MAURICE LAZAR
The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, etc., translated by Constance Garnett. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving (life) with one’s inside, with one’s stomach....
—Ivan Karamazov.
Chiefly concerned with the fester of civilization, literature, music, painting, all the modern forms of individual expression are elliptical in the sense that the old æsthetic values of emotional beauty seem to have become nullified, or else congealed, in the artist’s direct application of his instrument to the repudiation of fixed social values or moralities; to the expansion of life-interests. We today want more than beauty of external form; we want the beauty of depth!
The true artist is such primarily because of his engrossing appetite for life, because (as Flaubert said) of the chaos in his soul. And although Flaubert kept on chiseling words around the lives of men and women totally devoid of inspirating individuality, his dictum has been nobly exemplified in the life and writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, that great-hearted epileptic Russian of whose psychological powers Nietzsche admittedly availed himself.
Tolstoy was reported to have said, in conversation with a writer for Le Temps, “A woman who has never suffered pain is a beast.” He could have stretched the allegation to include the other sex, if only by way of illusion to that intense spiritual quality in modern Russian literature—a literature that has never been (notably) an off-shoot of, as much as a protest against, the retrogressive structures of its respective periods.
This spiritual, or psychical, concern with the individual’s adjustment to the functioning of life has been revealed to highest degree in Dostoevsky’s novels. It is also manifest in the analytical mould assumed by the creative arts of our time.
While Dostoevsky’s personality is separably bound up with his work, profitable appreciation of the latter can be considerably amplified with knowledge of the important facts of his life and the conditions with which he struggled. I will record the more essential facts of his life as I have gathered them, and try to explain the causes that have made for the distinction in his work from that of all other writers.
He was born in a charity-hospital in Moscow, in 1821. His father was an army-surgeon, his mother a store-keeper’s daughter. I like to think that he derived his expressive powers, or rather the nebulæ out of which they subsequently developed, from his mother, perhaps partly because of my theory that men of acute genius ultimately do transcend the difference of sex in the quality of their personalities as well as in that of their work.