“The Idiot” was one of Dostoievsky's books which had a cold reception from the Russian reading public, but which has been, next to “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Crime and Punishment,” the most popular in this country. The basic idea is the representation of a truly perfect and noble man, and it is not at all astonishing that Dostoievsky made him an epileptic. He had been impressed, he said, that all writers who had sought to represent Absolute Beauty were unequal to the task. It is so difficult, for the beautiful is the ideal, and ideals have long been wavering and waning in civilised Europe. There is only one figure of absolute beauty, Christ, and he patterns Prince Myshkin upon the Divine model. He brings him in contact with Nastasya Filipovna, who is the incarnation of the evil done in the world, and this evil is represented symbolically by Dostoievsky as the outrage of a child. The nine years of brooding which had followed the outrage inflicted upon Nastasya as a child by Prince Tosky had imprinted upon her face something which Myshkin recognises as the pain of the world, and from the thought of which he cannot deliver himself, and which he cannot mitigate for her. She marries him after agonies of rebellion, after having given him to her alter ego in virginal state, Aglaia Epanchin, and then takes him away to show her power and demonstrate her own weakness; but she deserts him on the church steps for her lover Rogozhin, who murders her that night. Myshkin, finding Rogozhin next morning, says more than “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” He lies beside him in the night and bathes his temples with his tears, but fortunately in the morning when the murderer is a raving lunatic a merciful Providence has enshrouded Myshkin in his disease.
As Dimitri Merejkowski, the most understanding critic and interpreter of Dostoievsky who has written of him, truthfully says, his works are not novels or epics, but tragedies. The narrative is secondary to the construction of the whole work, and the keystone of the narrative is the dialogue between the characters. The reader feels that he hears real persons talking and talking without artifice, just as they would talk in real life; and they express sentiments and convictions which one would expect from individuals of such inheritance, education, development, and environment, obsessed particularly with the injustices of this world and the uncertainties of the world to be, concerned day and night with the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the future of civilisation.
It has been said that he does not describe the appearance of his characters, for they depict themselves, their thoughts and feelings, their faces and bodies, by their peculiar forms of language and tones of voice. Although he does not dwell on portraiture, he has scarcely a rival in delineation, and his portraits have that quality which perhaps Leonardo of all who worked with the brush had the capacity to portray, and which Pater saw in the Gioconda; the revelation of the soul and its possibilities in the lineaments. The portrait of Mlle. Lebyadkin, the imbecile whom the proud Nikolay Stavrogin married, not from love or lust, but that he might exhaust the list of mortifications, those of the flesh, for himself, and those of pride for his family; that he might kill his instincts and become pure spirit, is as true to life as if Dostoievsky had spent his existence in an almshouse sketching the unfortunates segregated there. The art of portraiture cannot surpass this picture of Shatov, upon whose plastic soul Stavrogin impressed his immoralities in the shape of “the grand idea” and who said to Stavrogin in his agony, “Sha'n't I kiss your foot-prints when you've gone? I can't tear you out of my heart, Nikolay Stavrogin:”
“He was short, awkward, had a shock of flaxen hair, broad shoulders, thick lips, very thick overhanging white eyebrows, a wrinkled forehead, and a hostile, obstinately downcast, as it were shamefaced, expression in his eyes. His hair was always in a wild tangle and stood up in a shock which nothing could smooth. He was seven or eight and twenty.”
It is not as a photographer of the body that Dostoievsky is a source of power and inspiration in the world today, and will remain so for countless days to come—for he has depicted the Russian people as has no one else save Tolstoi, and his pictures constitute historical documents—but as a photographer of the soul, a psychologist. Psychology is said to be a new science, and a generation ago there was much ado over a new development called “experimental psychology,” which was hailed as the key that would unlock the casket wherein repose the secrets of the mind; the windlass that would lift layer by layer the veil that has, since man began, concealed the mysteries of thought, behaviour, and action. It has not fulfilled its promise. It would be beyond the truth to say that it has been sterile, but it is quite true to say that the contributions which it has made have been as naught compared with those made by abnormal psychology. Some, indeed, contend that the only real psychological contributions of value have come from a study of disease and deficiency, and their contentions are granted by the vast majority of those entitled to opinion.
Dostoievsky is the master portrayer of madness and of bizarre states of the soul and of the mind that are on the borderland of madness. Not only has he depicted the different types of mental alienation, but by an intuition peculiar to his genius, by a species of artistic divination, he has understood and portrayed their display, their causation, their onset—so often difficult to determine even for the expert—and finally the full development of the disease. Indeed, he forestalled the description of the alienists. “They call me a psychologist,” says Dostoievsky; “it is not true. I am only a realist in the highest sense of the word, that is I depict all the soul's depth. Arid observations of every-day trivialities I have long ceased to regard as realism—it is quite the reverse.”
It is the mission of one important branch of psychology to depict the soul's depth, the workings of the conscious mind, and as the interior of a house that one is forbidden to enter is best seen when the house has been shattered or is succumbing to the incidences of time and existence, so the contents of the soul are most discernible in the mind that has some of its impenetralia removed by disease. It was in this laboratory that Dostoievsky conducted his experiments, made his observations, and recorded the results from which he drew conclusions and inferences. “In my works I have never said so much as the twentieth part of what I wished to say, and perhaps could actually have said. I am firmly convinced that mankind knows much more than it has hitherto expressed either in science or in art. In what I have written there is much that came from the depth of my heart,” he says in a letter to a friendly critic, to which may be added that what he has said is in keeping with the science of today, and is corroborated by workers in other fields of psychology and psychiatry.
“The Possessed,” in which Dostoievsky reached the high-water mark of personality analysis, has always been a stumbling block to critics and interpreters. The recent publication by the Russian Government of a pamphlet containing “Stavrogin's Confession” sheds an illuminating light on the hero; and even second-hand knowledge of what has gone on in Russia, politically and socially, during the past six years facilitates an understanding of Pyotr Stepanovitch, Satan's impresario, and of Kirillov, nihilist.
The task that Dostoievsky set himself in “The Possessed” was not unlike that which the Marquis de Sade set himself in “Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue,” and Sacher-Masoch in “Liebesgeschichten”; viz., to narrate the life of an unfortunate creature whose most important fundamental instinct was perverted and who could get the full flavour of pleasure only by inflicting cruelty, causing pain, or engendering humiliation.
“Every unusually disgraceful, utterly degrading, dastardly, and above all, ridiculous situation in which I ever happened to be in my life, always roused in me, side by side with extreme anger, an incredible delight.”