Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  Dostoevsky in Cranford.

  It is amusing sometimes to freshen one’s notion of a great, and thus semi-mythical, character by transplanting him in imagination to one’s own age, shore, or country village. How, one asks, would Dostoevsky have behaved himself upon the vicarage lawn? In ‘Uncle’s Dream’, the longest story in Mrs Garnett’s new volume, he enables one to fancy him in those incongruous surroundings. Mordasov bears at any rate a superficial resemblance to Cranford. All the ladies in that small country town spend their time in drinking tea and talking scandal. A newcomer, such as Prince K., is instantly torn to pieces like a fish tossed to a circle of frenzied and ravenous seagulls. Mordasov cannot be altogether like Cranford, then. No such figure of speech could be used with propriety to describe the demure activities and bright-eyed curiosities of the English circle of ladies. After sending our imaginary Dostoevsky, therefore, pacing up and down the lawn, there can be no doubt that he suddenly stamps his foot, exclaims something unintelligible, and rushes off in despair. ‘The instinct of provincial newsmongers sometimes approaches the miraculous ... They know you by heart, they know even what you don’t know about yourself. The provincial ought, one would think, by his very nature to be a psychologist and a specialist in human nature. That is why I have been sometimes genuinely amazed at meeting in the provinces not psychologists and specialists in human nature, but a very great number of asses. But that is aside; that is a superfluous reflection.’ His patience is already exhausted; it is idle to expect that he will linger in the High-street or hang in a rapture of observation round the draper’s shop. The delightful shades and subdeties of English provincial life are lost upon him.

  But Mordasov is a very different place from Cranford. The ladies do not confine themselves to tea, as their condition after dinner sometimes testifies. Their tongues wag with a fury that is rather that of the open market-place than of the closed drawing-room. Though they indulge in petty vices such as listening at keyholes and stealing the sugar when the hostess is out of the room, they act with the brazen boldness of viragos. One would be alarmed to find oneself left alone with one of them. Nevertheless, in his big rough way, Dostoevsky is neither savagely contemptuous nor sadly compassionate; he is genuinely amused by the spectacle of Mordasov. It roused, as human life so seldom did, his sense of comedy. He tries even to adapt his dialogue to the little humours of a gossiping conversation.

  ‘Call that a dance! I’ve danced myself, the shawl dance, at the breaking-up party at Madame Jamis’s select boarding-school - and it really was a distinguished performance. I was applauded by senators! The daughters of princes and counts were educated there! ... Only fancy’ [she runs on, as if she were imitating the patter of Miss Bates] ‘chocolate was handed round to everyone, but not offered to me, and they did not say a word to me all the time... The tub of a woman, I’ll pay her out!’

  But Dostoevsky cannot keep to that tripping measure for long. The language becomes abusive, and the temper violent. His comedy has far more in common with the comedy of Wycherly than with the comedy of Jane Austen. It rapidly runs to seed, and becomes a helter-skelter, extravagant farce. The restraint and aloofness of the great comic writers are impossible to him. It is probable, for one reason, that he could not allow himself the time. ‘Uncle’s Dream’, ‘The Crocodile’, and ‘An Unpleasant Predicament’ read as if they were the improvisations of a gigantic talent reeling off its wild imaginations at breathless speed. They have the diffuseness of a mind too tired to concentrate, and too fully charged to stop short. Slack and un girt as it is, it tumbles out rubbish and splendour pell-mell.

  Yet we are perpetually conscious that, if Dostoevsky fails to keep within the proper limits, it is because the fervour of his genius goads him across the boundary. Because of his sympathy his laughter passes beyond merriment into a strange violent amusement which is not merry at all. He is incapable, even when his story is hampered by the digression, of passing by anything so important and lovable as a man or a woman without stopping to consider their case and explain it. Thus at one moment it occurs to him that there must be a reason why an unfortunate clerk could not afford to pay for a bottle of wine. Immediately, as if recalling a story which is known to him down to its most minute detail, he describes how the clerk had been born and brought up; it is then necessary to bring in the career of his brutal father-in-law, and that leads him to describe the peculiarities of the five unfortunate women whom the father-in-law bullies. In short, once you are alive, there is no end to the complexity of your connections, and sorrow and misery are so rubbed into the texture of life that the more you examine it the more cloudy and confused it becomes. Perhaps it is because we know so little about the family history of the ladies of Cranford that we can put the book down with a smile. Still, we need not underrate the value of comedy because Dostoevsky makes the perfection of the English product appear to be the result of leaving out all the most important things. It is the old, unnecessary quarrel between the inch of smooth ivory and the six feet of canvas with its strong coarse grains.

  Dostoyevsky on his deathbed, 1881

  Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg — Dostoyevsky’s final resting place

  Dostoyevsky’s grave