Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  “Pushkin is out-of-date,” my sister would calmly maintain. She knew that nothing put him out so thoroughly as a disrespectful remark about Pushkin.

  Dostoevsky would often spring up in a rage, seize his hat, and depart with a solemn asseveration that he did not want to have anything more to do with a Nihilist, and would never again cross our threshold. But next evening he would come again, as if nothing had happened.

  The more strained became the relations between Dostoevsky and my sister, the more friendly did I grow with him. I was more fascinated by him every day, and more subject to his influence. Of course he could see how I adored him, and he evidently liked it. He often told my sister that she should take example by me.

  When Dostoevsky uttered some profound idea or some clever paradox, my sister frequently chose to pretend that she did not understand him; I would be quite carried away, while she, to torment him, would make some insipid rejoinder.

  “You are a poor, insignificant thing!” Dostoevsky would then exclaim. “How different your sister is! She is still a child, but how wonderfully she understands me! Hers is a delicate, sensitive soul!”

  I would get crimson all over with delight; I would gladly have let myself be cut in pieces to show how well I understood him. In the depths of my soul I was well pleased with this change in the relation of Dostoevsky to my sister; but I was ashamed of the feeling. I accused myself of treachery to my sister, and took great pains to make up for my secret sin by being very nice to her. But despite all pangs of conscience, I was always glad of every fresh quarrel between Dostoevsky and Anyuta. He called me his friend, and I, in my simplicity, believed that I — was really dearer to him than my sister, and understood him better. Even my looks he praised to the detriment of hers.

  [Finally Dostoevsky made a proposal of marriage to the elder sister, but it was not accepted.]

  Dostoevsky came once more, to take leave. He stayed only a short time, but was simple and friendly in his manner to Anyuta; they promised to write to one another. He said good-bye to me very tenderly. He even kissed me, but had no idea, I am sure, of the feelings that he had awakened in me.

  After about six months, Dostoevsky wrote to my sister to say that he had learned to know and love a wonderful girl, who had consented to marry him. This girl, Anna Grigorevna Snitkin, became later his second wife. “My word of honour: if anyone had prophesied this to me half a year ago, I should not have believed it!” remarks Dostoevsky naïvely at the end of this letter.

  Dostoevsky in the Judgment of his Contemporaries

  I. R. P. Pobyedonoszev to I. S. Aksakov

  “January 30, 1881.

  MY DEAR FRIEND IVAN SERGEYEVITCH!

  “When you wrote to me that you felt so sick at heart, you as yet knew nothing of Dostoevsky’s death. But I stand by his bier, and my heart is doubly sick. I knew this man well. I had reserved for him my Saturday evenings, and he often came to talk alone with me. I even furnished him with many hints for his ‘Zosima’; we talked of that often and intimately. The time when he was editing Grajdanin was that of our intimacy. I pitied him in his desperate state, and worked together with him through a whole summer; in such a way we quickly made friends. In these times, he was the very man for our cause. He cannot be replaced, for he stood entirely alone....”

  II. I. S. Aksakov to R. P. Pobyedonoszev

  “Moscow,

  “February, 1881.

  “The death of Dostoevsky is a real chastisement from God. “Now for the first time it is fully felt what value he had as a teacher of the younger generation. Even those who did not know him personally must perceive it. Those noble ideals which many a youth cherishes unconsciously in his soul, found in him an upholder. For ‘ injured and insulted’ is, in very truth, only the religious and moral sense of the Russian intelligence....”

  III. TURGENEV ON DOSTOEVSKY

  Letter to Slutchevsky of December 26, 1861

  “My Bazarov, or to speak more precisely, my intentions, only two men have comprehended: Dostoevsky and Botkin.”

  Letter to Dostoevsky of December 26, 1861

  “I am reading with great enjoyment your ‘ House of the Dead.’ The description of the bath is worthy of a Dante; in several figures (for example, in Petrov) there are many most authentic psychological subtleties. I am truly rejoiced at the success of your journal, and repeat that I shall always be glad to give it a helping hand.”

  Letter to Polonsky of April 24, 1871

  “I am told that Dostoevsky has immortalized me in his novel; I don’t mind, if he likes to do that sort of thing....”

  [Turgenev goes on to tell of his meeting with Dostoevsky at Baden-Baden, and says more than once that he considers Dostoevsky to be mad.]

  Letter to Mme. Milyutin of December 3, 1872

  “MY DEAR MARIA AGGEYEVNA,

  “I thank you from my heart for the friendly feelings which dictated your last letter. I was not in the least surprised by Dostoevsky’s proceeding: he began to hate me when we were both young and at the commencement of our literary activities, although I did nothing to call forth that hatred. But unreasoned passions are, it is said, the strongest and most persistent of all. Dostoevsky has permitted himself something worse than a parody: he has shown me, under the mask of Karmasinov, as a secret partisan of Netchayev. It is worthy of remark that he selected for this parody the only story which I published in the journal at one time conducted by him — a story for which he overwhelmed me in his letters with thanks and praise. I still have his letters. It would certainly be rather amusing to make them public now. But he knows that I shall never do so.

  I am sorry that he should use his undoubtedly great talent for the satisfaction of such unlovely feelings; evidently he does not himself prize his gifts very highly, since he degrades them to a pamphlet.”

  Letter to Saltykov of November 25, 1875

  “The theme of Goncourt’s novel is very daring. As he says himself, the book is the fruit of a close scientific study of the life of prostitutes. But at all events, it’s something very different from Dostoevsky’s ‘Hobbledehoy.’ I glanced at that chaos in the last number of the Otetschestvennia Zapiski; my God, what a welter of hospital stinks! What a vain and incomprehensible stuttering; what a psychological rubbish-heap!...”

  Letter to Saltykov of September 24, 1882

  “I also read Michailovsky’s article on Dostoevsky. He has rightly divined the characteristic mark of Dostoevsky’s creative work. In French literature, too, there was a like case — namely, the famous Marquis de Sade. This latter depicts in his ‘Tourments et Supplices’ the sensual pleasure afforded by the infliction of refined tortures. And Dostoevsky, in one of his books, enlarges on the same sort of delights.... And when one thinks that all the Russian Bishops said masses for the soul of this Marquis de Sade, and even preached sermons about his great love for all mankind! Truly, we live in a remarkable age.”

  IV. LEO TOLSTOY ON DOSTOEVSKY

  From Tolstoy’s Letters to A. N. Strachov

  “September 26, 1880.

  ‘ Lately I was ill, and read Dostoevsky’s ‘House of the Dead.’ I have read much, and forgotten much; but I do not know in all modern literature, Pushkin included, any better book. Not the manner, but the point of view, is what is so remarkable; it is so frank, natural, and Christ-like. A fine, edifying book. Yesterday, when I read it, I knew such pleasure as I have not had for a long time. If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him.”

  At the beginning of 1881:

  “I wish I had the power to say all that I think of Dostoevsky! When you inscribed your thoughts, you partly expressed mine. I never saw the man, had no sort of direct relations with him; but when he died, I suddenly realized that he had been to me the most precious, the dearest, and the most necessary of beings. It never even entered my head to compare myself with him. Everything that he wrote (I mean only the good, the true things) was such that the more he did like that, the more I rejoiced. Artistic accomplishment and intellect can ar
ouse my envy; but a work from the heart — only joy. I always regarded him as my friend, and reckoned most confidently on seeing him at some time. And suddenly I read that he is dead. At first I was utterly confounded, and when later I realized how I had valued him, I began to weep — I am weeping even now. Only a few days before his death, I had read with emotion and delight his ‘ Injury and Insult.’”

  The Criticism

  ON RUSSIAN NOVELISTS by William Lyon Phelps

  This essay on Dostoyevsky’s life and work is taken from Phelps’ famous collection of essays on Russian writers, first published in 1911. Phelps was an American critic, whose scholarly works explored many areas of world literature.

  Dr William Lyon Phelps, 1922

  DOSTOEVSKI

  THE life of Dostoevski contrasts harshly with the luxurious ease and steady level seen in the outward existence of his two great contemporaries, Turgenev and Tolstoi. From beginning to end he lived in the very heart of storms, in the midst of mortal coil. He was often as poor as a rat; he suffered from a horrible disease; he was sick and in prison, and no one visited him; he knew the bitterness of death. Such a man’s testimony as to the value of life is worth attention; he was a faithful witness, and we know that his testimony is true.

  Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevski was born on the 30 October 1821, at Moscow. His father was a poor surgeon, and his mother the daughter of a mercantile man. He was acquainted with grief from the start, being born in a hospital. There were five children, and they very soon discovered the exact meaning of such words as hunger and cold. Poverty in early years sometimes makes men rather close and miserly in middle age, as it certainly did in the case of Ibsen, who seemed to think that charity began and ended at home. Not so Dostoevski: he was often victimised, he gave freely and impulsively, and was chronically in debt. He had about as much business instinct as a prize-fighter or an opera singer. As Merezhkovski puts it: “This victim of poverty dealt with money as if he held it not an evil, but utter rubbish. Dostoevski thinks he loves money, but money flees him. Tolstoi thinks he hates money, but money loves him, and accumulates about him. The one, dreaming all his life of wealth, lived, and but for his wife’s business qualities would have died, a beggar. The other, all his life dreaming and preaching of poverty, not only has not given away, but has greatly multiplied his very substantial possessions.” In order to make an impressive contrast, the Russian critic is here unfair to Tolstoi, but there is perhaps some truth in the Tolstoi paradox. No wonder Dostoevski loved children, for he was himself a great child.

  He was brought up on the Bible and the Christian religion. The teachings of the New Testament were with him almost innate ideas. Thus, although his parents could not give him wealth, or ease, or comfort, or health, they gave him something better than all four put together.

  When he was twenty-seven years old, having impulsively expressed revolutionary opinions at a Radical Club to which he belonged, he was arrested with a number of his mates, and after an imprisonment of some months, he was led out on the 22 December 1849, with twenty-one companions, to the scaffold. He passed through all the horror of dying, for visible preparations had been made for the execution, and he was certain that in a moment he would cease to live. Then came the news that the Tsar had commuted the sentence to hard labour; this saved their lives, but one of the sufferers had become insane.

  Then came four years in the Siberian prison, followed by a few years of enforced military service. His health actually grew better under the cruel régime of the prison, which is not difficult to understand, for even a cruel régime is better than none at all, and Dostoevski never had the slightest notion of how to take care of himself. At what time his epilepsy began is obscure, but this dreadful disease faithfully and frequently visited him during his whole adult life. From a curious hint that he once let fall, reënforced by the manner in which the poor epileptic in The Karamazov Brothers acquired the falling sickness, we cannot help thinking that its origin came from a blow given in anger by his father.

  Dostoevski was enormously interested in his disease, studied its symptoms carefully, one might say eagerly, and gave to his friends minute accounts of exactly how he felt before and after the convulsions, which tally precisely with the vivid descriptions written out in his novels. This illness coloured his whole life, profoundly affected his character, and gave a feverish and hysterical tone to his books.

  Dostoevski had a tremendous capacity for enthusiasm. As a boy, he was terribly shaken by the death of Pushkin, and he never lost his admiration for the founder of Russian literature. He read the great classics of antiquity and of modern Europe with wild excitement, and wrote burning eulogies in letters to his friends. The flame of his literary ambition was not quenched by the most abject poverty, nor by the death of those whom he loved most intensely. After his first wife died, he suffered agonies of grief, accentuated by wretched health, public neglect, and total lack of financial resources. But chill penury could not repress his noble rage. He was always planning and writing new novels, even when he had no place to lay his head. And the bodily distress of poverty did not cut him nearly so sharply as its shame. His letters prove clearly that at times he suffered in the same way as the pitiable hero of Poor Folk. That book was indeed a prophecy of the author’s own life.

  It is impossible to exaggerate the difficulties under which he wrote his greatest novels. His wife and children were literally starving. He could not get money, and was continually harassed by creditors. During part of the time, while writing in the midst of hunger and freezing cold, he had an epileptic attack every ten days. His comment on all this is, “I am only preparing to live,” which is as heroic as Paul Jones’s shout, “I have not yet begun to fight.”

  In 1880 a monument to Pushkin was unveiled, and the greatest Russian authors were invited to speak at the ceremony. This was the occasion where Turgenev vainly tried to persuade Tolstoi to appear and participate. Dostoevski paid his youthful debt to the ever living poet in a magnificent manner. He made a wonderful oration on Russian literature and the future of the Russian people, an address that thrilled the hearts of his hearers, and inspired his countrymen everywhere. On the 28 January 1881, he died, and forty thousand mourners saw his body committed to the earth.

  Much as I admire the brilliant Russian critic, Merezhkovski, I cannot understand his statement that Dostoevski “drew little on his personal experiences, had little self-consciousness, complained of no one.” His novels are filled with his personal experiences, he had an almost abnormal self-consciousness, and he bitterly complained that Turgenev, who did not need the money, received much more for his work than he. Dostoevski’s inequalities as a writer are so great that it is no wonder he has been condemned by some critics as a mere journalistic maker of melodrama, while others have exhausted their entire stock of adjectives in his exaltation. His most ardent admirer at this moment is Mr. Baring, who is at the same time animated by a strange jealousy of Turgenev’s fame, and seems to think it necessary to belittle the author of Fathers and Children in order to magnify the author of Crime and Punishment. This seems idle; Turgenev and Dostoevski were geniuses of a totally different order, and we ought to rejoice in the greatness of each man, just as we do in the greatness of those two entirely dissimilar poets, Tennyson and Browning. Much of Mr. Baring’s language is an echo of Merezhkovski; but this Russian critic, while loving Dostoevski more than Turgenev, was not at all blind to the latter’s supreme qualities. Listen to Mr. Baring: —

  “He possesses a certain quality which is different in kind from those of any other writer, a power of seeming to get nearer to the unknown, to what lies beyond the flesh, which is perhaps the secret of his amazing strength; and, besides this, he has certain great qualities which other writers, and notably other Russian writers, possess also; but he has them in so far higher a degree that when seen with other writers he annihilates them. The combination of this difference in kind and this difference in degree makes something so strong and so tremendous, that
it is not to be wondered at when we find many critics saying that Dostoevski is not only the greatest of all Russian writers, but one of the greatest writers that the world has ever seen. I am not exaggerating when I say that such views are held; for instance, Professor Brückner, a most level-headed critic, in his learned and exhaustive survey of Russian literature, says that it is not in Faust, but rather in Crime and Punishment, that the whole grief of mankind takes hold of us.

  “Even making allowance for the enthusiasm of his admirers, it is true to say that almost any Russian judge of literature at the present day would place Dostoevski as being equal to Tolstoi and immeasurably above Turgenev; in fact, the ordinary Russian critic at the present day no more dreams of comparing Turgenev with Dostoevski, than it would occur to an Englishman to compare Charlotte Yonge with Charlotte Brontë.”

  This last sentence shows the real animus against Turgenev that obsesses Mr. Baring’s mind; once more the reader queries, Suppose Dostoevski be all that Mr. Baring claims for him, why is it necessary to attack Turgenev? Is there not room in Russian literature for both men? But as Mr. Baring has appealed to Russian criticism, it is only fair to quote one Russian critic of good standing, Kropotkin. He says: —

  “Dostoevski is still very much read in Russia; and when, some twenty years ago, his novels were first translated into French, German, and English, they were received as a revelation. He was praised as one of the greatest writers of our own time, and as undoubtedly the one who ‘had best expressed the mystic Slavonic soul’ — whatever that expression may mean! Turgenev was eclipsed by Dostoevski, and Tolstoi was forgotten for a time. There was, of course, a great deal of hysterical exaggeration in all this, and at the present time sound literary critics do not venture to indulge in such praises. The fact is, that there is certainly a great deal of power in whatever Dostoevski wrote: his powers of creation suggest those of Hoffmann; and his sympathy with the most down-trodden and down-cast products of the civilisation of our large towns is so deep that it carries away the most indifferent reader and exercises a most powerful impression in the right direction upon young readers. His analysis of the most varied specimens of incipient psychical disease is said to be thoroughly correct. But with all that, the artistic qualities of his novels are incomparably below those of any one of the great Russian masters Tolstoi, Turgenev, or Goncharov. Pages of consummate realism are interwoven with the most fantastical incidents worthy only of the most incorrigible romantics. Scenes of a thrilling interest are interrupted in order to introduce a score of pages of the most unnatural theoretical discussions. Besides, the author is in such a hurry that he seems never to have had the time himself to read over his novels before sending them to the printer. And, worst of all, every one of the heroes of Dostoevski, especially in his novels of the later period, is a person suffering from some psychical disease or from moral perversion. As a result, while one may read some of the novels of Dostoevski with the greatest interest, one is never tempted to re-read them, as one re-reads the novels of Tolstoi and Turgenev, and even those of many secondary novel writers; and the present writer must confess that he had the greatest pain lately in reading through, for instance, The Brothers Karamazov, and never could pull himself through such a novel as The Idiot. However, one pardons Dostoevski everything, because when he speaks of the ill-treated and the forgotten children of our town civilisation he becomes truly great through his wide, infinite love of mankind — of man, even in his worst manifestations.”