I.
He was born at Moscow, in 1821, in the charity hospital. Destiny decreed that his eyes should first open upon the sad spectacle which was to be ever before them, and upon the most terrible forms of misery. His father, a retired military surgeon, was attached to this establishment. His family belonged to one of those lower orders of the nobility from which minor functionaries are generally chosen, and possessed a small estate and a few serfs in the province of Tula. The child was sometimes taken out to this country place; and these first visions of country life occasionally reappear in his works, but very rarely. Contrary to the habit of the other Russian authors, who adore nature, and especially love the place where they were reared, Dostoyevski is not attracted in this direction. He is a psychologist; the human soul absorbs his entire vision; the scenes of his choice are the suburbs of large cities, and miserable alleys. In his childish recollections, which almost invariably give their coloring to an author’s mind, you never feel the influence of peaceful woods and broad, open skies. The source from whence his imagination draws its supplies will give you glimpses of hospital courts, pallid faces under the regulation white cap, and forms clothed in brown robes; and you will encounter the timid gaze of the “Degraded” and “Insulted.”
Dostoyevski was one of a numerous family of children, and his life as a child was not one of luxury. After leaving a Moscow school, his father procured admission for the two elder sons, Alexis and Feodor, to the military engineering school at St. Petersburg. The two brothers, bound together by a common aptitude for literature, were always deeply attached to each other, and greatly depended, in all the crises of life, upon each other’s mutual support. We gain much knowledge of the interior life of Feodor Mikhailovitch, (Dostoyevski) through his letters to his brother Alexis in his “Correspondence.” Both felt themselves out of place in this school, which, for them, took the place of a University training. A classical education was just what Dostoyevski needed; it would have given him that refinement and balance which is gained by an early training in the best literature. He made up for the want of it as best he could, by reading Pushkin and Gogol, and the French romance-writers, Balzac, Eugene Sue, and George Sand, who seems to have had a strong influence upon his imagination. But Gogol was his favorite master. The humble world which attracted him most was revealed to him in “Dead Souls.”
Leaving the school in 1843 with the grade of sub-lieutenant, he did not long wear his engineer’s uniform. A year later he sent in his resignation, to devote himself exclusively to literary occupations. From this day, the fierce struggle of our author with poverty began which was to last forty years. After the father’s death the meagre patrimony was divided among the children, and it quickly vanished. The young Feodor undertook translations for journals and publishers. For forty years his correspondence, which recalls that of Balzac, was one long agonizing lament; a recapitulation of debts accumulating and weighing upon him, a complaint of the slavish life he led. For years he is never sure of his daily bread, except in the convict prison.
Although Dostoyevski became hardened to material privations, he was not proof against the moral wounds which poverty inflicts; the pitiable pride which formed the foundation of his character suffered terribly from everything which betrayed his poverty. You feel the existence of this open wound in his letters; and all his heroes, the real incarnations of his own soul, suffer the same torture. Moreover, he was really ill, a victim of shattered nerves; and he became so visionary that he believed himself threatened with every imaginable disease. He left on his table sometimes, before retiring for the night, a paper upon which he wrote: “I may to-night fall into a lethargic sleep; be careful not to bury me before a certain number of days.” This was no trick of the imagination, but a presentiment of the fatal malady, of which he then felt the first symptoms. It has been stated that he contracted it in Siberia later than this; but a friend of his youth assures me that at this very time he was in the habit of falling down in the street foaming at the mouth. He always was, what he seemed to us to be in his latter years, but a frail bundle of irritable nerves; a feminine soul in the frame of a Russian peasant; reserved, savage, full of hallucinations; while the deepest tenderness filled his heart when he looked upon the sufferings of the lower classes.
His work was his sole consolation and delight. He narrates in his letters projected plots for his romances with the most genuine enthusiasm; and the recollection of these first transports makes him put into the mouth of one of his characters, drawn from himself, the novelist who figures in “The Degraded and Insulted,”[J] the following expressions:—
“If I ever was happy, it was not during the first intoxicating moments of success, but at the time when I had never read nor shown my manuscript to any one; during those long nights, passed in enthusiastic dreams and hopes, when I passionately loved my work; when I lived with my fancies, with the characters created by me, as with real relatives, living beings. I loved them; I rejoiced or mourned with them, and I have actually shed bitter tears over the misfortunes of my poor hero.”
His first tale, “Poor People,” contained the germ of all the rest. He wrote it at the age of twenty-three. During the latter years of his life, he used to relate the story of this first venture. The poor little engineer knew not a single soul in the literary world, or what to do with his manuscript. One of his comrades, Grigorovitch, who became a man of considerable literary reputation, has confirmed this anecdote. He carried the manuscript to Nekrasof, the poet, and friend of poor authors.
At three o’clock in the morning, Dostoyevski heard a knock at his door. It was Grigorovitch, who brought Nekrasof in with him. The poet threw himself upon the young stranger’s neck, showing strong emotion. He had been up the whole night, reading the tale, and was perfectly carried away with it. He too lived the cautious and hidden life which at that time was the lot of every Russian writer. These two repressed hearts, mutually and irresistibly attracted to each other, now overflowed with all the generous enthusiasm of youth. The dawn of day found the three enthusiasts still absorbed in an exalted conversation and an interchange of thoughts, hopes, and artistic and poetical dreams.
On leaving his protégé, Nekrasof went directly to Bielinski, the oracle of Russian literature, the only critic formidable to young beginners. “A new Gogol is born to us!” cried the poet, as he entered his friend’s house. “Gogols sprout up nowadays like mushrooms,” replied the critic, with his most forbidding air, as he took up the manuscript, handling it as if it were something poisonous, in the same way that all great critics of every country treat new manuscripts. But when Bielinski had read the manuscript through, its effect upon him was magical; so that when the trembling young man presented himself before his judge, the latter cried out excitedly:—