Landmarks in Russian literature

by Maurice Baring

Alosha’s religion, therefore, was based on common sense, and admitted of no compromise. As soon as, after having thought about the matter, he becomes convinced that God and the immortality of the soul exist, he immediately says to himself quite naturally: “I wish to live for the future life, and to admit of no half-way house.” And just in the same way, had he been convinced that God and the immortality of the soul do not exist, he would have become an atheist and a socialist. For Dostoievsky says that Socialism is not only a social problem, but an atheistic problem. It is the problem of the incarnation of atheism, the problem of a Tower of Babel to be made without God, not in order to reach Heaven from earth, but to bring Heaven down to earth.

Alosha wishes to spend his whole life in the monastery, and to give himself up entirely to religion, but he is not allowed to do so. In the monastery, Alosha finds a spiritual father, Zosima. This character, which is drawn with power and vividness, strikes us as being a blend of saintliness, solid sense, and warm humanity. He is an old man, and he dies in the convent; but before he dies, he sees Alosha, and tells him that he must leave the convent for ever; he must go out into the world, and live in the world, and suffer. “You will have many adversaries,” he says to him, “but even your enemies will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on account of them, and you will bless life and cause others to bless it. That is the most important thing of all.” Alosha is to go into the world and submit to many trials, for he is a Karamazov too, and the microbe of lust which rages in the blood of that family is in him also. He is to put into practice Father Zosima’s precepts: “Be no man’s judge; humble love is a terrible power which effects more than violence. Only active love can bring out faith. Love men and do not be afraid of their sins: love man in his sin; love all the creatures of God, and pray God to make you cheerful. Be cheerful as children and as the birds.” These are the precepts which Alosha is to carry out in the face of many trials. How he does so we never see, for the book ends before his trials begin, and all we see is the strength of his influence, the effect of the sweetness of his character in relation to the trials of his two brothers, Mitya and Ivan.

That Dostoievsky should have died before finishing this monumental work which would have been his masterpiece, is a great calamity. Nevertheless the book is not incomplete in itself: it is a large piece of life, and it contains the whole of Dostoievsky’s philosophy and ideas. Moreover, considered merely as a novel, as a book to be read from the point of view of being entertained, and excited about what is going to happen next, it is of enthralling interest. This book, therefore, can be recommended to a hermit who wishes to ponder over something deep, in a cell or on a desert island, to a philosopher who wishes to sharpen his thoughts against a hard whetstone, to a man who is unhappy and wishes to find some healing balm, or to a man who is going on a railway journey and wishes for an exciting story to while away the time.

IX

This study of Dostoievsky, or rather this suggestion for a study of his work, cannot help being sketchy and incomplete. I have not only not dealt with his shorter stories, such as White Nights, The Friend of the Family, The Gambler and The Double, but I have not even mentioned two longer novels, The Hobbledehoy and Despised and Rejected. The last named, though it suffers from being somewhat melodramatic in parts, contains as strong a note of pathos as is to be found in any of Dostoievsky’s books; and an incident of this book has been singled out by Robert Louis Stevenson as being—together with the moment when Mark Antony takes off his helmet, and the scene when Kent has pity on the dying Lear—one of the most greatly moving episodes in the whole of literature. The reason why I have not dwelt on these minor works is that to the English reader, unacquainted with Dostoievsky, an exact and minute analysis of his works can only be tedious. I have only dealt with the very broadest outline of the case, so as to enable the reader to make up his mind whether he wishes to become acquainted with Dostoievsky’s work at all. My object has been merely to open the door, and not to act as a guide and to show him over every part of the house. If I have inspired him with a wish to enter the house, I have succeeded in my task. Should he wish for better-informed guides and fuller guide-books, he will find them in plenty; but guides and guide-books are utterly useless to people who do not wish to visit the country of which they treat. And my sole object has been to give in the broadest manner possible a rough sketch of the nature of the country, so as to enable the traveller to make up his mind whether he thinks it worth while or not to buy a ticket and to set forth on a voyage of exploration. Should such an one decide that the exploration is to him attractive and worth his while, I should advise him to begin with The Letters from a Dead House, and to go on with The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov; and to read The Possessed last of all. If he understands and appreciates The Letters from a Dead House, he will be able to understand and appreciate the character of Dostoievsky and the main ideas which lie at the root of all his books. If he is able to understand and appreciate The Idiot, he will be able to understand and appreciate the whole of Dostoievsky’s writings. But should he begin with Crime and Punishment, or The Possessed, it is possible that he might be put off, and relinquish the attempt; just as it is possible that a man who took up Shakespeare’s plays for the first time and began with King Lear, might make up his mind not to persevere, but to choose some more cheerful author. And by so doing he would probably lose a great deal, since a man who is repelled by King Lear might very well be able to appreciate not only The Merchant of Venice, but Henry IV and the Winter’s Tale. If one were asked to sum up briefly what was Dostoievsky’s message to his generation and to the world in general, one could do so in two words: love and pity. The love which is in Dostoievsky’s work is so great, so bountiful, so overflowing, that it is impossible to find a parallel to it, either in ancient or in modern literature. It is human, but more than human, that is to say, divine. Supposing the Gospel of St. John were to be annihilated and lost to us for ever, although nothing, of course, could replace it, Dostoievsky’s work would go nearer to recalling the spirit of it than any other books of any other European writer.[22] It is the love which faces everything and which shrinks from nothing. It is the love which that saint felt who sought out the starving and freezing beggar, and warmed and embraced him, although he was covered with sores, and who was rewarded by the beggar turning into His Lord and lifting him up into the infinite spaces of Heaven.

Dostoievsky tells us that the most complete of his characters, Alosha, is a Realist, and that was what Dostoievsky was himself. He was a Realist in the true sense of the word, and he was exactly the contrary of those people who when they wrote particularly filthy novels in which they singled out and dwelt at length on certain revolting details of life, called themselves Realists. He saw things as they really are; he never shut his eyes or averted his gaze from anything which was either cruel, hateful, ugly, bitter, diseased or obscene; but the more he looked at the ugly things, the more firmly he became convinced of the goodness that is in and behind everything: To put it briefly, the more clearly he realised mortal misery and sin, the more firmly he believed in God. Therefore, as I have more than once said in this study, although he sounds the lowest depths of human gloom, mortal despair, and suffering, his books are a cry of triumph, a clarion peal, a hosanna to the idea of goodness and to the glory of God. There is a great gulf between Dostoievsky and such novelists as make of their art a clinical laboratory, in which the vices and the sores, and only the vices and the sores, are dissected and observed, not under a microscope, but under a magnifying-glass, so that a totally distorted and exaggerated impression of life is the result. And this is all the more remarkable, because a large part of his most important characters are abnormal: monomaniacs, murderers, or epileptics. But it is in dealing with such characters that the secret of Dostoievsky’s greatness is revealed. For in contradistinction to many writers who show us what is insane in the sanest men, who search for and find a spot of disease in the healthiest body, a blemish in the fairest flower, a flaw in the brightest ruby, Dostoievsky seeks and finds the sanity of the insane, a healthy spot in the sorest soul, a gleam of gold in the darkest mine, a pearl in the filthiest refuse heap, a spring in the most arid desert. In depicting humanity at its lowest depth of misery and the human soul at its highest pitch of anguish, he is making a great act of faith, and an act of charity, and conferring a huge benefit on mankind. For in depicting the extremest pain of abnormal sufferers, he persuades us of the good that exists even in such men, and of the goodness that is in suffering itself; and by taking us in the darkest of dungeons, he gives us a glimpse such as no one else has given us of infinite light and love.

On the other hand, Dostoievsky is equally far removed from such writers (of which we have plenty in England) who throw a cloak over all evil things, and put on blinkers, and who, because the existence of evil is distasteful to them, refuse to admit and face it. Such an attitude is the direct outcome of either conscious or unconscious hypocrisy. Dostoievsky has not a grain of hypocrisy in his nature, and therefore such an attitude is impossible to him.

Dostoievsky is a Realist, and he sees things as they are all through life, from the most important matters down to the most trivial. He is free from cant, either moral or political, and absolutely free from all prejudice of caste or class. It is impossible for him to think that because a man is a revolutionary he must therefore be a braver man than his fellows, or because a man is a Conservative he must therefore be a more cruel man than his fellows, just as it is impossible for him to think the contrary, and to believe that because a man is a Conservative he cannot help being honest, or because a man is a Radical he must inevitably be a scoundrel. He judges men and things as they are, quite apart from the labels which they choose to give to their political opinions. That is why nobody who is by nature a doctrinaire[23] can appreciate or enjoy the works of Dostoievsky, since any one who bases his conduct upon theory cannot help at all costs being rudely shocked at every moment by Dostoievsky’s creed, which is based on reality and on reality alone. Dostoievsky sees and embraces everything as it really is. The existence of evil, of ugliness and of suffering, inspires him with only one thing, and this is pity; and his pity is like that which King Lear felt on the Heath when he said:

“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.”

Dostoievsky has a right to say such things, because throughout his life he not only exposed himself, but was exposed, to feel what wretches feel; because he might have said as King Lear said to Cordelia: