“Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind; and they were afraid. They also which saw it, told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils, was healed.”
The book, as I have said, undoubtedly reveals Dostoievsky’s powers at their highest pitch, in the sense that nowhere in the whole range of his work do we find such isolated scenes of power; scenes which are, so to speak, white hot with the fire of his soul; and characters in which he has concentrated the whole dæmonic force of his personality, and the whole blinding strength of his insight. On the other hand, it shows us, as I added, more clearly than any other of his books, the nature and the extent of his limitations. It is almost too full of characters and incidents; the incidents are crowded together in an incredibly short space of time, the whole action of the book, which is a remarkably long one, occupying only the space of a few days, while to the description of one morning enough space is allotted to make a bulky English novel. Again, the narrative is somewhat disconnected. You can sometimes scarcely see the wood for the trees. Of course, these objections are in a sense hypercritical, because, as far as my experience goes, any one who takes up this book finds it impossible to put it down until he has read it to the very end, so enthralling is the mere interest of the story, so powerful the grip of the characters. I therefore only suggest these criticisms for those who wish to form an idea of the net result of Dostoievsky’s artistic scope and achievement.
With regard to the further point, the “prophetic soul” which speaks in this book is perhaps that which is its most remarkable quality. The book was some thirty years ahead of its time: ahead of its time in the same way that Wagner’s music was ahead of its time,—and this was not only on account of the characters and the state of things which it divined and foreshadowed, but also on account of the ideas and the flashes of philosophy which abound in its pages. When the book was published, it was treated as a gross caricature, and even a few years ago, when Professor Brückner first published his History of Russian Literature, he talked of this book as being a satire not of Nihilism itself, but of the hangers-on, the camp-followers which accompany every army. “Dostoievsky,” he says, “did not paint the heroes but the Falstaffs, the silly adepts, the half and wholly crazed adherents of Nihilism. He was indeed fully within his rights. Of course there were such Nihilists, particularly between 1862 and 1869, but there were not only such: even Nechaev, the prototype of Petrushka, impressed us by a steel-like energy and a hatred for the upper classes which we wholly miss in the wind-bag and intriguer Petrushka.”
There is a certain amount of truth in this criticism. It is true that Dostoievsky certainly painted the Falstaffs and the half-crazy adherents of Nihilism. But I am convinced that the reason he did not paint the heroes was that he did not believe in their existence: he did not believe that the heroes of Nihilism were heroes; this is plain not only from this book, but from every line which he wrote about the people who played a part in the revolutionary movement in Russia; and so far from the leading personage in his book being merely a wind-bag, I would say that one is almost more impressed by the steel-like energy of the character, as drawn in this book, than by the sayings and doings of his prototype—or rather his prototypes in real life. The amazing thing is that even if a few years ago real life had not furnished examples of revolutionaries as extreme both in their energy and in their craziness as Dostoievsky paints them, real life has done so in the last four years. Therefore, Dostoievsky not only saw with prophetic divination that should circumstances in Russia ever lead to a general upheaval, such characters might arise and exercise an influence, but his prophetic insight has actually been justified by the facts.
As soon as such circumstances arose, as they did after the Japanese War of 1904, characters such as Dostoievsky depicted immediately came to the front and played a leading part. When M. de Vogüé published his book, La Roman Russe, in speaking of The Possessed, he said that he had assisted at several of the trials of Anarchists in 1871, and he added that many of the men who came up for trial, and many of the crimes of which they were accused, were identical reproductions of the men and the crimes imagined by the novelist. If this was true when applied to the revolutionaries of 1871, it is a great deal truer applied to those of 1904-1909. That Dostoievsky believed that this would happen, I think there can be no doubt. Witness the following passage:
“Chigalev,” says the leading character of The Possessed, speaking of one of his revolutionary disciples, a man with long ears, “is a man of genius: a genius in the manner of Fourier, but bolder and cleverer. He has invented ‘equality.’ In his system, every member of society has an eye on every one else. To tell tales is a duty. The individual belongs to the community and the community belongs to the individual. All are slaves and equal in their bondage. Calumny and assassination can be used in extreme cases, but the most important thing is equality. The first necessity is to lower the level of culture science and talent. A high scientific level is only accessible to superior intellects, and we don’t want superior intellects. Men gifted with high capacities have always seized upon power and become despots. Highly gifted men cannot help being despots, and have always done more harm than good. They must be exiled or executed. Cicero’s tongue must be cut out, Copernicus’ eyes must be blinded, Shakespeare must be stoned. That is Chigalevism. Slaves must be equal. Without despotism, up to the present time, neither liberty nor equality has existed, but in a herd, equality should reign supreme,—and that is Chigalevism.... I am all for Chigalevism. Down with instruction and science! There is enough of it, as it is, to last thousands of years, but we must organise obedience: it is the only thing which is wanting in the world. The desire for culture is an aristocratic desire. As soon as you admit the idea of the family or of love, you will have the desire for personal property. We will annihilate this desire: we will let loose drunkenness, slander, tale-telling, and unheard-of debauchery. We will strangle every genius in his cradle. We will reduce everything to the same denomination, complete equality. ‘We have learnt a trade, and we are honest men: we need nothing else.’ Such was the answer which some English workman made the other day. The indispensable alone is indispensable. Such will thenceforth be the watchword of the world, but we must have upheavals. We will see to that, we the governing class. The slaves must have leaders. Complete obedience, absolute impersonality, but once every thirty years Chigalev will bring about an upheaval, and men will begin to devour each other: always up to a given point, so that we may not be bored. Boredom is an aristocratic sensation, and in Chigalevism there will be no desires. We will reserve for ourselves desire and suffering, and for the slaves there will be Chigalevism.... We will begin by fermenting disorder; we will reach the people itself. Do you know that we are already terribly strong? those who belong to us are not only the men who murder and set fire, who commit injuries after the approved fashion, and who bite: these people are only in the way. I do not understand anything unless there be discipline. I myself am a scoundrel, but I am not a Socialist. Ha, ha! listen! I have counted them all: the teacher who laughs with the children whom he teaches, at their God and at their cradle, belongs to us; the barrister who defends a well-educated assassin by proving that he is more educated than his victims, and that in order to get money he was obliged to kill, belongs to us; the schoolboy who in order to experience a sharp sensation kills a peasant, belongs to us; the juries who systematically acquit all criminals, belong to us; the judge who at the tribunal is afraid of not showing himself to be sufficiently liberal, belongs to us; among the administrators, among the men of letters, a great number belong to us, and they do not know it themselves. On the other hand, the obedience of schoolboys and fools has reached its zenith. Everywhere you see an immeasurable vanity, and bestial, unheard-of appetites. Do you know how much we owe to the theories in vogue at present alone? When I left Russia, Littré’s thesis, which likens crime to madness, was the rage. I return, and crime is already no longer considered even as madness: it is considered as common sense itself, almost a duty, at least a noble protest. ‘Why should not an enlightened man kill if he has need of money?’ Such is the argument you hear. But that is nothing. The Russian God has ceded his place to drink. The people are drunk, the mothers are drunk, the children are drunk, the churches are empty. Oh, let this generation grow: it is a pity we cannot wait. They would be drunk still. Ah, what a pity that we have no proletariat! But it will come, it will come. The moment is drawing near.”
In this declaration of revolutionary faith, Dostoievsky has concentrated the whole of an ideal on which thousands of ignorant men in Russia have acted during the last three years. All of the so-called Hooliganism which came about in Russia after the war, which although it has greatly diminished has by no means yet been exterminated by a wholesale system of military court-martials, proceeds from this, and its adepts are conscious or unconscious disciples of this creed. For the proletariat which Dostoievsky foresaw is now a living fact, and a great part of it has been saturated with such ideas. Not all of it, of course. I do not for a moment mean to say that every ordinary Russian social-democrat fosters such ideas; but what I do mean to say is that these ideas exist and that a great number of men have acted on a similar creed which they have only half digested, and have sunk into ruin, ruining others in doing so, and have ended by being hanged.
Thus the book, Devils, which, when it appeared in 1871, was thought a piece of gross exaggeration, and which had not been out long before events began to show that it was less exaggerated than it appeared at first sight—has in the last three years, and even in this year of grace, received further justification by events such as the rôle that Father Gapon played in the revolutionary movement, and the revelations which have been lately made with regard to Azev and similar characters. Any one who finds difficulty in believing a story such as that which came to light through the Azev revelations, had better read The Possessed. It will throw an illuminating light on the motives that cause such men to act as they do, and the circumstances that produce such men.
The main idea of the book is to show that the whole strength of what were then the Nihilists and what are now the Revolutionaries,—let us say the Maximalists,—lies, not in lofty dogmas and theories held by a vast and splendidly organised community, but simply in the strength of character of one or two men, and in the peculiar weakness of the common herd. I say the peculiar weakness with intention. It does not follow that the common herd, to which the majority of the revolutionary disciples belong, is necessarily altogether weak, but that though the men of whom it is composed may be strong and clever in a thousand ways, they have one peculiar weakness, which is, indeed, a common weakness of the Russian character. But before going into this question, it is advisable first to say that what Dostoievsky shows in his book, The Possessed, is that these Nihilists are almost entirely devoid of ideas; the organisations round which so many legends gather, consist in reality of only a few local clubs,—in this particular case, of one local club. All the talk of central committees, executive committees, and so forth, existed only in the imagination of the leaders. On the other hand, the character of those few men who were the leaders and who dominated their disciples, was as strong as steel and as cold as ice. And what Dostoievsky shows is how this peculiar strength of the leaders exercised itself on the peculiar weakness of the disciples. Let us now turn to the peculiar nature of this weakness. Dostoievsky explains it at the very beginning of the book. In describing one of the characters, Chatov, who is an unwilling disciple of the Nihilist leaders, he says:
“He is one of those Russian Idealists whom any strong idea strikes all of a sudden, and on the spot annihilates his will, sometimes for ever. They are never able to react against the idea. They believe in it passionately, and the rest of their life passes as though they were writhing under a stone which was crushing them.”