Russia: Its People and Its Literature

by condesa de Emilia Pardo Bazán

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

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

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

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

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

Although he had been (at the time of writing this) four years released from prison, he delayed still six years longer before returning to Europe to publish his works. When he began his labors for the press, he did not unite himself to the liberal party, but, erratic as usual, he turned to the Sclavophiles,—the blind lovers of old usages and customs, the bitter enemies of the civilization of the Occident. Fate was not yet weary in persecuting him. After the death of his wife and brother he was obliged to flee the country on account of his creditors. His sorrows were not exactly of the sublime nature of Puchkine's and the melancholy poet's; they were on the contrary very prosaic,—lack of money, combined with terrible fits of epilepsy. To understand the mortifications of poverty to a proud and sensitive man, one must read Dostoiëwsky's correspondence,—so like Balzac's in its incessant complaints against pecuniary affairs. He exclaims, "The details of my poverty are shameful. I cannot relate them. Sometimes I spend the whole night walking my room like a caged beast, tearing my hair in despair. I must have such or such a sum to-morrow, without fail!" Gloomy and ill, he wandered through Germany, France, and Italy, caring nothing for the wonders of civilization, and impressed by no sights except the guillotine. He wrote during this time his three principal novels, whose very names are nightmares,—"Possessed with Devils," "The Idiot," and "Crime and Punishment."

I know by experience the diabolical power of Dostoiëwsky's psychological analysis. His books make one ill, although one appear to be well. No wonder that they exercise a perturbing influence on Russian imaginations, which are only too prone to hallucination and mental ecstasy. I will briefly mention his best and most widely known book, "Crime and Punishment," of which the following is the argument: A student commits a crime, and then voluntarily confesses it to the magistrate. This seems neither more nor less than an ordinary notice in the newspaper, but what an analysis is conveyed by means of it! It is horrible to think that the sentiments so studiously wrought out can be human, and that we all carry the germs of them hidden in some corner of the soul; and not only human, but possessed even by a person of great intellectual culture, like the hero, whose crime is the result of great reading reduced to horrible sophisms. Those two Parisian students who, after saturating their minds with Darwin and Haeckel, cut a woman to pieces with their histories, must have been prototypes of Rodion Romanovitch, the hero of this novel of Dostoiëwsky. This young man is not only clever, but possesses really refined sentiments; one of the motives that lead to his crime is that one of his sisters, the most dearly loved, may have to marry an unworthy man in order to insure the welfare of the family. Such a sale as this poor girl's marriage would be seems to the student a greater wrong than the assassination of the old money-lender. The first seed of the crime falls upon his soul on overhearing at a wine-shop a dialogue between another student and an officer. "Here you have on the one hand," says the student, "an old woman, sick, stupid, wicked, useful to nobody, and only doing harm to all the world about her, who does not know what she lives for, and who, when you least expect it, will die a natural death; you have on the other hand a young creature whose strength is being wasted for lack of sustenance, a hundred lives that might be guided into a right path, dozens of families that might be saved from destitution, dissolution, ruin, and vice if that old woman's money were only available. If somebody were to kill her and use her fortune for the good of humanity, do you not think that a thousand good deeds would compensate for the crime? It is a mathematical question. What weight has a stupid, evil-minded old shrew in the social scale? About as much as a bed-bug."

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

"My friend," the other replies, "Nature can be corrected and amended. If it were not so we should all be buried to the neck in prejudices, and there would not be a great man amongst us."

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