Dostoievsky is the greatest of subjective writers because he goes deepest and is the most truthful. His books are narratives of sins and crimes and descriptions of attempts at expiation. He didn't invent sins, he took them from life; he presented those he had committed and seen committed. He invented only the expiation, and some of that, it must be admitted, he experienced. His sinners are never normal mentally. They are never insane legally, but all of them are insane medically.
Dostoievsky himself was far from “normal” mentally, aside from his epilepsy, though he made approximation to it as he grew older. His mind was a garden sown with the flower seeds of virtue and the thistle seeds of vice. All of them germinated. Some became full blown, others remained stunted and dwarfed.
“I have invented a new kind of enjoyment for myself,” he wrote to his brother, “a most strange one—to make myself suffer. I take your letter, turn it over in my hand for several minutes, feel if it is full weight, and having looked on it sufficiently and admired the closed envelope, I put it in my pocket. You won't believe what a voluptuous state of soul, feeling and heart there is in that!”
That is the anlage of masochism. In the outline of “The Life of a Great Sinner,” the novel whose completion would permit him to die in peace, for then he should have expressed himself completely, one sees the wealth of detail taken by the author from his boyhood and early manhood. The hero of the “Life” was unsociable and uncommunicative; a proud, passionate, and domineering nature. So was Dostoievsky. So here was to be apotheosis of individualism, consciousness of his superiority, of his determination, and of his uniqueness. Dostoievsky wrote of himself in 1867, “Everywhere and in everything I reach the furthest limits; I have passed beyond the boundaries of all life.”
The most inattentive reader of his “Letters” will be reminded of Dostoievsky when they read that the hero of the “Life” “surprised everybody by unexpectedly rude pranks,” “behaved like a monster,” “offended an old woman,” and that he was obsessed with the idea of amassing money; and the alternative stages of belief and disbelief of the hero are obviously recollections of his own trials. “I believe I shall express the whole of myself in it” he wrote of it to a friend, and no one familiar with his books and his life can read the outline of it and doubt that he would have succeeded. Wherever Dostoievsky looked he saw a question mark and before it was written “Is there a God? Does God exist?” He was determined to find the answer. He had found Christ abundantly and satisfactorily, but the God of Job he never knew, nor had He ever overthrown him or compassed him with His net.
Dostoievsky was a rare example of dual personality. His life was the expression of his ego personality (and what a life of strife and misery and unhappiness it was!), revealed with extraordinary lucidity in his “Letters” and “The Journal of an Author”; and his legacy to mankind is the record of his unconscious mind revealed in his novels. The latter is the life he would have liked to live, and in it he depicts the changes in man's moral nature that he would have liked to witness. His contention was that man should be master of his fate, captain of his soul. He must express his thought and conviction in action and conduct, particularly in his relation to his fellow-man. He must take life's measure and go to it no matter what it entails or how painful, unpleasant, or disastrous the struggle, or the end.
Many thoughtful minds believe that Dostoievsky has shown us the only salvation in the great crisis of the European conscience. The people, it matters not of what nationality, still possess the strength and equilibrium of internal power. The conviction that man shall not live as a beast of burden still survives in the Russian people and is shared with them by the masses throughout the civilised world. Salvation from internal anarchy was his plea, and it is the plea that is today being made by millions in other lands than his.
As a prophet he foresaw the supremacy of the Russian people, the common people succoured to knowledge, faith, and understanding by liberty, education, and health, and by conformation to its teaching the Renaissance of the Christian faith, which shall be a faith that shall show man how to live and how to die, and which shall be manifest in conduct as well as by word of mouth; primacy of the Russian church; and the consummation of European culture by the effort and propaganda of Russia. “Russia is the one God-fearing nation and her ultimate destiny shall be to make known the Russian Christ for the salvation of lost humanity.” No one can say at this day that his prophecies may not come true, and to the student of history there may seem to be more suggestive indication of it in the Russia of today than in that of half a century ago; for from a world in ferment unexpected distillations may flow. But to the person who needs proof Russia is silent now. Dostoievsky's doctrines have not dropped as the rain, nor has his speech been distilled as the dew, though he published the name of the Lord and ascribed greatness unto our God. Indeed, the fate that has overtaken Russia would seem to deny the possibility of the fulfillment of his prophecies either for his country or his people.
As a narrator of the events of life here, and of the thoughts of life here and hereafter, he has had few peers of any nation or language. That he did it in a disorderly way must be admitted; that the events of his tragedies had little time incidence is obvious to the most casual reader; that the reader has to bring to their perusal concentration and application is beyond debate; and that his characters are “degenerates,” using that word in its biological sense, there is no doubt. But despite these defects, Dostoievsky succeeds in straining the essence of the Russian's soul through his unconscious to his conscious mind, and then expressing it; and his books are the imperishable soul-prints of his contemporaneous countrymen. Not only does he stand highest in literary achievement of all men of his time, but he is a figure of international significance in the world of literature. His life and struggle was Hauptmann's song,
“Always must the heart-strings vibrate in the breath of the world's sorrow, for the world's sorrow is the root of heaven's desire.”