Dostoevsky

André Gide is now one of the leaders of French literature. The first book of his to attract wide attention among the lettered was L’Immoraliste. Since then, in some twenty years of productiveness, he has gradually consolidated his position until at the present day his admirers are entitled to say that no other living French author stands so firm and so passionately acknowledged as an influence. His authority over the schools of young writers who contribute to or are published by La Nouvelle Revue Française (with which he has been intimately connected from its foundation) is quite unrivalled. And it must be stated, as a final proof of mastership, that he has powerful and not despicable opponents.

To my mind his outstanding characteristic is that he is equally interested in the æsthetic and in the moral aspect of literature. Few imaginative writers have his broad and vivacious curiosity about moral problems, and scarcely any moralists exhibit even half his preoccupation with the æsthetic. He is a distinguished, if somewhat fragmentary, literary critic—not merely of French but of Russian, English and classical literatures. I shall not forget his excitement when he first read Tom Jones. “Ce livre m’attendait,” said he, with grave delight. His practical interest in the technique of fiction never fades; indeed it grows. So much so that his latest novel, now appearing serially in La Nouvelle Revue Française, really amounts to an essay in a new form; and with startling modesty he has labelled it, in the dedication, “my first novel.”

Of course no novelist can achieve anything permanent without a moral basis or background. Balzac had it. De Maupassant had it to the point of savagery. Zola had it, in his degree. Paul Bourget—a writer whom highbrows French and English have still to reckon with—has it. But André Gide writes in the very midst of morals. They are not only his background, but frequently his foreground. Scarcely one of his books (the exception may be Les Caves du Vatican) but poses and attempts to resolve a moral problem.

It was natural and even necessary that such a writer as Gide should deal with such a writer as Dostoevsky. They were made for each other—or rather Dostoevsky was made for Gide. I first met Gide in the immense field of Dostoevsky. He said, and I agreed, that The Brothers Karamazov was the greatest novel ever written. This was ages ago, and years have only confirmed us in the opinion.

“But,” said Gide, “everything that Dostoevsky ever wrote is worth reading and must be read. Nothing can safely be omitted.”

At that period there was none but a mutilated French translation of The Brothers Karamazov, and Gide had to read Dostoevsky in German. A complete translation, I fear, still lacks in French, but André Gide can now read him in full in English: which is to our credit and his. Let us, however, not be too much uplifted. Dostoevsky’s important Journal d’un Ecrivain exists in French but not in English.

Those who read Gide’s Dostoevsky will receive light, some of it dazzling, on both Dostoevsky and Gide. I can recall no other critical work which more cogently justifies and more securely establishes its subject. If anyone wants to appreciate the progress made by Western Europe in the appreciation of Russian psychology, let him compare the late Count Melchior de Voguë’s Le Roman Russe with the present work. It is impossible to read this Dostoevsky without enlarging one’s idea of Dostoevsky and of the functions of the novel. All the conventional charges against the greatest of the Russians—morbidity, etc., etc., fall to pieces during perusal. They are not killed; they merely expire. And Dostoevsky in the end stands out not simply as a supreme psychologist and narrator, but also as a publicist of genius endowed with a prophetic view over the future of the nations as astounding as his insight into the individual. “There never was,” says Gide, “an author more Russian in the strictest sense of the word and withal so universally European.”

Dostoevsky had various and distressing personal defects, but his humanity and his wisdom, doubtless derived from the man Jesus who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, are unique; and André Gide’s demonstration of their worth is his invaluable contribution to Dostoevsky literature.

ARNOLD BENNETT.