CHAPTER IIIFEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY: TRAGEDIST, PROPHET, AND PSYCHOLOGIST
A hundred years ago, in Moscow, a being manifested its existence, who in the fullness of extraordinary vision and intellectuality heralded a religious rebirth, became the prophet of a new moral, ethical, and geographical order in the world, and the prototype of a new hero. Time has accorded Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoievsky the position of one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, and as time passes his position becomes more secure. Like the prophet of old, during life he was fastened between two pieces of timber—debts and epilepsy—and sawn asunder by his creditors and his conscience. Posterity links his name with Pushkin and Tolstoi as the three great writers of their times. They are to the Russian Renaissance what Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were to the Italian Renaissance.
It is appropriate now, the centenary of his birth, to make a brief statement of Dostoievsky's position as a writer or novelist, and in so doing estimate must be made of him as a prophet, preacher, psychologist, pathologist, artist, and individual. Though he was not schooled to speak as expert in any of these fields, yet speak in them he did, and in a way that would have reflected credit upon a professor. It is particularly the field of morbid psychology, usually called psychiatry, that Dostoievsky made uniquely his own. He described many of the nervous and mental disorders, such as mania and depression, the psychoneuroses, hysteria, obsessive states, epilepsy, moral insanity, alcoholism, and that mysterious mental and moral constitution called “degeneracy” (apparently first hand, forthere is no evidence or indication that he had access to books on mental medicine), in such a way that alienists recognise in his descriptions masterpieces in the same way that the painter recognises the apogee of his art in Giotto or Velázquez.
Not only did he portray the mental activity and output of the partially and potentially insane, but he described the conduct and reproduced the speech of individuals with personality defects, and with emotional disequilibrium, in a way that has never been excelled in any literature. For instance, it would be difficult to find a more comprehensive account of adult infantilism than the history of Stepan Trofimovitch, a more accurate presentation of the composition of a hypocrite than Rahkitin, of “The Brothers Karamazov.” No one save Shakespeare has shown how consuming and overwhelming jealousy may be. That infirmity has a deeper significance for anyone familiar with the story of Katerina Ivanovna. Indeed Dostoievsky is the novelist of passions. He creates his creatures that they may suffer, not that they may enjoy from the reactions of life, though some of them get pleasure in suffering. Such was Lise, the true hysteric, who said, “I should like some one to torture me, marry me and then torture me, deceive me and then go away. I don't want to be happy.”