Landmarks in Russian literature

by Maurice Baring

IX

This study of Dostoievsky, or rather this suggestion for a study of his work, cannot help being sketchy and incomplete. I have not only not dealt with his shorter stories, such as White Nights, The Friend of the Family, The Gambler and The Double, but I have not even mentioned two longer novels, The Hobbledehoy and Despised and Rejected. The last named, though it suffers from being somewhat melodramatic in parts, contains as strong a note of pathos as is to be found in any of Dostoievsky’s books; and an incident of this book has been singled out by Robert Louis Stevenson as being—together with the moment when Mark Antony takes off his helmet, and the scene when Kent has pity on the dying Lear—one of the most greatly moving episodes in the whole of literature. The reason why I have not dwelt on these minor works is that to the English reader, unacquainted with Dostoievsky, an exact and minute analysis of his works can only be tedious. I have only dealt with the very broadest outline of the case, so as to enable the reader to make up his mind whether he wishes to become acquainted with Dostoievsky’s work at all. My object has been merely to open the door, and not to act as a guide and to show him over every part of the house. If I have inspired him with a wish to enter the house, I have succeeded in my task. Should he wish for better-informed guides and fuller guide-books, he will find them in plenty; but guides and guide-books are utterly useless to people who do not wish to visit the country of which they treat. And my sole object has been to give in the broadest manner possible a rough sketch of the nature of the country, so as to enable the traveller to make up his mind whether he thinks it worth while or not to buy a ticket and to set forth on a voyage of exploration. Should such an one decide that the exploration is to him attractive and worth his while, I should advise him to begin with The Letters from a Dead House, and to go on with The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov; and to read The Possessed last of all. If he understands and appreciates The Letters from a Dead House, he will be able to understand and appreciate the character of Dostoievsky and the main ideas which lie at the root of all his books. If he is able to understand and appreciate The Idiot, he will be able to understand and appreciate the whole of Dostoievsky’s writings. But should he begin with Crime and Punishment, or The Possessed, it is possible that he might be put off, and relinquish the attempt; just as it is possible that a man who took up Shakespeare’s plays for the first time and began with King Lear, might make up his mind not to persevere, but to choose some more cheerful author. And by so doing he would probably lose a great deal, since a man who is repelled by King Lear might very well be able to appreciate not only The Merchant of Venice, but Henry IV and the Winter’s Tale. If one were asked to sum up briefly what was Dostoievsky’s message to his generation and to the world in general, one could do so in two words: love and pity. The love which is in Dostoievsky’s work is so great, so bountiful, so overflowing, that it is impossible to find a parallel to it, either in ancient or in modern literature. It is human, but more than human, that is to say, divine. Supposing the Gospel of St. John were to be annihilated and lost to us for ever, although nothing, of course, could replace it, Dostoievsky’s work would go nearer to recalling the spirit of it than any other books of any other European writer.[22] It is the love which faces everything and which shrinks from nothing. It is the love which that saint felt who sought out the starving and freezing beggar, and warmed and embraced him, although he was covered with sores, and who was rewarded by the beggar turning into His Lord and lifting him up into the infinite spaces of Heaven.

Dostoievsky tells us that the most complete of his characters, Alosha, is a Realist, and that was what Dostoievsky was himself. He was a Realist in the true sense of the word, and he was exactly the contrary of those people who when they wrote particularly filthy novels in which they singled out and dwelt at length on certain revolting details of life, called themselves Realists. He saw things as they really are; he never shut his eyes or averted his gaze from anything which was either cruel, hateful, ugly, bitter, diseased or obscene; but the more he looked at the ugly things, the more firmly he became convinced of the goodness that is in and behind everything: To put it briefly, the more clearly he realised mortal misery and sin, the more firmly he believed in God. Therefore, as I have more than once said in this study, although he sounds the lowest depths of human gloom, mortal despair, and suffering, his books are a cry of triumph, a clarion peal, a hosanna to the idea of goodness and to the glory of God. There is a great gulf between Dostoievsky and such novelists as make of their art a clinical laboratory, in which the vices and the sores, and only the vices and the sores, are dissected and observed, not under a microscope, but under a magnifying-glass, so that a totally distorted and exaggerated impression of life is the result. And this is all the more remarkable, because a large part of his most important characters are abnormal: monomaniacs, murderers, or epileptics. But it is in dealing with such characters that the secret of Dostoievsky’s greatness is revealed. For in contradistinction to many writers who show us what is insane in the sanest men, who search for and find a spot of disease in the healthiest body, a blemish in the fairest flower, a flaw in the brightest ruby, Dostoievsky seeks and finds the sanity of the insane, a healthy spot in the sorest soul, a gleam of gold in the darkest mine, a pearl in the filthiest refuse heap, a spring in the most arid desert. In depicting humanity at its lowest depth of misery and the human soul at its highest pitch of anguish, he is making a great act of faith, and an act of charity, and conferring a huge benefit on mankind. For in depicting the extremest pain of abnormal sufferers, he persuades us of the good that exists even in such men, and of the goodness that is in suffering itself; and by taking us in the darkest of dungeons, he gives us a glimpse such as no one else has given us of infinite light and love.

On the other hand, Dostoievsky is equally far removed from such writers (of which we have plenty in England) who throw a cloak over all evil things, and put on blinkers, and who, because the existence of evil is distasteful to them, refuse to admit and face it. Such an attitude is the direct outcome of either conscious or unconscious hypocrisy. Dostoievsky has not a grain of hypocrisy in his nature, and therefore such an attitude is impossible to him.

Dostoievsky is a Realist, and he sees things as they are all through life, from the most important matters down to the most trivial. He is free from cant, either moral or political, and absolutely free from all prejudice of caste or class. It is impossible for him to think that because a man is a revolutionary he must therefore be a braver man than his fellows, or because a man is a Conservative he must therefore be a more cruel man than his fellows, just as it is impossible for him to think the contrary, and to believe that because a man is a Conservative he cannot help being honest, or because a man is a Radical he must inevitably be a scoundrel. He judges men and things as they are, quite apart from the labels which they choose to give to their political opinions. That is why nobody who is by nature a doctrinaire[23] can appreciate or enjoy the works of Dostoievsky, since any one who bases his conduct upon theory cannot help at all costs being rudely shocked at every moment by Dostoievsky’s creed, which is based on reality and on reality alone. Dostoievsky sees and embraces everything as it really is. The existence of evil, of ugliness and of suffering, inspires him with only one thing, and this is pity; and his pity is like that which King Lear felt on the Heath when he said:

“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.”

Dostoievsky has a right to say such things, because throughout his life he not only exposed himself, but was exposed, to feel what wretches feel; because he might have said as King Lear said to Cordelia:

“I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.”

He knew what wretches feel, by experience and not by theory, and all his life he was bound upon a “wheel of fire.”

With regard to Dostoievsky’s political opinions, he synthesised and expressed them all in the speech which he made in June 1880, at Moscow, in memory of Pushkin. “There was never,” he said, “a poet who possessed such universal receptivity as Pushkin. It was not only that he was receptive, but this receptivity was so extraordinarily deep, that he was able to embrace and absorb in his soul the spirit of foreign nations. No other poet has ever possessed such a gift; only Pushkin; and Pushkin is in this sense a unique and a prophetic apparition, since it is owing to this gift, and by means of it, that the strength of Pushkin—that in him which is national and Russian—found expression.... For what is the strength of the Russian national spirit other than an aspiration towards a universal spirit, which shall embrace the whole world and the whole of mankind? And because Pushkin expressed the national strength, he anticipated and foretold its future meaning. Because of this he was a prophet. For what did Peter the Great’s reforms mean to us? I am not only speaking of what they were to bring about in the future, but of what they were when they were carried out. These reforms were not merely a matter of adopting European dress, habits, instruction and science.... But the men who adopted them aspired towards the union and the fraternity of the world. We in no hostile fashion, as would seem to have been the case, but in all friendliness and love, received into our spirit the genius of foreign nations, of all foreign nations, without any distinction of race, and we were able by instinct and at the first glance to distinguish, to eliminate contradictions, to reconcile differences; and by this we expressed our readiness and our inclination, we who had only just been united together and had found expression, to bring about a universal union of all the great Aryan race. The significance of the Russian race is without doubt European and universal. To be a real Russian and to be wholly Russian means only this: to be a brother of all men, to be universally human. All this is called Slavophilism; and what we call ‘Westernism’ is only a great, although a historical and inevitable misunderstanding. To the true Russian, Europe and the affairs of the great Aryan race, are as dear as the affairs of Russia herself and of his native country, because our affairs are the affairs of the whole world, and they are not to be obtained by the sword, but by the strength of fraternity and by our brotherly effort towards the universal union of mankind.... And in the long-run I am convinced that we, that is to say, not we, but the future generations of the Russian people, shall every one of us, from the first to the last, understand that to be a real Russian must signify simply this: to strive towards bringing about a solution and an end to European conflicts; to show to Europe a way of escape from its anguish in the Russian soul, which is universal and all-embracing; to instil into her a brotherly love for all men’s brothers, and in the end perhaps to utter the great and final word of universal harmony, the fraternal and lasting concord of all peoples according to the gospel of Christ.”

So much for the characteristics of Dostoievsky’s moral and political ideals. There remains a third aspect of the man to be dealt with: his significance as a writer, as an artist, and as a maker of books; his place in Russian literature, and in the literature of the world. This is, I think, not very difficult to define. Dostoievsky, in spite of the universality of his nature, in spite of his large sympathy and his gift of understanding and assimilation, was debarred, owing to the violence and the want of balance of his temperament, which was largely the result of disease, from seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. The greatest fault of his genius, his character, and his work, is a want of proportion. His work is often shapeless, and the incidents in his books are sometimes fantastic and extravagant to the verge of insanity. Nevertheless his vision, and his power of expressing that vision, make up for what they lose in serenity and breadth, by their intensity, their depth and their penetration. He could not look upon the whole world with the calm of Sophocles and of Shakespeare; he could not paint a large and luminous panorama of life unmarred by any trace of exaggeration, as Tolstoy did. On the other hand, he realised and perceived certain heights and depths of the human soul which were beyond the range of Tolstoy, and almost beyond that of Shakespeare. His position with regard to Tolstoy, Fielding, and other great novelists is like that of Marlowe with regard to Shakespeare. Marlowe’s plays compared with those of Shakespeare are like a series of tumultuous fugues, on the same theme, played on an organ which possesses but a few tremendous stops, compared with the interpretation of music, infinitely various in mood, by stringed instruments played in perfect concord, and rendering the finest and most subtle gradations and shades of musical phrase and intention. But every now and then the organ-fugue, with its thunderous bass notes and soaring treble, attains to a pitch of intensity which no delicacy of blended strings can rival: So, every now and then, Marlowe, in the scenes, for instance, when Helena appears to Faustus, when Zenocrate speaks her passion, when Faustus counts the minutes to midnight, awaiting in an agony of terror the coming of Mephistopheles, or when Edward II is face to face with his executioners, reaches a pitch of soaring rapture, of tragic intensity which is not to be found even in Shakespeare. So it is with Dostoievsky. His genius soars higher and dives deeper than that of any other novelist, Russian or European. And what it thus gains in intensity it loses in serenity, balance and steadiness. Therefore, though Dostoievsky as a man possesses qualities of universality, he is not a universal artist such as Shakespeare, or even as Tolstoy, although he has one eminently Shakespearian gift, and that is the faculty for discerning the “soul of goodness in things evil.” Yet, as a writer, he reached and expressed the ultimate extreme of the soul’s rapture, anguish and despair, and spoke the most precious words of pity which have been heard in the world since the Gospels were written. In this man were mingled the love of St. John, and the passion and the fury of a fiend; but the goodness in him was triumphant over the evil. He was a martyr; but bound though he was on a fiery wheel, he maintained that life was good, and he never ceased to cry “Hosanna to the Lord: for He is just!” For this reason Dostoievsky is something more than a Russian writer: he is a brother to all mankind, especially to those who are desolate, afflicted and oppressed. He had “great allies”:

“His friends were exaltations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.”