Such, briefly, are the main facts of Dostoievsky’s crowded life. Unlike Tolstoy, who has himself told us in every conceivable way everything down to the most intimate detail which is to be known about himself, Dostoievsky told us little of himself, and all that we know about him is gathered from other people or from his letters; and even now we know comparatively little about his life. He disliked talking about himself; he could not bear to be pitied. He was modest, and shielded his feelings with a lofty shame. Strakhov writes about him thus:
“In Dostoievsky you could never detect the slightest bitterness or hardness resulting from the sufferings he had undergone, and there was never in him a hint of posing as a martyr. He behaved as if there had been nothing extraordinary in his past. He never represented himself as disillusioned, or as not having an equable mind; but, on the contrary, he appeared cheerful and alert, when his health allowed him to do so. I remember that a lady coming for the first time to Michael Dostoievsky’s (his brother’s) evenings at the newspaper office, looked long at Dostoievsky, and finally said: ‘As I look at you it seems to me that I see in your face the sufferings which you have endured.’ These words visibly annoyed Dostoievsky. ‘What sufferings?’ he said, and began to joke on indifferent matters.”
Long after his imprisonment and exile, when some friends of his tried to prove to him that his exile had been a brutal act of injustice, he said: “The Socialists are the result of the followers of Petrachevsky. Petrachevsky’s disciples sowed many seeds.” And when he was asked whether such men deserved to be exiled, he answered: “Our exile was just; the people would have condemned us.”
The main characteristics of his nature were generosity, catholicity, vehement passion, and a “sweet reasonableness.” Once when he was living with Riesenkampf, a German doctor, he was found living on bread and milk; and even for that he was in debt at a little milk shop. This same doctor says that Dostoievsky was “one of those men to live with whom is good for every one, but who are themselves in perpetual want.” He was mercilessly robbed, but he would never blame any one who took advantage of his kindness and his trustfulness. One of his biographers tells us that his life with Riesenkampf proved expensive to him, because no poor man who came to see the doctor went away without having received something from Dostoievsky. One cannot read a page of his books without being aware of the “sweet reasonableness” of his nature. This pervaded his writings with fragrance like some precious balm, and is made manifest to us in the touching simplicity of some of his characters, such as the Idiot and Alexis Karamazov, to read of whom is like being with some warm and comforting influence, something sweet and sensible and infinitely human. His catholicity consists in an almost boundless power of appreciation, an appreciation of things, persons and books widely removed from himself by accidents of time, space, class, nationality and character. Dostoievsky is equally able to appreciate the very essence of a performance got up by convicts in his prison, and the innermost beauty of the plays of Racine. This last point is singular and remarkable. He was universal and cosmopolitan in his admiration of the literature of foreign countries; and he was cosmopolitan, not because he wished to cut himself away from Russian traditions and to become European and Westernised, but because he was profoundly Russian, and had the peculiarly Russian plastic and receptive power of understanding and assimilating things widely different from himself.
When he was a young man, Shakespeare and Schiller were well known, and it was the fashion to admire them. It was equally the fashion to despise the French writers of the seventeenth century. But Dostoievsky was just as enthusiastic in his admiration of Racine and Corneille and all the great classics of the seventeenth century. Thus he writes: “But Phèdre, brother! You will be the Lord knows what if you say this is not the highest and purest nature and poetry; the outline of it is Shakespearian, but the statue is in plaster, not in marble.” And again of Corneille: “Have you read The Cid? Read it, you wretch, read it, and go down in the dust before Corneille!”
Dostoievsky was constantly “going down in the dust” before the great masterpieces, not only of his own, but of other countries, which bears out the saying that “La valeur morale de l’homme est en proportion de sa faculté d’admirer.”
Dostoievsky never theorised as to how alms should be given, or as to how charity should be organised. He gave what he had, simply and naturally, to those who he saw had need of it; and he had a right to this knowledge, for he himself had received alms in prison. Neither did he ever theorise as to whether a man should leave the work which he was fitted by Providence to do (such as writing books), in order to plough fields and to cut down trees. He had practised hard labour, not as a theoretic amateur, but as a constrained professional. He had carried heavy loads of bricks and broken up ships and swept up heaps of snow, not out of philosophy or theory, but because he had been obliged to do so; because if he had not done so he would have been severely punished. All that Tolstoy dreamed of and aimed at, which was serious in theory but not serious in practice, that is to say, giving up his property, becoming one with the people, ploughing the fields, was a reality to Dostoievsky when he was in prison. He knew that hard labour is only real when it is a necessity, when you cannot leave off doing it when you want to; he had experienced this kind of hard labour for four years, and during his whole life he had to work for his daily bread. The result of this is that he made no theories about what work a man should do, but simply did as well as he could the work he had to do. In the words of a ballade written by Mr. Chesterton, he might have said:
“We eat the cheese,—you scraped about the rind,
You lopped the tree—we eat the fruit instead.
You were benevolent, but we were kind,
You know the laws of food, but we were fed.”
And this is the great difference between Dostoievsky and Tolstoy. Tolstoy was benevolent, but Dostoievsky was kind. Tolstoy theorised on the distribution of food, but Dostoievsky was fed and received alms like a beggar. Dostoievsky, so far from despising the calling of an author, or thinking that it was an occupation “thin sown with aught of profit or delight” for the human race, loved literature passionately. He was proud of his profession: he was a great man of letters as well as a great author. “I have never sold,” he wrote, “one of my books without getting the price down beforehand. I am a literary proletarian. If anybody wants my work he must ensure me by prepayment.”
There is something which resembles Dr. Johnson in the way he talks of his profession and his attitude towards it. But there is, nevertheless, in the phrase just quoted, something bitterly ironical when one reflects that he was a poor man all his life and incessantly harassed by creditors, and that he derived almost nothing from the great popularity and sale of his books.