No man can persistently look upon his fellow men without awakening his own real self. Now, see how this doctrine of expression works itself out when we give due value to the personal equation. Here is a man who was born October 30, 1821, in a charity hospital in Warsaw, as the second of seven children. His father, a poor army surgeon, was of excellent birth, though his family lived in but two rooms. Féodor went to boarding-school when thirteen, was graduated with honors from the Military School of Engineering in St. Petersburg, received a good appointment, but soon resigned to give himself to literature.
His first novel, “Poor People” (1846), won him the name of the “new Gogol,” but in 1849 he was unjustly arrested for inciting to insurrection, condemned to be shot, and reprieved after standing on the executioner’s platform for twenty minutes in freezing weather while almost naked. Four terrible years in a Siberian prison nearly completed the ruin which a sickly constitution, shattered nerves, and epileptic attacks had begun. Brückner puts it thus dramatically: “...for no single moment, or at most when he collapsed under his load of bricks, did he feel himself a man.” Yet, quite in the wonderful way that life often takes, this very prison era made the man and the novelist.
When at length he was released from prison, he served three years in the Siberian army, and finally was permitted to return home—to a period of struggle with his little magazine, its silly suppression by the censor, the ruin of his family, the death of his dear ones, the exhausting fight to bear the load of debt, the flight from the debtors’ prison into foreign countries, the ill-rewarded toil which forever harassed him, in short, to a cycle of suffering which might well have worn out the strongest. No wonder that he had the sensation of being flayed alive—that every breath of air held pains in store for him.
Now suppose that such a maddening plenitude of experience should clamor for expression, why should not the unfortunate epileptic indite with his pen the diseased, the abnormal, the despairing, sensations which piled upon him with terrific weight year after year? He saw all with sympathy, why should not his soul-cries rouse the world to pity for what he saw?
There is an immeasurable area lying between that morbid mind which loves to depict the purlieus of life and that brave heart which reaches down deep into the filthy and the sickening for the sake of dragging somewhat of value up to the light. Dostoevski conceived that Russia could never energize her arm for saving service without a wide knowledge of what existed in every place of nameless horror. As a great natural pathologist, he understood the vagaries of the diseased and the defective; in Siberia he perforce mingled with the lowest criminals—the results he embodied in a score of novels, four or five of them great novels, for those to read who dare look in the face the life of the shadowy alleys, for those to avoid who prefer the light and airy high-paths.
What is more, no pleasant bucolic pipe can rouse like a bugle-blast. Those who play the notes of beauty will exalt or pacify the soul, but those who would rouse the whole being must choose sturdy instruments and various. To shift the similitude, Russia needed no soothing unguents, her festering sores called for the heroic knife—first exact diagnosis, then the knife. And Dostoevski showed always the truth—the sordid, noisome, revolting, pitiful truth—and, as this serene prophet saw that she would, Russia herself is more and more bravely using the knife. Yet beauty and sweetness and upper air are in his stories, too, especially if one sees beneath the surface.
Russia’s greatest novelists are really three: Turgenev, the cosmopolitan, was an æsthete, an artist, a polished littérateur; Tolstoi, the mystic, was a brooding reformer, too self-centered to realize his humanitarian ideals, but a majestic figure in literature as in life; Dostoevski, the profoundly religious psychologist, was an unbalanced, fiery apostle, winging among the highest, stalking amidst the lowest, seeing visions not given to common men.
Dostoevski’s novels are great not by reason of their art, but from their artlessness, which is to say their explosive sincerity, like the incoherent violence of one who feels things too powerful for orderly utterance. In this they reflect his life only in that they reproduce what the seismograph of his spirit recorded. Outwardly, he was quiet, detached, even morose, his epileptic seizures doubtless sending him into the companionship of his own life; but his soul shook with the volcanic terrors which he perforce beheld, from his cradle in the charity hospital, through the turbulent years of Siberia, Russia, and the continent, down to the day of his too early taking-off at the age of fifty-nine.
Not all of his novels are worth general reading, even were they all available in English. He was too much preoccupied with his struggle with debt, his physical sufferings, his inner life, his passion of pity, his profound analyses of the characters about him, his tender religious faith, to allow him to study the graces of expression. In consequence, diffuseness and lack of compact, progressive plot—for he had no dramatic skill—characterize his work, and when he does rise to heights of beautiful utterance, which is not seldom, it is the outbursting of sheer feeling, the power of his theme, not the premeditated caperings of the self-conscious stylist. The man and his vehement message are far bigger than his technique.