According as we are affected by particular examples of his talent, we call him a philosopher, an apostle, a lunatic, a consoler of the afflicted, or the torturer of a tranquil mind; the Jeremiah of the prison or the Shakespeare of the mad-house. Every one of these appellations belongs to him; but no one of them, taken alone, will suffice. What he himself said of his race, in “Crime and Punishment,” we may say of him:—
“The soul of the Russian is great, like his vast country; but terribly prone to everything fantastic and excessive; it is a real misfortune to be great without any special genius.”
I subscribe to this; but also to the opinion that I have heard expressed upon this book by one of our masters of psychology: “This author opens up unknown horizons, and discloses souls different from ours; he reveals to us a new world of beings, with stronger natures, both for good and evil, having stronger wills and greater endurance.”
V.
I must apologize for returning to personal recollections in order to make this sketch complete, and must therefore recall the man himself, and give some idea of his extraordinary influence. By chance I met Feodor Mikhailovitch many times during the last three years of his life. The impression he made upon you was as profound as was that of the most striking scenes of his romances; if you had once seen him, you would never forget him. His appearance exactly corresponded with his life and its work. He was short and spare, and seemed to be all nerves; worn and haggard at the age of sixty. He was, in fact, prematurely old, and looked ill, with his long beard and blond hair, but, in spite of all, as vivacious as ever. His face was of the true peasant type of Moscow: the flat nose; the small, twinkling eyes, full of fire and tenderness; the broad forehead, all seamed with wrinkles, and with many indentations and protuberances; the sunken temples, and, most noticeable of all, a mouth of inexpressible sadness. I never saw in any human face such an expression of accumulated sorrow—as if every trial of soul and body had left its imprint upon it. You could read in his face better than in any book his recollections of the dead house, and his long experience of terror, mistrust, and martyrdom. His eyelids, lips, and every fibre of his face quivered with nervous contractions. His features would grow fierce with anger when excited over some subject of discussion, and at another time would wear the gentle expression of sadness you so often see in the saints on the ancient Slavonic altar-pieces, so venerated by the Slav nation. The man’s nature was wholly plebeian, with the curious mixture of roughness, sagacity, and mildness of the Russian peasant, together with something incongruous—possibly an effect of the concentration of thought illumining this beggar’s mask. At first he rather repelled you, before his strange magnetism had begun to act upon you. He was generally taciturn, but when he spoke it was in a low tone, slow and deliberate, growing gradually more earnest, and defending his opinions without regard to any one. While sustaining his favorite theme of the superiority of the Russian lower classes, he often observed to ladies in the fashionable society he was drawn into, “You cannot pretend to compare with the most inferior peasant.”
There was not much opportunity for literary discussion with Dostoyevski. He would stop you with one word of proud disdain. “We possess the best qualities of every other people, and our own peculiar ones in addition; therefore we can understand you, but you are not capable of understanding us.”
May I be forgiven, but I shall now attempt to prove the contrary. In spite of his assertion, his views on European life were laughably ingenuous. I remember well one of his tirades against the city of Paris, one evening when the inspiration seized him. He spoke of it with fiery indignation, as Jonah would have spoken concerning Nineveh. I remember the very words:—
“Some night a prophet will appear in the ‘Café Anglais’! He will write on the wall the three words of fire; that will be the signal for the end of the old world, and Paris will be destroyed in fire and blood, in all its pride, with its theatres and its ‘Café Anglais.’” In the seer’s imagination, this inoffensive establishment represented the heart of Sodom, a den of enticing and infernal orgies, which he thought it his duty to call down curses upon. He enlarged long and eloquently upon this theme.
He often reminded me of J. J. Rousseau. That pedantic genius has often come before me since I have studied the character and works of this distrustful philanthropist of Moscow. Both entertained the same notions, had the same combination of roughness and ideality, of sensibility and ill-humor, as well as the same deep sympathy for humanity which compels the attention of their contemporaries. After Rousseau, no man had greater literary defects than Dostoyevski: boundless self-love, over-sensitiveness, jealousy, and spite, none knew better how to win the hearts of his fellow-men by showing them how they filled his heart. This writer, so forbidding in society, was the idol of a large proportion of the young men of Russia, who awaited with feverish impatience the appearance of his novels, as well as his periodical; who consulted him as they would a spiritual adviser and director, and sought his help in all moral questions.
The most important work of the latter years of his life was to reply to the scores of letters which brought to him the echo of strangers’ grievances. One must have lived in Russia during those troublous times, to understand the ascendancy he obtained over the world of “Poor People” in their search for a new ideal, as well as over the class just above the very poor. The influence of Turgenef’s literary and artistic work was most unjustly eclipsed; Tolstoï with his philosophy influenced only the most intellectual minds, but Dostoyevski won all hearts and obtained a most powerful sway over them. In 1880, at the time of the inauguration of the monument to Pushkin, when all the Russian authors assembled in full force to celebrate the fête, Dostoyevski’s popularity entirely obliterated that of all his rivals. The audience sobbed when he addressed them. They bore him in triumph in their arms; the students crowded upon the platform and took possession of it, that they might see and be near him and touch him; and one of these young enthusiasts swooned from emotion when he had succeeded in reaching him. The current of feeling ran so high that had he lived a few years longer he would have found himself in a very difficult position. In the official hierarchy of the empire there is no place for plants of such exuberant growth; no field for the influence of a Goethe or a Voltaire. In spite of his consistency in politics and his perfect orthodoxy, the old exile would have seriously risked being compromised by his blind partisans, and even considered dangerous. They only realized on the day of his death how dangerous he was.