“What a number of national types and characters I became familiar with in the prison; I lived into their lives and so I believe I know them really well. Many tramps' and thieves' careers were laid bare to me, and above all the whole wretched existence of the common people. I learnt to know the Russian people as only a few know them.”
After four years he was, through the mediation of powerful friends, transferred for five years to military service in Siberia, chiefly at Semipalatinsk. In 1859 he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg, and in the twenty years that followed he published those books upon which his fame rests; namely, “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “The Possessed,” “The Journal of an Author,” and “The Brothers Karamazov.” In 1867 he was obliged to leave Russia to escape imprisonment for debt, and he remained abroad, chiefly in Switzerland, for four years.
In his appeal to General Todleben to get transferred from the military to the civil service and to be permitted to employ himself in literature, he said:
“Perhaps you have heard something of my arrest, my trial and the supreme ratification of the sentence which was given in the case concerning me in the year 1849. I was guilty and am very conscious of it. I was convicted of the intention (but only the intention) of acting against the Government; I was lawfully and quite justly condemned; the hard and painful experiences of the ensuing years have sobered me and altered my views in many respects, but then while I was still blind I believed in all the theories and Utopias. For two years before my offense I had suffered from a strange moral disease—I had fallen into hypochondria. There was a time even when I lost my reason. I was exaggeratedly irritable, had a morbidly developed sensibility and the power of distorting the most ordinary events into things immeasurable.”
While Dostoievsky was in prison his physical health improved very strikingly, but, despite this, his epilepsy, which had previously manifested itself only in vague or minor attacks, became fully developed. Attempts have been made to prove that prison life and particularly its hardships and inhumanities were responsible in a measure for Dostoievsky's epilepsy; but such allegations are no more acceptable than those which attribute it to his father's alcoholism. His epilepsy was a part of his general make-up, a part of his constitution. It was an integral part of him and it became an integral part of his books.
The phenomena of epilepsy may be said to be the epileptic personality and the attack with its warning, its manifestations, and the after-effects. The disease is veiled in the same mystery today as it was when Hercules was alleged to have had it. Nothing is known of its causation or of its dependency, and all that can truthfully be said of the personality of the epileptic is that it is likely to display psychic disorder, evanescent or fixed. Attacks are subject to the widest variation both as to frequency and intensity, but the most enigmatic things about the disease are the warnings of the attack, and the phenomena that sometimes appear vicariously of the attack—the epileptic equivalent they are called. Dostoievsky had these auræ and equivalents in an unusual way and with extraordinary intensity, and narration of them as they were displayed in the different characters of his creation who were afflicted with epilepsy, and of their effects and consequences is an important part of every one of his great books. Dostoievsky would seem to have been of the belief that a brain in which some of the mechanisms are disordered may yet remain superior both intellectually and morally to others less affected, and that the display of such weakness or maladjustment may put the possessor in tune with the Infinite, may permit him to blend momentarily with the Eternal Harmony, to be restored temporarily to the Source of its temporal emanation. Although he describes this in his “Letters,” as he experienced it, he elaborates it in his epileptic heroes, and in none so seductively as in “The Idiot.” He makes Prince Myshkin say:
“He thought amongst other things how in his epileptic condition there was one stage, just before the actual attack, when suddenly in the midst of sadness, mental darkness and oppression his brain flared up, as it were, and with an unwonted outburst all his vital powers were vivified simultaneously. The sensation of living and of self-consciousness was increased at such moments almost tenfold. They were moments like prolonged lightning. As he thought over this afterward in a normal state he often said to himself that all these flashes and beams of the highest self-realisation, self-consciousness and “highest existence” were nothing but disease, the interruption of the normal state. If this were so, then it was by no means the highest state, but, on the contrary, it must be reckoned as the very lowest. And yet he came at last to the very paradoxical conclusion: What matter if it is a morbid state? What difference can it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation when remembered and examined in the healthy state proves to be in the highest degree harmony and beauty, and gives an unheard-of and undreamed-of feeling of completion, of balance, of satisfaction and exultant prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life? If at the last moment of consciousness before the attack he had happened to say to himself lucidly and deliberately “for this one moment one might give one's whole life,” then certainly that moment would be worth a lifetime. However, he did not stand out for dialectics; obfuscation, mental darkness and idiocy stand before him as the obvious consequences of those loftiest moments.”
It is a question for the individual to decide whether one would give his whole life for a moment of perfection and bliss, but it is probable that no one would without assurance that some permanent advantage, some growth of spirit that could be retained, some impress of spirituality that was indelible, such as comes from an understanding reading of “Hamlet” or a comprehended rendering of “Parsifal,” would flow from it or follow it. But to have it and then come back to a world that is “just one damn thing after another” it is impossible to believe. Dostoievsky was right when he said that Myshkin could look forward to obfuscation, mental darkness, and imbecility with some certainty, for physicians experienced with epilepsy know empirically that the unfortunates who have panoplied warnings, and especially illusions, are most liable to become demented early. But that all epileptics with such warnings do not suffer this degradation is attested by the life of Dostoievsky, who was in his mental summation when death seized him in his sixtieth year.
Another phenomenon of epilepsy that Dostoievsky makes many of his characters display is detachment of the spirit from the body. They cease to feel their bodies at supreme moments, such as at the moment of condemnation, of premeditated murder, or planned crime. In other words, they are thrown into a state of ecstasy similar to that responsible for the mystic utterances of St. Theresa, or of insensibility to obvious agonies such as that of Santa Fina. He not only depicts the phenomena of the epileptic attack, its warnings, and its after-effects in the most masterful way, as they have never been rendered in literature, lay or scientific, but he also describes many varieties of the disease. Before he was exiled, in 1847, he gave a most perfect description of the epileptic constitution as it was manifested in Murin, a character in “The Landlady.” The disease, as it displays itself in the classical way, is revealed by Nelly in “The Insulted and Injured,” but it is in Myshkin, in “The Idiot,” that we see epilepsy transforming the individual from adult infantilism, gradually, almost imperceptibly, to imbecility, the victim meantime displaying nobility and tender-mindedness that make the reader's heart go out to him.
The first fruits of Dostoievsky's activities after he had obtained permission to publish were inconsequential. It was not until the appearance of “Letters from a Deadhouse,” which revealed his experiences and thoughts while in prison, and the volume called “The Despised and the Rejected,” that the literary world of St. Petersburg realised that the brilliant promise which he had given in 1846 was realised. Some of his literary adventures, especially in journalism, got him into financial difficulties, and he began to write under the lash, as he described it, and against time.