Dostoevsky

(1922)

I

Some time before the war I was preparing for Charles Péguy’s Cahiers de la Quinzaine, a Life of Dostoevsky after the manner of Romain Rolland’s fine monographs on Beethoven and Michelangelo. War came, and I was forced to lay aside the notes I had taken. For long other cares and duties absorbed me and my project was to all intents and purposes abandoned, when recently at the celebration of Dostoevsky’s Centenary, Jacques Copeau asked me to address a meeting in his theatre, the Vieux Colombier. I brought my packet of notes out into the light of day again, and re-reading them after the lapse of time, I found the ideas I had jotted down seemed worth our attention, but that chronological order, though necessary for biographical purposes, was perhaps not the most advisable on this occasion. It is often a difficult task to separate the ideas Dostoevsky weaves, as it were, into a fine web in each of his novels, but we never lose track of them. In my eyes these ideas are all that is most precious in Dostoevsky and I have made them my own. If I took up each of his works in turn, I could not possibly avoid repeating myself. There is, however, another—and better—way: pursuing his ideas from one novel to another, I shall try to lay hold of them and set them forth as plainly as is possible despite their apparent confusion. Psychologist, sociologist, moralist—Dostoevsky is all three, and novelist as well. Whereas in his works ideas are never presented in their crude state, but always through the medium of the character expressing them (which accounts for their confusion and relativity), I, for my part, will try to avoid abstractions and outline the ideas as sharply as possible. I should like first of all to introduce you to Dostoevsky in person, and speak of some incidents in his life that reveal his character and help us to draw a clear likeness of him.

My pre-war plan of the biography comprised an introduction in which I proposed to discuss the commonly accepted idea of him. To throw light on the subject, I should have drawn a parallel between him and Rousseau—and no arbitrary one, I can assure you. Their natures reveal such deep-laid analogies that Rousseau’s Confessions were able to exert an extraordinary influence on Dostoevsky. But in my opinion Rousseau, from the very beginning of his life, was poisoned, as it were, by Plutarch, through whom he fashioned for himself a somewhat rhetorical and pompous notion of a “great man.” He set up before himself the image of a fancied hero, and his life was one prolonged effort to be like it. He tried hard to be what he wanted to seem. I allow that his painting of his own character may be sincere, but he is ever thinking of his pose, which pride alone dictates.

“False greatness,” in the admirable words of La Bruyère, “is shy and inaccessible. Conscious of its foible, it hides away, or at least never shows an open face, letting be seen only as much as will make an impression and save it from being revealed for what it really is, something mean and small.”

And if I do not go so far as to recognize Rousseau in this description, I do think of Dostoevsky when a little farther on I read:

“True greatness is free, gentle, familiar, unaffected; it can be touched and handled, and loses nothing when seen at close quarters. The better you are acquainted with it, the more you admire it. It bends out of goodness of heart to its inferiors, and returns to its own level without effort. Sometimes it lets itself go, neglecting and surrendering its natural advantages, but ever ready to recover them and put them to use.”

With Dostoevsky there is this complete absence of pose or stage-management. He never considers himself a superman. He is most humbly human, and I do not think that pride of intellect could ever properly understand him.

The word humility comes up again and again in his letters and works. “Why should they deny me? I make no demands. I am but a humble petitioner.” (November 23, 1869.)—“I do not demand, I only seek in all humility.” (December 7, 1869.)—“I have made the humblest of requests.” (February 12, 1870.)

“He often astonished me by a kind of humility,” says the Raw Youth in speaking of his father, and in his effort to understand the possible relations between his father and mother, and the quality of their love, he recollects his father’s phrase, “She married me out of humility.”

I read lately in an interview with M. Henry Bordeaux a sentence which surprised me somewhat: “Seek first to know yourself.” The literary creator who seeks himself runs a great risk—the risk of finding himself. From then onwards he writes coldly, deliberately, in keeping with the self he has found. He imitates himself. If he knows his path and his limitations, it is only to keep strictly to them. His great dread is no longer insincerity, but inconsistency. The true artist is never but half-conscious of himself when creating. He does not know exactly who he is. He learns to know himself only through his creation, in it, and after it. Dostoevsky never set out to find himself; he gave himself without stint in his works. He lost himself in each of the characters of his books, and, for this reason, it is in them that he can be found again. Presently we shall see how painfully awkward he is when speaking in his own name, how eloquent, on the other hand, when his own ideas are expressed by those whom he inspires. It is in endowing them with life that he finds himself. He lives in each of them, and the most obvious result of merging himself in their diversity is the masking of his own inconsistencies.

I know no writer richer in contradictions and inconsistencies than Dostoevsky: Nietzsche would describe them as antagonisms. Had he been philosopher instead of novelist, he would certainly have attempted to bring his ideas into line, whereby we should have lost the most precious of them.

The happenings in Dostoevsky’s life, however tragic, are but surface disturbances. The passions overwhelming him seem to shake him to the depths; but beyond, there remains an inner chamber, unreached by outside happenings or by passion. In this connection a few of his own words will seem a revelation, if read in conjunction with another passage:

“Without some goal and some effort to reach it, no man can live. When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man often becomes a monster in his misery.”⁠[31]

But then he seems still in error where his real goal is concerned, for he adds immediately after: “The one object of the prisoners was freedom and to get out of prison.”

These words were written in 1861. Such then was his idea of an aim in life. Of course he was suffering in that dread captivity! (He spent ten years in Siberia: four in prison, then six more in forced military service.) He was suffering; but once more a free man, he could realize that the real goal, the freedom he really longed for, was something deeper and had no connection with the throwing wide of prison gates. In 1874 he could write this extraordinary sentence, which I like to compare with what I read to you a moment ago:

“No aim can possibly be worth a wrecked existence.”⁠[32]

So, according to Dostoevsky, we have each our reason for living, superior, hidden—hidden often from ourselves—certainly far different from the ostensible goal assigned by most of us to our existence.

Let us first of all try to picture Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky. His friend Riesenkampf delineates him as he was at twenty years of age, in 1841:

“The face was rounded and full; the nose slightly retroussé; the hair light brown, worn short. A broad forehead, and beneath thin eyebrows, little grey eyes, set deep in the head. Pale cheeks, covered with freckles. A sickly, almost livid complexion, and very thick lips.”

It is sometimes asserted that his first epileptic attacks occurred in Siberia; but he was a sick man even before sentence was passed on him, and the disease certainly made progress in Siberia. “A sickly complexion.” Dostoevsky had always had poor health. And yet he, weak and complaining, was singled out for military service while his robust brother was exempted.

In 1841, that is, at twenty years of age, he was promoted non-commissioned officer, and then, in 1843, he took the examinations and was commissioned ensign. We learn that his officer’s pay amounted to 3,000 roubles, and although he had come into his share of the father’s fortune after the latter’s death, he led a free life, and had to take a younger brother in charge, consequently he was always falling into debt. This money question turns up again and again in his letters, much more urgently than in Balzac’s. It plays an extremely important part almost to the very end of his life, and it was not until the closing years that he was really freed from his financial worries.

In his young days Dostoevsky indulged in every dissipation. He was assiduous at the play, at concerts, at the ballet. Not a care in the world! He chooses to rent a flat simply because he has taken a fancy to the landlord’s appearance. His servant robs him, and he finds entertainment in watching the pilfering continue. His mood changes abruptly, according as fortune smiles or frowns. Faced with his utter inability to steer a course in life, his family and friends are anxious to see him share quarters with Riesenkampf. “Take this real methodical German as your model,” they tell him. Riesenkampf, slightly older than Dostoevsky, was a physician, and came to settle down in Petersburg in the year 1843. At this moment, Dostoevsky has not a penny to his name. He is living on bread and milk—both unpaid for. “Fyodor is one of these people in whose company a man lives well, but who himself will remain a needy creature till the very end of his days.” They set up quarters together, but Dostoevsky proves himself impossible as a companion. He receives Riesenkampf’s patients in the waiting-room, and each time one of them appears needy, Dostoevsky succours him with Riesenkampf’s funds or with his own, when he has any. One fine day he receives a thousand roubles from Moscow, the bulk of which sum is immediately employed in settling some debts; then, the very same evening, Dostoevsky gambles away the rest, at billiards, by his own account, and the following morning is obliged to borrow five roubles from his friend. I forgot to tell you that the last fifty roubles had been stolen by a patient of Riesenkampf’s, whom Dostoevsky, in a sudden manifestation of friendliness, had shown into his room. Riesenkampf and Dostoevsky parted in March, 1844, without much apparent improvement in the latter’s ways.

In 1846, he published Poor Folk. This book had sudden and considerable success. Dostoevsky’s manner of speaking about his success is significant of the man. We read in a contemporary letter:

“It dazes me: I am not living. I haven’t time to think.... A precarious reputation has been built up around me, and I don’t know how long the damnable thing will last.”⁠[33]

In 1849, along with a group of suspects, he is taken by the police. This is the affair known as the Petrachevsky Plot.

It is difficult to say what exactly were at this time Dostoevsky’s political and social opinions. From this frequenting of suspected individuals we are to infer a great measure of intellectual curiosity and a certain generous warm-heartedness which ran him into unconsidered risks. But we have no authority for believing that Dostoevsky ever was what can be termed an anarchist, a being threatening the safety of the state.

Numerous passages in his letters and in the Journal of an Author show him as entertaining quite the opposite ideas, and the whole of The Possessed is, as it were, a speech for the prosecution against anarchism. At any rate, taken he was amongst these suspects meeting round Petrachevsky. He was thrown into prison, sent to trial, and heard himself condemned to death. It was only at the eleventh hour that the death sentence was commuted and he was exiled to Siberia. All this is already familiar to you. In these causeries I should like to speak only of what you could not find elsewhere; but, for the sake of such as are unfamiliar with them, I shall read to you some passages from his letters dealing with his sentence and his life in the penal settlement. I consider them very self-revealing. In them we shall see, through the portrayal of his sufferings, appear again and again the optimism that supported him all his days. This is what he wrote, on July 18, 1849, from the fortress where he lay awaiting the verdict.

“Human beings have an incredible amount of endurance and will to live; I should never have expected to find so much in myself; now I know from experience that it is there.”⁠[34]

Then in August, weighed down by ill-health:

“To lose courage is to sin ... work, ever more work, con amore, therein lies real happiness.”⁠[35]

And again, on September 14, 1849:

“I had expected worse. And I know now that I have in me such reserves of vitality that it would be difficult to exhaust.”⁠[36]

I shall read almost the whole of his short letter dated December 22.

“To-day, December 22, we were led out to Semionovsky Square. There the death warrant was read over to us all, we were given the cross to kiss, swords were snapped above our heads, and our last toilet was performed (white shirts). Then, three of us were placed against posts for execution. I was the sixth; we were called up in threes, so I came in the second group, and I had a few moments left to live. I thought of you, brother, and of yours; at that last moment you alone were in my thoughts, and then I realized how much I loved you, beloved brother! I had time to kiss Plestcheyev and Dourov, who were beside me, and bid them farewell. At last the retreat was sounded, those tied to the posts were fetched back, and it was read out to us that His Imperial Majesty was pleased to spare our lives.”⁠[37]

In Dostoevsky’s novels we shall come across again and again more or less direct allusions to the death sentence and to the condemned man’s last hours. I cannot dwell on this for the moment.

Before starting out for Semipalatinsk, he was granted half an hour to take leave of his brother Michael. Of the two, he was the calmer, a friend relates, and said:

“In the settlement, dear brother, the convicts are not wild beasts, just men, better men than I perhaps, more deserving, too, maybe. Yes, we shall meet again, I hope: I am sure we shall see each other again. Only do write to me and send me books. I shall soon let you know which to send: surely reading is permitted there.” (This, says the narrator, was a white lie to comfort his brother.) “As soon as I am released, I shall begin to write. I have lived during these last months, and in the days before me, what shall I not see and live through? After all that I shall not lack material for writing.”⁠[38]

During the four years of Siberia which followed, Dostoevsky was not permitted to write to his family. At any rate the existing volume of correspondence contains no letters from this period, nor do Orest Müller’s Documents (Materialen), published in 1883, indicate any. But since the issue of these Documents numerous Dostoevsky letters have been found and published; doubtless still more will yet be discovered.

According to Müller, Dostoevsky left the penal settlement on March 2, 1854: according to official records, on January 23. These same archives mention nineteen letters written by Fyodor Dostoevsky between March 16, 1854 and September 11, 1856 to his brother, relatives, and friends during the years of military service at Semipalatinsk, where his sentence was completed. The French translation gives only twelve of these letters, omitting (and why I cannot tell) that admirable letter dated February 22, 1854, which, originally translated and printed in Numbers 12 and 13 of La Vogue, 1886, now only with difficulty accessible, was reprinted in the February issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française, 1922.

Seeing this letter is not to be found in the published volume of Dostoevsky’s correspondence, allow me to read some lengthy extracts from it:⁠[39]

(February 22, 1854.) “At last I can talk with you somewhat more explicitly, and, I believe, in a more reasonable manner. But before I write another line I must ask you: tell me, for God’s sake, why you have never written me a single syllable till now? Could I have expected this from you? Believe me, in my lonely and isolated state, I sometimes fell into utter despair, for I believed that you were no longer alive; through whole nights I would brood upon what was to become of your children, and I cursed my fate because I could not help them....”

You see his keenest suffering is not in the consciousness of his own abandonment, but in the realization of his powerlessness to help.

“How can I impart to you what is now in my mind—the things I thought, the things I did, the convictions I acquired, the conclusions I came to? I cannot even attempt the task. It is absolutely impossible. I don’t like to leave a piece of work half done; to say only a part is to say nothing. At any rate, you now have my detailed report in your hands: read it, and get from it what you will. It is my duty to tell you all, and so I will begin with my recollections. Do you remember how we parted from each other, dear beloved fellow? You had scarcely left me when we three, Dourov, Yastrembsky, and I, were led out to have the irons put on. Precisely at midnight on that Christmas Eve (1849) did chains touch me for the first time. They weigh about ten pounds, and make walking extraordinarily difficult. Then we were sent into open sledges, each with a gendarme; and so, in four sledges, the orderly opening the procession, we left Petersburg. I was heavy-hearted, and the many different impressions filled me with confused and uncertain sensations. My heart beat with a peculiar flutter, and that numbed its pain. Still, the fresh air was reviving in its effect, and, since it is usual before all new experiences to be aware of a curious vivacity and eagerness, so I was at the bottom quite tranquil. I looked attentively at all the festively-lit houses of Petersburg, and said good-bye to each. They drove us past your abode, and at Krayevsky’s the windows were brilliantly lit. You had told me he was giving a Christmas party and tree, and that your children were going to it, with Emilie Fyodorovna; I did feel dreadfully sad as we passed that house. I took leave, as it were, of the little ones. I felt so lonely for them, and even years afterwards I often thought of them with tears in my eyes. We were driven beyond Yaroslavl; after three or four stations we stopped, in the first grey of morning, at Schlüsselburg, and went into an inn. There we drank tea with as much avidity as if we had not touched anything for a week. After the eight months’ captivity, sixty versts in a sledge gave us appetites of which, even to-day, I think with pleasure.

“I was in a good temper. Dourov chattered incessantly, and Yastryembsky expressed unwonted apprehensions for the future. We all laid ourselves out to become better acquainted with our orderly. He was a good old man, very friendly inclined towards us: a man who had seen a lot of life; he had travelled all over Europe with dispatches. On the way he showed us many kindnesses. His name was Kusma Prokofyevitch Prokofyev. Among other things he let us have a covered sledge, which was very welcome, for the frost was fearful.

“The second day was a holiday; the drivers, who were changed at the various stations, wore cloaks of grey German cloth and bright red belts; in the village streets there was not a soul to be seen. It was a splendid winter day. They drove us through the remote parts of the Petersburg, Novgorod, and Yaroslavl Governments. There were quite insignificant little towns, at great distances from one another. But as we were passing through on a holiday, there was always plenty to eat and drink; we drove—drove terribly. We were warmly dressed, it is true, but we had to sit for ten hours at a time in the sledges, halting at only five or six stations; it was almost unendurable. I froze to the marrow, and could scarcely thaw myself in the warm rooms at the stations. Strange to say, the journey completely restored me to health. Near Perm, we had a frost of 40 degrees during some of the nights. I don’t recommend that to you. It was highly disagreeable.

“Mournful was the moment when we crossed the Ural. The horses and sledges sank deep in the snow; a snowstorm was raging. We got out of the sledge—it was night—and waited, standing, till they were extricated. All about us whirled the snowstorm. We were standing on the confines of Europe and Asia; before us lay Siberia and the mysterious future—behind us, our whole past; it was very melancholy. Tears came to my eyes. On the way, the peasants would stream out of all the villages to see us; and although we were fettered, prices were trebled to us at all the stations. Kusma Prokofyevitch took half our expenses on himself, though we tried hard to prevent him; in this way each of us, during the whole journey, spent only fifteen roubles.

“On January 12, 1850, we came to Tobolsk. After we had been paraded before the authorities, and searched, in which proceeding all our money was taken from us, myself, Dourov and Yastryembsky were taken into one cell; the others, Spejechynov, etc., who had arrived before us, were in another section, and during the whole time we hardly once saw each other. I should like to tell you more of our six days’ stay in Tobolsk, and of the impression it made upon me. But I haven’t room here. I will only tell you that the great compassion and sympathy which was shown to us there, made up to us, like a big piece of happiness, for all that had gone before. The prisoners of former days⁠[40] (and still more their wives) cared for us as if they had been our kith and kin. Those noble souls, tested by five-and-twenty years of suffering and self-sacrifice! We saw them but seldom, for we were very rigidly guarded; still they sent us clothes and provisions, they comforted and encouraged us. I had brought far too few clothes, and had bitterly repented it; but they sent me clothes. Finally we left Tobolsk, and reached Omsk in three days.

“While I was in Tobolsk, I gathered information about my future superiors. They told me that the Commandant was a very decent fellow, but that the Major, Krivzov, was an uncommon brute, a petty tyrant, a drunkard, a trickster—in short, the greatest horror that can be imagined. From the very beginning, he called both Dourov and me blockhead, and vowed to chastise us bodily at the first transgression. He had already held his position for two years, and done the most hideous and unsanctioned things; two years later he was court-martialled for them. So God protected me from him! He used to come to us mad drunk (I never once saw him sober), and would seek out some inoffensive person and flog him on the pretext that he—the prisoner—was drunk. Often he came at night and punished at random—say, because such and such a one was sleeping on his left side instead of his right, or because he talked or moaned in his sleep—in fact, anything that occurred to his drunken mind. I should have had to break out in the long run against such a man as that, and it was he who wrote the monthly reports of us to Petersburg.

“I spent the whole four years behind dungeon walls, and only left the prison when I was taken on ‘hard labour.’ The work was hard, though not always; sometimes in bad weather, in rain, or in winter during the unendurable frosts, my strength would forsake me. Once I had to spend four hours at a piece of extra work, and in such frost that the quicksilver froze; it was perhaps 40 degrees below zero. One of my feet was frost-bitten. We all lived together in one barrack-room. Imagine an old, crazy, wooden building, that should long ago have been broken up as useless. In the summer it is unbearably hot, in the winter unbearably cold. All the boards are rotten; on the ground filth lies an inch thick; every instant one is in danger of slipping and coming down. The small windows are so frozen over that even by day one can hardly read. The ice on the panes is three inches thick. The ceilings drip, there are draughts everywhere. We are packed like herrings in a barrel. The stove is heated with six logs of wood, but the room is so cold that the ice never thaws; the atmosphere is unbearable—and so through all the winter long.

“In the same room, the prisoners wash their linen, and thus make the place so wet that one scarcely dares to move. From twilight till morning we are forbidden to leave the barrack-room; the doors are barricaded; in the ante-room a great wooden trough for the calls of nature is placed; this makes one almost unable to breathe. All the prisoners stink like pigs; they say that they can’t help it, for they must live, and are but men. We sleep upon bare boards; each man was allowed one pillow only. We covered ourselves with short sheepskins, and our feet were outside the covering all the time. It was thus that we froze night after night. Fleas, lice, and other vermin by the bushel. In the winter we got thin sheepskins to wear, which didn’t keep us warm at all, and boots with short legs; thus equipped, we had to go out into the frost.

“To eat we got bread and cabbage soup; the soup should, by the regulations, have contained a quarter pound of meat per head; but they put in sausage-meat, and so I never came across a piece of genuine flesh. On feast days we got porridge, but with scarcely any butter. On fast days, cabbage and nothing else. My stomach went utterly to pieces, and I suffered tortures from indigestion.

“From all this you can see yourself that one couldn’t live there at all without money; if I had had none, I should most assuredly have perished; no one could endure such a life. But every convict does some sort of work and sells it, thus earning, every single one of them, a few pence. I often drank tea and bought myself a piece of meat; it was my salvation. It was quite impossible to do without smoking, for otherwise the stench would have choked one. All these things were done behind the backs of the officials.

“I was often in hospital. My nerves were so shattered that I had some epileptic fits—however, that was not often. I have rheumatism in my legs now, too. But except for that, I feel right well. Add to all these discomforts the fact that it was almost impossible to get one’s self a book, and that when I did get one, I had to read it on the sly; that all around me was incessant malignity, turbulence, and quarrelling; then perpetual espionage, and the impossibility of ever being alone, even for an instant—and so without variation for four long years. You’ll believe me when I tell you I was not happy! And imagine, in addition, the ever-present dread of drawing down some punishment on myself, the irons, and the utter oppression of spirits—and you have the picture of my life.

“I won’t even try to tell you what transformations were undergone by my soul, my faith, my mind, and my heart, in those four years. It would be a long story. Still, the eternal concentration, the escape into myself from bitter reality, did bear its fruit. I now have many new needs and hopes of which I never thought in other days. But all this will be pure enigma for you, and so I’ll pass to other things. I will say only one word: do not forget me, and do help me! I need books and money. Send them me, for Christ’s sake.

“Omsk is a hateful hole. There is hardly a tree there. In summer, heat and winds that bring sandstorms; in winter, snowstorms. I have scarcely seen anything of the country around. The place is dirty, almost exclusively inhabited by military, and dissolute to the last degree. I mean the common people. If I hadn’t discovered some human beings here, I should have gone utterly to the dogs.

“Constantine Ivanovitch Ivanov is like a brother to me. He has done everything that he in any way could for me. I owe him money. If he ever goes to Petersburg, show him some recognition. I owe him twenty-five roubles. But how can I repay his kindness, his constant willingness to carry out all my requests, his attention and care for me, just like a brother’s? And he is not the only one I have to thank in that way. Brother, there are very many noble natures in the world.

“I have already said that your silence often tortures me. I thank you for the money you sent. In your next letter (even if it’s ‘official,’ for I don’t know yet whether it is possible for me to correspond with you)—in your next, write as fully as you can of all your affairs, of Emilie Fyodorovna, the children, all relations and acquaintances; also of those in Moscow—who is alive and who is dead; and of your business; tell me what capital you started with, whether it is lucrative, whether you are in funds, finally, whether you will help me financially, and how much you will send me a year. But send no money with the official letter—particularly if I don’t find a covering address. For the present, give Michael Petrovitch as the consignor of all packets (you understand, don’t you?). For the time, I have some money, but I have no books. If you can, send me the magazines for this year, or at any rate the O.Z.

“But what I urgently need are the following: I need (very necessary!) ancient historians (in French translation), modern historians: Guizot, Thierry, Thiers, Ranke, and so forth; national studies, and the Fathers of the Church. Choose the cheapest and most compact editions. Send them by return.

“People try to console me: ‘They’re quite simple sort of fellows there.’ But I dread simple men more than complex ones. For that matter, men everywhere are just—men. Even among the robber-murderers in the prison, I came to know some men in those four years. Believe me, there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior. And not in a single case, or even two, but in several cases. Some inspired respect, others were downright fine. I taught the Russian language to a young Circassian—he had been transported to Siberia for robbery with murder. How grateful he was to me! Another convict wept when I said good-bye to him. Certainly I had often given him money, but it was so little, and his gratitude so boundless! My character, though, was deteriorating; in my relations with others I was ill-tempered and impatient. They accounted for it by my mental condition, and bore all without grumbling. Apropos, what a number of national types and characters I became familiar with in prison! I lived into their lives, and so I believe I know them really well. Many tramps’ and thieves’ careers were laid bare to me, and above all, the whole wretched existence of the common people. Decidedly I have not spent my time there in vain. I have learnt to know the Russian people as only a few know them. I am a little vain of it. I hope that such vanity is pardonable....

“Send me the Koran, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and if you have the chance of sending me anything not officially, then be sure to send Hegel, but particularly Hegel’s History of Philosophy. Upon that depends my whole future. For God’s sake, exert yourself to get me transferred to the Caucasus; try to find out from well-informed sources whether I shall be permitted to print my works, and in what way I should seek this sanction. I intend to try for permission in two or three years. I beg you to sustain me so long. Without money I shall be destroyed by military life. So please!...

“Now I mean to write novels and plays. But I must still read a great deal. Don’t forget me.

“Once again farewell.

“F. D.”⁠[41]

This letter, like so many others, remained unanswered. It is evident that Dostoevsky was left without news from his family during his whole term of imprisonment. Are we to suppose, on his brother’s part, prudence, fear of compromising himself, or maybe indifference? I cannot tell. Mme. Hoffmann, in her biography, inclines to the last-mentioned supposition.

The first we know of Dostoevsky’s letters subsequent to his release and enlistment in the 7th Siberian Line Regiment is dated March 27, 1854. It does not appear in the French edition of his correspondence. In this letter we read as follows:

“Send me—not newspapers, but European histories. Economists—Church Fathers—as many of the classics as possible. Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Pliny, Flavius, Plutarch, Diodorus, etc., in French translations. And the Koran and a German Dictionary. Not all at once, of course, but as much as you can. Send me Pissaren’s Physics too, and a manual of physiology, any one, in French if better than in Russian. All in the cheapest editions. Not in one consignment, but slowly, one book after another. I shall be grateful for every little thing you can do for me. Do realize how urgently I need this intellectual food!...”

“Now you know my chief occupations,” he writes a little later. “Really I have none but these connected with my duty. No outside events, no disturbances in my life, no mishaps. But what is happening in soul, heart, and mind, what has sprung up, ripened or been blighted, what has been cast aside with the tares, that cannot be told and written down on a scrap of paper. Here I live in isolation; I shrink out of sight, as usual. Moreover, for five years I lived with an escort, and there are times when it is pure bliss for me to be alone. On the whole, prison has destroyed many things in me and created new. For example, I’ve already spoken about my illness: strange attacks resembling epilepsy. And yet not epilepsy. Some day I shall give you particulars.”⁠[42]

In the last of these causeries we shall come back to this terrible question of his illness.

In a letter dated November 6 of the same year we find:

“It will soon be ten months since I took up my new life. As for the other four years, I look upon them as a period when I was buried alive and closed in a coffin. What terrible years! I cannot, my friend, tell you how terrible. Unspeakable suffering without end, for every hour, every minute lay heavy on my soul. During the whole of these four years, not a moment but what I was conscious of my prison walls.”⁠[43]

But, immediately after, watch how far his optimism rises above it all:

“I was so busy all summer that I had scarcely time for sleep. But now I have grown used to things. My health too has improved slightly. And, hope not wholly lost, I can look at the future with moderate fortitude.”⁠[44]

Three letters from the same period were given in the Niva, April, 1898. Of these the French edition of Dostoevsky’s Correspondence includes the first only. In one (August 21, 1855) there is reference to a letter of the previous October, which has not been traced.

“When, in my letter of last October, I repeated my complaints at your silence, you answered that these had made very painful reading for you. Oh, Mysha! for the love of God, bear me no ill-will; remember my loneliness. I am like a pebble cast aside. I’ve always been of a gloomy, sickly, susceptible disposition. I am myself thoroughly convinced I was in the wrong.”

Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg on November 29, 1859. At Semipalatinsk he had married the widow of a deportee, mother of a growing son whose intelligence seemingly was less than mediocre. Dostoevsky adopted the boy, for whom he made himself answerable. He had a perfect mania for assuming burdens.

“He was but little altered,” his friend Miliukov tells us. “His mien is more confident than of yore, and his features have lost none of the energy they used to express.”

In 1861 he published Insulted and Injured; in 1861–2 his Memories of the House of the Dead. Crime and Punishment, the first of his great novels, did not appear till 1866.

During the years 1863–1865, he busied himself actively with a review. One of his letters speaks so eloquently of the years between that I must read further passages: this is, I think, the last time I shall quote to you from his correspondence! This particular letter is dated March 31, 1865.

“I am going to recount my life during this time. Not the whole of it, though. That is impossible, for in such a case one never tells in letters the essential facts. There are things I cannot narrate simply. That’s why I shall confine myself to a summary account of the past year of my life.

“You probably know that four years ago my brother Michael undertook the publication of a review, wherein I collaborated. Everything was going well. My House of the Dead had met with considerable success and given a fresh lease of life to my literary reputation. When my brother began publication, he owed a lot of money; his debts were being paid off when suddenly, in May, 1863, the review was suspended on account of a strong and patriotic article, which, misinterpreted, was read as a protest against the conduct of the Government and public opinion. The blow killed him; debt after debt accumulated, and his health became impaired. At the moment, I was far away, in Moscow, at the bedside of my dying wife. Yes, dear friend, you wrote to sympathize in my cruel loss, the death of my beloved brother, but you did not know how heavy the hand of fate was upon me. Another creature who loved me, and whom I loved infinitely—my wife—died of consumption in Moscow, where she had been settled for a twelvemonth. The whole winter of 1864 I never left her bedside....

“... Ah, dear friend, she loved me deeply, and I returned her love; yet, we did not live happily together. I shall tell you all about it when I see you. Let me say just this. Although we were unhappy (by reason of her difficult character—she was hypochondriac, and full of a sick woman’s whims), we could not cease to love each other. Indeed, the unhappier we grew, the closer we were drawn together. Strange though it may seem, it is true. She was the best, the noblest, the most generous-hearted woman I have ever known. After she was gone (despite all my anxieties during the twelvemonth I watched her dying), although I felt and painfully realized what I was burying with her, I could not picture the emptiness and misery of my life. That is a year ago now, and the feeling is still the same.

“Immediately after the funeral, I hastened to Petersburg to my brother. He alone was left me! Three months later he, too, was no more. His illness lasted only a month. It did not appear serious and the attack which carried him off in three days was practically unforeseen.

“Then I was suddenly left alone; and I knew fear! It has become terrible! My life is broken in two. On one hand, the past, with all that I had to live for; on the other, the unknown, with not one loving heart to comfort me in my loss. There was literally no reason why I should go on living. Forge new links, start a fresh existence? The very thought revolted me! Then I realized for the first time that I could not replace my loved ones; they were all I held dear, and new loves could not, ought not to exist.”⁠[45]

This letter was continued in April, and a fortnight after this cry of despair, we read, under the date April 14: “Of all my reserves of strength and energy, there is nothing left save a vague uneasiness of soul, a state bordering on despair. Bitterness and indecision—a mood foreign to me. And then I’m utterly alone. I’ve lost the friend of a lifetime. Yet I always have the feeling that I am going to begin to live! Ridiculous, isn’t it? The cat and its nine lives?”⁠[46]

He adds these words: “I write to you at great length, and I see that of the very essence of my moral or spiritual life I have given you not a notion,” which passage I should like to set side by side with an extraordinary paragraph I find in Crime and Punishment.

In this novel Dostoevsky tells us the story of Raskolnikov, who commits a crime and is sent to Siberia. In the last pages he speaks of the strange feeling that takes possession of his hero’s being, the feeling that at last he is going to live. “And what were all, all the agonies of the past! Everything, even his crime, sentence, and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external, strange fact, with which he had no concern. But he could not think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have analysed consciously, he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of theory.”⁠[47]

These sentences I have read to you in justification of my opening remarks. The great external events of Dostoevsky’s life, tragic though they were, are less important than this one small fact which it is now time to consider. During his years in Siberia, Dostoevsky made the acquaintance of a woman who put the New Testament into his hand—this, by the way, being the only officially sanctioned reading matter in gaol. This reading and meditating the Gospels was of vital importance to Dostoevsky. All his subsequently written works are steeped in the teaching of the Gospels, and we shall be obliged again and again to revert to the truths he discovered in reading them.

I find it highly interesting to observe and compare in two natures akin in so many respects, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the very different reactions to contact with the Gospels. With Nietzsche the reaction, immediate and marked, was, we may as well admit, jealousy. It does not seem to me possible to understand Nietzsche’s works without taking account of this feeling. Nietzsche was jealous of Jesus Christ, jealous to the point of madness. In writing his Zarathustra, Nietzsche is ever harassed by his desire to write a counterpart to the Gospels. He even adopts at times the form of the Beatitudes the better to make mockery of them. He wrote the Anti-Christ, and in his last work, Ecce Homo, he poses as the adversary triumphant of Him he sought to oust.

With Dostoevsky the reaction is far different. He felt at once that he was face to face with something superior, not only to himself, but to entire mankind, something divine.... The humility of which I spoke earlier in the day, and to which I shall time and again return, predisposed him to making submission before what was avowedly better and higher than himself. He bowed his head humbly before Jesus Christ, and the first, the greatest consequence of his submission and self-surrender was the safeguarding intact his nature’s rich complexity. No artist ever more truly practised the teaching of the Gospel: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever will lose his life for My sake, the same shall save it.”

By reason of this sacrifice and renunciation the most discordant elements are able to live side by side in Dostoevsky’s soul, and the extraordinary wealth of antagonisms is preserved.

At our next meeting we shall inquire whether several of Dostoevsky’s characteristics, which to us Westerners seem perchance more than strange, are not common to all Russians, and by so inquiring we may be enabled to discern such features as are more purely individual and personal.