Like most imaginative youths who come into contact with fine art, Dostoevsky was stimulated to literary expression by his study of classical and contemporaneous European literature. He had lived twenty-three years when he graduated from a St. Petersburg school of military engineering. His first novel, Poor Folk, was published three years later, and served to focus upon him the attention of the critics.
In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested, with members of a radical organization, on governmental charges of sedition. The terrible suffering he sustained while awaiting his execution (he was first confined in prison for eight months) have been set forth in striking passages of his novels, The Idiot and Letters from a Dead House. The sentence of death was finally, and very unexpectedly, commuted to one of imprisonment in Siberia for four years. At the expiration of this period he served perforce as a private soldier in the Russian army for three more years. When he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg he was accompanied by his first wife, whom he had loved and married while in exile.
Dostoevsky’s interminable suffering from epileptic seizures (it has been suggested that these fits originated in a beating administered to him by his father when Fyodor was a boy); his poverty, and the constant accumulation of debt; the terrific haste with which he found it necessary to write his most profound books—all have made it natural to him, in dwelling upon any physiological aspect of his characters, to be as unconvincing as the eremite attempting an analysis of conditions of sex life.
In short, Dostoevsky’s nervous disorders pervaded his “sensual sense” of beauty—of beauty in all its manifestations. At the same time it must be remarked that this negation of physical responsiveness surely intensified the acuteness of his mental vision, which was otherwise refined emotionally by the results of his imprisonment and life-long hardships. And this also explains why Dostoevsky’s novels are lacking so singularly in the tingle of the physical contact of his characters; why the suffering of his men and women move us so profoundly; why his writings are so uneven, his dialogues of such elemental power, and his purely descriptive passages so ordinary.
The elemental power in his dialogues is due chiefly to the vigor of action accredited his characters. In his work is not to be found the picturesque phrase, the adroitly-turned period, the illuminating metaphor, the sequence of construction, the tone or shading offered by the commingling of his objects. Dostoevsky has no style of form, his outlines are amorphous. It is in his power of transcribing the living voice, of recording in never-failing reflex emotionalism the lives and deeds of his startling figures that he is supreme.
If you have read one of his books you know much of what he has to say. His other works are repetitions, mainly. For Dostoevsky does not attempt to paint character, and rarely does he stop to show the subtly-reacting influence of environment upon his men and women. Always he is concerned with the idea of the individual’s personal adjustments to life. Each book of his throbs with the discordant elements that clash over the establishment of this idea; and always its conclusions are recognized. That is why I regard Dostoevsky as an optimist. And his emphasis on humanity’s spiritual conception of life, no matter what the cost, grew more and more pronounced in his later works.
His faith in human beings is expressed in one set theme, which can be conveniently resolved into terms of comparison: on one hand the individual’s evasion of life’s realities by the exercise of material (and therefore fictitious) values; and on the other hand, the frank acceptance of life’s realities for the attainment of a proportionate spiritual balance.
In Crime and Punishment, Dr. Raskolnikov is in doubt as to the ultimate worth of this attainment, until he expiates his crime in killing the old moneylender (I forget her name) not by confessing,—Dostoevsky is too fine a realist for that,—but by obtaining personal solace from the regenerating qualities of his resignation. And it is characteristic of our writer’s method that Raskolnikov is assisted toward this state of resignation by his love, Sonia, the prostitute, whose regard for the murderer is based upon the confirmation evidenced in him of the faith that has been stimulated in herself.
Similar in thesis, though expressed in terms of minor differences, is Dostoevsky’s last and unquestionably finest work, The Brothers Karamazov. It is incomplete, actually one-third as long as he had intended it to be. He died before he could finish the book. Nevertheless it is compactly-formed material as the work now stands, and superior to his other novels not because his outlines are more constrained, his movement more co-ordinate, and the actual writing of a more intensive quality, but because here he defines his own conception of spiritual beauty in a distinctive fashion not to be found in his other books.
He offers us the history of a family,—and what a family! Each figure in this domestic (?) group embodies conflicting phases of his great idea. Fyodor Karamazov, the father, is a sensualist of the lowest type imaginable. His three sons are Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. There is also another (illegitimate) son, Smerdyakov, an epileptic.