It is appropriate now, the centenary of his birth, to make a brief statement of Dostoievsky's position as a writer or novelist, and in so doing estimate must be made of him as a prophet, preacher, psychologist, pathologist, artist, and individual. Though he was not schooled to speak as expert in any of these fields, yet speak in them he did, and in a way that would have reflected credit upon a professor. It is particularly the field of morbid psychology, usually called psychiatry, that Dostoievsky made uniquely his own. He described many of the nervous and mental disorders, such as mania and depression, the psychoneuroses, hysteria, obsessive states, epilepsy, moral insanity, alcoholism, and that mysterious mental and moral constitution called “degeneracy” (apparently first hand, for there is no evidence or indication that he had access to books on mental medicine), in such a way that alienists recognise in his descriptions masterpieces in the same way that the painter recognises the apogee of his art in Giotto or Velázquez.
Not only did he portray the mental activity and output of the partially and potentially insane, but he described the conduct and reproduced the speech of individuals with personality defects, and with emotional disequilibrium, in a way that has never been excelled in any literature. For instance, it would be difficult to find a more comprehensive account of adult infantilism than the history of Stepan Trofimovitch, a more accurate presentation of the composition of a hypocrite than Rahkitin, of “The Brothers Karamazov.” No one save Shakespeare has shown how consuming and overwhelming jealousy may be. That infirmity has a deeper significance for anyone familiar with the story of Katerina Ivanovna. Indeed Dostoievsky is the novelist of passions. He creates his creatures that they may suffer, not that they may enjoy from the reactions of life, though some of them get pleasure in suffering. Such was Lise, the true hysteric, who said, “I should like some one to torture me, marry me and then torture me, deceive me and then go away. I don't want to be happy.”
FEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY
Like Baudelaire and Nietzsche, whom he resembled morally and intellectually, Dostoievsky was an intellectual romantic in rebellion against life. His determination seemed to be to create an individual who should defy life, and when he had defied it to his heart's content “to hand God back his ticket,” having no further need of it as the journey of existence was at an end. There is no place to go, nothing to do, everything worth trying has been tried and found valueless, and wherever he turns his gaze he sees the angel standing upon the sea and upon the earth avowing that there shall be time no longer; so he puts a bullet in his temple if his name is Svidrigailov, or soaps a silken cord so that it will support his weight when one end is attached to a large nail and the other to his neck, if it is Stavrogin. Dostoievsky as a littérateur was obsessed with sin and expiation. He connived and laboured to invent some new sin; he struggled and fought to augment some old one with which he could inflict one of his creation, and then watch him contend with it, stagger beneath it, or flaunt it in the world's face. After it has wrought havoc, shipwrecked the possessor's life, and brought inestimable calamity and suffering to others, then he must devise adequate expiation. Expiation is synonymous with sincere regret, honest request for forgiveness, and genuine determination to sin no more, but Dostoievsky's sinners must do something more; they must make renunciation in keeping with the magnitude of their sins, and as this is beyond human expression they usually kill themselves or go mad.
He had planned for his masterpiece “The Life of a Great Sinner,” and the outline of it from his note-book deposited in the Central Archive Department of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, has now been published. The hero is a composite of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth, plus the sin against the Holy Ghost. No one has yet succeeded in defining that sin satisfactorily, but it is what Dostoievsky's antinomian heroes were trying to do, especially such an one as Stavrogin. Another noteworthy feature about them is that they were all sadistic or masochistic: they got pleasure varying from an appreciative glow to voluptuous ecstasy and beyond, from causing pain and inducing humiliation, or having it caused in them by others.
This was a conditioning factor of conduct of all his antinomian heroes, and unless it be kept in mind when reading of them, their antics and their reflections are sometimes difficult of comprehension. He makes one of them, one of the most intellectual and moral, Ivan Karamazov, say “You know we prefer beating-rods and scourges—that's our national institution.... I know for a fact there are people who at every blow are worked up to sensuality, which increases progressively at every blow they inflict.”
It is difficult for a psychiatrist, after reading Dostoievsky's novels, to believe that he did not have access to the literature of insanity or have first-hand knowledge of the insane, and the criminologist must wonder where he got his extraordinary knowledge of the relation between suffering and lust. It may be that the habits of the Emperor Cheou-sin Yeow-waug were known to him, just as those of Caligula and Claudius were known to him.
It is not with the passions of the body or of the senses alone that his heroes contend, but with those of the mind. The fire that burns within them is abstraction, and the fuel that replenishes it is thought—thought of whence and whither. By it the possessors are lashed to a conduct that surpasses that of hate, jealousy, lubricity, or any of the baser passions as the light of an incandescent bulb surpasses that of a tallow candle. They are all men of parts, either originally endowed with great intelligence or brought to a certain elevation of intellectuality by education. Their conduct, their actions, their misdeeds, their crimes are the direct result of their argumentation, not of concrete, but of abstract things, and chiefly the nature and existence of God, the varieties of use that an individual may permit his intelligence, free-will, free determination, and of the impositions of dogma founded on faith and inspiration which seem contrary to reason and science.
All his heroes are more or less insane. Herein lies Dostoievsky's strength and his weakness in character creation. None of them could be held fully responsible in a court of justice. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings the Lord ordained strength, but there is no writing to show that out of the mouths of the insane comes wisdom. Not that insanity is inimical to brilliant, even wise, utterance; but the pragmatic application of wisdom to life calls for sanity.