Dostoievsky’s nature was alien to Socialism, and he loathed the moral materialism of his Socialistic contemporaries. Petrachevsky repelled him because he was an atheist and laughed at all belief; and the attitude of Bielinsky towards religion, which was one of flippant contempt, awoke in Dostoievsky a passion of hatred which blazed up whenever he thought of the man. Dostoievsky thus became a martyr, and was within an ace of losing his life for the revolutionary cause; a movement in which he had never taken part, and in which he disbelieved all his life.
Dostoievsky returned from prison just at the time of the emancipation of the serfs, and the trials which awaited him on his release were severer than those which he endured during his captivity. In January 1861 he started a newspaper called the Vremya. The venture was a success. But just as he thought that Fortune was smiling upon him, and that freedom from want was drawing near, the newspaper, by an extraordinary misunderstanding, was prohibited by the censorship for an article on Polish affairs. This blow, like his condemnation to death, was due to a casual blunder in the official machinery. After considerable efforts, in 1864 he started another newspaper called the Epocha. This newspaper incurred the wrath, not of the Government censorship, but of the Liberals; and it was now that his peculiar situation, namely, that of a man between two fires, became evident. The Liberals abused him in every kind of manner, went so far as to hint that the Epocha and its staff were Government spies, and declared that Dostoievsky was a scribbler with whom the police should deal. At this same time his brother Michael, his best friend Grigoriev, who was on the staff of his newspaper, and his first wife, Marie, died one after another. Dostoievsky was now left all alone; he felt that his whole life was broken, and that he had nothing to live for. His brother’s family was left without resources of any kind. He tried to support them by carrying on the publication of the Epocha, and worked day and night at this, being the sole editor, reading all the proofs, dealing with the authors and the censorship, revising articles, procuring money, sitting up till six in the morning, and sleeping only five out of the twenty-four hours. But this second paper came to grief in 1865, and Dostoievsky was forced to own himself temporarily insolvent. He had incurred heavy liabilities, not only to the subscribers of the newspaper, but in addition a sum of £1400 in bills and £700 in debts of honour. He writes to a friend at this period: “I would gladly go back to prison if only to pay off my debts and to feel myself free once more.”
A publishing bookseller, Stellovsky, a notorious rascal, threatened to have him taken up for debt. He had to choose between the debtors’ prison and flight: he chose the latter, and escaped abroad, where he spent four years of inexpressible misery, in the last extremity of want.
His Crime and Punishment was published in 1866, and this book brought him fame and popularity; yet in spite of this, on an occasion in 1869, he was obliged to pawn his overcoat and his last shirt in order with difficulty to obtain two thalers.
During all this time his attacks of epilepsy continued. He was constantly in trouble with his publishers, and bound and hampered by all sorts of contracts. He writes at this epoch: “In spite of all this I feel as if I were only just beginning to live. It is curious, isn’t it? I have the vitality of a cat.” And on another occasion he talks of his stubborn and inexhaustible vitality. He also says through the mouth of one of his characters, Dimitri Karamazov, “I can bear anything, any suffering, if I can only keep on saying to myself: ‘I live; I am in a thousand torments, but I live! I am on the pillory, but I exist! I see the sun, or I do not see the sun, but I know that it is there. And to know that there is a sun is enough.’”
It was during these four years, overwhelmed by domestic calamity, perpetually harassed by creditors, attacked by the authorities on the one hand and the Liberals on the other, misunderstood by his readers, poor, almost starving, and never well, that he composed his three great masterpieces: Crime and Punishment in 1866, The Idiot in 1868, and The Possessed in 1871-2; besides planning The Brothers Karamazov. He had married a second time, in 1867. He returned to Russia in July 1871: his second exile was over. His popularity had increased, and the success of his books enabled him to free himself from debt. He became a journalist once more, and in 1873 edited Prince Meschtcherki’s newspaper, The Grazjdanin. In 1876 he started a monthly review called The Diary of a Writer, which sometimes appeared once a month and sometimes less often. The appearance of the last number coincided with his death. This review was a kind of encyclopædia, in which Dostoievsky wrote all his social, literary and political ideas, related any stray anecdotes, recollections and experiences which occurred to him, and commented on the political and literary topics of the day. He never ceased fighting his adversaries in this review; and during this time he began his last book, The Brothers Karamazov, which was never finished. In all his articles he preached his Slavophil creed, and on one occasion he made the whole of Russia listen to him and applaud him as one man. This was on June 8, 1880, when he made a speech at Moscow in memory of Pushkin, and aroused to frenzy the enthusiasm even of those men whose political ideals were the exact opposite of his own. He made people forget they were “Slavophils” or “Westernisers,” and remember only one thing—that they were Russians.
In the latter half of 1880, when he was working on The Brothers Karamazov, Strakhov records: “He was unusually thin and exhausted; his body had become so frail that the first slight blow might destroy it. His mental activity was untiring, although work had grown very difficult for him. In the beginning of 1881 he fell ill with a severe attack of emphysema, the result of catarrh in the lung. On January 28 he had hæmorrhage from the throat. Feeling the approach of death, he wished to confess and to receive the Blessed Sacrament. He gave the New Testament used by him in prison to his wife to read aloud. The first passage chanced to be Matthew iii. 14: “But John held Him back and said, ‘It is I that should be baptized by Thee, and dost Thou come to me?’ And Jesus answered and said unto him, ‘Detain Me not; for thus it behoves us to fulfil a great truth.’”
When his wife had read this, Dostoievsky said: “You hear: Do not detain me. That means that I am to die.” And he closed the book. A few hours later he did actually die, instantaneously, from the rupture of an artery in the lungs.
This was on the 28th of January 1881; on the 30th he was buried in St. Petersburg. His death and his funeral had about them an almost mythical greatness, and his funeral is the most striking comment on the nature of the feeling which the Russian public had for him both as a writer and as a man. On the day after his death, St. Petersburg witnessed a most extraordinary sight: the little house in which he had lived suddenly became for the moment the moral centre of Russia. Russia understood that with the death of this struggling and disease-stricken novelist, she had lost something inestimably precious, rare and irreplaceable. Spontaneously, and without any organised preparation, the most imposing and triumphant funeral ceremony was given to Dostoievsky’s remains; and this funeral was not only the greatest and most inspiring which had ever taken place in Russia, but as far as its inward significance was concerned there can hardly ever have been a greater one in the world. Other great writers and other great men have been buried with more gorgeous pomp and with a braver show of outward display, but never, when such a man has been followed to the grave by a mourning multitude, have the trophies and tributes of grief been so real; for striking as they were by their quantity and their nature, they seemed but a feeble and slender evidence of the sorrow and the love to which they bore witness. There were deputations bearing countless wreaths, there were numerous choirs singing religious chants, there were thousands of people following in a slow stream along the streets of St. Petersburg, there were men and women of every class, but mostly poor people, shabbily dressed, of the lower middle or the lower classes. The dream of Dostoievsky, that the whole of Russia should be united by a bond of fraternity and brotherly love, seemed to be realised when this crowd of men, composed of such various and widely differing elements, met together in common grief by his grave. Dostoievsky had lived the life of a pauper, and of a man who had to fight with all his strength in order to win his daily bread. He had been assailed by disease and hunted by misfortune; his whole life seemed to have rushed by before he had had time to sit down quietly and write the great ideas which were seething in his mind. Everything he had written seemed to have been written by chance, haphazardly, to have been jotted down against time, between wind and water. But in spite of this, in his work, however incomplete, however fragmentary and full of faults it may have been, there was a voice speaking, a particular message being delivered, which was different from that of other writers, and at times more precious. While it was there, the public took it for granted, like the sun; and it was only when Dostoievsky died that the hugeness of the gap made by his death, caused them to feel how great was the place he had occupied both in their hearts and in their minds. It was only when he died that they recognised how great a man he was, and how warmly they admired and loved him. Everybody felt this from the highest to the lowest. Tolstoy, in writing of Dostoievsky’s death, says: “I never saw the man, and never had any direct relations with him, yet suddenly when he died I understood that he was the nearest and dearest and most necessary of men to me. Everything that he did was of the kind that the more he did of it the better I felt it was for men. And all at once I read that he is dead, and a prop has fallen from me.” This is what the whole of Russia felt, that a support had fallen from them; and this is what they expressed when they gave to Dostoievsky a funeral such as no king nor Captain has ever had, a funeral whose very shabbiness was greater than any splendour, and whose trophies and emblems were the grief of a nation and the tears of thousands of hearts united together in the admiration and love of a man whom each one of them regarded as his brother.