I do not think of him as an artist, though he is a great one. You do not think of him.... In ordinary life we suppress half the things and more we might say. Vanity and fear are the ultimate things. In Dostoevsky the people tug and scrape at one anothers’ vain nerves with adder’s poison. He gives one the sensation of discovering one’s self and betraying one’s self. He reveals as friends talking and discussing in the small hours of the morning reveal themselves to one another. The talk may be a describing of the animal functions of the human body. But in reality it is the psychic tingling, electric vibrations which the physiological structure exerts upon mind! Mind! Mind! Dostoevsky is interested in what people actually feel. He is more with people who have written diaries than with so-called realistic novelists. One gets from him a sense of perversion of human imagination.... He is the most important of novelists; full of ripples and vibrations of imagination. Everybody has imagination. The things we do are nothing. Imagination is the only thing over which Will has no power.
Nietzsche says that he got all his contemporary philosophy from Dostoevsky. He got from him even his idea of the inner circle of aristocratic souls who really rule the world, are themselves unhappy, and take with others to places which they (these others) cannot enter. Dostoevsky thinks that the secret of the world is in abandonment, perversion; Nietzsche in harness, stiffness, the gay, the strong, the beautiful, aristocratic, dominant.... Nietzsche with all his reality does not describe life as it is. Zarathustra is a dream—impossible perhaps. But Dostoevsky does describe life. Nietzsche’s man is absolutely alone—has his own hell. Dostoevsky’s has that too, but in a different way. He gives the feeling of a third person where two are alone. Do not think that Dostoevsky is a mystic. The essential thing is that you have this sense of a third person to which genius appeals. Dostoevsky is a stronger as well as a truer one than even Nietzsche himself.
Nietzsche is as a skater upon the ice, a dancer upon a tight rope who remains a white, balanced figure on the surface. Dostoevsky plunges—into a darkness full of voices. You must get there by a form of perversion. Every one of his characters is incurably hurt. Nietzscheans harden their hearts and live on the surface. All Dostoevsky people are weak. He thinks that only out of weakness will redemption come; abandonment to every emotion. In that he is Dionysian.... Dostoevsky I cannot put into words. Perversion; Disease; God is Disease; God is Pain; Dostoevsky depicts how Disease gives one illumination. We have an idea that we must be well. Even Nietzsche says that. The Greeks said it ages ago. Dostoevsky says “No; I offer you a new value.” He has a lust for fools—understands the mania that people have of making fools of themselves. God is Folly; God is Cruelty—perhaps an epicene God.
Dostoevsky is a cerebralist. His specialty is imaginative reactions. All the lusts that have stretched their wailing arms, all the hopes, all the goblins.... In sex as in everything else people are not what they are doing; they are in that vortex of what they imagine themselves. Dostoevsky understands all that. Those frank-spoken people who think they know sex are puritans on the other side. They have no imagination.
We can overestimate what Dostoevsky has from Russia and not attribute what he is to himself. Other Russians are Russians—Turgeniev, Tolstoy, Andreyev, Chekhov, Gorky—but they are not as big as he is; perhaps they are more of the broader stamp.
... Constance Garnett’s translations are masterpieces. The French are too artistic to translate Dostoevsky.... No one can approach Dostoevsky in creating a saint. Russia as the spiritual bringer-back of the world to Christianity—this runs through his works. He is the Christian. His books are full of translations from Scripture. He understands the underlying psychology of the gospels. Nietzsche said that putting the gospels with the art of the Old Testament was a crime in the name of Art. The Old Testament is undoubtedly finer art, but the New is psychology—masterly.
VERS LIBRE AND COMMON SENSE
Clinton Masseck, St. Louis:
Vers Libre has no inconsiderable tradition in English verse, as Mr. Arthur Ficke has recently pointed out in THE LITTLE REVIEW. Its progress in French poetry, particularly among modern writers, is familiar to all students. And if we were inclined to forget or to forgive Whitman (meaning in politer terms to accept him and his followers), the recent verse of the Imagiste group and such writers as Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Max Bodenheim in our own midst would be likely to force our attention to this interesting form—if I may employ this word in no paradoxical sense.
But vers libre is of the moment—new, if you will, in its present appeal. Its modern themes, its unique figures of speech, its wide practice, both in this country and in England, mark it as a new movement, or at least a new recrudescence.