“Dostoievsky,” writes Strakov, “loved literature; he took her as she was, with all her conditions; he never stood apart from literature, and he never looked down upon her. This absence of the least hint of literary snobbishness is in him a beautiful and touching characteristic. Russian literature was the one lodestar of Dostoievsky’s life, and he cherished for it a passionate love and devotion. He knew very well that when he entered the lists he would have to go into the public market-place, and he was never ashamed of his trade nor of his fellow-workers. On the contrary, he was proud of his profession, and considered it a great and sacred one.”
He speaks of himself as a literary hack: he writes at so much a line, three and a half printed pages of a newspaper in two days and two nights. “Often,” he says, “it happened in my literary career that the beginning of the chapter of a novel or story was already set up, and the end was still in my mind and had to be written by the next day.” Again: “Work from want and for money has crushed and devoured me. Will my poverty ever cease? Ah, if I had money, then I should be free!”
I have said that one of the main elements of Dostoievsky’s character was vehement passion. There was more than a vehement element of passion in Dostoievsky; he was not only passionate in his loves and passionate in his hates, but his passion was unbridled. In this he resembles the people of the Renaissance. There were perilous depths in his personality; black pools of passion; a seething whirlpool that sent up every now and then great eddies of boiling surge; yet this passion has nothing about it which is undefinably evil; it never smells of the pit. The reason of this is that although Dostoievsky’s soul descended into hell, it was purged by the flames, and no poisonous fumes ever came from it. There was something of St. Francis in him, and something of Velasquez. Dostoievsky was a violent hater. I have already told how he hated Bielinsky, the Socialists and the materialists whom he attacked all his life, but against Tourgeniev he nourished a blind and causeless hatred. This manifests itself as soon as he leaves prison, in the following outburst: “I know very well,” he writes, “that I write worse than Tourgeniev, but not so very much worse, and after all I hope one day to write quite as well as he does. Why, with my crying wants, do I receive only 100 roubles a sheet, and Tourgeniev, who possesses two thousand serfs, receives 400 roubles? Owing to my poverty I am obliged to hurry, to write for money, and consequently to spoil my work.” In a postscript he says that he sends Katkov, the great Moscow editor, fifteen sheets at 100 roubles a sheet, that is, 1500 roubles in all. “I have had 500 roubles from him, and besides, when I had sent three-quarters of the novel, I asked him for 200 to help me along, or 700 altogether. I shall reach Tver without a farthing. But, on the other hand, I shall shortly receive from Katkov seven or eight hundred roubles.”
It must not be forgotten that the whole nature of Dostoievsky, both as man and artist, was profoundly modified by the disease from which he suffered all his life, his epilepsy. He had therefore two handicaps against him: disease and poverty. But it is his epilepsy which was probably the cause of his dislikes, his hatreds and his outbreaks of violent passion. The attacks of epilepsy came upon him about once a month, and sometimes, though not often, they were more frequent. He once had two in a week. His friend Strakov describes one of them thus: “I once saw one of his ordinary attacks: it was, I fancy, in 1863, just before Easter. Late in the evening, about eleven o’clock, he came to see me, and we had a very animated conversation. I cannot remember the subject, but I know that it was important and abstruse. He became excited, and walked about the room while I sat at the table. He said something fine and jubilant. I confirmed his opinion by some remark, and he turned to me a face which positively glowed with the most transcendent inspiration. He paused for a moment, as if searching for words, and had already opened his lips to speak. I looked at him all expectant for fresh revelation. Suddenly from his open mouth issued a strange, prolonged, and inarticulate moan. He sank senseless on the floor in the middle of the room.”
The ancients called this “the sacred sickness.” Just before the attacks, Dostoievsky felt a kind of rapture, something like what people say they feel when they hear very great music, a perfect harmony between himself and the world, a sensation as if he had reached the edge of a planet, and were falling off it into infinite space. And this feeling was such that for some seconds of the rapture, he said, you might give ten years of your life, or even the whole of it. But after the attack his condition was dreadful, and he could hardly sustain the state of low-spirited dreariness and sensitiveness into which he was plunged. He felt like a criminal, and fancied there hung over him an invisible guilt, a great transgression. He compares both sensations, suddenly combined and blended in a flash, to the famous falling pitcher of Mahomet, which had not time to empty itself while the Prophet on Allah’s steed was girdling heaven and hell. It is no doubt the presence of this disease and the frequency of the attacks, which were responsible for the want of balance in his nature and in his artistic conceptions, just as his grinding poverty and the merciless conditions of his existence are responsible for the want of finish in his style. But Dostoievsky had the qualities of his defects, and it is perhaps owing to his very illness, and to its extraordinary nature, that he was able so deeply to penetrate into the human soul. It is as if the veil of flesh and blood dividing the soul from that which is behind all things, was finer and more transparent in Dostoievsky than in other men: by his very illness he may have been able to discern what is invisible to others. It is certainly owing to the combined poverty and disease which made up his life, that he had such an unexampled insight into the lives and hearts of the humble, the rejected, the despised, the afflicted, and the oppressed. He sounded the utmost depths of human misery, he lived face to face with the lowest representatives of human misfortune and disgrace, and he was neither dispirited nor dismayed. He came to the conclusion that it was all for the best, and like Job in dust and ashes consented to the eternal scheme. And though all his life he was one of the conquered, he never ceased fighting, and never for one moment believed that life was not worth living. On the contrary, he blessed life and made others bless it.
His life was “a long disease,” rendered harder to bear and more difficult by exceptionally cruel circumstances. In spite of this, Dostoievsky was a happy man: he was happy and he was cheerful; and he was happy not because he was a saint, but because, in spite of all his faults, he radiated goodness; because his immense heart overflowed in kindness, and having suffered much himself, he understood the sufferings of others; thus although his books are terrible, and deal with the darkest clouds which can overshadow the human spirit, the descent into hell of the human soul, yet the main impression left by them is not one of gloom but one of comfort. Dostoievsky is, above all things, a healer and a comforter, and this is because the whole of his teaching, his morality, his art, his character, are based on the simple foundation of what the Russians call “dolgoterpjenie,” that is, forbearance, and “smirenie,” that is to say, resignation. In the whole history of the world’s literature there is no literary man’s life which was so arduous and so hard; but Dostoievsky never complained, nor, we can be sure, would he have wished his life to have been otherwise. His life was a martyrdom, but he enjoyed it. Although no one more nearly than he bears witness to Heine’s saying that “where a great spirit is, there is Golgotha,” yet we can say without hesitation that Dostoievsky was a happy man, and he was happy because he never thought about himself, and because, consciously or unconsciously, he relieved and comforted the sufferings of others. And his books continued to do so long after he ceased to live.
All this can be summed up in one word: the value of Dostoievsky’s life. And the whole reason that his books, although they deal with the tragedies of mankind, bring comfort to the reader instead of gloom, hope instead of despair, is, firstly, that Dostoievsky was an altruist, and that he fulfilled the most difficult precept of Christianity—to love others better than oneself; and, secondly, that in leading us down in the lowest depths of tragedy, he shows us that where man ends, God takes up the tale.
IV
Poor Folk and the Letters from a Dead House
In his first book, Poor Folk, which was published in 1846, we have the germ of all Dostoievsky’s talent and genius. It is true that he accomplished far greater things, but never anything more characteristic. It is the story of a poor official, a minor clerk in a Government office, already aged and worn with cares, who battles against material want. In his sombre and monotonous life there is a ray of light: in another house as poor and as squalid as his own, there lives a girl, a distant relation of his, who is also in hard and humble circumstances, and who has nothing in the world save the affection and friendship of this poor clerk. They write to each other daily. In the man’s letters a discreet unselfishness is revealed, a rare delicacy of feeling, which is in sharp contrast to the awkwardness of his everyday actions and ideas, which verge on the grotesque. At the office, he has to cringe and sacrifice his honour in order not to forfeit the favour of his superiors. He stints himself, and makes every kind of small sacrifice, in order that this woman may be relieved of her privations. He writes to her like a father or brother; but it is easy for us to see in his simple phrases that he is in love with her, although she does not realise it. The character of the woman is equally clear to us: she is superior to him in education and mind, and she is less resigned to her fate than he is. In the course of their correspondence we learn all that is to be known about their past, their melancholy history and the small incidents of their everyday life, the struggle that is continually working in the mind of the clerk between his material want and his desire not to lose his personal honour. This correspondence continues day by day until the crisis comes, and the clerk loses the one joy of his life, and learns that his friend is engaged to be married. But she has not been caught up or carried off in a brilliant adventure: she marries a middle-aged man, very rich and slightly discredited, and all her last letters are full of commissions which she trusts to her devoted old friend to accomplish. He is sent to the dress-makers about her gowns, and to the jeweller about her rings; and all this he accepts and does with perfect self-sacrifice; and his sacrifice seems quite accidental, a matter of course: there is not the slightest pose in it, nor any fuss, and only at the end, in his very last letter, and even then only in a veiled and discreet form, does he express anything of the immense sorrow which the blow is bringing to him.
The woman’s character is as subtly drawn as the man’s; she is more independent than he, and less resigned; she is kind and good, and it is from no selfish motives that she grasps at the improvement in her fortunes. But she is still young, and her youth rises within her and imperatively claims its natural desires. She is convinced that by accepting the proposal which is made to her she will alleviate her friend’s position as much as her own; moreover, she regards him as a faithful friend, and nothing more. But we, the outsiders who read his letters, see clearly that what he feels for her is more than friendship: it is simply love and nothing else.