However this may be, at the present time Dostoievsky’s fame in Russia is every day becoming more universally and more emphatically recognised. The present generation are inclined to consider him the greatest of all their novelists; and although they as a rule, with the critic Merejkowski, put him equal with Tolstoy as one of the two great pillars which uphold the Temple of Russian literature, they are for the most part agreed in thinking that he was a unique product, a more startling revelation and embodiment of genius, a greater elemental force, than Tolstoy or any other Russian writer of fiction. In fact, they hold the same view about him that we do with regard to Shelley in our poetical literature. We may not think that Shelley is a greater poet than Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge or Byron, but he certainly is a more exceptional incarnation of poetical genius. We can imagine poets like Keats arising again,—one nearly akin to him and almost equally exquisite did appear in the shape of Tennyson. We can imagine there being other writers who would attain to Wordsworth’s simplicity and communion with nature, but Shelley has as yet been without kith or kindred, without mate or equal, in the whole range of the world’s literary history. He does not appear to us like a plant that grows among others, differing from them only in being more beautiful and striking, which is true even of poets like Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe, who reveal in the highest degree qualities which other poets possess in a lesser degree, and complete and fulfil what the others aim at and only partially achieve; but Shelley is altogether different in kind: he aims at and achieves something which is beyond the range and beyond the ken of other poets. It is as though he were not a man at all, but an embodiment of certain elemental forces.
So it is with Dostoievsky. And for this reason those who admire him do so passionately and extravagantly. It must not be thought that they do not discern his faults, his incompleteness, and his limitations, but the positive qualities that he possesses seem to them matchless, and so precious, so rare, so tremendous, that they annihilate all petty criticism. The example of Shelley may again serve us here. Only a pedant, in the face of such flights of genius as “The Cloud,” the “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Sensitive Plant,” or that high pageant of grief, fantasy, of “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,”—“Adonais,”—would apply a magnifying glass to such poems and complain of the occasional lapses of style or of the mistakes in grammar which may be found in them. These poems may be full of trivial lapses of this kind, but such matters are of small account when a poet has evoked for us a vision of what dwells beyond the veil of the senses, and struck chords of a music which has the power and the wonder of a miracle.
With Dostoievsky the case is somewhat but not in all respects similar. He possesses a certain quality which is different in kind from those of any other writer, a power of seeming to get nearer to the unknown, to what lies beyond the flesh, which is perhaps the secret of his amazing strength; and, besides this, he has certain great qualities which other writers, and notably other Russian writers, possess also; but he has them in so far higher a degree that when seen with other writers he annihilates them. The combination of this difference in kind and this difference in degree makes something so strong and so tremendous, that it is not to be wondered at when we find many critics saying that Dostoievsky is not only the greatest of all Russian writers, but one of the greatest writers that the world has ever seen. I am not exaggerating when I say that such views are held; for instance, Professor Brückner, a most level-headed critic, in his learned and exhaustive survey of Russian literature, says that it is not in Faust, but rather in Crime and Punishment, that the whole grief of mankind takes hold of us.
Even making allowance for the enthusiasm of his admirers, it is true to say that almost any Russian judge of literature at the present day would place Dostoievsky as being equal to Tolstoy and immeasurably above Tourgeniev; in fact, the ordinary Russian critic at the present day no more dreams of comparing Tourgeniev with Dostoievsky, than it would occur to an Englishman to compare Charlotte Yonge with Charlotte Brontë.
Dostoievsky’s fame came late, although his first book, Poor Folk, made a considerable stir, and the publication of his Crime and Punishment ensured his popularity. But when I say “fame,” I mean the universal recognition of him by the best and most competent judges. This recognition is now an accomplished fact in Russia and also in Germany. The same cannot be said positively of France, although his books are for the most part well translated into French, and have received the warmest and the most acute appreciation at the hands of a French critic, namely, M. de Vogüé in Le Roman Russe.[18] In England, Dostoievsky cannot be said to be known at all, since the translations of his works are not only inadequate, but scarce and difficult to obtain, and it is possible to come across the most amazing judgments pronounced on them by critics whose judgment on other subjects is excellent.[19] The reason of this tardy recognition of Dostoievsky in his own country is that he was one of those men whose innate sense of fairness and hatred of cant prevent them from whole-heartedly joining a political party and swallowing its tenets indiscriminately, even when some of these tenets are nonsensical and iniquitous. He was one of those men who put truth and love higher than any political cause, and can fight for such a cause only when the leaders of it, in practice as well as in theory, never deviate from the one or the other. He was between two fires: the Government considered him a revolutionary, and the revolutionaries thought him a retrograde; because he refused to be blind to the merits of the Government, such as they were, and equally refused to be blind to the defects of the enemies of the Government. He therefore attacked not only the Government, but the Government’s enemies; and when he attacked, it was with thunderbolts. The Liberals never forgave him this. Dostoievsky was unjustly condemned to spend four years in penal servitude for a political crime; for having taken part in a revolutionary propaganda. He returned from Siberia a Slavophil, and, I will not say a Conservative, as the word is misleading; but a man convinced not only of the futility of revolution, but also of the worthlessness of a great part of the revolutionaries. Nor did the Liberals ever forgive him this. They are only just beginning to do so now. Moreover, in one of his most powerful books, The Possessed, he draws a scathing picture of all the flotsam and jetsam of revolution, and not only of the worthless hangers-on who are the parasites of any such movement, but he reveals the decadence and worthlessness of some of the men, who by their dominating character played leading parts and were popular heroes. Still less did the Liberals forgive him this book; and even now, few Liberal writers are fair towards it. Again, Dostoievsky was, as I shall show later, by nature an antagonist of Socialism and a hater of materialism; and since all the leading men among the Liberals of his time were either one or the other, if not both, Dostoievsky aroused the enmity of the whole Liberal camp, by attacking not only its parasites but its leaders, men of high principle such as Bielinsky, who were obviously sincere and deserving of the highest consideration and respect. One can imagine a similar situation in England if at the present time there were an autocratic government, a backward and ignorant peasantry, and a small and Liberal movement carried on by a minority of extremely intellectual men, headed, let us say, by Mr. Bernard Shaw, Lord Morley, Professor Raleigh, and Sir J. J. Thomson. I purposely take men of widely different opinions, because in a country where there is a fight going on for a definite thing, such as a Constitution, there is a moment when men, who under another régime would be split up into Liberals and Conservatives, are necessarily grouped together in one big Liberal camp. Now, let us suppose that the men who were carrying on this propaganda for reform were undergoing great sacrifices; let us likewise suppose them to be Socialists and materialists to the core. Then suppose there should appear a novelist of conspicuous power, such as George Meredith or Mr. Thomas Hardy or Mr. H. G. Wells, who by some error was sent to Botany Bay for having been supposed to be mixed up with a revolutionary propaganda, and on his return announced that he was an Anti-Revolutionary, violently attacked Mr. Shaw, wrote a book in which he caricatured him, and drew a scathing portrait of all his disciples,—especially of the less intelligent among them. One can imagine how unpopular such an author would be in Liberal circles. This was the case of Dostoievsky in Russia. It is only fair to add that his genius has now obtained full recognition, even at the hands of Liberals, though they still may not be able to tolerate his book, The Possessed. But considering the magnitude of his genius, this recognition has been, on the whole, a tardy one. For instance, even in so valuable a book as Prince Kropotkin’s Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature, Dostoievsky receives inadequate treatment and scanty appreciation. On the other hand, in Merejkowsky’s Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, Merejkowsky, who is also a Liberal, praises Dostoievsky with complete comprehension and with brilliance of thought and expression.
II
Dostoievsky’s Life
Dostoievsky was the son of a staff-surgeon and a tradesman’s daughter. He was born in a charity hospital, the “Maison de Dieu,” at Moscow, in 1821. He was, as he said, a member of a stray family. His father and five children lived in a flat consisting of two rooms and a kitchen. The nursery of the two boys, Michael and Fedor, consisted of a small part of the entrance hall, which was partitioned off. His family belonged to the lowest ranks of the nobility, to that stratum of society which supplied the bureaucracy with its minor public servants. The poverty surrounding his earliest years was to last until the day of his death.
Some people are, as far as money is concerned, like a negative pole—money seems to fly away from them, or rather, when it comes to them, to be unable to find any substance it can cleave to. Dostoievsky was one of these people; he never knew how much money he had, and when he had any, however little, he gave it away. He was what the French call a panier percé: money went through him as through a sieve. And however much money he had, it was never he but his friends who benefited by it.
He received his earliest education at a small school in Moscow, where a schoolmaster who taught Russian inspired him and his brother with a love of literature, of Pushkin’s poetry and other writers, introduced him also to the works of Walter Scott, and took him to see a performance of Schiller’s Robbers. When his preliminary studies were ended, he was sent with his brother to a school of military engineers at St. Petersburg. Here his interest in literature, which had been first aroused by coming into contact with Walter Scott’s works, was further developed by his discovery of Balzac, George Sand, and Homer. Dostoievsky developed a passionate love of literature and poetry. His favourite author was Gogol. He left this school in 1843 at the age of twenty-three, with the rank of sub-lieutenant.
His first success in literature was his novel, Poor Folk (published in 1846), which he possibly began to write while he was still at school. He sent this work to a review and awaited the result, utterly hopeless of its being accepted. One day, at four o’clock in the morning, just when Dostoievsky was despairing of success and thinking of suicide, Nekrasov the poet, and Grigorovitch the critic, came to him and said: “Do you understand yourself what you have written? To have written such a book you must have possessed the direct inspiration of an artist.”