifferent matters.”

Long after his imprisonment and exile, when some friends of his tried to prove to him that his exile had been a brutal act of injustice, he said: “The Socialists are the result of the followers of Petrachevsky. Petrachevsky’s disciples sowed many seeds.” And when he was asked whether such men deserved to be exiled, he answered: “Our exile was just; the people would have condemned us.”

The main characteristics of his nature were generosity, catholicity, vehement passion, and a “sweet reasonableness.” Once when he was living with Riesenkampf, a German doctor, he was found living on bread and milk; and even for that he was in debt at a little milk shop. This same doctor says that Dostoievsky was “one of those men to live with whom is good for every one, but who are themselves in perpetual want.” He was mercilessly robbed, but he would never blame any one who took advantage of his kindness and his trustfulness. One of his biographers tells us that his life with Riesenkampf proved expensive to him, because no poor man who came to see the doctor went away without having received something from Dostoievsky. One cannot read a page of his books without being aware of the “sweet reasonableness” of his nature. This pervaded his writings with fragrance like some precious balm, and is made manifest to us in the touching simplicity of some of his characters, such as the Idiot and Alexis Karamazov, to read of whom is like being with some warm and comforting influence, something sweet and sensible and infinitely human. His catholicity consists in an almost boundless power of appreciation, an appreciation of things, persons and books widely removed from himself by accidents of time, space, class, nationality and character. Dostoievsky is equally able to appreciate the very essence of a performance got up by convicts in his prison, and the innermost beauty of the plays of Racine. This last point is singular and remarkable. He was universal and cosmopolitan in his admiration of the literature of foreign countries; and he was cosmopolitan, not because he wished to cut himself away from Russian traditions and to become European and Westernised, but because he was profoundly Russian, and had the peculiarly Russian plastic and receptive power of understanding and assimilating things widely different from himself.

When he was a young man, Shakespeare and Schiller were well known, and it was the fashion to admire them. It was equally the fashion to despise the French writers of the seventeenth century. But Dostoievsky was just as enthusiastic in his admiration of Racine and Corneille and all the great classics of the seventeenth century. Thus he writes: “But Phèdre, brother! You will be the Lord knows what if you say this is not the highest and purest nature and poetry; the outline of it is Shakespearian, but the statue is in plaster, not in marble.” And again of Corneille: “Have you read The Cid? Read it, you wretch, read it, and go down in the dust before Corneille!”

Dostoievsky was constantly “going down in the dust” before the great masterpieces, not only of his own, but of other countries, which bears out the saying that “La valeur morale de l’homme est en proportion de sa faculté d’admirer.”

Dostoievsky never theorised as to how alms should be given, or as to how charity should be organised. He gave what he had, simply and naturally, to those who he saw had need of it; and he had a right to this knowledge, for he himself had received alms in prison. Neither did he ever theorise as to whether a man should leave the work which he was fitted by Providence to do (such as writing books), in order to plough fields and to cut down trees. He had practised hard labour, not as a theoretic amateur, but as a constrained professional. He had carried heavy loads of bricks and broken up ships and swept up heaps of snow, not out of philosophy or theory, but because he had been obliged to do so; because if he had not done so he would have been severely punished. All that Tolstoy dreamed of and aimed at, which was serious in theory but not serious in practice, that is to say, giving up his property, becoming one with the people, ploughing the fields, was a reality to Dostoievsky when he was in prison. He knew that hard labour is only real when it is a necessity, when you cannot leave off doing it when you want to; he had experienced this kind of hard labour for four years, and during his whole life he had to work for his daily bread. The result of this is that he made no theories about what work a man should do, but simply did as well as he could the work he had to do. In the words of a ballade written by Mr. Chesterton, he might have said:

“We eat the cheese,—you scraped about the rind,
You lopped the tree—we eat the fruit instead.
You were benevolent, but we were kind,
You know the laws of food, but we were fed.”

And this is the great difference between Dostoievsky and Tolstoy. Tolstoy was benevolent, but Dostoievsky was kind. Tolstoy theorised on the distribution of food, but Dostoievsky was fed and received alms like a beggar. Dostoievsky, so far from despising the calling of an author, or thinking that it was an occupation “thin sown with aught of profit or delight” for the human race, loved literature passionately. He was proud of his profession: he was a great man of letters as well as a great author. “I have never sold,” he wrote, “one of my books without getting the price down beforehand. I am a literary proletarian. If anybody wants my work he must ensure me by prepayment.”

There is something which resembles Dr. Johnson in the way he talks of his profession and his attitude towards it. But there is, nevertheless, in the phrase just quoted, something bitterly ironical when one reflects that he was a poor man all his life and incessantly harassed by creditors, and that he derived almost nothing from the great popularity and sale of his books.

“Dostoievsky,” writes Strakov, “loved literature; he took her as she was, with all her conditions; he never stood apart from literature, and he never looked down upon her. This absence of the least hint of literary snobbishness is in him a beautiful and touching characteristic. Russian literature was the one lodestar of Dostoievsky’s life, and he cherished for it a passionate love and devotion. He knew very well that when he entered the lists he would have to go into the public market-place, and he was never ashamed of his trade nor of his fellow-workers. On the contrary, he was proud of his profession, and considered it a great and sacred one.”

He speaks of himself as a literary hack: he writes at so much a line, three and a half printed pages of a newspaper in two days and two nights. “Often,” he says, “it happened in my literary career that the beginning of the chapter of a novel or story was already set up, and the end was still in my mind and had to be written by the next day.” Again: “Work from want and for money has crushed and devoured me. Will my poverty ever cease? Ah, if I had money, then I should be free!”

I have said that one of the main elements of Dostoievsky’s character was vehement passion. There was more than a vehement element of passion in Dostoievsky; he was not only passionate in his loves and passionate in his hates, but his passion was unbridled. In this he resembles the people of the Renaissance. There were perilous depths in his personality; black pools of passion; a seething whirlpool that sent up every now and then great eddies of boiling surge; yet this passion has nothing about it which is undefinably evil; it never smells of the pit. The reason of this is that although Dostoievsky’s soul descended into hell, it was purged by the flames, and no poisonous fumes ever came from it. There was something of St. Francis in him, and something of Velasquez. Dostoievsky was a violent hater. I have already told how he hated Bielinsky, the Socialists and the materialists whom he attacked all his life, but against Tourgeniev he nourished a blind and causeless hatred. This manifests itself as soon as he leaves prison, in the following outburst: “I know very well,” he writes, “that I write worse than Tourgeniev, but not so very much worse, and after all I hope one day to write quite as well as he does. Why, with my crying wants, do I receive only 100 roubles a sheet, and Tourgeniev, who possesses two thousand serfs, receives 400 roubles? Owing to my poverty I am obliged to hurry, to write for money, and consequently to spoil my work.” In a postscript he says that he sends Katkov, the great Moscow editor, fifteen sheets at 100 roubles a sheet, that is, 1500 roubles in all. “I have had 500 roubles from him, and besides, when I had sent three-quarters of the novel, I asked him for 200 to help me along, or 700 altogether. I shall reach Tver without a farthing. But, on the other hand, I shall shortly receive from Katkov seven or eight hundred roubles.”

It must not be forgotten that the whole nature of Dostoievsky, both as man and artist, was profoundly modified by the disease from which he suffered all his life, his epilepsy. He had therefore two handicaps against him: disease and poverty. But it is his epilepsy which was probably the cause of his dislikes, his hatreds and his outbreaks of violent passion. The attacks of epilepsy came upon him about once a month, and sometimes, though not often, they were more frequent. He once had two in a week. His friend Strakov describes one of them thus: “I once saw one of his ordinary 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, but I know that it was important and abstruse. He became excited, and walked about the room while I sat at the table. He said something fine and jubilant. I confirmed his opinion by some remark, and he turned to me a face which positively glowed with the most transcendent inspiration. He paused for a moment, as if searching for words, and had already opened his lips to speak. I looked at him all expectant for fresh revelation. Suddenly from his open mouth issued a strange, prolonged, and inarticulate moan. He sank senseless on the floor in the middle of the room.”

The ancients called this “the sacred sickness.” Just before the attacks, Dostoievsky felt a kind of rapture, something like what people say they feel when they hear very great music, a perfect harmony between himself and the world, a sensation as if he had reached the edge of a planet, and were falling off it into infinite space. And this feeling was such that for some seconds of the rapture, he said, you might give ten years of your life, or even the whole of it. But after the attack his condition was dreadful, and he could hardly sustain the state of low-spirited dreariness and sensitiveness into which he was plunged. He felt like a criminal, and fancied there hung over him an invisible guilt, a great transgression. He compares both sensations, suddenly combined and blended in a flash, to the famous falling pitcher of Mahomet, which had not time to empty itself while the Prophet on Allah’s steed was girdling heaven and hell. It is no doubt the presence of this disease and the frequency of the attacks, which were responsible for the want of balance in his nature and in his artistic conceptions, just as his grinding poverty and the merciless conditions of his existence are responsible for the want of finish in his style. But Dostoievsky had the qualities of his defects, and it is perhaps owing to his very illness, and to its extraordinary nature, that he was able so deeply to penetrate into the human soul. It is as if the veil of flesh and blood dividing the soul from that which is behind all things, was finer and more transparent in Dostoievsky than in other men: by his very illness he may have been able to discern what is invisible to others. It is certainly owing to the combined poverty and disease which made up his life, that he had such an unexampled insight into the lives and hearts of the humble, the rejected, the despised, the afflicted, and the oppressed. He sounded the utmost depths of human misery, he lived face to face with the lowest representatives of human misfortune and disgrace, and he was neither dispirited nor dismayed. He came to the conclusion that it was all for the best, and like Job in dust and ashes consented to the eternal scheme. And though all his life he was one of the conquered, he never ceased fighting, and never for one moment believed that life was not worth living. On the contrary, he blessed life and made others bless it.

His life was “a long disease,” rendered harder to bear and more difficult by exceptionally cruel circumstances. In spite of this, Dostoievsky was a happy man: he was happy and he was cheerful; and he was happy not because he was a saint, but because, in spite of all his faults, he radiated goodness; because his immense heart overflowed in kindness, and having suffered much himself, he understood the sufferings of others; thus although his books are terrible, and deal with the darkest clouds which can overshadow the human spirit, the descent into hell of the human soul, yet the main impression left by them is not one of gloom but one of comfort. Dostoievsky is, above all things, a healer and a comforter, and this is because the whole of his teaching, his morality, his art, his character, are based on the simple foundation of what the Russians call “dolgoterpjenie,” that is, forbearance, and “smirenie,” that is to say, resignation. In the whole history of the world’s literature there is no literary man’s life which was so arduous and so hard; but Dostoievsky never complained, nor, we can be sure, would he have wished his life to have been otherwise. His life was a martyrdom, but he enjoyed it. Although no one more nearly than he bears witness to Heine’s saying that “where a great spirit is, there is Golgotha,” yet we can say without hesitation that Dostoievsky was a happy man, and he was happy because he never thought about himself, and because, consciously or unconsciously, he relieved and comforted the sufferings of others. And his books continued to do so long after he ceased to live.

All this can be summed up in one word: the value of Dostoievsky’s life. And the whole reason that his books, although they deal with the tragedies of mankind, bring comfort to the reader instead of gloom, hope instead of despair, is, firstly, that Dostoievsky was an altruist, and that he fulfilled the most difficult precept of Christianity—to love others better than oneself; and, secondly, that in leading us down in the lowest depths of tragedy, he shows us that where man ends, God takes up the tale.

IV
Poor Folk and the Letters from a Dead House

In his first book, Poor Folk, which was published in 1846, we have the germ of all Dostoievsky’s talent and genius. It is true that he accomplished far greater things, but never anything more characteristic. It is the story of a poor official, a minor clerk in a Government office, already aged and worn with cares, who battles against material want. In his sombre and monotonous life there is a ray of light: in another house as poor and as squalid as his own, there lives a girl, a distant relation of his, who is also in hard and humble circumstances, and who has nothing in the world save the affection and friendship of this poor clerk. They write to each other daily. In the man’s letters a discreet unselfishness is revealed, a rare delicacy of feeling, which is in sharp contrast to the awkwardness of his everyday actions and ideas, which verge on the grotesque. At the office, he has to cringe and sacrifice his honour in order not to forfeit the favour of his superiors. He stints himself, and makes every kind of small sacrifice, in order that this woman may be relieved of her privations. He writes to her like a father or brother; but it is easy for us to see in his simple phrases that he is in love with her, although she does not realise it. The character of the woman is equally clear to us: she is superior to him in education and mind, and she is less resigned to her fate than he is. In the course of their correspondence we learn all that is to be known about their past, their melancholy history and the small incidents of their everyday life, the struggle that is continually working in the mind of the clerk between his material want and his desire not to lose his personal honour. This correspondence continues day by day until the crisis comes, and the clerk loses the one joy of his life, and learns that his friend is engaged to be married. But she has not been caught up or carried off in a brilliant adventure: she marries a middle-aged man, very rich and slightly discredited, and all her last letters are full of commissions which she trusts to her devoted old friend to accomplish. He is sent to the dress-makers about her gowns, and to the jeweller about her rings; and all this he accepts and does with perfect self-sacrifice; and his sacrifice seems quite accidental, a matter of course: there is not the slightest pose in it, nor any fuss, and only at the end, in his very last letter, and even then only in a veiled and discreet form, does he express anything of the immense sorrow which the blow is bringing to him.

The woman’s character is as subtly drawn as the man’s; she is more independent than he, and less resigned; she is kind and good, and it is from no selfish motives that she grasps at the improvement in her fortunes. But she is still young, and her youth rises within her and imperatively claims its natural desires. She is convinced that by accepting the proposal which is made to her she will alleviate her friend’s position as much as her own; moreover, she regards him as a faithful friend, and nothing more. But we, the outsiders who read his letters, see clearly that what he feels for her is more than friendship: it is simply love and nothing else.

The second important book which Dostoievsky wrote (for the stories he published immediately after Poor Folk were not up to his mark) was the Letters from a Dead House, which was published on his return to Russia in 1861. This book may not be his finest artistic achievement, but it is certainly the most humanly interesting book which he ever wrote, and one of the most interesting books which exist in the whole of the world’s literature. In this book he told his prison experiences: they were put forward in the shape of the posthumous records of a nobleman who had committed murder out of jealousy, and was condemned to spend some years in the convict prison. The book is supposed to be the papers which this nobleman left behind him. They cover a period of four years, which was the term of Dostoievsky’s sentence. The most remarkable characteristic of the book is the entire absence of egotism in the author. Many authors in similar circumstances would have written volumes of self-analysis, and filled pages with their lamentations and in diagnosing their sensations. Very few men in such a situation could have avoided a slight pose of martyrdom. In Dostoievsky there is nothing of this. He faces the horror of the situation, but he has no grievance; and the book is all about other people and as little as possible about himself. And herein lies its priceless value, for there is no other book either of fiction or travel which throws such a searching light on the character of the Russian people, and especially on that of the Russian peasants. Dostoievsky got nearer to the Russian peasant than any one has ever done, and necessarily so, because he lived with them on equal terms as a convict. But this alone would not suffice to produce so valuable a book; something else was necessary, and the second indispensable factor was supplied by Dostoievsky’s peculiar nature, his simplicity of mind, his kindness of heart, his sympathy and understanding. In the very first pages of this book we are led into the heart of a convict’s life: the milieu rises before us in startling vividness. The first thing which we are made aware of is that this prison life has a peculiar character of its own. The strange family or colony which was gathered together in this Siberian prison consisted of criminals of every grade and description, and in which not only every class of Russian society, but every shade and variety of the Russian people was represented; that is to say, there were here assassins by profession, and men who had become assassins by chance, robbers, brigands, tramps, pick-pockets, smugglers, peasants, Armenians, Jews, Poles, Mussulmans, soldiers who were there for insubordination and even for murder; officers, gentlemen, and political prisoners, and men who were there no one knew why.

Now Dostoievsky points out that at a first glance you could detect one common characteristic in this strange family. Even the most sharply defined, the most eccentric and original personalities, who stood out and towered above their comrades, even these did their best to adopt the manners and customs, the unwritten code, the etiquette of the prison. In general, he continues, these people with a very few exceptions (innately cheerful people who met with universal contempt) were surly, envious, extraordinarily vain, boastful, touchy, and in the highest degree punctilious and conventional. To be astonished at nothing was considered the highest quality; and in all of them the one aim and obsession was outward demeanour and the wish to keep up appearances. There were men who pretended to have either great moral or great physical strength and boasted of it, who were in reality cowards at heart, and whose cowardice was revealed in a flash. There were also men who possessed really strong characters; but the curious thing was, Dostoievsky tells us, that these really strong characters were abnormally vain. The main and universal characteristic of the criminal was his vanity, his desire, as the Italians say, to fare figura at all costs. I have been told that this is true of English prisons, where prisoners will exercise the most extraordinary ingenuity in order to shave. The greater part of these people were radically vicious, and frightfully quarrelsome. The gossip, the backbiting, the tale-bearing, and the repeating of small calumnies were incessant; yet in spite of this not one man dared to stand up against the public opinion of the prison, according to whose etiquette and unwritten law a particular kind of demeanour was observed. In other words, these prisoners were exactly like private schoolboys or public schoolboys. At a public school, boys will create a certain etiquette, which has its unwritten law; for instance, let us take Eton. At Eton you may walk on one side of the street but not on the other, unless you are a person of sufficient importance. When you wear a great-coat, you must always turn the collar up, unless you are a person of a particular importance. You must likewise never go about with an umbrella unrolled; and, far more important than all these questions, there arrives a psychological moment in the career of an Eton boy when, of his own accord, he wears a stick-up collar instead of a turned-down collar, by which act he proclaims to the world that he is a person of considerable importance. These rules are unwritten and undefined. Nobody tells another boy not to walk on the wrong side of the road; no boy will ever dream of turning down his collar, if he is not important enough; and in the third and more special case, the boy who suddenly puts on a stick-up collar must feel himself by instinct when that psychological moment has arrived. It is not done for any definite reason, it is merely the expression of a kind of atmosphere. He knows at a given moment that he can or cannot go into stick-ups. Some boys can go into stick-ups for almost nothing, if they have in their personality the necessary amount of imponderable prestige; others, though the possessors of many trophies and colours, can only do so at the last possible minute. But all must have some definite reason for going into stick-ups: no boy can go into stick-ups merely because he is clever and thinks a lot of himself,—that would not only be impossible, but unthinkable.

Dostoievsky’s account of the convicts reminds me so strongly of the conduct of private and public schoolboys in England, that, with a few slight changes, his Letters from a Dead House might be about an English school, as far as the mere etiquette of the convicts is concerned. Here, for instance, is a case in point: Dostoievsky says that there lived in this prison men of dynamic personalities, who feared neither God nor man, and had never obeyed any one in their lives; and yet they at once fell in with the standard of behaviour expected of them. There came to the prison men who had been the terror of their village and their neighbourhood. Such a “new boy” looked round, and at once understood that he had arrived at a place where he could astonish no one, and that the only thing to do was to be quiet and fall in with the manners of the place, and into what Dostoievsky calls the universal etiquette, which he defines as follows: “This etiquette,” he says, “consisted outwardly of a kind of peculiar dignity with which every inhabitant of the prison was impregnated, as if the fact of being a convict was, ipso facto, a kind of rank, and a respectable rank.” This is exactly the point of view of a schoolboy at a private school. A schoolboy prefers to be at home rather than at school. He knows that he is obliged to be at school, he is obliged to work against his will, and to do things which are often disagreeable to him; at the same time his entire efforts are strained to one object, towards preserving the dignity of his status. That was the great ambition of the convicts, to preserve the dignity of the status of a convict. Throughout this book one receives the impression that the convicts behaved in many ways like schoolboys; in fact, in one place Dostoievsky says that in many respects they were exactly like children. He quotes, for instance, their delight in spending the little money they could get hold of on a smart linen shirt and a belt, and walking round the whole prison to show it off. They did not keep such finery long, and nearly always ended by selling it for almost nothing; but their delight while they possessed it was intense. There was, however, one curious item in their code of morals, which is singularly unlike that of schoolboys in England, in Russia, or in any other country: they had no horror of a man who told tales to the authorities, who, in schoolboy language, was a sneak. “The Sneak” did not expose himself to the very smallest loss of caste. Indignation against him was an unthinkable thing: nobody shunned him, people were friends with him; and if you had explained in the prison the whole odiousness of his behaviour, they would not have understood you at all.

“There was one of the gentlemen prisoners, a vicious and mean fellow, with whom from the first moment I would have nothing to do. He made friends with the major’s orderly, and became his spy; and this man told everything he heard about the prisoners to the major. We all knew this, and nobody ever once thought of punishing or even of blaming the scoundrel.”

This is the more remarkable from the fact that in Russian schools, and especially in those schools where military discipline prevails, sneaking is the greatest possible crime. In speaking of another man who constantly reported everything to the authorities, Dostoievsky says that the other convicts despised him, not because he sneaked, but because he did not know how to behave himself properly.

The convicts, although they never showed the slightest signs of remorse or regret for anything they had done in the past, were allowed by their etiquette to express, as it were officially, a kind of outward resignation, a peaceful logic, such as, “We are a fallen people. We could not live in freedom, and now we must break stones.... We could not obey father and mother, and now we must obey the beating of the drum.” The criminals abused each other mercilessly; they were adepts in the art, more than adepts, artists. Abuse in their hands became a science and a fine art; their object was to find not so much the word that would give pain, as the offensive thought, the spirit, the idea, as to who should be most venomous, the most razor-like in his abuse.

Another striking characteristic which also reminds one of schoolboys, was that the convict would be, as a rule, obedient and submissive in the extreme. But there were certain limits beyond which his patience was exhausted, and when once this limit was overstepped by his warders or the officer in charge, he was ready to do anything, even to commit murder, and feared no punishment.

Dostoievsky tells us that during all the time he was in prison he never noticed among the convicts the slightest sign of remorse, the slightest burden of spirit with regard to the crimes they had committed; and the majority of them in their hearts considered themselves perfectly justified. But the one thing they could not bear, not because it roused feelings of emotion in them, but because it was against the etiquette of the place, was that people should dwell upon their past crimes. He quotes one instance of a man who was drunk—the convicts could get wine—beginning to relate how he had killed a child of five years old. The whole prison, which up till then had been laughing at his jokes, cried out like a man, and the assassin was obliged to be silent. They did not cry out from indignation, but because it was not the thing to speak of that, because to speak of that was considered to be violating the unwritten code of the prison. The two things which Dostoievsky found to be the hardest trials during his life as a convict were, first, the absolute absence of privacy, since during the whole four years he was in prison he was never for one minute either by day or night alone; and, secondly, the bar which existed between him and the majority of the convicts, owing to the fact that he was a gentleman. The convicts hated people of the upper class; although such men were on a footing of social equality with them, the convicts never recognised them as comrades. Quite unconsciously, even sincerely, they regarded them as gentlemen, although they liked teasing them about their change of circumstance. They despised them because they did not know how to work properly, and Dostoievsky says that he was two years in prison before he won over some of the convicts, though one can see from his accounts of what they said to him, how much they must have liked him, and he admits that the majority of them recognised, after a time, that he was a good fellow. He points out how much harder such a sentence was on one of his own class than on a peasant. The peasant arrives from all ends of Russia, no matter where it be, and finds in prison the milieu he is accustomed to, and into which he falls at once without difficulty. He is treated as a brother and an equal by the people who are there. With a gentleman it is different, and especially, Dostoievsky tells us, with a political offender, whom the majority of the convicts hate. He never becomes an equal; they may like him, as they obviously did in Dostoievsky’s case, but they never regard him as being on a footing of equality with themselves. They preferred even foreigners, Germans for instance, to the Russian gentlemen; and the people they disliked most of all were the gentlemen Poles, because they were almost exaggeratedly polite towards the convicts, and at the same time could not conceal their innate hatred of them. With regard to the effect of this difference of class, Dostoievsky, in the course of the book, tells a striking story. Every now and then, when the convicts had a grievance about their food or their treatment, they would go on strike, and assemble in the prison yard. Dostoievsky relates that one day there was a strike about the food. As all the convicts were gathered together in the yard, he joined them, whereupon he was immediately told that that was not his place, that he had better go to the kitchen, where the Poles and the other gentlemen were. He was told this kindly by his friends, and men who were less friendly to him made it plain by shouting out sarcastic remarks to him. Although he wished to stay, he was told that he must go. Afterwards the strike was dispersed and the strikers punished, and Dostoievsky asked a friend of his, one of the convicts, whether they were not angry with the gentlemen convicts.

“Why?” asked this man.

“Why, because we did not join in the strike.”

“Why should you have joined in the strike?” asked the convict, trying to understand, “You buy your own food.”

“Many of us eat the ordinary food,” answered Dostoievsky, “but I should have thought that apart from this we ought to have joined, out of fellowship, out of comradeship.”

“But you are not our comrade,” said the other man quite simply; and Dostoievsky saw that the man did not even understand what he meant. Dostoievsky realised that he could never be a real comrade of these men; he might be a convict for a century, he might be the most experienced of criminals, the most accomplished of assassins, the barrier existing between the classes would never disappear: to them he would always be a gentleman, it would always be a case of “You go your way, we go ours.” And this, he said, was the saddest thing he experienced during the whole of his prison life.

The thing which perhaps caused him the most pleasure was the insight he gained into the kindness shown to convicts by outsiders. Alluding to the doctors in the prison hospital, he says: “It is well known to prisoners all over Russia that the men who sympathise with them the most are the doctors: they never make the slightest difference in their treatment of prisoners, as nearly all outsiders do, except perhaps the Russian poor. The Russian poor man never blames the prisoner for his crime, however terrible it may be; he forgives him everything for the punishment that he is enduring, and for his misfortune in general. It is not in vain that the whole of the Russian people call crime a misfortune and criminals ‘unfortunates.’ This definition has a deep meaning; it is all the more valuable in that it is made unconsciously and instinctively.”

It is an incident revealing this pity for the unfortunate which gave Dostoievsky more pleasure than anything during his stay in prison. It was the first occasion on which he directly received alms. He relates it thus:

“It was soon after my arrival in the prison: I was coming back from my morning’s work, accompanied only by the guard. There met me a mother and her daughter. The little girl was ten years old, as pretty as a cherub; I had already seen them once; the mother was the wife of a soldier, a widow; her husband, a young soldier, had been under arrest, and had died in the hospital in the same ward in which I had lain ill. The wife and the daughter had come to say good-bye to him, and both had cried bitterly. Seeing me, the little girl blushed, whispered something to her mother, and she immediately stopped and took out of her bundle a quarter of a kopeck and gave it to the little girl. The child ran after me and called out, ‘Unfortunate! For the sake of Christ, take this copper.’ I took the piece of money, and the little girl ran back to her mother quite contented. I kept that little piece of money for a very long time.”

What is most remarkable about the book, are the many and various discoveries which Dostoievsky made with regard to human nature: his power of getting behind the gloomy mask of the criminal to the real man underneath, his success in detecting the “soul of goodness” in the criminals. Every single one of the characters he describes stands out in startling relief; and if one began to quote these one would never end. Nevertheless I will quote a few instances.

There is Akim Akimitch, an officer who had earned his sentence thus: He had served in the Caucasus, and been made governor of some small fortress. One night a neighbouring Caucasian prince attacked his fortress and burnt it down, but was defeated and driven back. Akim Akimitch pretended not to know who the culprit was. A month elapsed, and Akim Akimitch asked the prince to come and pay him a visit. He came without suspecting any evil. Akim Akimitch marched out his troops, and in their presence told him it was exceedingly wrong to burn down fortresses; and after giving him minute directions as to what the behaviour of a peaceful prince should be, shot him dead on the spot, and reported the case to his superiors. He was tried and condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to twelve years’ hard labour. Akim Akimitch had thus once in his life acted according to his own judgment, and the result had been penal servitude. He had not common sense enough to see where he had been guilty, but he came to the conclusion that he never under any circumstances ought to judge for himself. He thenceforth renounced all initiative of any kind or sort, and made himself into a machine. He was uneducated, extremely accurate, and the soul of honesty; very clever with his fingers, he was by turn carpenter, bootmaker, shoemaker, gilder, and there was no trade which he could not learn. Akim Akimitch arranged his life in so methodical a manner in every detail, with such pedantic accuracy, that at first he almost drove Dostoievsky mad, although Akim Akimitch was kindness itself to him, and helped him in every possible way during the first days of his imprisonment. Akim Akimitch appeared to be absolutely indifferent as to whether he was in prison or not. He arranged everything as though he were to stay there for the rest of his life; everything, from his pillow upwards, was arranged as though no change could possibly occur to him. At first Dostoievsky found the ways of this automaton a severe trial, but he afterwards became entirely reconciled to him.

Then there was Orlov, one of the more desperate criminals. He was a soldier who had deserted. He was of small stature and slight build, but he was absolutely devoid of any sort of fear. Dostoievsky says that never in his life had he met with such a strong, such an iron character as this man had. There was, in this man, a complete triumph of the spirit over the flesh. He could bear any amount of physical punishment with supreme indifference. He was consumed with boundless energy, a thirst for action, for revenge, and for the accomplishment of the aim which he set before him. He looked down on everybody in prison. Dostoievsky says he doubts whether there was any one in the world who could have influenced this man by his authority. He had a calm outlook on the world, as though there existed nothing that could astonish him; and although he knew that the other convicts looked up to him with respect, there was no trace of swagger about him: he was not at all stupid, and terribly frank, although not talkative. Dostoievsky would ask him about his adventures. He did not much like talking about them, but he always answered frankly. When once he understood, however, that Dostoievsky was trying to find out whether he felt any pangs of conscience or remorse for what he had done, he looked at him with a lofty and utter contempt, as though he suddenly had to deal with some stupid little boy who could not reason like grown-up people. There was even an expression of pity in his face, and after a minute or two he burst out in the simplest and heartiest laugh, without a trace of irony, and Dostoievsky was convinced that when left to himself he must have laughed again time after time, so comic did the thought appear to him.

One of the most sympathetic characters Dostoievsky describes is a young Tartar called Alei, who was not more than twenty-two years old. He had an open, clever, and even beautiful face, and a good-natured and naïve expression which won your heart at once. His smile was so confiding, so childlike and simple, his big black eyes so soft and kind, that it was a consolation merely to look at him. He was in prison for having taken part in an expedition made by his brothers against a rich Armenian merchant whom they had robbed. He retained his softness of heart and simplicity and his strict honesty all the time he was in prison; he never quarrelled, although he knew quite well how to stand up for himself, and everybody liked him. “I consider Alei,” writes Dostoievsky, “as being far from an ordinary personality, and I count my acquaintance with him as one of the most valuable events of my life. There are characters so beautiful by nature, so near to God, that even the very thought that they may some day change for the worse seems impossible. As far as they are concerned you feel absolutely secure, and I now feel secure for Alei. Where is he now?”

I cannot help quoting two incidents in Dostoievsky’s prison life which seem to me to throw light on the characteristics of the people with whom he mixed, and their manner of behaviour; the first is a story of how a young soldier called Sirotkin came to be a convict. Here is the story which Dostoievsky gives us in the man’s own words:

“My mother loved me very much. When I became a recruit, I have since heard, she lay down on her bed and never rose again. As a recruit I found life bitter. The colonel did not like me, and punished me for everything. And what for? I was obedient, orderly, I never drank wine, I never borrowed, and that, Alexander Petrovitch, is a bad business, when a man borrows. All round me were such hard hearts, there was no place where one could have a good cry. Sometimes I would creep into a corner and cry a little there. Once I was standing on guard as a sentry; it was night. The wind was blowing, it was autumn, and so dark you could see nothing. And I was so miserable, so miserable! I took my gun, unscrewed the bayonet, and laid it on the ground; then I pulled off my right boot, put the muzzle of the barrel to my heart, leaned heavily on it and pulled the trigger with my big toe. It was a miss-fire. I examined the gun, cleaned the barrel, put in another cartridge and again pressed it to my breast. Again a miss-fire. I put on my boot again, fixed the bayonet, shouldered my gun, and walked up and down in silence; and I settled that whatever might happen I would get out of being a recruit. Half an hour later the colonel rode by, at the head of the patrol, right past me.

“‘Is that the way to stand on guard?’ he said.

“I took the gun in my hand and speared him with the bayonet right up to the muzzle of the gun. I was severely flogged, and was sent here for life.”

The second story is about a man who “exchanged” his sentence. It happened thus: A party of exiles were going to Siberia. Some were going to prison, some were merely exiled; some were going to work in factories, but all were going together. They stopped somewhere on the way in the Government of Perm. Among these exiles there was a man called Mikhailov, who was condemned to a life sentence for murder. He was a cunning fellow, and made up his mind to exchange his sentence. He comes across a simple fellow called Shushilov, who was merely condemned to a few years’ transportation, that is to say, he had to live in Siberia and not in European Russia for a few years. This latter man was naïve, ignorant, and, moreover, had no money of his own. Mikhailov made friends with him and finally made him drunk, and then proposed to him an exchange of sentences. Mikhailov said: “It is true that I am going to prison, but I am going to some special department,” which he explained was a particular favour, as it was a kind of first class. Shushilov, under the influence of drink, and being simple-minded, was full of gratitude for the offer, and Mikhailov taking advantage of his simplicity bought his name from him for a red shirt and a silver rouble, which he gave him on the spot, before witnesses. On the following day Shushilov spent the silver rouble and sold the red shirt for drink also, but as soon as he became sober again he regretted the bargain. Then Mikhailov said to him: “If you regret the bargain give me back my money.” This he could not do; it was impossible for him to raise a rouble. At the next étape at which they stopped, when their names were called and the officer called out Mikhailov, Shushilov answered and Mikhailov answered to Shushilov’s name, and the result was that when they left Tobolsk, Mikhailov was sent somewhere to spend a few years in exile, and Shushilov became a “lifer”; and the special department which the other man talked of as a kind of superior class, turned out to be the department reserved for the most desperate criminals of all, those who had no chance of ever leaving prison, and who were most strictly watched and guarded. It was no good complaining; there was no means of rectifying the mistake. There were no witnesses. Had there been witnesses they would have perjured themselves. And so Shushilov, who had done nothing at all, received the severest sentence the Russian Government had power to inflict, whereas the other man, a desperate criminal, merely enjoyed a few years’ change of air in the country. The most remarkable thing about this story is this: Dostoievsky tells us that the convicts despised Shushilov, not because he had exchanged his sentence, but because he had made so bad a bargain, and had only got a red shirt and a silver rouble. Had he exchanged it for two or three shirts and two or three roubles, they would have thought it quite natural.

The whole book is crammed with such stories, each one of which throws a flood of light on the character of the Russian people.

These Letters from a Dead House are translated into French, and a good English translation of them by Marie von Thilo was published by Messrs. Longmans in 1881. But it is now, I believe, out of print. Yet if there is one foreign book in the whole world which deserves to be well known, it is this one. Not only because it throws more light on the Russian people than any other book which has ever been written, but also because it tells in the simplest possible way illuminating things about prisoners and prison life. It is a book which should be read by all legislators; it is true that the prison life it describes is now obsolete. It deals with convict life in the fifties, when everything was far more antiquated, brutal and severe than it is now. Yet although prisoners had to run the gauntlet between a regiment of soldiers, and were sometimes beaten nearly to death, in spite of the squalor of the prison and in spite of the dreariness and anguish inseparable from their lives, the life of the prisoners stands out in a positively favourable contrast to that which is led by our convicts in what Mr. Chesterton calls our “clean and cruel prisons,” where our prisoners pick oakum to-day in “separate” confinement. The proof of this is that Dostoievsky was able to write one of the most beautiful studies of human nature that have ever been written out of his prison experience. In the first place, the prisoners enjoyed human fellowship. They all had tobacco; they played cards; they could receive alms, and, though this was more difficult, they could get wine. There were no rules forbidding them to speak. Each prisoner had an occupation of his own, a hobby, a trade, in which he occupied all his leisure time. Had it not been for this, Dostoievsky says, the prisoners would have gone mad. One wonders what they would think of an English prison, where the prisoners are not even allowed to speak to each other. Such a régime was and is and probably always will be perfectly unthinkable to a Russian mind. Indeed this point reminds me of a startling phrase of a Russian revolutionary, who had experiences of Russian prisons. He was a member of the second Russian Duma; he had spent many years in prison in Russia. In the winter of 1906 there was a socialistic conference in London which he attended. When he returned to Russia he was asked by his fellow-politicians to lecture on the liberty of English institutions. He refused to do so. “A Russian,” he said, “is freer in prison than an Englishman is at large.”

The secret of the merit of this extraordinary book is also the secret of the unique quality which we find in all Dostoievsky’s fiction. It is this: Dostoievsky faces the truth; he faces what is bad, what is worst, what is most revolting in human nature; he does not put on blinkers and deny the existence of evil, like many English writers, and he does not, like Zola, indulge in filthy analysis and erect out of his beastly investigations a pseudo-scientific theory based on the belief that all human nature is wholly bad. Dostoievsky analyses, not in order to experiment on the patient and to satisfy his own curiosity, but in order to cure and to comfort him. And having faced the evil and recognised it, he proceeds to unearth the good from underneath it; and he accepts the whole because of the good, and gives thanks for it. He finds God’s image in the worst of the criminals, and shows it to us, and for that reason this book is one of the most important books ever written. Terrible as it is, and sad as it is, no one can read it without feeling better and stronger and more hopeful. For Dostoievsky proves to us—so far from complaining of his lot—that life in the Dead House is not only worth living, but full of unsuspected and unexplored riches, rare pearls of goodness, shining gems of kindness, and secret springs of pity. He leaves prison with something like regret, and he regards his four years’ experience there as a special boon of Providence, the captain jewel of his life. He goes out saved for ever from despair, and full of that wisdom more precious than rubies which is to be found in the hearts of children.

V
Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment was published in 1866. It is a book which brought Dostoievsky fame and popularity, and by which, in Europe at any rate, he is still best known. It is the greatest tragedy about a murderer that has been written since Macbeth.

In the chapter on Tolstoy and Tourgeniev, I pointed out that the Russian character could roughly be divided into two types, which dominate the whole of Russian fiction, the two types being Lucifer, the embodiment of invincible pride, and Ivan Durak, the wise fool. This is especially true with regard to Dostoievsky’s novels. Nearly all the most important characters in his books represent one or other of these two types. Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment, is the embodiment of the Lucifer type, and the whole motive and mainspring of his character is pride.

Raskolnikov is a Nihilist in the true sense of the word, not a political Nihilist nor an intellectual Nihilist like Tourgeniev’s Bazarov, but a moral Nihilist; that is to say, a man who strives to act without principle and to be unscrupulous, who desires to put himself beyond and above human moral conventions. His idea is that if he can trample on human conventions, he will be a sort of Napoleon. He goes to pawn a jewel at an old woman pawnbroker’s, and the idea which is to affect his whole future vaguely takes root in his mind, namely, that an intelligent man, possessed of the fortune of this pawnbroker, could do anything, and that the only necessary step is to suppress this useless and positively harmful old woman. He thus expresses the idea later:

“I used to put myself this question: If Napoleon had found himself in my position and had not wherewith to begin his career, and there was neither Toulon, nor Egypt, nor the passage of the Alps, and if there were, instead of these splendid and monumental episodes, simply some ridiculous old woman, a usurer whom he would have to kill in order to get her money, would he shrink from doing this if there were no other alternative, merely because it would not be a fine deed and because it would be sinful? Now I tell you that I was possessed by this problem for a long time, and that I felt deeply ashamed when I at last guessed, suddenly as it were, that not only would he not be frightened at the idea, but that the thought that the thing was not important and grandiose enough would not even enter into his head: he would not even understand where the need for hesitation lay; and if there were no other way open to him, he would kill the woman without further reflection. Well, I ceased reflecting, and I killed her, following the example of my authority.”

Raskolnikov is obsessed by the idea, just as Macbeth is obsessed by the prophecy of the three witches, and circumstances seem to play the part of Fate in a Greek tragedy, and to lead him against his will to commit a horrible crime. “He is mechanically forced,” says Professor Brückner in his History of Russian Literature, “into performing the act, as if he had gone too near machinery in motion, had been caught by a bit of his clothing, and cut to pieces.” As soon as he has killed the old woman, he is fatally led into committing another crime immediately after the first crime is committed. He thinks that by committing this crime he will have trampled on human conventions, that he will be above and beyond morality, a Napoleon, a Superman. The tragedy of the book consists in his failure, and in his realising that he has failed. Instead of becoming stronger than mankind, he becomes weaker than mankind; instead of having conquered convention and morality, he is himself vanquished by them. He finds that as soon as the crime is committed the whole of his relation towards the world is changed, and his life becomes a long struggle with himself, a revolt against the moral consequences of his act. His instinct of self-preservation is in conflict with the horror of what he has done and the need for confession. Raskolnikov, as I have said, is the embodiment of pride; pride is the mainspring of his character. He is proud enough to build gigantic conceptions, to foster the ambition of placing himself above and beyond humanity, but his character is not strong enough to bear the load of his ideas. He thinks he has the makings of a great man in him, and in order to prove this to himself he commits a crime that would put an ordinary man beyond the pale of humanity, because he thinks that being an extraordinary man he will remain within the pale of humanity and not suffer. His pride suffers a mortal blow when he finds that he is weak, and that the moral consequences of his act face him at every turn. He fights against this, he strives not to recognise it; he deliberately seeks the company of detectives; he discusses murder and murderers with them minutely, and with a recklessness which leads him to the very brink of the precipice, when it would need but a word more for him to betray himself. The examining magistrate, indeed, guesses that he has committed the crime, and plays with him as a cat plays with a mouse, being perfectly certain that in the long-run he will confess of his own accord. The chapters which consist of the duel between these two men are the most poignant in anguish which I have ever read. I have seen two of these scenes acted on the stage, and several people in the audience had hysterics before they were over. At last the moment of expiation comes, though that of regeneration is still far distant. Raskolnikov loves a poor prostitute named Sonia. His act, his murder, has affected his love for Sonia, as it has affected the rest of his life, and has charged it with a sullen despair. Sonia, who loves him as the only man who has never treated her with contempt, sees that he has some great load on his mind, that he is tortured by some hidden secret. She tries in vain to get him to tell her what it is, but at last he comes to her with the intention of telling her, and she reads the speaking secret in his eyes. As soon as she knows, she tells him that he must kiss the earth which he has stained, and confess to the whole world that he has committed murder. Then, she says, God will send him a new life. At first he refuses: he says that society is worse than he, that greater crimes than his are committed every day; that those who commit them are highly honoured. Sonia speaks of his suffering, and of the torture he will undergo by keeping his dread secret, but he will not yet give in, nor admit that he is not a strong man, that he is really a louse—which is the name he gives to all human beings who are not “Supermen.” Sonia says that they must go to exile together, and that by suffering together they will expiate his deed. This is one of Dostoievsky’s principal ideas, or rather it is the interpretation and conception of Christianity which you will most frequently meet with among the Russian people,—that suffering is good in itself, and especially suffering in common with some one else.

After Raskolnikov has confessed his crime to Sonia, he still hovers round and round the police, like a moth fatally attracted by a candle, and at last he makes open confession, and is condemned to seven years’ penal servitude. But although he has been defeated in the battle with his idea, although he has not only failed, but failed miserably, even after he has confessed his crime and is paying the penalty for it in prison, his pride still survives. When he arrives in prison, it is not the hardships of prison life, it is not the hard labour, the coarse food, the shaven head, the convict’s dress, that weigh on his spirit; nor does he feel remorse for his crime. But here once more in prison he begins to criticise and reflect on his former actions, and finds them neither foolish nor horrible as he did before. “In what,” he thinks, “was my conception stupider than many conceptions and theories which are current in the world? One need only look at the matter from an independent standpoint, and with a point-of-view unbiased by conventional ideas, and the idea will not seem so strange. And why does my deed,” he thought to himself, “appear so ugly? In what way was it an evil deed? My conscience is at rest. Naturally I committed a criminal offence, I broke the letter of the law and I shed blood. Well, take my head in return for the letter of the law and make an end of it! Of course, even many of those men who have benefited mankind and who were never satiated with power, after they had seized it for themselves, ought to have been executed as soon as they had taken their first step, but these people succeeded in taking further steps, and therefore they are justified: I did not succeed, and therefore perhaps I had not the right to take the first step.”

Raskolnikov accordingly considered that his crime consisted solely in this, that he was not strong enough to carry it through to the end, and not strong enough not to confess it. He also tortured himself with another thought: why did he not kill himself as soon as he recognised the truth? Why did he prefer the weakness of confession?

The other convicts in the prison disliked him, distrusted him, and ended by hating him. Dostoievsky’s own experience of convict life enables him in a short space to give us a striking picture of Raskolnikov’s relations with the other convicts. He gradually becomes aware of the vast gulf which there is between him and the others. The class barrier which rises between him and them, is more difficult to break down than that caused by a difference in nationality. At the same time, he noticed that in the prison there were political prisoners, Poles, for instance, and officers, who looked down on the other convicts as though they were insects, ciphers of ignorance, and despised them accordingly. But he is unable to do this, he cannot help seeing that these ‘ciphers’ are far cleverer in many cases than the men who look down on them. On the other hand, he is astonished that they all love Sonia, who has followed him to the penal settlement where his prison is, and lives in the town. The convicts rarely see her, meeting her only from time to time at their work; and yet they adore her, because she has followed Raskolnikov. The hatred of the other convicts against him grows so strong that one day at Easter, when he goes to church with them, they turn on him and say: “You have no right to go to church: you do not believe in God, you are an atheist, you ought to be killed.” He had never spoken with them of God or of religion, and yet they wished to kill him as an atheist. He only narrowly escaped being killed by the timely interference of a sentry. To the truth of this incident I can testify by personal experience, as I have heard Russian peasants and soldiers say that such and such a man was religious and that such and such a man was “godless,” although these men had never mentioned religion to them; and they were always right.

Then Raskolnikov fell ill and lay for some time in delirium in the hospital. After his recovery he learns that Sonia has fallen ill herself, and has not been near the prison, and a great sadness comes over him. At last she recovers, and he meets her one day at his work. Something melts in his heart, he knows not how or why; he falls at her feet and cries; and from that moment a new life begins for him. His despair has rolled away like a cloud: his heart has risen as though from the dead.

Crime and Punishment, the best known of all Dostoievsky’s works, is certainly the most powerful. The anguish of mind which Raskolnikov goes through tortures the reader. Dostoievsky seems to have touched the extreme limit of suffering which the human soul can experience when it descends into hell. At the same time, he never seems to be gloating over the suffering, but, on the contrary, to be revealing the agonies of the human spirit in order to pour balm upon them. There is an episode earlier in the story, when Raskolnikov kneels down before Sonia, and speaks words which might be taken as the motto of this book, and indeed of nearly all of Dostoievsky’s books: “It is not before you that I am kneeling, but before all the suffering of mankind.”

It is in this book more than in any of his other books that one has the feeling that Dostoievsky is kneeling down before the great agonies that the human soul can endure: and in doing this, he teaches us how to endure and how to hope. Apart from the astounding analysis to be found in the book, and the terrible network of details of which the conflict between Raskolnikov and his obsession consists: apart from the duel of tongues between the examining magistrate, who is determined that the criminal shall be condemned, not on account of any circumstantial evidence, but by his own confession, and who drives the criminal to confession by playing upon his obsession: apart from all this main action, there is a wealth of minor characters, episodes and scenes, all of which are indispensable to the main thread of tragedy which runs through the whole. The book, as has been pointed out, did not receive anything like its full recognition in 1866 when it appeared, and now, in 1909, it stands higher in the estimation of all those who are qualified to judge it than it did then. This can be said of very few books published in Europe in the sixties. For all the so-called psychological and analytical novels which have been published since 1866 in France and in England not only seem pale and lifeless compared with Dostoievsky’s fierce revelations, but not one of them has a drop of his large humanity, or a breath of his fragrant goodness.

VI
The Idiot

Although Crime and Punishment is the most powerful, and probably the most popular of Dostoievsky’s books, I do not think it is the most characteristic; that is to say, I do not think it possesses in so high a degree those qualities which are peculiar to his genius. More characteristic still is The Idiot, in the main character of which the very soul and spirit of Dostoievsky breathe and live. The hero of The Idiot, Prince Mwishkin, is the type of Ivan Durak, the simple fool who by his simplicity outwits the wisdom of the wise.

We make his acquaintance in a third-class railway carriage of the train which is arriving at St. Petersburg from Warsaw. He is a young man about twenty-six years old, with thick fair hair, sloping shoulders, and a very slight fair beard; his eyes are large, light-blue, and penetrating; in his expression there is something tranquil but burdensome, something of that strange look which enables physicians to recognise at a first glance a victim of the falling sickness. In his hand he is carrying a bundle made of old foulard, which is his whole luggage. A fellow-traveller enters into conversation with him. He answers with unusual alacrity. Being asked whether he has been absent long, he says that it is over four years since he was in Russia, that he was sent abroad on account of his health—on account of some strange nervous illness like St. Vitus’ dance. As he listens, his fellow-traveller laughs several times, and especially when to the question, “Did they cure you?” the fair-haired man answers, “No, they did not cure me.” The dark-haired man is Rogozhin, a merchant. These two characters are the two figures round which the drama of the book centres and is played.

The purpose of Prince Mwishkin in coming to St. Petersburg is to find a distant relation of his, the wife of a General Epanchin. He has already written to her from Switzerland, but has received no answer. He presents himself at the general’s house with his bundle. A man in livery opens the door and regards him with suspicion. At last, after he has explained clearly and at some length that he is Prince Mwishkin, and that it is necessary for him to see the general on important business, the servant leads him into a small front-hall into which the anteroom (where guests are received) of the general’s study opens. He delivers him into the hands of another servant who is dressed in black. This man tells the prince to wait in the anteroom and to leave his bundle in the front-hall. He sits down in his armchair and looks with severe astonishment at the prince, who, instead of taking the suggestion, sits down beside him on a chair, with his bundle in his hands.

“If you will allow me,” said the prince, “I would rather wait here with you. What should I do there alone?”

“The hall,” answered the servant, “is not the place for you, because you are a visitor, or in other words, a guest. You wish to see the general himself?” The servant obviously could not reconcile himself with the idea of showing in such a visitor, and decided to question him further.

“Yes, I have come on business,” began the prince.

“I do not ask you what is your business. My business is simply to announce you. But without asking the secretary I said I would not announce you.” The suspicions of the servant continually seemed to increase. The prince was so unlike the ordinary run of everyday visitors. “... You are, so to speak, from abroad?” asked the servant at last, and hesitated as if he wished to say, “You are really Prince Mwishkin?”

“Yes, I have this moment come from the train. I think that you wished to ask me whether I am really Prince Mwishkin, and that you did not ask me out of politeness.”

“H’m!” murmured the astonished servant.

“I assure you that I was not telling lies, and that you will not get into trouble on account of me. That I am dressed as I am and carrying a bundle like this is not astonishing, for at the present moment my circumstances are not flourishing.”

“H’m! I am not afraid of that. You see I am obliged to announce you, and the secretary will come to see you unless ... the matter is like this: You have not come to beg from the general, may I be so bold as to ask?”

“Oh no, you may rest assured of that. I have come on other business.”

“Pardon me. Please wait for the secretary; he is busy....”

“Very well. If I shall have to wait long I should like to ask you whether I might smoke. I have a pipe and some tobacco.”

“Smoke!” The servant looked at him with contempt, as if he could not believe his ears. “Smoke? No, you cannot smoke here. And what is more, you should be ashamed of thinking of such a thing. Well, this is queer!”

“I did not mean in this room, but I would go somewhere if you would show me, because I am accustomed to it, and I have not smoked now for three hours. But as you like.”

“Now, how shall I announce you?” murmured the servant as though almost unwillingly to himself. “In the first place you ought not to be here, but in the anteroom, because you are a visitor, that is to say, a guest, and I am responsible. Have you come to live here?” he asked, looking again at the prince’s bundle, which evidently disturbed him.

“No, I don’t think so; even if they invited me, I should not stay. I have simply come to make acquaintance, nothing more.”

“How do you mean, to make acquaintance?” the servant asked, with trebled suspicion and astonishment. “You said at first that you had come on business.”

“Well, it’s not exactly business; that is to say, if you like, it is business,—it is only to ask advice. But the chief thing is that I have come to introduce myself, because I and the general’s wife are both descendants from the Mwishkins, and besides myself there are no Mwishkins left.”

“So, what’s more you are a relation!” said the frightened servant.

“No, not exactly a relation,—that is to say, if you go back far enough, we are, of course, relations; but so far back that it doesn’t count! I wrote to the general’s wife a letter from abroad, but she did not answer me. All the same, I considered it necessary to make her acquaintance as soon as I arrived. I am explaining all this to you so that you should not have any doubts, because I see that you are disquieted. Announce that it is Prince Mwishkin, and that will be enough to explain the object of my visit. If they will see me, all will be well. If they do not, very likely all will be well too. But I don’t think they can help receiving me, because the general’s wife will naturally wish to see the oldest, indeed the only representative of her family; and she is most particular about keeping up relations with her family, as I have heard.”

“The conversation of the prince seemed as simple as possible, but the simpler it was, the more absurd it became under the circumstances; and the experienced footman could not help feeling something which was perfectly right between man and man, and utterly wrong between man and servant. Servants are generally far cleverer than their masters think, and this one thought that two things might be possible; either the prince had come to ask for money, or that he was simply a fool without ambition,—because an ambitious prince would not remain in the front-hall talking of his affairs with a footman, and would he not probably be responsible and to blame in either the one case or the other?”

I have quoted this episode, which occurs in the second chapter of the book, in full, because in it the whole character of the prince is revealed. He is the wise fool. He suffers from epilepsy, and this “sacred” illness which has fallen on him has destroyed all those parts of the intellect out of which our faults grow, such as irony, arrogance and egoism. He is absolutely simple. He has the brains of a man, the tenderness of a woman and the heart of a child. He knows nothing of any barriers, either of class or character. He is the same and absolutely himself with every one he meets. And yet his unsuspicious naïveté, his untarnished sincerity and simplicity, are combined with penetrating intuition, so that he can read other people’s minds like a book.

The general receives him, and he is just as frank and simple with the general as he has been with the servant. He is entirely without means, and has nothing in the world save his little bundle. The general inquires whether his handwriting is good, and resolves to get him some secretarial work; he gives him 25 roubles, and arranges that the prince shall live in his secretary’s house. The general makes the prince stay for luncheon, and introduces him to his family. The general’s wife is a charming, rather childish person, and she has three daughters, Alexandra, Adelaide and Aglaia. The prince astonishes them very much by his simplicity. They cannot quite understand at first whether he is a child or a knave, but his simplicity conquers them. After they have talked of various matters, his life in Switzerland, the experiences of a man condemned to death, which had been related to him and which I have already quoted, an execution which he had witnessed, one of the girls asks him if he was ever in love.

“No,” he says, “I have never been in love ... I was happy otherwise.”

“How was that?” they ask.

Then he relates the following: “Where I was living they were all children, and I spent all my time with the children, and only with them. They were the children of the village; they all went to school. I never taught them, there was a schoolmaster for that.... I perhaps did teach them too, in a way, for I was more with them, and all the four years that I spent there went in this way. I had need of nothing else. I told them everything, I kept nothing secret from them. Their fathers and relations were angry with me because at last the children could not do without me, and always came round me in crowds, and the schoolmaster in the end became my greatest enemy. I made many enemies there, all on account of the children. And what were they afraid of? You can tell a child everything—everything. I have always been struck by the thought of how ignorant grown-up people are of children, how ignorant even fathers and mothers are of their own children. You should conceal nothing from children under the pretext that they are small, and that it is too soon for them to know. That is a sad, an unhappy thought. And how well children themselves understand that their fathers are thinking they are too small and do not understand anything—when they really understand everything. Grown-up people do not understand that a child even in the most difficult matter can give extremely important advice. Heavens! when one of these lovely little birds looks up at you, confiding and happy, it is a shame to deceive it. I call them birds because there is nothing better than birds in the world. To go on with my story, the people in the village were most angry with me because of one thing: the schoolmaster simply envied me. At first he shook his head, and wondered how the children understood everything I told them, and almost nothing of what he told them. Then he began to laugh at me when I said to him that we could neither of us teach them anything, but that they could teach us. And how could he envy me and slander me when he himself lived with children? Children heal the soul.”

Into the character of the hero of this book Dostoievsky has put all the sweetness of his nature, all his sympathy with the unfortunate, all his pity for the sick, all his understanding and love of children. The character of Prince Mwishkin reflects all that is best in Dostoievsky. He is a portrait not of what Dostoievsky was, but of what the author would like to have been. It must not for a moment be thought that he imagined that he fulfilled this ideal: he was well aware of his faults: of the sudden outbursts and the seething deeps of his passionate nature; his capacity for rage, hatred, jealousy and envy; none the less Dostoievsky could not possibly have created the character of Prince Mwishkin, the Idiot, had he not been made of much the same substance himself.

All through Dostoievsky’s books, whenever children are mentioned or appear, the pages breathe a kind of freshness and fragrance like that of lilies-of-the-valley. Whatever he says about children or whatever he makes them say, has the rare accent of truth. The smile of children lights up the dark pages of his books, like spring flowers growing at the edge of a dark abyss.

In strong contrast to the character of the prince is the merchant Rogozhin. He is the incarnation of the second type, that of the obdurate spirit, which I have already said dominates Dostoievsky’s novels. He is, perhaps, less proud than Raskolnikov, but he is far stronger, more passionate and more vehement. His imperious and unfettered nature is handicapped by no weakness of nerves, no sapping self-analysis. He is undisciplined and centrifugal. He is not “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,” but it is his passions and not his ideas which are too great for the vessel that contains them. Rogozhin loves Nastasia, a hetaira, who has likewise unbridled passions and impulses. He loves her with all the strength of his violent and undisciplined nature, and he is tormented by jealousy because she does not love him, although she cannot help submitting to the influence of his imperious personality. The jealous poison in him takes so complete a possession of his body and soul that he ultimately kills Nastasia almost immediately after she has married him and given herself to him, because he feels that she is never his own, least of all at the moment when she abandons herself to him for ever. So great is his passion, that this woman, even while hating him, cannot resist going to him against her will, knowing well that he will kill her.

The description of the night that follows this murder, when Rogozhin talks all night with the prince in front of the bed where Nastasia is lying dead, is by its absence of melodrama and its simplicity perhaps the most icily terrible piece of writing that Dostoievsky ever penned. The reason why Nastasia does not love Rogozhin is that she loves Prince Mwishkin, the Idiot, and so does the third daughter of the general, Aglaia, although he gives them nothing but pity, and never makes love to them. And here we come to the root-idea and the kernel of the book, which is the influence which the Idiot exercises on everybody with whom he comes in contact. Dostoievsky places him in a nest of rascals, scoundrels and villains, a world of usurers, liars and thieves, interested, worldly, ambitious and shady. He not only passes unscathed through all this den of evil, but the most deadly weapons of the wicked, their astuteness, their cunning and their fraud, are utterly powerless against his very simplicity, and there is not one of these people, however crusted with worldliness, however sordid or bad, who can evade his magical influence. The women at first laugh at him; but in the end, as I have already said, he becomes a cardinal factor in the life of both Nastasia the unbridled and passionate woman, and Aglaia the innocent and intelligent girl: so much so that they end by joining in a battle of wild jealousy over him, although he himself is naïvely unconscious of the cause of their dispute.

This book, more than any other, reveals to us the methods and the art of Dostoievsky. This method and this art are not unlike those of Charlotte Brontë. The setting of the picture, the accessories, are fantastic, sometimes to the verge of impossibility, and this no more matters than the fantastic setting of Jane Eyre matters. All we see and all we feel is the white flame of light that burns throughout the book. We no more care whether a man like General Epanchin could or could not have existed, or whether the circumstances of his life are possible or impossible than we care whether the friends of Mr. Rochester are possible or impossible. Such things seem utterly trivial in this book, where at every moment we are allowed to look deep down into the very depths of human nature, to look as it were on the spirit of man and woman naked and unashamed. For though the setting may be fantastic if not impossible, though we may never have seen such people in our lives, they are truer than life in a way: we seem to see right inside every one of these characters as though they had been stripped of everything which was false and artificial about them, as though they were left with nothing but their bared souls, as they will be at the Day of Judgment.

With regard to the artistic construction of the book, the method is the same as that of most of Dostoievsky’s books. In nearly all his works the book begins just before a catastrophe and occupies the space of a few days. And yet the book is very long. It is entirely taken up by conversation and explanation of the conversation. There are no descriptions of nature; everything is in a dialogue. Directly one character speaks we hear the tone of his voice. There are no “stage directions.” We are not told that so and so is such and such a person, we feel it and recognise it from the very first word he says. On the other hand, there is a great deal of analysis, but it is never of an unnecessary kind. Dostoievsky never nudges our elbow, never points out to us things which we know already, but he illuminates with a strong searchlight the deeps of the sombre and tortuous souls of his characters, by showing us what they are themselves thinking, but not what he thinks of them. His analysis resembles the Greek chorus, and his books resemble Greek tragedies in the making, rich ore mingled with dark dross, granite and marble, the stuff out of which Æschylus could have hewn another Agamemnon, or Shakespeare have written another King Lear.

The Idiot may not be the most artistic of all his books, in the sense that it is not centralised and is often diffuse, which is not the case with Crime and Punishment, but it is perhaps the most characteristic, the most personal, for none but Dostoievsky could have invented and caused to live such a character as Prince Mwishkin, and made him positively radiate goodness and love.

VII
The Possessed

The Possessed, or Devils, which is the literal translation of the Russian title, is perhaps inferior to Dostoievsky’s other work as a whole, but in one sense it is the most interesting book which he ever wrote. There are two reasons for this: in the first place, his qualities and his defects as a writer are seen in this book intensified, under a magnifying glass as it were, at their extremes, so that it both gives you an idea of the furthest range of his powers, and shows you most clearly the limitations of his genius. Stevenson points out somewhere that this is the case with Victor Hugo’s least successful novels. In the second place, the book was far in advance of its time. In it Dostoievsky shows that he possessed “a prophetic soul.”

The book deals with the Nihilists who played a prominent part in the sixties. The explanation of the title is to be found in a quotation from the 8th chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel.

“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 saw it, told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils, was healed.”

The book, as I have said, undoubtedly reveals Dostoievsky’s powers at their highest pitch, in the sense that nowhere in the whole range of his work do we find such isolated scenes of power; scenes which are, so to speak, white hot with the fire of his soul; and characters in which he has concentrated the whole dæmonic force of his personality, and the whole blinding strength of his insight. On the other hand, it shows us, as I added, more clearly than any other of his books, the nature and the extent of his limitations. It is almost too full of characters and incidents; the incidents are crowded together in an incredibly short space of time, the whole action of the book, which is a remarkably long one, occupying only the space of a few days, while to the description of one morning enough space is allotted to make a bulky English novel. Again, the narrative is somewhat disconnected. You can sometimes scarcely see the wood for the trees. Of course, these objections are in a sense hypercritical, because, as far as my experience goes, any one who takes up this book finds it impossible to put it down until he has read it to the very end, so enthralling is the mere interest of the story, so powerful the grip of the characters. I therefore only suggest these criticisms for those who wish to form an idea of the net result of Dostoievsky’s artistic scope and achievement.

With regard to the further point, the “prophetic soul” which speaks in this book is perhaps that which is its most remarkable quality. The book was some thirty years ahead of its time: ahead of its time in the same way that Wagner’s music was ahead of its time,—and this was not only on account of the characters and the state of things which it divined and foreshadowed, but also on account of the ideas and the flashes of philosophy which abound in its pages. When the book was published, it was treated as a gross caricature, and even a few years ago, when Professor Brückner first published his History of Russian Literature, he talked of this book as being a satire not of Nihilism itself, but of the hangers-on, the camp-followers which accompany every army. “Dostoievsky,” he says, “did not paint the heroes but the Falstaffs, the silly adepts, the half and wholly crazed adherents of Nihilism. He was indeed fully within his rights. Of course there were such Nihilists, particularly between 1862 and 1869, but there were not only such: even Nechaev, the prototype of Petrushka, impressed us by a steel-like energy and a hatred for the upper classes which we wholly miss in the wind-bag and intriguer Petrushka.”

There is a certain amount of truth in this criticism. It is true that Dostoievsky certainly painted the Falstaffs and the half-crazy adherents of Nihilism. But I am convinced that the reason he did not paint the heroes was that he did not believe in their existence: he did not believe that the heroes of Nihilism were heroes; this is plain not only from this book, but from every line which he wrote about the people who played a part in the revolutionary movement in Russia; and so far from the leading personage in his book being merely a wind-bag, I would say that one is almost more impressed by the steel-like energy of the character, as drawn in this book, than by the sayings and doings of his prototype—or rather his prototypes in real life. The amazing thing is that even if a few years ago real life had not furnished examples of revolutionaries as extreme both in their energy and in their craziness as Dostoievsky paints them, real life has done so in the last four years. Therefore, Dostoievsky not only saw with prophetic divination that should circumstances in Russia ever lead to a general upheaval, such characters might arise and exercise an influence, but his prophetic insight has actually been justified by the facts.

As soon as such circumstances arose, as they did after the Japanese War of 1904, characters such as Dostoievsky depicted immediately came to the front and played a leading part. When M. de Vogüé published his book, La Roman Russe, in speaking of The Possessed, he said that he had assisted at several of the trials of Anarchists in 1871, and he added that many of the men who came up for trial, and many of the crimes of which they were accused, were identical reproductions of the men and the crimes imagined by the novelist. If this was true when applied to the revolutionaries of 1871, it is a great deal truer applied to those of 1904-1909. That Dostoievsky believed that this would happen, I think there can be no doubt. Witness the following passage:

“Chigalev,” says the leading character of The Possessed, speaking of one of his revolutionary disciples, a man with long ears, “is a man of genius: a genius in the manner of Fourier, but bolder and cleverer. He has invented ‘equality.’ In his system, every member of society has an eye on every one else. To tell tales is a duty. The individual belongs to the community and the community belongs to the individual. All are slaves and equal in their bondage. Calumny and assassination can be used in extreme cases, but the most important thing is equality. The first necessity is to lower the level of culture science and talent. A high scientific level is only accessible to superior intellects, and we don’t want superior intellects. Men gifted with high capacities have always seized upon power and become despots. Highly gifted men cannot help being despots, and have always done more harm than good. They must be exiled or executed. Cicero’s tongue must be cut out, Copernicus’ eyes must be blinded, Shakespeare must be stoned. That is Chigalevism. Slaves must be equal. Without despotism, up to the present time, neither liberty nor equality has existed, but in a herd, equality should reign supreme,—and that is Chigalevism.... I am all for Chigalevism. Down with instruction and science! There is enough of it, as it is, to last thousands of years, but we must organise obedience: it is the only thing which is wanting in the world. The desire for culture is an aristocratic desire. As soon as you admit the idea of the family or of love, you will have the desire for personal property. We will annihilate this desire: we will let loose drunkenness, slander, tale-telling, and unheard-of debauchery. We will strangle every genius in his cradle. We will reduce everything to the same denomination, complete equality. ‘We have learnt a trade, and we are honest men: we need nothing else.’ Such was the answer which some English workman made the other day. The indispensable alone is indispensable. Such will thenceforth be the watchword of the world, but we must have upheavals. We will see to that, we the governing class. The slaves must have leaders. Complete obedience, absolute impersonality, but once every thirty years Chigalev will bring about an upheaval, and men will begin to devour each other: always up to a given point, so that we may not be bored. Boredom is an aristocratic sensation, and in Chigalevism there will be no desires. We will reserve for ourselves desire and suffering, and for the slaves there will be Chigalevism.... We will begin by fermenting disorder; we will reach the people itself. Do you know that we are already terribly strong? those who belong to us are not only the men who murder and set fire, who commit injuries after the approved fashion, and who bite: these people are only in the way. I do not understand anything unless there be discipline. I myself am a scoundrel, but I am not a Socialist. Ha, ha! listen! I have counted them all: the teacher who laughs with the children whom he teaches, at their God and at their cradle, belongs to us; the barrister who defends a well-educated assassin by proving that he is more educated than his victims, and that in order to get money he was obliged to kill, belongs to us; the schoolboy who in order to experience a sharp sensation kills a peasant, belongs to us; the juries who systematically acquit all criminals, belong to us; the judge who at the tribunal is afraid of not showing himself to be sufficiently liberal, belongs to us; among the administrators, among the men of letters, a great number belong to us, and they do not know it themselves. On the other hand, the obedience of schoolboys and fools has reached its zenith. Everywhere you see an immeasurable vanity, and bestial, unheard-of appetites. Do you know how much we owe to the theories in vogue at present alone? When I left Russia, Littré’s thesis, which likens crime to madness, was the rage. I return, and crime is already no longer considered even as madness: it is considered as common sense itself, almost a duty, at least a noble protest. ‘Why should not an enlightened man kill if he has need of money?’ Such is the argument you hear. But that is nothing. The Russian God has ceded his place to drink. The people are drunk, the mothers are drunk, the children are drunk, the churches are empty. Oh, let this generation grow: it is a pity we cannot wait. They would be drunk still. Ah, what a pity that we have no proletariat! But it will come, it will come. The moment is drawing near.”

In this declaration of revolutionary faith, Dostoievsky has concentrated the whole of an ideal on which thousands of ignorant men in Russia have acted during the last three years. All of the so-called Hooliganism which came about in Russia after the war, which although it has greatly diminished has by no means yet been exterminated by a wholesale system of military court-martials, proceeds from this, and its adepts are conscious or unconscious disciples of this creed. For the proletariat which Dostoievsky foresaw is now a living fact, and a great part of it has been saturated with such ideas. Not all of it, of course. I do not for a moment mean to say that every ordinary Russian social-democrat fosters such ideas; but what I do mean to say is that these ideas exist and that a great number of men have acted on a similar creed which they have only half digested, and have sunk into ruin, ruining others in doing so, and have ended by being hanged.

Thus the book, Devils, which, when it appeared in 1871, was thought a piece of gross exaggeration, and which had not been out long before events began to show that it was less exaggerated than it appeared at first sight—has in the last three years, and even in this year of grace, received further justification by events such as the rôle that Father Gapon played in the revolutionary movement, and the revelations which have been lately made with regard to Azev and similar characters. Any one who finds difficulty in believing a story such as that which came to light through the Azev revelations, had better read The Possessed. It will throw an illuminating light on the motives that cause such men to act as they do, and the circumstances that produce such men.

The main idea of the book is to show that the whole strength of what were then the Nihilists and what are now the Revolutionaries,—let us say the Maximalists,—lies, not in lofty dogmas and theories held by a vast and splendidly organised community, but simply in the strength of character of one or two men, and in the peculiar weakness of the common herd. I say the peculiar weakness with intention. It does not follow that the common herd, to which the majority of the revolutionary disciples belong, is necessarily altogether weak, but that though the men of whom it is composed may be strong and clever in a thousand ways, they have one peculiar weakness, which is, indeed, a common weakness of the Russian character. But before going into this question, it is advisable first to say that what Dostoievsky shows in his book, The Possessed, is that these Nihilists are almost entirely devoid of ideas; the organisations round which so many legends gather, consist in reality of only a few local clubs,—in this particular case, of one local club. All the talk of central committees, executive committees, and so forth, existed only in the imagination of the leaders. On the other hand, the character of those few men who were the leaders and who dominated their disciples, was as strong as steel and as cold as ice. And what Dostoievsky shows is how this peculiar strength of the leaders exercised itself on the peculiar weakness of the disciples. Let us now turn to the peculiar nature of this weakness. Dostoievsky explains it at the very beginning of the book. In describing one of the characters, Chatov, who is an unwilling disciple of the Nihilist leaders, he says:

“He is one of those Russian Idealists whom any strong idea strikes all of a sudden, and on the spot annihilates his will, sometimes for ever. They are never able to react against the idea. They believe in it passionately, and the rest of their life passes as though they were writhing under a stone which was crushing them.”

The leading figure of the book is one Peter Verkhovensky, a political agitator. He is unscrupulous, ingenious, and plausible in the highest degree, as clever as a fiend, a complete egotist, boundlessly ambitious, untroubled by conscience, and as hard as steel. His prototype was Nachaef, an actual Nihilist. The ambition of this man is to create disorder, and disorder once created, to seize the authority which must ultimately arise out of any disorder. His means of effecting this is as ingenious as Chichikov’s method of disposing of “dead souls” in Gogol’s masterpiece. By imagining a central committee, of which he is the representative, he organises a small local committee, consisting of five men called “the Fiver”; and he persuades his dupes that a network of similar small committees exists all over Russia. He aims at getting the local committee entirely into his hands, and making the members of it absolute slaves to his will. His ultimate aim is to create similar committees all over the country, persuading people in every new place that the network is ready everywhere else, and that they are all working in complete harmony and in absolute obedience to a central committee, which is somewhere abroad, and which in reality does not exist. This once accomplished, his idea is to create disorder among the peasants or the masses, and in the general upheaval to seize the power. It is possible that I am defining his aim too closely, since in the book one only sees his work, so far as one local committee is concerned. But it is clear from his character that he has some big idea at the back of his head. He is not merely dabbling with excitement in a small local sphere, for all the other characters in the book, however much they hate him, are agreed about one thing; that in his cold and self-seeking character there lies an element of sheer enthusiasm. The manner in which he creates disciples out of his immediate surroundings, and obtains an unbounded influence over them, is by playing on the peculiar weakness which I have already quoted as being the characteristic of Chigalevism. He plays on the one-sidedness of the Russian character; he plays on the fact that directly one single idea takes possession of the brain of a certain kind of Russian idealist, as in the case of Chatov, or Raskolnikov, for instance, he is no longer able to control it. Peter works on this. He also works on the vanity of his disciples, and on their fear of not being thought advanced enough.

“The principal strength,” he says on one occasion, “the cement which binds everything, is the fear of public opinion, the fear of having an opinion of one’s own. It is with just such people that success is possible. I tell you they would throw themselves into the fire if I told them to do so, if I ordered it. I would only have to say that they were bad Liberals. I have been blamed for having deceived my associates here in speaking of a central committee and of ‘innumerable ramifications.’ But where is the deception? The central committee is you and me. As to the ramifications, I can have as many as you wish.”

But as Peter’s plans advance, this cement, consisting of vanity and the fear of public opinion, is not sufficient for him; he wants a stronger bond to bind his disciples together, and to keep them under his own immediate and exclusive control; and such a bond must be one of blood. He therefore persuades his committee that one of their members, Chatov, to whom I have already alluded, is a spy. This is easy, because Chatov is a member of the organisation against his will. He became involved in the business when he was abroad, in Switzerland; and on the first possible occasion he says he will have nothing to do with any Nihilist propaganda, since he is absolutely opposed to it, being a convinced Slavophil and a hater of all acts of violence. Peter lays a trap for him. At a meeting of the committee he asks every one of those present whether, should they be aware that a political assassination were about to take place, they would denounce the man who was to perform it. With one exception all answer no, that they would denounce an ordinary assassin, but that political assassination is not murder. When the question is put to Chatov he refuses to answer. Peter tells the others that this is the proof that he is a spy, and that he must be made away with. His object is that they should kill Chatov, and thenceforth be bound to him by fear of each other and of him. He has a further plan for attributing the guilt of Chatov’s murder to another man. He has come across an engineer named Kirilov. This man is also possessed by one idea, in the same manner as Raskolnikov and Chatov, only that, unlike them, his character is strong. His idea is practically that enunciated many years later by Nietzsche, that of the Superman. Kirilov is a maniac: the single idea which in his case has taken possession of him is that of suicide. There are two prejudices, he reasons, which prevent man committing suicide. One of them is insignificant, the other very serious, but the insignificant reason is not without considerable importance: it is the fear of pain. In exposing his idea he argues that were a stone the size of a six-storied house to be suspended over a man, he would know that the fall of the stone would cause him no pain, yet he would instinctively dread its fall, as causing extreme pain. As long as that stone remained suspended over him, he would be in terror lest it should cause him pain by its fall, and no one, not even the most scientific of men, could escape this impression. Complete liberty will come about only when it will be immaterial to man whether he lives or not: that is the aim.

The second cause and the most serious one that prevents men from committing suicide, is the idea of another world. For the sake of clearness I will here quote Kirilov’s conversation on this subject with the narrator of the story, which is told in the first person:

“... That is to say, punishment?” says his interlocutor.

“No, that is nothing—simply the idea of another world.”

“Are there not atheists who already disbelieve in another world?”

Kirilov was silent.

“You perhaps judge by yourself.”

“Every man can judge only by himself,” said Kirilov, blushing. “Complete liberty will come about when it will be entirely immaterial to man whether he lives or whether he dies: that is the aim of everything.”

“The aim? Then nobody will be able or will wish to live.”

“Nobody,” he answered.

“Man fears death, and therefore loves life,” I remarked. “That is how I understand the matter, and thus has Nature ordained.”

“That is a base idea, and therein lies the whole imposture. Life is suffering, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Everything now is in pain and terror. Man loves life now, because he loves pain and terror. Thus has he been made. Man gives his life now for pain and fear, and therein lies the whole imposture. Man is not at present what he ought to be. A new man will rise, happy and proud, to whom it will be immaterial whether he lives or dies. That will be the new man. He who vanquishes pain and fear, he will be God, and the other gods will no longer exist.”

“Then, according to you, the other God does exist?”

“He exists without existing. In the stone there is no pain, but in the fear of the stone there is pain. God is the pain which arises from the fear of death. He who vanquishes the pain and the fear, he will be God. Then there will be a new life, a new man, everything new. Then history will be divided into two parts. From the gorilla to the destruction of God, and from the destruction of God to....”

“To the gorilla ...?”

“To the physical transformation of man and of the world. Man will be God, and will be transformed physically.”

“How do you think man will be transformed physically?”

“The transformation will take place in the world, in thought, sentiments, and actions.”

“If it will be immaterial to men whether they live or die, then men will all kill each other. That is perhaps the form the transformation will take?”

“That is immaterial. The imposture will be destroyed. He who desires to attain complete freedom must not be afraid of killing himself. He who dares to kill himself, has discovered where the error lies. There is no greater liberty than this: this is the end of all things, and you cannot go further. He who dares to kill himself is God. It is at present in every one’s power to bring this about: that God shall be no more, and that nothing shall exist any more. But nobody has yet done this.”

“There have been millions of suicides.”

“But they have never been inspired with this idea. They have always killed themselves out of fear, and never in order to kill fear. He who will kill himself simply in order to kill fear, he will be God.”

In this last sentence we have the whole idea and philosophy of Kirilov. He had made up his mind to kill himself, in order to prove that he was not afraid of death, and he was possessed by that idea, and by that idea alone. In another place he says that man is unhappy because he does not know that he is happy: simply for this reason: that is all. “He who knows that he is happy will become happy at once, immediately.” And further on he says: “Men are not good, simply because they do not know they are good. When they realise this, they will no longer commit crimes. They must learn that they are good, and instantly they will become good, one and all of them. He who will teach men that they are good, will end the world.” The man to whom he is talking objects that He who taught men that they were good was crucified.

“The man will come,” Kirilov replies, “and his name will be the Man-God.”

“The God-Man?” says his interlocutor.

“No, the Man-God,—there is a difference.”

Here we have his idea of the Superman.[20]

As soon as Peter discovers Kirilov’s obsession, he extracts from him a promise that, as he has determined to commit suicide, and that as it is quite indifferent to him how and when he does it, he shall do it when it is useful to him, Peter. Kirilov consents to this, although he feels himself in no way bound to Peter, and although he sees through him entirely and completely, and would hate him were his contempt not too great for hatred. But Peter’s most ambitious plans do not consist merely in binding five men to him by an indissoluble bond of blood: that is only the means to an end. The end, as I have already said, is vaguely to get power; and besides the five men whom he intends to make his slaves for life, Peter has another and far more important trump card. This trump card consists of a man, Nicholas Stavrogin, who is the hero of the book. He is the only son of a widow with a landed estate, and after being brought up by Peter’s father, an old, harmless and kindly Radical, he is sent to school at the age of sixteen, and later on goes into the army, receiving a commission in one of the most brilliant of the Guards regiments in St. Petersburg. No sooner does he get to St. Petersburg, than he distinguishes himself by savage eccentricities. He is what the Russians call a skandalist. He is a good-looking young man of Herculean strength, and quiet, pleasant manners, who every now and then gives way to the wildest caprices, the most extravagant and astounding whims, when he seems to lose all control over himself. For a time he leads the kind of life led by Prince Harry with Falstaff, and his extravagances are the subject of much talk. He drives over people in his carriage, and publicly insults a lady of high position. Finally, he takes part in two duels. In both cases he is the aggressor. One of his adversaries is killed, and the other severely wounded. On account of this he is court-martialled, degraded to the ranks, and has to serve as a common soldier in an infantry regiment. But in 1863 he has an opportunity of distinguishing himself, and after a time his military rank is given back to him. It is then that he returns to the provincial town, where the whole of the events told in the book take place, and plays a part in Peter’s organisation. Peter regards him, as I have said, as his trump card, because of the strength of his character. He is one of those people who represent the extreme Lucifer quality of the Russian nature. He is proud and inflexible, without any trace of weakness. There is nothing in the world he is afraid of, and there is nothing he will not do if he wishes to do it. He will commit the wildest follies, the most outrageous extravagances, but as it were deliberately, and not as if he were carried away by the impetuosity of his temperament. On the contrary, he seems throughout to be as cold as ice, and eternally unruffled and cool; and he is capable when he chooses of showing a self-control as astonishing and remarkable as his outbursts of violence. Peter knows very well that he cannot hope to influence such a man. Stavrogin sees through Peter and despises him. At the same time, Peter hopes to entangle him in his scheme, as he entangles the others, and thinks that, this once done, a man with Stavrogin’s character cannot help being his principal asset. It is on this very character, however, that the whole of Peter’s schemes break down. Stavrogin has married a lame, half-witted girl; the marriage is kept secret, and he loves and is loved by an extremely beautiful girl called Lisa. Peter conceives the idea of getting a tramp, an ex-convict who is capable of everything, to murder Stavrogin’s wife and the drunken brother with whom she lives, and to set fire to a part of the town and the house where the two are living. He hopes that Stavrogin will marry Lisa, and then not be able to withdraw from his organisation for fear of being held responsible for the murder of his wife.

Stavrogin sees through the whole scheme. He announces his marriage publicly; but this act, instead of alienating Lisa from him, increases her passion. Nevertheless Stavrogin’s wife and her brother are murdered, and a large quarter of the town is burned. When Lisa asks Stavrogin if he is in any way connected with this murder, he replies that he was opposed to it, but that he had guessed that they would be murdered, and that he had taken no steps to prevent it. Lisa herself is killed, almost by accident, on the scene of the murder of Stavrogin’s wife. She is killed by an excited man in the crowd, who holds her responsible for the deed, and thinks that she has come to gloat over her victims. After this Stavrogin washes his hands of the whole business, and leaves the town. It is then that Peter carries out the rest of his plans. Chatov is murdered, and Peter calls upon Kirilov to fulfil his promise and commit suicide. He wishes him, before committing the act, to write a paper in which he shall state that he has disseminated revolutionary pamphlets and proclamations, and that he has employed the ex-convict who committed the murders. He is also to add that he has killed Chatov on account of his betrayal. But Kirilov has not known until this moment that Chatov is dead, and he refuses to say a word about him. Then begins a duel between these two men in the night, which is the most exciting chapter in the book, and perhaps one of the most exciting and terrifying things ever written. Peter is in terror lest Kirilov should fail him, and Kirilov is determined not to be a party to Peter’s baseness. Peter plays upon his vanity, and by subtle taunts excites to a frenzy the man’s monomania, till at last he consents to sign the paper. Then snatching a revolver he goes into the next room. Peter waits, not knowing what is going to happen. Ten minutes pass, and Peter, consumed by anxiety, takes a candle and opens the door of the room in which Kirilov has shut himself. He opens the door, and somebody flies at him like a wild beast. He shuts the door with all his might, and remains listening. He hears nothing, and as he is now convinced that Kirilov will not commit suicide, he makes up his mind to kill Kirilov himself, now that he has got the paper. He knows that in a quarter of an hour his candle will be entirely consumed; he sees there is nothing else to be done but to kill Kirilov, but at the same time he does not wish to do it.

At last he takes the revolver in his right hand and the candle in his left hand, and with his left hand manages to open the door. The room is apparently empty. At first he thinks that Kirilov has fled; then he becomes aware that against the wall, between a window and a cupboard, Kirilov is standing, stiff and motionless as a ghost. He rushes toward him. Kirilov remains motionless, but his eye is fixed on Peter, and a sardonic smile is on his lips, as though he had guessed what was in Peter’s mind. Peter, losing all self-control, flies at Kirilov, who knocks the candle out of Peter’s hand, and bites his little finger nearly in two. Peter beats him on the head with the butt of his revolver, and escapes from the room. As he escapes, he hears terrifying screams of “At once! at once! at once!” Peter is running for his life, and is already in the vestibule of the house, when he hears a revolver shot. Then he goes back and finds that Kirilov has killed himself.

This is practically the end of the book. Peter gets away to St. Petersburg, and all his machinations are discovered. The corpse of Chatov is found; the declaration in Kirilov’s handwriting at first misleads the police, but the whole truth soon comes out, since nearly all the conspirators confess, each being overcome with remorse. Peter escapes and goes abroad. Nicholas Stavrogin returns to his home from St. Petersburg; he is not inculpated in any way in the plots, since the conspirators bear witness that he had nothing to do with them. But he hangs himself nevertheless.

As I have said before, the chief characters of this book, Stavrogin, Peter, Chatov, and Kirilov, who seemed such gross exaggerations when the book was published, would surprise nobody who has had any experience of contemporary Russia. Indeed, Peter is less an imitation of Nechaev than a prototype of Azev. As to Kirilov, there are dozens of such men, possessed by one idea and one idea only, in Russia. Stavrogin also is a type which occurs throughout Russian history. Stavrogin has something of Peter the Great in him, Peter the Great run to seed, and of such there are also many in Russia to-day.

VIII
The Brothers Karamazov

The subject of The Brothers Karamazov[21] had occupied Dostoievsky’s mind ever since 1870, but he did not begin to write it until 1879, and when he died in 1881, only half the book was finished; in fact, he never even reached what he intended to be the real subject of the book. The subject was to be the life of a great sinner, Alosha Karamazov. But when Dostoievsky died, he had only written the prelude, in itself an extremely long book; and in this prelude he told the story of the bringing up of his hero, his surroundings and his early life, and in so doing he tells us all that is important about his hero’s brothers and father. The story of Alosha’s two brothers, and of their relations to their father, is in itself so rich in incident and ideas that it occupies the whole book, and Dostoievsky died before he had reached the development of Alosha himself.

The father is a cynical sensualist, utterly wanting in balance, vain, loquacious, and foolish. His eldest son, Mitya, inherits his father’s sensuality, but at the same time he has the energy and strength of his mother, his father’s first wife; Mitya is full of energy and strength. His nature does not know discipline; and since his passions have neither curb nor limit, they drive him to catastrophe. His nature is a mixture of fire and dross, and the dross has to be purged by intense suffering. Like Raskolnikov, Mitya has to expiate a crime. Circumstantial evidence seems to indicate that he has killed his father. Everything points to it, so much so that when one reads the book without knowing the story beforehand, one’s mind shifts from doubt to certainty, and from certainty to doubt, just as though one were following some absorbing criminal story in real life. After a long series of legal proceedings, cross-examinations, and a trial in which the lawyers perform miracles of forensic art, Mitya is finally condemned. I will not spoil the reader’s pleasure by saying whether Mitya is guilty or not, because there is something more than idle curiosity excited by this problem as one reads the book. The question seems to test to the utmost one’s power of judging character, so abundant and so intensely vivid are the psychological data which the author gives us. Moreover, the question as to whether Mitya did or did not kill his father is in reality only a side-issue in the book; the main subjects of which are, firstly, the character of the hero, which is made to rise before us in its entirety, although we do not get as far as the vicissitudes through which it is to pass. Secondly, the root-idea of the book is an attack upon materialism, and the character of Alosha forms a part of this attack. Materialism is represented in the second of the brothers, Ivan Karamazov, and a great part of the book is devoted to the tragedy and the crisis of Ivan’s life.

Ivan’s mind is, as he says himself, Euclidean and quite material. It is impossible, he says, to love men when they are near to you. You can only love them at a distance. Men are hateful, and there is sufficient proof of this in the sufferings which children alone have to endure upon earth. At the same time, his logical mind finds nothing to wonder at in the universal sufferings of mankind. Men, he says, are themselves guilty: they were given Paradise, they wished for freedom, and they stole fire from heaven, knowing that they would thereby become unhappy; therefore they are not to be pitied. He only knows that suffering exists, that no one is guilty, that one thing follows from another perfectly simply, that everything proceeds from something else, and that everything works out as in an equation. But this is not enough for him: it is not enough for him to recognise that one thing proceeds simply and directly from another. He wants something else; he must needs have compensation and retribution, otherwise he would destroy himself; and he does not want to obtain this compensation somewhere and some time, in infinity, but here and now, on earth, so that he should see it himself. He has not suffered, merely in order that his very self should supply, by its evil deeds and its passions, the manure out of which some far-off future harmony may arise. He wishes to see with his own eyes how the lion shall lie down with the lamb. The great stumbling-block to him is the question of children: the sufferings of children. If all men have to suffer, in order that by their suffering they may build an eternal harmony, what have children got to do with this? It is inexplicable that they should suffer, and that it should be necessary for them to attain to an eternal harmony by their sufferings. Why should they fall into the material earth, and make manure for some future harmony? He understands that there can be solidarity in sin between men; he understands the idea of solidarity and retaliation, but he cannot understand the idea of solidarity with children in sin. The mocker will say, he adds, that the child will grow up and have time to sin; but he is not yet grown up. He understands, he says, what the universal vibration of joy must be, when everything in heaven and on earth joins in one shout of praise, and every living thing cries aloud, “Thou art just, O Lord, for Thou hast revealed Thy ways.” And when the mother shall embrace the man who tormented and tore her child to bits,—when mother, child, and tormentor shall all join in the cry, “Lord, Thou art just!” then naturally the full revelation will be accomplished and everything will be made plain. Perhaps, he says, he would join in the Hosanna himself, were that moment to come, but he does not wish to do so; while there is yet time, he wishes to guard himself against so doing, and therefore he entirely renounces any idea of the higher harmony. He does not consider it worth the smallest tear of one suffering child; it is not worth it, because he considers that such tears are irreparable, and that no compensation can be made for them; and if they are not compensated for, how can there be an eternal harmony? But for a child’s tears, he says, there is no compensation, for retribution—that is to say, the punishment of those who caused the suffering—is not compensation. Finally, he does not think that the mother has the right to forgive the man who caused her children to suffer; she may forgive him for her own sufferings, but she has not the right to forgive him the sufferings of her children. And without such forgiveness there can be no harmony. It is for love of mankind that he does not desire this harmony: he prefers to remain with his irreparable wrong, for which no compensation can be made. He prefers to remain with his unavenged and unavengeable injuries and his tireless indignation. Even if he is not right, they have put too high a price, he says, on this eternal harmony. “We cannot afford to pay so much for it; we cannot afford to pay so much for the ticket of admission into it. Therefore I give it back. And if I am an honest man, I am obliged to give it back as soon as possible. This I do. It is not because I do not acknowledge God, only I must respectfully return Him the ticket.”

The result of Ivan’s philosophy is logical egotism and materialism. But his whole theory is upset, owing to its being pushed to its logical conclusion by a half-brother of the Karamazovs, a lackey, Smerdyakov, who puts into practice the theories of Ivan, and commits first a crime and then suicide. This and a severe illness combine to shatter Ivan’s theories. His physical being may recover, but one sees that his epicurean theories of life cannot subsist.

In sharp contrast to the two elder brothers is the third brother, Alosha, the hero of the book. He is one of the finest and most sympathetic characters that Dostoievsky created. He has the simplicity of “The Idiot,” without his naïveté, and without the abnormality arising from epilepsy. He is a normal man, perfectly sane and sensible. He is the very incarnation of “sweet reasonableness.” He is Ivan Durak, Ivan the Fool, but without being a fool. Alosha, Dostoievsky says, was in no way a fanatic; he was not even what most people call a mystic, but simply a lover of human beings; he loved humanity; all his life he believed in men, and yet nobody would have taken him for a fool or for a simple creature. There was something in him which convinced you that he did not wish to be a judge of men, that he did not wish to claim or exercise the right of judging others. One remarkable fact about his character, which is equally true of Dostoievsky’s own character, was that Alosha with this wide tolerance never put on blinkers, or shut his eyes to the wickedness of man, or to the ugliness of life. No one could astonish or frighten him, even when he was quite a child. Every one loved him wherever he went. Nor did he ever win the love of people by calculation, or cunning, or by the craft of pleasing. But he possessed in himself the gift of making people love him. It was innate in him; it acted immediately and directly, and with perfect naturalness. The basis of his character was that he was a Realist. When he was in the monastery where he spent a part of his youth, he believed in miracles; but Dostoievsky says, “Miracles never trouble a Realist; it is not miracles which incline a Realist to believe. A true Realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself sufficient strength and sufficient capacity to disbelieve even in a miracle. And if a miracle appears before him as an undeniable fact, he will sooner disbelieve in his senses than admit the fact of the miracle. If, on the other hand, he admits it, he will admit it as a natural fact, which up to the present he was unaware of. The Realist does not believe in God because he believes in miracles, but he believes in miracles because he believes in God. If a Realist believes in God, his realism will necessarily lead him to admit the existence of miracles also.”

Alosha’s religion, therefore, was based on common sense, and admitted of no compromise. As soon as, after having thought about the matter, he becomes convinced that God and the immortality of the soul exist, he immediately says to himself quite naturally: “I wish to live for the future life, and to admit of no half-way house.” And just in the same way, had he been convinced that God and the immortality of the soul do not exist, he would have become an atheist and a socialist. For Dostoievsky says that Socialism is not only a social problem, but an atheistic problem. It is the problem of the incarnation of atheism, the problem of a Tower of Babel to be made without God, not in order to reach Heaven from earth, but to bring Heaven down to earth.

Alosha wishes to spend his whole life in the monastery, and to give himself up entirely to religion, but he is not allowed to do so. In the monastery, Alosha finds a spiritual father, Zosima. This character, which is drawn with power and vividness, strikes us as being a blend of saintliness, solid sense, and warm humanity. He is an old man, and he dies in the convent; but before he dies, he sees Alosha, and tells him that he must leave the convent for ever; he must go out into the world, and live in the world, and suffer. “You will have many adversaries,” he says to him, “but even your enemies will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on account of them, and you will bless life and cause others to bless it. That is the most important thing of all.” Alosha is to go into the world and submit to many trials, for he is a Karamazov too, and the microbe of lust which rages in the blood of that family is in him also. He is to put into practice Father Zosima’s precepts: “Be no man’s judge; humble love is a terrible power which effects more than violence. Only active love can bring out faith. Love men and do not be afraid of their sins: love man in his sin; love all the creatures of God, and pray God to make you cheerful. Be cheerful as children and as the birds.” These are the precepts which Alosha is to carry out in the face of many trials. How he does so we never see, for the book ends before his trials begin, and all we see is the strength of his influence, the effect of the sweetness of his character in relation to the trials of his two brothers, Mitya and Ivan.

That Dostoievsky should have died before finishing this monumental work which would have been his masterpiece, is a great calamity. Nevertheless the book is not incomplete in itself: it is a large piece of life, and it contains the whole of Dostoievsky’s philosophy and ideas. Moreover, considered merely as a novel, as a book to be read from the point of view of being entertained, and excited about what is going to happen next, it is of enthralling interest. This book, therefore, can be recommended to a hermit who wishes to ponder over something deep, in a cell or on a desert island, to a philosopher who wishes to sharpen his thoughts against a hard whetstone, to a man who is unhappy and wishes to find some healing balm, or to a man who is going on a railway journey and wishes for an exciting story to while away the time.