Although I regret to finish this sombre sketch with a funereal scene, I cannot refrain from speaking of the apotheosis accorded to him, and the impression it made upon me, for it will show, more than any extended criticism, what this man was to his native country. On the 10th of February, 1881, some friends of Dostoyevski told me that he had died the preceding night, after a short illness. We went to his house to attend the service which the Russian Church holds twice a day over the remains of the dead, from the time of the decease until the burial. He lived in a populous quarter of St. Petersburg. We found an immense crowd before the door and on the staircase, and with great difficulty threaded our way to the study, where the great author lay. It was a small apartment, strewn with papers and pamphlets, and crowded by the visitors, who filed around the coffin, which rested upon a little table at one end of the room. I saw that face for the first time at peace, utterly free from pain. He seemed to be happily dreaming under the profusion of roses, which quickly disappeared, divided among the crowd as relics. The crowd increased every moment, all the women were in tears, the men boisterously pushing and crowding, eager to see his face. The temperature of the room became suffocating, being closed quite tightly from the air, as Russian rooms are in winter. Suddenly the air seemed to be exhausted, all the candles went out, and only the little flickering lamp before the holy images remained. Just at this moment, in the darkness, there was a terrible rush from the staircase, bringing a new influx of people. It seemed as if the whole crowd outside were mounting the stairs; the first comers were hurled against the coffin, which tottered—the poor widow, crowded, with her two children, between the table and the wall, threw herself over the body of her husband, and held it, screaming with terror. For a few moments we thought the corpse would be crushed under foot by the crowd. It oscillated, pressed upon by this mass of humanity, by the ardent and brutal affection of the rushing throngs below. At this moment there came before me a rapid vision of the author’s whole work, with all the cruelty, terror, and tenderness he tried to portray in it. This throng of strangers seemed to assume names and forms quite familiar to me. Fancy had sketched them in books, but now they stood living before me, taking part in a similar scene of horror. His characters seemed to have come to torment him, even after death, to bring him their rough homage, even to the profanation of the object of it. He would have appreciated just such exaggerated homage.
Two days after, this vision was repeated more completely, and on a larger scale. The 12th February, 1881, was a memorable day in Russia. Except on the occasion of the death of Skobelef, there were never seen in St. Petersburg such significant and imposing obsequies. From an early hour the whole population were standing in the street, one hundred thousand persons along the line where the procession was to pass. More than twenty thousand persons followed it. The government was alarmed, fearing some serious disturbance. They thought the corpse might be seized, and they had to repress the students who wanted to have the chains of the Siberian prisoner carried behind the funeral car. The timorous officials insisted upon preventing all risk of a revolutionary uprising. This was at the time of the most important of the Nihilist conspiracies, only one month previous to that one which cost the Tsar his life, during the time of that experiment of the liberal leader, Loris Melikof. Russia was at this moment in a state of fermentation, and the most trifling incident might produce an explosion. Loris thought it wiser to associate himself with the popular sentiment than to try to crush it out. He was right; the wicked designs of a few men were absorbed in the general grief. Through one of those unexpected combinations, of which Russia alone possesses the secret, all parties, all adversaries, all the disjointed fragments of the empire, now came together, through the death of this man, in a general communion of grief and enthusiasm. Whoever witnessed this funeral procession saw this country of contrasts illustrated in all its phases; the priests who chanted the service, the students of the universities, the school children, the young female students from the medical schools, the Nihilists, easily recognized by their peculiarities of dress and bearing, the men wearing a plaid over the shoulder, the spectacles and closely cut hair of the women; all the literary and scientific societies, deputations from every part of the empire, old Muscovite merchants, peasants, lackeys, and beggars. In the church waited the official dignitaries, the minister of public instruction, and the young princes of the imperial family.
A forest of banners, crosses, and wreaths were borne by that army, which was made up of such various elements, and produced in the spectator such a medley of impressions. To me everything that passed seemed an illustration of the author’s work, formed of elements both formidable and restless, with all their folly and grandeur. In the first rank, and most numerous, were those he loved best, the ‘poor people,’ the ‘degraded,’ the ‘insulted,’ the ‘possessed’ even, glad to take part in leading the remains of their advocate over this path of glory;—but accompanying and surrounding all were the uncertainty and confusion of the national life, as he had painted it, filled with all the vague hopes that he had stirred.
The crowd pressed into the little church, decked with flowers, and into the cemetery around it. Then there was a Babel of words. Before the altar the high-priest discoursed of God and of eternity, while others took the body to carry it to the grave, and discoursed of glory. Official orators, students, Slavophile and liberal committees, men of letters and poets,—every one came there to set forth his own ideal, to claim the departed spirit for his cause, and parade his own ambition over this tomb.
While the winter wind bore away all this eloquence with the rustling leaves and the snow-dust raised by the spades of the grave-diggers, I made an effort to make, in my own mind, a fair estimate of the man’s moral worth and of his life’s work. I felt as much perplexed as when I had to pronounce judgment upon his literary merit. He had sympathized with the people, and awakened sympathy, and even piety, in them. But what excessive ideas and what moral convulsions he engendered! He had given his heart to the cause, it is true; but unaccompanied by reason, that inseparable companion of the heart. I reviewed the whole course of that strange life;—born in a hospital, to a youth of poverty, illness, and trial, exiled to Siberia, then sent to the barracks, ever pursued by poverty and distress, always crushed, and yet ennobled by a labor which was his salvation. I now felt that this persecuted life should not be judged by our standards, which may not apply to his peculiar case, and that I must leave him to Him who judges all hearts according to their true merits. When I bent over his grave, covered with laurel wreaths, the farewell words which came to my lips were those of the student to the poor abandoned girl, and which express Dostoyevski’s entire creed: “It is not only before thee that I prostrate myself, but before all suffering humanity!”
FOOTNOTES:
[J] An English translation was published in 1886, under the title, “Injury and Insult.”
[K] Published also under the title “Buried Alive.”
CHAPTER VI.
NIHILISM AND MYSTICISM.—TOLSTOÏ.
In Turgenef’s artistic work, illustrative of the national characteristics, we have witnessed the birth of the Russian romance, and how it has naturally tended toward the psychological classification of a few general types; or, perhaps, more justly, toward the contemplation of them, when we consider with what serenity this artist’s moral investigations were conducted. Dostoyevski has shown a spirit quite contrary to this, uncultured and yet subtile, sympathetic, tortured by tragic visions, morbidly preoccupied by exceptional and perverted types. The first of these two writers was constantly coquetting, so to speak, with liberal doctrines: the second was a Slavophile of the most extreme type.