“And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain; and they besought Him that He would suffer them to enter into them. And He suffered them. Then went the devils out of the man and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake and were choked. When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country.“Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man out ofwhom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind; and they were afraid. They also which saw it, told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils, was healed.”
“And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain; and they besought Him that He would suffer them to enter into them. And He suffered them. Then went the devils out of the man and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake and were choked. When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country.
“Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man out ofwhom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind; and they were afraid. They also which saw it, told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils, was healed.”
The book, as I have said, undoubtedly reveals Dostoievsky’s powers at their highest pitch, in the sense that nowhere in the whole range of his work do we find such isolated scenes of power; scenes which are, so to speak, white hot with the fire of his soul; and characters in which he has concentrated the whole dæmonic force of his personality, and the whole blinding strength of his insight. On the other hand, it shows us, as I added, more clearly than any other of his books, the nature and the extent of his limitations. It is almost too full of characters and incidents; the incidents are crowded together in an incredibly short space of time, the whole action of the book, which is a remarkably long one, occupying only the space of a few days, while to the description of one morning enough space is allotted to make a bulky English novel. Again, the narrative is somewhat disconnected. You can sometimes scarcely see the wood for the trees. Of course, these objections are in a sense hypercritical, because, as far as my experience goes, any one who takes up this book finds it impossible to put it down until he has read it to the very end, soenthralling is the mere interest of the story, so powerful the grip of the characters. I therefore only suggest these criticisms for those who wish to form an idea of the net result of Dostoievsky’s artistic scope and achievement.
With regard to the further point, the “prophetic soul” which speaks in this book is perhaps that which is its most remarkable quality. The book was some thirty years ahead of its time: ahead of its time in the same way that Wagner’s music was ahead of its time,—and this was not only on account of the characters and the state of things which it divined and foreshadowed, but also on account of the ideas and the flashes of philosophy which abound in its pages. When the book was published, it was treated as a gross caricature, and even a few years ago, when Professor Brückner first published hisHistory of Russian Literature, he talked of this book as being a satire not of Nihilism itself, but of the hangers-on, the camp-followers which accompany every army. “Dostoievsky,” he says, “did not paint the heroes but the Falstaffs, the silly adepts, the half and wholly crazed adherents of Nihilism. He was indeed fully within his rights. Of course there were such Nihilists, particularly between 1862 and 1869, but there were not only such: even Nechaev, the prototype of Petrushka, impressed us by a steel-like energy and a hatred for theupper classes which we wholly miss in the wind-bag and intriguer Petrushka.”
There is a certain amount of truth in this criticism. It is true that Dostoievsky certainly painted the Falstaffs and the half-crazy adherents of Nihilism. But I am convinced that the reason he did not paint the heroes was that he did not believe in their existence: he did not believe that the heroes of Nihilism were heroes; this is plain not only from this book, but from every line which he wrote about the people who played a part in the revolutionary movement in Russia; and so far from the leading personage in his book being merely a wind-bag, I would say that one is almost more impressed by the steel-like energy of the character, as drawn in this book, than by the sayings and doings of his prototype—or rather his prototypes in real life. The amazing thing is that even if a few years ago real life had not furnished examples of revolutionaries as extreme both in their energy and in their craziness as Dostoievsky paints them, real life has done so in the last four years. Therefore, Dostoievsky not only saw with prophetic divination that should circumstances in Russia ever lead to a general upheaval, such characters might arise and exercise an influence, but his prophetic insight has actually been justified by the facts.
As soon as such circumstances arose, asthey did after the Japanese War of 1904, characters such as Dostoievsky depicted immediately came to the front and played a leading part. When M. de Vogüé published his book,La Roman Russe, in speaking ofThe Possessed, he said that he had assisted at several of the trials of Anarchists in 1871, and he added that many of the men who came up for trial, and many of the crimes of which they were accused, were identical reproductions of the men and the crimes imagined by the novelist. If this was true when applied to the revolutionaries of 1871, it is a great deal truer applied to those of 1904-1909. That Dostoievsky believed that this would happen, I think there can be no doubt. Witness the following passage:
“Chigalev,” says the leading character ofThe Possessed, speaking of one of his revolutionary disciples, a man with long ears, “is a man of genius: a genius in the manner of Fourier, but bolder and cleverer. He has invented ‘equality.’ In his system, every member of society has an eye on every one else. To tell tales is a duty. The individual belongs to the community and the community belongs to the individual. All are slaves and equal in their bondage. Calumny and assassination can be used in extreme cases, but the most important thing is equality. The first necessity is to lower the level of culture scienceand talent. A high scientific level is only accessible to superior intellects, and we don’t want superior intellects. Men gifted with high capacities have always seized upon power and become despots. Highly gifted men cannot help being despots, and have always done more harm than good. They must be exiled or executed. Cicero’s tongue must be cut out, Copernicus’ eyes must be blinded, Shakespeare must be stoned. That is Chigalevism. Slaves must be equal. Without despotism, up to the present time, neither liberty nor equality has existed, but in a herd, equality should reign supreme,—and that is Chigalevism.... I am all for Chigalevism. Down with instruction and science! There is enough of it, as it is, to last thousands of years, but we must organise obedience: it is the only thing which is wanting in the world. The desire for culture is an aristocratic desire. As soon as you admit the idea of the family or of love, you will have the desire for personal property. We will annihilate this desire: we will let loose drunkenness, slander, tale-telling, and unheard-of debauchery. We will strangle every genius in his cradle. We will reduce everything to the same denomination, complete equality. ‘We have learnt a trade, and we are honest men: we need nothing else.’ Such was the answer which some English workman made the other day. Theindispensable alone is indispensable. Such will thenceforth be the watchword of the world, but we must have upheavals. We will see to that, we the governing class. The slaves must have leaders. Complete obedience, absolute impersonality, but once every thirty years Chigalev will bring about an upheaval, and men will begin to devour each other: always up to a given point, so that we may not be bored. Boredom is an aristocratic sensation, and in Chigalevism there will be no desires. We will reserve for ourselves desire and suffering, and for the slaves there will be Chigalevism.... We will begin by fermenting disorder; we will reach the people itself. Do you know that we are already terribly strong? those who belong to us are not only the men who murder and set fire, who commit injuries after the approved fashion, and who bite: these people are only in the way. I do not understand anything unless there be discipline. I myself am a scoundrel, but I am not a Socialist. Ha, ha! listen! I have counted them all: the teacher who laughs with the children whom he teaches, at their God and at their cradle, belongs to us; the barrister who defends a well-educated assassin by proving that he is more educated than his victims, and that in order to get money he was obliged to kill, belongs to us; the schoolboy who in order to experience a sharp sensation killsa peasant, belongs to us; the juries who systematically acquit all criminals, belong to us; the judge who at the tribunal is afraid of not showing himself to be sufficiently liberal, belongs to us; among the administrators, among the men of letters, a great number belong to us, and they do not know it themselves. On the other hand, the obedience of schoolboys and fools has reached its zenith. Everywhere you see an immeasurable vanity, and bestial, unheard-of appetites. Do you know how much we owe to the theories in vogue at present alone? When I left Russia, Littré’s thesis, which likens crime to madness, was the rage. I return, and crime is already no longer considered even as madness: it is considered as common sense itself, almost a duty, at least a noble protest. ‘Why should not an enlightened man kill if he has need of money?’ Such is the argument you hear. But that is nothing. The Russian God has ceded his place to drink. The people are drunk, the mothers are drunk, the children are drunk, the churches are empty. Oh, let this generation grow: it is a pity we cannot wait. They would be drunk still. Ah, what a pity that we have no proletariat! But it will come, it will come. The moment is drawing near.”
In this declaration of revolutionary faith, Dostoievsky has concentrated the whole of anideal on which thousands of ignorant men in Russia have acted during the last three years. All of the so-called Hooliganism which came about in Russia after the war, which although it has greatly diminished has by no means yet been exterminated by a wholesale system of military court-martials, proceeds from this, and its adepts are conscious or unconscious disciples of this creed. For the proletariat which Dostoievsky foresaw is now a living fact, and a great part of it has been saturated with such ideas. Not all of it, of course. I do not for a moment mean to say that every ordinary Russian social-democrat fosters such ideas; but what I do mean to say is that these ideas exist and that a great number of men have acted on a similar creed which they have only half digested, and have sunk into ruin, ruining others in doing so, and have ended by being hanged.
Thus the book,Devils, which, when it appeared in 1871, was thought a piece of gross exaggeration, and which had not been out long before events began to show that it was less exaggerated than it appeared at first sight—has in the last three years, and even in this year of grace, received further justification by events such as the rôle that Father Gapon played in the revolutionary movement, and the revelations which have been lately made with regard toAzev and similar characters. Any one who finds difficulty in believing a story such as that which came to light through the Azev revelations, had better readThe Possessed. It will throw an illuminating light on the motives that cause such men to act as they do, and the circumstances that produce such men.
The main idea of the book is to show that the whole strength of what were then the Nihilists and what are now the Revolutionaries,—let us say the Maximalists,—lies, not in lofty dogmas and theories held by a vast and splendidly organised community, but simply in the strength of character of one or two men, and in the peculiar weakness of the common herd. I say the peculiar weakness with intention. It does not follow that the common herd, to which the majority of the revolutionary disciples belong, is necessarily altogether weak, but that though the men of whom it is composed may be strong and clever in a thousand ways, they have one peculiar weakness, which is, indeed, a common weakness of the Russian character. But before going into this question, it is advisable first to say that what Dostoievsky shows in his book,The Possessed, is that these Nihilists are almost entirely devoid of ideas; the organisations round which so many legends gather, consist in reality of only a few local clubs,—in thisparticular case, of one local club. All the talk of central committees, executive committees, and so forth, existed only in the imagination of the leaders. On the other hand, the character of those few men who were the leaders and who dominated their disciples, was as strong as steel and as cold as ice. And what Dostoievsky shows is how this peculiar strength of the leaders exercised itself on the peculiar weakness of the disciples. Let us now turn to the peculiar nature of this weakness. Dostoievsky explains it at the very beginning of the book. In describing one of the characters, Chatov, who is an unwilling disciple of the Nihilist leaders, he says:
“He is one of those Russian Idealists whom any strong idea strikes all of a sudden, and on the spot annihilates his will, sometimes for ever. They are never able to react against the idea. They believe in it passionately, and the rest of their life passes as though they were writhing under a stone which was crushing them.”
The leading figure of the book is one Peter Verkhovensky, a political agitator. He is unscrupulous, ingenious, and plausible in the highest degree, as clever as a fiend, a complete egotist, boundlessly ambitious, untroubled by conscience, and as hard as steel. His prototype was Nachaef, an actual Nihilist. The ambition of this man is to create disorder, and disorder once created,to seize the authority which must ultimately arise out of any disorder. His means of effecting this is as ingenious as Chichikov’s method of disposing of “dead souls” in Gogol’s masterpiece. By imagining a central committee, of which he is the representative, he organises a small local committee, consisting of five men called “the Fiver”; and he persuades his dupes that a network of similar small committees exists all over Russia. He aims at getting the local committee entirely into his hands, and making the members of it absolute slaves to his will. His ultimate aim is to create similar committees all over the country, persuading people in every new place that the network is ready everywhere else, and that they are all working in complete harmony and in absolute obedience to a central committee, which is somewhere abroad, and which in reality does not exist. This once accomplished, his idea is to create disorder among the peasants or the masses, and in the general upheaval to seize the power. It is possible that I am defining his aim too closely, since in the book one only sees his work, so far as one local committee is concerned. But it is clear from his character that he has some big idea at the back of his head. He is not merely dabbling with excitement in a small local sphere, for all the other characters in the book, however much they hate him, are agreed about one thing;that in his cold and self-seeking character there lies an element of sheer enthusiasm. The manner in which he creates disciples out of his immediate surroundings, and obtains an unbounded influence over them, is by playing on the peculiar weakness which I have already quoted as being the characteristic of Chigalevism. He plays on the one-sidedness of the Russian character; he plays on the fact that directly one single idea takes possession of the brain of a certain kind of Russian idealist, as in the case of Chatov, or Raskolnikov, for instance, he is no longer able to control it. Peter works on this. He also works on the vanity of his disciples, and on their fear of not being thought advanced enough.
“The principal strength,” he says on one occasion, “the cement which binds everything, is the fear of public opinion, the fear of having an opinion of one’s own. It is with just such people that success is possible. I tell you they would throw themselves into the fire if I told them to do so, if I ordered it. I would only have to say that they were bad Liberals. I have been blamed for having deceived my associates here in speaking of a central committee and of ‘innumerable ramifications.’ But where is the deception? The central committee is you and me. As to the ramifications, I can have as many as you wish.”
But as Peter’s plans advance, this cement, consisting of vanity and the fear of public opinion, is not sufficient for him; he wants a stronger bond to bind his disciples together, and to keep them under his own immediate and exclusive control; and such a bond must be one of blood. He therefore persuades his committee that one of their members, Chatov, to whom I have already alluded, is a spy. This is easy, because Chatov is a member of the organisation against his will. He became involved in the business when he was abroad, in Switzerland; and on the first possible occasion he says he will have nothing to do with any Nihilist propaganda, since he is absolutely opposed to it, being a convinced Slavophil and a hater of all acts of violence. Peter lays a trap for him. At a meeting of the committee he asks every one of those present whether, should they be aware that a political assassination were about to take place, they would denounce the man who was to perform it. With one exception all answer no, that they would denounce an ordinary assassin, but that political assassination is not murder. When the question is put to Chatov he refuses to answer. Peter tells the others that this is the proof that he is a spy, and that he must be made away with. His object is that they should kill Chatov, and thenceforth be bound to him by fear of each other and of him. He has a further plan forattributing the guilt of Chatov’s murder to another man. He has come across an engineer named Kirilov. This man is also possessed by one idea, in the same manner as Raskolnikov and Chatov, only that, unlike them, his character is strong. His idea is practically that enunciated many years later by Nietzsche, that of the Superman. Kirilov is a maniac: the single idea which in his case has taken possession of him is that of suicide. There are two prejudices, he reasons, which prevent man committing suicide. One of them is insignificant, the other very serious, but the insignificant reason is not without considerable importance: it is the fear of pain. In exposing his idea he argues that were a stone the size of a six-storied house to be suspended over a man, he would know that the fall of the stone would cause him no pain, yet he would instinctively dread its fall, as causing extreme pain. As long as that stone remained suspended over him, he would be in terror lest it should cause him pain by its fall, and no one, not even the most scientific of men, could escape this impression. Complete liberty will come about only when it will be immaterial to man whether he lives or not: that is the aim.
The second cause and the most serious one that prevents men from committing suicide, is the idea of another world. For the sake of clearness I will here quote Kirilov’s conversation on thissubject with the narrator of the story, which is told in the first person:
“... That is to say, punishment?” says his interlocutor.
“No, that is nothing—simply the idea of another world.”
“Are there not atheists who already disbelieve in another world?”
Kirilov was silent.
“You perhaps judge by yourself.”
“Every man can judge only by himself,” said Kirilov, blushing. “Complete liberty will come about when it will be entirely immaterial to man whether he lives or whether he dies: that is the aim of everything.”
“The aim? Then nobody will be able or will wish to live.”
“Nobody,” he answered.
“Man fears death, and therefore loves life,” I remarked. “That is how I understand the matter, and thus has Nature ordained.”
“That is a base idea, and therein lies the whole imposture. Life is suffering, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Everything now is in pain and terror. Man loves life now, because he loves pain and terror. Thus has he been made. Man gives his life now for pain and fear, and therein lies the whole imposture. Man is not at present what he ought to be. A new man will rise, happy andproud, to whom it will be immaterial whether he lives or dies. That will be the new man. He who vanquishes pain and fear, he will be God, and the other gods will no longer exist.”
“Then, according to you, the other God does exist?”
“He exists without existing. In the stone there is no pain, but in the fear of the stone there is pain. God is the pain which arises from the fear of death. He who vanquishes the pain and the fear, he will be God. Then there will be a new life, a new man, everything new. Then history will be divided into two parts. From the gorilla to the destruction of God, and from the destruction of God to....”
“To the gorilla ...?”
“To the physical transformation of man and of the world. Man will be God, and will be transformed physically.”
“How do you think man will be transformed physically?”
“The transformation will take place in the world, in thought, sentiments, and actions.”
“If it will be immaterial to men whether they live or die, then men will all kill each other. That is perhaps the form the transformation will take?”
“That is immaterial. The imposture will be destroyed. He who desires to attain complete freedom must not be afraid of killing himself.He who dares to kill himself, has discovered where the error lies. There is no greater liberty than this: this is the end of all things, and you cannot go further. He who dares to kill himself is God. It is at present in every one’s power to bring this about: that God shall be no more, and that nothing shall exist any more. But nobody has yet done this.”
“There have been millions of suicides.”
“But they have never been inspired with this idea. They have always killed themselves out of fear, and never in order to kill fear. He who will kill himself simply in order to kill fear, he will be God.”
In this last sentence we have the whole idea and philosophy of Kirilov. He had made up his mind to kill himself, in order to prove that he was not afraid of death, and he was possessed by that idea, and by that idea alone. In another place he says that man is unhappy because he does not know that he is happy: simply for this reason: that is all. “He who knows that he is happy will become happy at once, immediately.” And further on he says: “Men are not good, simply because they do not know they are good. When they realise this, they will no longer commit crimes. They must learn that they are good, and instantly they will become good, one and all of them. He who will teach men thatthey are good, will end the world.” The man to whom he is talking objects that He who taught men that they were good was crucified.
“The man will come,” Kirilov replies, “and his name will be the Man-God.”
“The God-Man?” says his interlocutor.
“No, the Man-God,—there is a difference.”
Here we have his idea of the Superman.[20]
As soon as Peter discovers Kirilov’s obsession, he extracts from him a promise that, as he has determined to commit suicide, and that as it is quite indifferent to him how and when he does it, he shall do it when it is useful to him, Peter. Kirilov consents to this, although he feels himself in no way bound to Peter, and although he sees through him entirely and completely, and would hate him were his contempt not too great for hatred. But Peter’s most ambitious plans do not consist merely in binding five men to him by an indissoluble bond of blood: that is only the means to an end. The end, as I have already said, is vaguely to get power; and besides the five men whom he intends to make his slaves for life, Peter has another and far more important trump card. This trump card consists of a man, Nicholas Stavrogin, who is the hero of the book. He is the only son of a widow with a landed estate, and afterbeing brought up by Peter’s father, an old, harmless and kindly Radical, he is sent to school at the age of sixteen, and later on goes into the army, receiving a commission in one of the most brilliant of the Guards regiments in St. Petersburg. No sooner does he get to St. Petersburg, than he distinguishes himself by savage eccentricities. He is what the Russians call askandalist. He is a good-looking young man of Herculean strength, and quiet, pleasant manners, who every now and then gives way to the wildest caprices, the most extravagant and astounding whims, when he seems to lose all control over himself. For a time he leads the kind of life led by Prince Harry with Falstaff, and his extravagances are the subject of much talk. He drives over people in his carriage, and publicly insults a lady of high position. Finally, he takes part in two duels. In both cases he is the aggressor. One of his adversaries is killed, and the other severely wounded. On account of this he is court-martialled, degraded to the ranks, and has to serve as a common soldier in an infantry regiment. But in 1863 he has an opportunity of distinguishing himself, and after a time his military rank is given back to him. It is then that he returns to the provincial town, where the whole of the events told in the book take place, and plays a part in Peter’s organisation. Peter regards him, as I have said, as his trumpcard, because of the strength of his character. He is one of those people who represent the extreme Lucifer quality of the Russian nature. He is proud and inflexible, without any trace of weakness. There is nothing in the world he is afraid of, and there is nothing he will not do if he wishes to do it. He will commit the wildest follies, the most outrageous extravagances, but as it weredeliberately, and not as if he were carried away by the impetuosity of his temperament. On the contrary, he seems throughout to be as cold as ice, and eternally unruffled and cool; and he is capable when he chooses of showing a self-control as astonishing and remarkable as his outbursts of violence. Peter knows very well that he cannot hope to influence such a man. Stavrogin sees through Peter and despises him. At the same time, Peter hopes to entangle him in his scheme, as he entangles the others, and thinks that, this once done, a man with Stavrogin’s character cannot help being his principal asset. It is on this very character, however, that the whole of Peter’s schemes break down. Stavrogin has married a lame, half-witted girl; the marriage is kept secret, and he loves and is loved by an extremely beautiful girl called Lisa. Peter conceives the idea of getting a tramp, an ex-convict who is capable of everything, to murder Stavrogin’s wife and the drunken brother withwhom she lives, and to set fire to a part of the town and the house where the two are living. He hopes that Stavrogin will marry Lisa, and then not be able to withdraw from his organisation for fear of being held responsible for the murder of his wife.
Stavrogin sees through the whole scheme. He announces his marriage publicly; but this act, instead of alienating Lisa from him, increases her passion. Nevertheless Stavrogin’s wife and her brother are murdered, and a large quarter of the town is burned. When Lisa asks Stavrogin if he is in any way connected with this murder, he replies that he was opposed to it, but that he had guessed that they would be murdered, and that he had taken no steps to prevent it. Lisa herself is killed, almost by accident, on the scene of the murder of Stavrogin’s wife. She is killed by an excited man in the crowd, who holds her responsible for the deed, and thinks that she has come to gloat over her victims. After this Stavrogin washes his hands of the whole business, and leaves the town. It is then that Peter carries out the rest of his plans. Chatov is murdered, and Peter calls upon Kirilov to fulfil his promise and commit suicide. He wishes him, before committing the act, to write a paper in which he shall state that he has disseminated revolutionary pamphlets and proclamations, and that he has employed theex-convict who committed the murders. He is also to add that he has killed Chatov on account of his betrayal. But Kirilov has not known until this moment that Chatov is dead, and he refuses to say a word about him. Then begins a duel between these two men in the night, which is the most exciting chapter in the book, and perhaps one of the most exciting and terrifying things ever written. Peter is in terror lest Kirilov should fail him, and Kirilov is determined not to be a party to Peter’s baseness. Peter plays upon his vanity, and by subtle taunts excites to a frenzy the man’s monomania, till at last he consents to sign the paper. Then snatching a revolver he goes into the next room. Peter waits, not knowing what is going to happen. Ten minutes pass, and Peter, consumed by anxiety, takes a candle and opens the door of the room in which Kirilov has shut himself. He opens the door, and somebody flies at him like a wild beast. He shuts the door with all his might, and remains listening. He hears nothing, and as he is now convinced that Kirilov will not commit suicide, he makes up his mind to kill Kirilov himself, now that he has got the paper. He knows that in a quarter of an hour his candle will be entirely consumed; he sees there is nothing else to be done but to kill Kirilov, but at the same time he does not wish to do it.
At last he takes the revolver in his right hand and the candle in his left hand, and with his left hand manages to open the door. The room is apparently empty. At first he thinks that Kirilov has fled; then he becomes aware that against the wall, between a window and a cupboard, Kirilov is standing, stiff and motionless as a ghost. He rushes toward him. Kirilov remains motionless, but his eye is fixed on Peter, and a sardonic smile is on his lips, as though he had guessed what was in Peter’s mind. Peter, losing all self-control, flies at Kirilov, who knocks the candle out of Peter’s hand, and bites his little finger nearly in two. Peter beats him on the head with the butt of his revolver, and escapes from the room. As he escapes, he hears terrifying screams of “At once! at once! at once!” Peter is running for his life, and is already in the vestibule of the house, when he hears a revolver shot. Then he goes back and finds that Kirilov has killed himself.
This is practically the end of the book. Peter gets away to St. Petersburg, and all his machinations are discovered. The corpse of Chatov is found; the declaration in Kirilov’s handwriting at first misleads the police, but the whole truth soon comes out, since nearly all the conspirators confess, each being overcome with remorse. Peter escapes and goes abroad. Nicholas Stavroginreturns to his home from St. Petersburg; he is not inculpated in any way in the plots, since the conspirators bear witness that he had nothing to do with them. But he hangs himself nevertheless.
As I have said before, the chief characters of this book, Stavrogin, Peter, Chatov, and Kirilov, who seemed such gross exaggerations when the book was published, would surprise nobody who has had any experience of contemporary Russia. Indeed, Peter is less an imitation of Nechaev than a prototype of Azev. As to Kirilov, there are dozens of such men, possessed by one idea and one idea only, in Russia. Stavrogin also is a type which occurs throughout Russian history. Stavrogin has something of Peter the Great in him, Peter the Great run to seed, and of such there are also many in Russia to-day.
The subject ofThe Brothers Karamazov[21]had occupied Dostoievsky’s mind ever since 1870, but he did not begin to write it until 1879, and when he died in 1881, only half the book was finished; in fact, he never even reached what heintended to be the real subject of the book. The subject was to be the life of a great sinner, Alosha Karamazov. But when Dostoievsky died, he had only written the prelude, in itself an extremely long book; and in this prelude he told the story of the bringing up of his hero, his surroundings and his early life, and in so doing he tells us all that is important about his hero’s brothers and father. The story of Alosha’s two brothers, and of their relations to their father, is in itself so rich in incident and ideas that it occupies the whole book, and Dostoievsky died before he had reached the development of Alosha himself.
The father is a cynical sensualist, utterly wanting in balance, vain, loquacious, and foolish. His eldest son, Mitya, inherits his father’s sensuality, but at the same time he has the energy and strength of his mother, his father’s first wife; Mitya is full of energy and strength. His nature does not know discipline; and since his passions have neither curb nor limit, they drive him to catastrophe. His nature is a mixture of fire and dross, and the dross has to be purged by intense suffering. Like Raskolnikov, Mitya has to expiate a crime. Circumstantial evidence seems to indicate that he has killed his father. Everything points to it, so much so that when one reads the book without knowing the storybeforehand, one’s mind shifts from doubt to certainty, and from certainty to doubt, just as though one were following some absorbing criminal story in real life. After a long series of legal proceedings, cross-examinations, and a trial in which the lawyers perform miracles of forensic art, Mitya is finally condemned. I will not spoil the reader’s pleasure by saying whether Mitya is guilty or not, because there is something more than idle curiosity excited by this problem as one reads the book. The question seems to test to the utmost one’s power of judging character, so abundant and so intensely vivid are the psychological data which the author gives us. Moreover, the question as to whether Mitya did or did not kill his father is in reality only a side-issue in the book; the main subjects of which are, firstly, the character of the hero, which is made to rise before us in its entirety, although we do not get as far as the vicissitudes through which it is to pass. Secondly, the root-idea of the book is an attack upon materialism, and the character of Alosha forms a part of this attack. Materialism is represented in the second of the brothers, Ivan Karamazov, and a great part of the book is devoted to the tragedy and the crisis of Ivan’s life.
Ivan’s mind is, as he says himself, Euclidean and quite material. It is impossible, he says,to love men when they are near to you. You can only love them at a distance. Men are hateful, and there is sufficient proof of this in the sufferings which children alone have to endure upon earth. At the same time, his logical mind finds nothing to wonder at in the universal sufferings of mankind. Men, he says, are themselves guilty: they were given Paradise, they wished for freedom, and they stole fire from heaven, knowing that they would thereby become unhappy; therefore they are not to be pitied. He only knows that suffering exists, that no one is guilty, that one thing follows from another perfectly simply, that everything proceeds from something else, and that everything works out as in an equation. But this is not enough for him: it is not enough for him to recognise that one thing proceeds simply and directly from another. He wants something else; he must needs have compensation and retribution, otherwise he would destroy himself; and he does not want to obtain this compensation somewhere and some time, in infinity, but here and now, on earth, so that he should see it himself. He has not suffered, merely in order that his very self should supply, by its evil deeds and its passions, the manure out of which some far-off future harmony may arise. He wishes to see with his own eyes how the lion shall lie down with the lamb. The great stumbling-block to him isthe question of children: the sufferings of children. If all men have to suffer, in order that by their suffering they may build an eternal harmony, what have children got to do with this? It is inexplicable that they should suffer, and that it should be necessary for them to attain to an eternal harmony by their sufferings. Why shouldtheyfall into the material earth, and make manure for some future harmony? He understands that there can be solidarity in sin between men; he understands the idea of solidarity and retaliation, but he cannot understand the idea of solidarity with children in sin. The mocker will say, he adds, that the child will grow up and have time to sin; but he is not yet grown up. He understands, he says, what the universal vibration of joy must be, when everything in heaven and on earth joins in one shout of praise, and every living thing cries aloud, “Thou art just, O Lord, for Thou hast revealed Thy ways.” And when the mother shall embrace the man who tormented and tore her child to bits,—when mother, child, and tormentor shall all join in the cry, “Lord, Thou art just!” then naturally the full revelation will be accomplished and everything will be made plain. Perhaps, he says, he would join in the Hosanna himself, were that moment to come, but he does not wish to do so; while there is yet time, he wishes to guard himself against so doing, andtherefore he entirely renounces any idea of the higher harmony. He does not consider it worth the smallest tear of one suffering child; it is not worth it, because he considers that such tears are irreparable, and that no compensation can be made for them; and if they are not compensated for, how can there be an eternal harmony? But for a child’s tears, he says, there is no compensation, for retribution—that is to say, the punishment of those who caused the suffering—is not compensation. Finally, he does not think that the mother has the right to forgive the man who caused her children to suffer; she may forgive him for her own sufferings, but she has not the right to forgive him the sufferings of her children. And without such forgiveness there can be no harmony. It is for love of mankind that he does not desire this harmony: he prefers to remain with his irreparable wrong, for which no compensation can be made. He prefers to remain with his unavenged and unavengeable injuries and his tireless indignation. Even if he is not right, they have put too high a price, he says, on this eternal harmony. “We cannot afford to pay so much for it; we cannot afford to pay so much for the ticket of admission into it. Therefore I give it back. And if I am an honest man, I am obliged to give it back as soon as possible. This I do. It is not because I do not acknowledgeGod, only I must respectfully return Him the ticket.”
The result of Ivan’s philosophy is logical egotism and materialism. But his whole theory is upset, owing to its being pushed to its logical conclusion by a half-brother of the Karamazovs, a lackey, Smerdyakov, who puts into practice the theories of Ivan, and commits first a crime and then suicide. This and a severe illness combine to shatter Ivan’s theories. His physical being may recover, but one sees that his epicurean theories of life cannot subsist.
In sharp contrast to the two elder brothers is the third brother, Alosha, the hero of the book. He is one of the finest and most sympathetic characters that Dostoievsky created. He has the simplicity of “The Idiot,” without his naïveté, and without the abnormality arising from epilepsy. He is a normal man, perfectly sane and sensible. He is the very incarnation of “sweet reasonableness.” He isIvan Durak, Ivan the Fool, but without being a fool. Alosha, Dostoievsky says, was in no way a fanatic; he was not even what most people call a mystic, but simply a lover of human beings; he loved humanity; all his life he believed in men, and yet nobody would have taken him for a fool or for a simple creature. There was something in him which convinced you that he did not wish to be a judge of men, thathe did not wish to claim or exercise the right of judging others. One remarkable fact about his character, which is equally true of Dostoievsky’s own character, was that Alosha with this wide tolerance never put on blinkers, or shut his eyes to the wickedness of man, or to the ugliness of life. No one could astonish or frighten him, even when he was quite a child. Every one loved him wherever he went. Nor did he ever win the love of people by calculation, or cunning, or by the craft of pleasing. But he possessed in himself the gift of making people love him. It was innate in him; it acted immediately and directly, and with perfect naturalness. The basis of his character was that he was aRealist. When he was in the monastery where he spent a part of his youth, he believed in miracles; but Dostoievsky says, “Miracles never trouble a Realist; it is not miracles which incline a Realist to believe. A true Realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself sufficient strength and sufficient capacity to disbelieve even in a miracle. And if a miracle appears before him as an undeniable fact, he will sooner disbelieve in his senses than admit the fact of the miracle. If, on the other hand, he admits it, he will admit it as a natural fact, which up to the present he was unaware of. The Realist does not believe in God because he believes in miracles, but he believes in miraclesbecause he believes in God. If a Realist believes in God, his realism will necessarily lead him to admit the existence of miracles also.”
Alosha’s religion, therefore, was based on common sense, and admitted of no compromise. As soon as, after having thought about the matter, he becomes convinced that God and the immortality of the soul exist, he immediately says to himself quite naturally: “I wish to live for the future life, and to admit of no half-way house.” And just in the same way, had he been convinced that God and the immortality of the soul do not exist, he would have become an atheist and a socialist. For Dostoievsky says that Socialism is not only a social problem, but anatheisticproblem. It is the problem of the incarnation of atheism, the problem of a Tower of Babel to be made without God, not in order to reach Heaven from earth, but to bring Heaven down to earth.
Alosha wishes to spend his whole life in the monastery, and to give himself up entirely to religion, but he is not allowed to do so. In the monastery, Alosha finds a spiritual father, Zosima. This character, which is drawn with power and vividness, strikes us as being a blend of saintliness, solid sense, and warm humanity. He is an old man, and he dies in the convent; but before he dies, he sees Alosha, and tells him that he must leave the convent for ever; he must go out intothe world, and live in the world, and suffer. “You will have many adversaries,” he says to him, “but even your enemies will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on account of them, and you will bless life and cause others to bless it. That is the most important thing of all.” Alosha is to go into the world and submit to many trials, for he is a Karamazov too, and the microbe of lust which rages in the blood of that family is in him also. He is to put into practice Father Zosima’s precepts: “Be no man’s judge; humble love is a terrible power which effects more than violence. Only active love can bring out faith. Love men and do not be afraid of their sins: love man in his sin; love all the creatures of God, and pray God to make you cheerful. Be cheerful as children and as the birds.” These are the precepts which Alosha is to carry out in the face of many trials. How he does so we never see, for the book ends before his trials begin, and all we see is the strength of his influence, the effect of the sweetness of his character in relation to the trials of his two brothers, Mitya and Ivan.
That Dostoievsky should have died before finishing this monumental work which would have been his masterpiece, is a great calamity. Nevertheless the book is not incomplete in itself: it is a large piece of life, and it contains the whole ofDostoievsky’s philosophy and ideas. Moreover, considered merely as a novel, as a book to be read from the point of view of being entertained, and excited about what is going to happen next, it is of enthralling interest. This book, therefore, can be recommended to a hermit who wishes to ponder over something deep, in a cell or on a desert island, to a philosopher who wishes to sharpen his thoughts against a hard whetstone, to a man who is unhappy and wishes to find some healing balm, or to a man who is going on a railway journey and wishes for an exciting story to while away the time.
This study of Dostoievsky, or rather this suggestion for a study of his work, cannot help being sketchy and incomplete. I have not only not dealt with his shorter stories, such asWhite Nights,The Friend of the Family,The GamblerandThe Double, but I have not even mentioned two longer novels,The HobbledehoyandDespised and Rejected. The last named, though it suffers from being somewhat melodramatic in parts, contains as strong a note of pathos as is to be found in any of Dostoievsky’s books; and an incident of this book has been singled out by Robert Louis Stevenson as being—together withthe moment when Mark Antony takes off his helmet, and the scene when Kent has pity on the dying Lear—one of the most greatly moving episodes in the whole of literature. The reason why I have not dwelt on these minor works is that to the English reader, unacquainted with Dostoievsky, an exact and minute analysis of his works can only be tedious. I have only dealt with the very broadest outline of the case, so as to enable the reader to make up his mind whether he wishes to become acquainted with Dostoievsky’s work at all. My object has been merely to open the door, and not to act as a guide and to show him over every part of the house. If I have inspired him with a wish to enter the house, I have succeeded in my task. Should he wish for better-informed guides and fuller guide-books, he will find them in plenty; but guides and guide-books are utterly useless to people who do not wish to visit the country of which they treat. And my sole object has been to give in the broadest manner possible a rough sketch of the nature of the country, so as to enable the traveller to make up his mind whether he thinks it worth while or not to buy a ticket and to set forth on a voyage of exploration. Should such an one decide that the exploration is to him attractive and worth his while, I should advise him to begin withThe Letters from a Dead House, and to go on withThe Idiot,Crime and Punishment,andThe Brothers Karamazov; and to readThe Possessedlast of all. If he understands and appreciatesThe Letters from a Dead House, he will be able to understand and appreciate the character of Dostoievsky and the main ideas which lie at the root of all his books. If he is able to understand and appreciateThe Idiot, he will be able to understand and appreciate the whole of Dostoievsky’s writings. But should he begin withCrime and Punishment, orThe Possessed, it is possible that he might be put off, and relinquish the attempt; just as it is possible that a man who took up Shakespeare’s plays for the first time and began withKing Lear, might make up his mind not to persevere, but to choose some more cheerful author. And by so doing he would probably lose a great deal, since a man who is repelled byKing Learmight very well be able to appreciate not onlyThe Merchant of Venice, butHenry IVand theWinter’s Tale. If one were asked to sum up briefly what was Dostoievsky’s message to his generation and to the world in general, one could do so in two words: love and pity. The love which is in Dostoievsky’s work is so great, so bountiful, so overflowing, that it is impossible to find a parallel to it, either in ancient or in modern literature. It is human, but more than human, that is to say, divine. Supposing the Gospel of St. John were to be annihilated and lost to us forever, although nothing, of course, could replace it, Dostoievsky’s work would go nearer to recalling the spirit of it than any other books of any other European writer.[22]It is the love which faces everything and which shrinks from nothing. It is the love which that saint felt who sought out the starving and freezing beggar, and warmed and embraced him, although he was covered with sores, and who was rewarded by the beggar turning into His Lord and lifting him up into the infinite spaces of Heaven.
Dostoievsky tells us that the most complete of his characters, Alosha, is a Realist, and that was what Dostoievsky was himself. He was a Realist in the true sense of the word, and he was exactly the contrary of those people who when they wrote particularly filthy novels in which they singled out and dwelt at length on certain revolting details of life, called themselves Realists. He saw things as they really are; he never shut his eyes or averted his gaze from anything which was either cruel, hateful, ugly, bitter, diseased or obscene; but the more he looked at the ugly things, the more firmly he became convinced of the goodness that is in and behind everything: To put itbriefly, the more clearly he realised mortal misery and sin, the more firmly he believed in God. Therefore, as I have more than once said in this study, although he sounds the lowest depths of human gloom, mortal despair, and suffering, his books are a cry of triumph, a clarion peal, a hosanna to the idea of goodness and to the glory of God. There is a great gulf between Dostoievsky and such novelists as make of their art a clinical laboratory, in which the vices and the sores, and only the vices and the sores, are dissected and observed, not under a microscope, but under a magnifying-glass, so that a totally distorted and exaggerated impression of life is the result. And this is all the more remarkable, because a large part of his most important characters are abnormal: monomaniacs, murderers, or epileptics. But it is in dealing with such characters that the secret of Dostoievsky’s greatness is revealed. For in contradistinction to many writers who show us what is insane in the sanest men, who search for and find a spot of disease in the healthiest body, a blemish in the fairest flower, a flaw in the brightest ruby, Dostoievsky seeks and finds the sanity of the insane, a healthy spot in the sorest soul, a gleam of gold in the darkest mine, a pearl in the filthiest refuse heap, a spring in the most arid desert. In depicting humanity at its lowest depth of misery andthe human soul at its highest pitch of anguish, he is making a great act of faith, and an act of charity, and conferring a huge benefit on mankind. For in depicting the extremest pain of abnormal sufferers, he persuades us of the good that exists even in such men, and of the goodness that is in suffering itself; and by taking us in the darkest of dungeons, he gives us a glimpse such as no one else has given us of infinite light and love.
On the other hand, Dostoievsky is equally far removed from such writers (of which we have plenty in England) who throw a cloak over all evil things, and put on blinkers, and who, because the existence of evil is distasteful to them, refuse to admit and face it. Such an attitude is the direct outcome of either conscious or unconscious hypocrisy. Dostoievsky has not a grain of hypocrisy in his nature, and therefore such an attitude is impossible to him.
Dostoievsky is a Realist, and he sees things as they are all through life, from the most important matters down to the most trivial. He is free from cant, either moral or political, and absolutely free from all prejudice of caste or class. It is impossible for him to think that because a man is a revolutionary he must therefore be a braver man than his fellows, or because a man is a Conservative he must therefore be a more cruel man than his fellows, justas it is impossible for him to think the contrary, and to believe that because a man is a Conservative he cannot help being honest, or because a man is a Radical he must inevitably be a scoundrel. He judges men and things as they are, quite apart from the labels which they choose to give to their political opinions. That is why nobody who is by nature a doctrinaire[23]can appreciate or enjoy the works of Dostoievsky, since any one who bases his conduct upon theory cannot help at all costs being rudely shocked at every moment by Dostoievsky’s creed, which is based on reality and on reality alone. Dostoievsky sees and embraces everything as it really is. The existence of evil, of ugliness and of suffering, inspires him with only one thing, and this is pity; and his pity is like that which King Lear felt on the Heath when he said:
“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend youFrom seasons such as these? O, I have ta’enToo little care of this! Take physic, pomp;Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,That thou may’st shake the superflux to them,And show the heavens more just.”
Dostoievsky has a right to say such things, because throughout his life he not only exposed himself, but was exposed, to feel what wretches feel; because he might have said as King Lear said to Cordelia:
“I am boundUpon a wheel of fire that mine own tearsDo scald like molten lead.”
He knew what wretches feel, by experience and not by theory, and all his life he was bound upon a “wheel of fire.”
With regard to Dostoievsky’s political opinions, he synthesised and expressed them all in the speech which he made in June 1880, at Moscow, in memory of Pushkin. “There was never,” he said, “a poet who possessed such universal receptivity as Pushkin. It was not only that he was receptive, but this receptivity was so extraordinarily deep, that he was able to embrace and absorb in his soul the spirit of foreign nations. No other poet has ever possessed such a gift; only Pushkin; and Pushkin is in this sense a unique and a prophetic apparition, since it is owing to this gift, and by means of it, that the strength of Pushkin—that in him which is national and Russian—found expression.... For what is the strength of the Russian national spirit other than an aspiration towards a universal spirit, which shall embrace the whole worldand the whole of mankind? And because Pushkin expressed the national strength, he anticipated and foretold its future meaning. Because of this he was a prophet. For what did Peter the Great’s reforms mean to us? I am not only speaking of what they were to bring about in the future, but of what they were when they were carried out. These reforms were not merely a matter of adopting European dress, habits, instruction and science.... But the men who adopted them aspired towards the union and the fraternity of the world. We in no hostile fashion, as would seem to have been the case, but in all friendliness and love, received into our spirit the genius of foreign nations, of all foreign nations, without any distinction of race, and we were able by instinct and at the first glance to distinguish, to eliminate contradictions, to reconcile differences; and by this we expressed our readiness and our inclination, we who had only just been united together and had found expression, to bring about a universal union of all the great Aryan race. The significance of the Russian race is without doubt European and universal. To be a real Russian and to be wholly Russian means only this: to be a brother of all men, to be universally human. All this is called Slavophilism; and what we call ‘Westernism’ is only a great, although ahistorical and inevitable misunderstanding. To the true Russian, Europe and the affairs of the great Aryan race, are as dear as the affairs of Russia herself and of his native country, because our affairs are the affairs of the whole world, and they are not to be obtained by the sword, but by the strength of fraternity and by our brotherly effort towards the universal union of mankind.... And in the long-run I am convinced that we, that is to say, not we, but the future generations of the Russian people, shall every one of us, from the first to the last, understand that to be a real Russian must signify simply this: to strive towards bringing about a solution and an end to European conflicts; to show to Europe a way of escape from its anguish in the Russian soul, which is universal and all-embracing; to instil into her a brotherly love for all men’s brothers, and in the end perhaps to utter the great and final word of universal harmony, the fraternal and lasting concord of all peoples according to the gospel of Christ.”
So much for the characteristics of Dostoievsky’s moral and political ideals. There remains a third aspect of the man to be dealt with: his significance as a writer, as an artist, and as a maker of books; his place in Russian literature, and in the literature of the world. This is, I think, not very difficult to define. Dostoievsky, in spite of theuniversality of his nature, in spite of his large sympathy and his gift of understanding and assimilation, was debarred, owing to the violence and the want of balance of his temperament, which was largely the result of disease, from seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. The greatest fault of his genius, his character, and his work, is a want of proportion. His work is often shapeless, and the incidents in his books are sometimes fantastic and extravagant to the verge of insanity. Nevertheless his vision, and his power of expressing that vision, make up for what they lose in serenity and breadth, by their intensity, their depth and their penetration. He could not look upon the whole world with the calm of Sophocles and of Shakespeare; he could not paint a large and luminous panorama of life unmarred by any trace of exaggeration, as Tolstoy did. On the other hand, he realised and perceived certain heights and depths of the human soul which were beyond the range of Tolstoy, and almost beyond that of Shakespeare. His position with regard to Tolstoy, Fielding, and other great novelists is like that of Marlowe with regard to Shakespeare. Marlowe’s plays compared with those of Shakespeare are like a series of tumultuous fugues, on the same theme, played on an organ which possesses but a few tremendous stops, compared with the interpretation of music, infinitely variousin mood, by stringed instruments played in perfect concord, and rendering the finest and most subtle gradations and shades of musical phrase and intention. But every now and then the organ-fugue, with its thunderous bass notes and soaring treble, attains to a pitch of intensity which no delicacy of blended strings can rival: So, every now and then, Marlowe, in the scenes, for instance, when Helena appears to Faustus, when Zenocrate speaks her passion, when Faustus counts the minutes to midnight, awaiting in an agony of terror the coming of Mephistopheles, or when Edward II is face to face with his executioners, reaches a pitch of soaring rapture, of tragic intensity which is not to be found even in Shakespeare. So it is with Dostoievsky. His genius soars higher and dives deeper than that of any other novelist, Russian or European. And what it thus gains in intensity it loses in serenity, balance and steadiness. Therefore, though Dostoievsky as a man possesses qualities of universality, he is not a universal artist such as Shakespeare, or even as Tolstoy, although he has one eminently Shakespearian gift, and that is the faculty for discerning the “soul of goodness in things evil.” Yet, as a writer, he reached and expressed the ultimate extreme of the soul’s rapture, anguish and despair, and spoke the most precious words of pity which have been heard inthe world since the Gospels were written. In this man were mingled the love of St. John, and the passion and the fury of a fiend; but the goodness in him was triumphant over the evil. He was a martyr; but bound though he was on a fiery wheel, he maintained that life was good, and he never ceased to cry “Hosanna to the Lord: for He is just!” For this reason Dostoievsky is something more than a Russian writer: he is a brother to all mankind, especially to those who are desolate, afflicted and oppressed. He had “great allies”:
“His friends were exaltations, agonies,And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.”