Like Baudelaire and Nietzsche, whom he resembled morally and intellectually, Dostoievsky was an intellectual romantic in rebellion against life. His determination seemed to be to create an individual who should defy life, and when he had defied it to his heart's content “to hand God back his ticket,” having no further need of it as the journey of existence was at an end. There is no place to go, nothing to do, everything worth trying has been tried and found valueless, and wherever he turns his gaze he sees the angel standing upon the sea and upon the earth avowing that there shall be time no longer; so he puts a bullet in his temple if his name is Svidrigailov, or soaps a silken cord so that it will support his weight when one end is attached to a large nail and the other to his neck,if it is Stavrogin. Dostoievsky as a littérateur was obsessed with sin and expiation. He connived and laboured to invent some new sin; he struggled and fought to augment some old one with which he could inflict one of his creation, and then watch him contend with it, stagger beneath it, or flaunt it in the world's face. After it has wrought havoc, shipwrecked the possessor's life, and brought inestimable calamity and suffering to others, then he must devise adequate expiation. Expiation is synonymous with sincere regret, honest request for forgiveness, and genuine determination to sin no more, but Dostoievsky's sinners must do something more; they must make renunciation in keeping with the magnitude of their sins, and as this is beyond human expression they usually kill themselves or go mad.
He had planned for his masterpiece “The Life of a Great Sinner,” and the outline of it from his note-book deposited in the Central Archive Department of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, has now been published. The hero is a composite of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth, plus the sin against the Holy Ghost. No one has yet succeeded in defining that sin satisfactorily, but it is what Dostoievsky's antinomian heroes were trying to do, especially such an one as Stavrogin. Another noteworthy feature about them is that they were all sadistic or masochistic: they got pleasure varying from an appreciative glow to voluptuous ecstasy and beyond, from causing pain and inducing humiliation, or having it caused in them by others.
This was a conditioning factor of conduct of all his antinomian heroes, and unless it be kept in mind when reading of them, their antics and their reflections are sometimes difficult of comprehension. He makes one of them, one of the most intellectual and moral, Ivan Karamazov, say “You know we prefer beating-rods and scourges—that's our national institution.... I know for a fact there are people who at everyblow are worked up to sensuality, which increases progressively at every blow they inflict.”
It is difficult for a psychiatrist, after reading Dostoievsky's novels, to believe that he did not have access to the literature of insanity or have first-hand knowledge of the insane, and the criminologist must wonder where he got his extraordinary knowledge of the relation between suffering and lust. It may be that the habits of the Emperor Cheou-sin Yeow-waug were known to him, just as those of Caligula and Claudius were known to him.
It is not with the passions of the body or of the senses alone that his heroes contend, but with those of the mind. The fire that burns within them is abstraction, and the fuel that replenishes it is thought—thought of whence and whither. By it the possessors are lashed to a conduct that surpasses that of hate, jealousy, lubricity, or any of the baser passions as the light of an incandescent bulb surpasses that of a tallow candle. They are all men of parts, either originally endowed with great intelligence or brought to a certain elevation of intellectuality by education. Their conduct, their actions, their misdeeds, their crimes are the direct result of their argumentation, not of concrete, but of abstract things, and chiefly the nature and existence of God, the varieties of use that an individual may permit his intelligence, free-will, free determination, and of the impositions of dogma founded on faith and inspiration which seem contrary to reason and science.
All his heroes are more or less insane. Herein lies Dostoievsky's strength and his weakness in character creation. None of them could be held fully responsible in a court of justice. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings the Lord ordained strength, but there is no writing to show that out of the mouths of the insane comes wisdom. Not that insanity is inimical to brilliant, even wise, utterance; but the pragmatic application of wisdom to life calls for sanity.
Dostoievsky himself was abnormal. He was what the physiciancalls a neuropathic and psychopathic individual. In addition, he had genuine epilepsy, that is, epilepsy not dependent upon some accidental disease, such as infection, injury, or new growth. He was of psychopathic temperament and at different times in his life displayed hallucination, obsession, and hypochondria.
He wrote of them as if he were the professor, not the possessor. The psychopathic constitution displays itself as:
“An unstable balance of the psychic impulses, an overfacile tendency to emotion, an overswift interchange of mental phases, an abnormally violent reaction of the psychic mechanism. The feature most striking to the beholder in the character of such sufferers is its heterogeneous medley of moods and whims, of sympathies and antipathies; of ideas in turn joyous, stern, gloomy, depressed and philosophical; of aspirations at first charged with energy then dying away to nothing. Another feature peculiar to these sufferers is their self-love. They are the most naïve of egoists; they talk exclusively and persistently and absorbedly of themselves; they strive always to attract the general attention, to excite the general interest and to engage everyone in conversation concerning their personality, their ailments and even their vices.”
“An unstable balance of the psychic impulses, an overfacile tendency to emotion, an overswift interchange of mental phases, an abnormally violent reaction of the psychic mechanism. The feature most striking to the beholder in the character of such sufferers is its heterogeneous medley of moods and whims, of sympathies and antipathies; of ideas in turn joyous, stern, gloomy, depressed and philosophical; of aspirations at first charged with energy then dying away to nothing. Another feature peculiar to these sufferers is their self-love. They are the most naïve of egoists; they talk exclusively and persistently and absorbedly of themselves; they strive always to attract the general attention, to excite the general interest and to engage everyone in conversation concerning their personality, their ailments and even their vices.”
Scores of his characters had such constitution, and in none is it more perfectly delineated than in Katerina Ivanovna, though Lise Hohlakov, of the same novel, had wider display of the hysteria that grew on this fertile soil.
The facts of Dostoievsky's life that are important to the reader who would comprehend his psychopathic creations are that his father, surgeon to the Workhouse Hospital at Moscow, was a stern, suspicious, narrow-minded, gloomy, distrustful man who made a failure of life. “He has lived in the world fifty years and yet he has the same opinions of mankind that he had thirty years ago,” wrote Feodor when seventeen years old. His mother was tender-minded, pious, and domestic, and died early of tuberculosis. Although much has been written of his boyhood, there is nothing particularly interestingin it bearing on his career save that he was sensitive, introspective, unsociable, and early displayed a desire to be alone. The hero of the book “Youth” relates that in the lowest classes of the gymnasium he scorned all relations with those of his class who surpassed him in any way in the sciences, physical strength, or in clever repartee. He did not hate such a person nor wish him harm. He simply turned away from him, that being his nature. These characteristics run like a red thread through the entire life of Dostoievsky. A tendency to day-dreaming was apparent in his earliest years, and he gives graphic accounts of hallucination in “An Author's Diary.” At the age of sixteen he was admitted to the School of Engineering and remained there six years. During the latter part of his student days he decided upon literature as a career. Before taking it up, however, he had a brief experience with life after he had obtained his commission as engineer, which showed him to be totally incapable of dealing with its every-day eventualities, particularly in relation to money, whose purpose he knew but whose value was ever to remain a secret. It was then that he first displayed inability to subscribe or to submit to ordinary social conventions; indeed, a determination to transgress them.
From his earliest years the misfortunes of others hurt him and distressed him, and in later life the despised and the rejected, the poor and the oppressed, always had his sympathy and his understanding. God and the people, that is the Russian people, were his passion. “The people have a lofty instinct for truth. They may be dirty, degraded, repellent, but without them and in disregard of them nothing useful can be effected.” The intellectuals who held themselves aloof from the masses he could not abide, and atheists, and their propaganda socialism, were anathema. He demanded of men who arrogated to themselves a distinction above their fellow men, “who go to the people not to learn to know it, but condescendinglyto instruct and patronise it,” not only repentance, but expiation by suffering.
His first important literary contribution was entitled “Poor Folk.” He was fortunate enough to be praised by his contemporaries and particularly by Bielinsky, an editor and great critic, who saw in the central idea of the story corroboration of his favourite theory, viz.: abnormal social conditions distort and dehumanise mankind to such an extent that they lose the human form and semblance. As the result of this publication, Dostoievsky made the acquaintance of the leading literary lights of St. Petersburg, many of whom praised him too immoderately for his own good, as he produced nothing worthy of his fame until many years after the event in his life which must be looked upon as the beginning of his mental awakenment—banishment and penal servitude in Siberia.
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrines of the Frenchman, Charles Fourier, were having such acceptance in this country, where the North American Phalanx in New Jersey and the Brook farm in Massachusetts were thriving, as to encourage the disciples of that sentimental but wholly mad socialist in other lands, particularly in Russia, that their hopes of seeing the world dotted withPhalansteresmight be fulfilled. Dostoievsky later stated most emphatically that he never believed in Fourierism, but nibbling at it nearly cost him his life. In fact, all that stood between him and death was the utterance of the word “Go,” which it would seem the lips of the executioner had puckered to utter when the reprieve came. Dostoievsky was suspected of being a Revolutionary. One evening at the Petrashevsky Club he declaimed Pushkin's poem on Solitude:
“My friends, I see the people no longer oppressed,And slavery fallen by the will of the Czar,And a dawn breaking over us, glorious and bright,And our country lighted by freedom's rays.”
In discussion he suggested that the emancipation of the peasantry might have to come through a rising. Thus he became suspected. But it was not until he denounced the censorship and reflected on its severity and injustice that he was taken into custody. He and twenty-one others were sentenced to death. He spent four years in a Siberian prison and there became acquainted with misery, suffering, and criminality that beggars description.
“What a number of national types and characters I became familiar with in the 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. I learnt to know the Russian people as only a few know them.”
“What a number of national types and characters I became familiar with in the 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. I learnt to know the Russian people as only a few know them.”
After four years he was, through the mediation of powerful friends, transferred for five years to military service in Siberia, chiefly at Semipalatinsk. In 1859 he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg, and in the twenty years that followed he published those books upon which his fame rests; namely, “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “The Possessed,” “The Journal of an Author,” and “The Brothers Karamazov.” In 1867 he was obliged to leave Russia to escape imprisonment for debt, and he remained abroad, chiefly in Switzerland, for four years.
In his appeal to General Todleben to get transferred from the military to the civil service and to be permitted to employ himself in literature, he said:
“Perhaps you have heard something of my arrest, my trial and the supreme ratification of the sentence which was given in the case concerning me in the year 1849. I was guilty and am very conscious of it. I was convicted of the intention (but only the intention) of acting against the Government; I was lawfully and quite justly condemned; the hard and painful experiences of the ensuing years have sobered me and altered my views in many respects, but then while I was stillblind I believed in all the theories and Utopias. For two years before my offense I had suffered from a strange moral disease—I had fallen into hypochondria. There was a time even when I lost my reason. I was exaggeratedly irritable, had a morbidly developed sensibility and the power of distorting the most ordinary events into things immeasurable.”
“Perhaps you have heard something of my arrest, my trial and the supreme ratification of the sentence which was given in the case concerning me in the year 1849. I was guilty and am very conscious of it. I was convicted of the intention (but only the intention) of acting against the Government; I was lawfully and quite justly condemned; the hard and painful experiences of the ensuing years have sobered me and altered my views in many respects, but then while I was stillblind I believed in all the theories and Utopias. For two years before my offense I had suffered from a strange moral disease—I had fallen into hypochondria. There was a time even when I lost my reason. I was exaggeratedly irritable, had a morbidly developed sensibility and the power of distorting the most ordinary events into things immeasurable.”
While Dostoievsky was in prison his physical health improved very strikingly, but, despite this, his epilepsy, which had previously manifested itself only in vague or minor attacks, became fully developed. Attempts have been made to prove that prison life and particularly its hardships and inhumanities were responsible in a measure for Dostoievsky's epilepsy; but such allegations are no more acceptable than those which attribute it to his father's alcoholism. His epilepsy was a part of his general make-up, a part of his constitution. It was an integral part of him and it became an integral part of his books.
The phenomena of epilepsy may be said to be the epileptic personality and the attack with its warning, its manifestations, and the after-effects. The disease is veiled in the same mystery today as it was when Hercules was alleged to have had it. Nothing is known of its causation or of its dependency, and all that can truthfully be said of the personality of the epileptic is that it is likely to display psychic disorder, evanescent or fixed. Attacks are subject to the widest variation both as to frequency and intensity, but the most enigmatic things about the disease are the warnings of the attack, and the phenomena that sometimes appear vicariously of the attack—the epileptic equivalent they are called. Dostoievsky had theseauræand equivalents in an unusual way and with extraordinary intensity, and narration of them as they were displayed in the different characters of his creation who were afflicted with epilepsy, and of their effects and consequences is an important part of every one of his great books. Dostoievsky would seemto have been of the belief that a brain in which some of the mechanisms are disordered may yet remain superior both intellectually and morally to others less affected, and that the display of such weakness or maladjustment may put the possessor in tune with the Infinite, may permit him to blend momentarily with the Eternal Harmony, to be restored temporarily to the Source of its temporal emanation. Although he describes this in his “Letters,” as he experienced it, he elaborates it in his epileptic heroes, and in none so seductively as in “The Idiot.” He makes Prince Myshkin say:
“He thought amongst other things how in his epileptic condition there was one stage, just before the actual attack, when suddenly in the midst of sadness, mental darkness and oppression his brain flared up, as it were, and with an unwonted outburst all his vital powers were vivified simultaneously. The sensation of living and of self-consciousness was increased at such moments almost tenfold. They were moments like prolonged lightning. As he thought over this afterward in a normal state he often said to himself that all these flashes and beams of the highest self-realisation, self-consciousness and “highest existence” were nothing but disease, the interruption of the normal state. If this were so, then it was by no means the highest state, but, on the contrary, it must be reckoned as the very lowest. And yet he came at last to the very paradoxical conclusion: What matter if it is a morbid state? What difference can it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation when remembered and examined in the healthy state proves to be in the highest degree harmony and beauty, and gives an unheard-of and undreamed-of feeling of completion, of balance, of satisfaction and exultant prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life? If at the last moment of consciousness before the attack he had happened to say to himself lucidly and deliberately “for this one moment one might give one's whole life,” then certainly that moment would be worth a lifetime. However, he did not stand out for dialectics; obfuscation, mental darkness and idiocy stand before him as the obvious consequences of those loftiest moments.”
“He thought amongst other things how in his epileptic condition there was one stage, just before the actual attack, when suddenly in the midst of sadness, mental darkness and oppression his brain flared up, as it were, and with an unwonted outburst all his vital powers were vivified simultaneously. The sensation of living and of self-consciousness was increased at such moments almost tenfold. They were moments like prolonged lightning. As he thought over this afterward in a normal state he often said to himself that all these flashes and beams of the highest self-realisation, self-consciousness and “highest existence” were nothing but disease, the interruption of the normal state. If this were so, then it was by no means the highest state, but, on the contrary, it must be reckoned as the very lowest. And yet he came at last to the very paradoxical conclusion: What matter if it is a morbid state? What difference can it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation when remembered and examined in the healthy state proves to be in the highest degree harmony and beauty, and gives an unheard-of and undreamed-of feeling of completion, of balance, of satisfaction and exultant prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life? If at the last moment of consciousness before the attack he had happened to say to himself lucidly and deliberately “for this one moment one might give one's whole life,” then certainly that moment would be worth a lifetime. However, he did not stand out for dialectics; obfuscation, mental darkness and idiocy stand before him as the obvious consequences of those loftiest moments.”
It is a question for the individual to decide whether one would give his whole life for a moment of perfection and bliss, but it is probable that no one would without assurance that some permanent advantage, some growth of spirit that could be retained, some impress of spirituality that was indelible, such as comes from an understanding reading of “Hamlet” or a comprehended rendering of “Parsifal,” would flow from it or follow it. But to have it and then come back to a world that is “just one damn thing after another” it is impossible to believe. Dostoievsky was right when he said that Myshkin could look forward to obfuscation, mental darkness, and imbecility with some certainty, for physicians experienced with epilepsy know empirically that the unfortunates who have panoplied warnings, and especially illusions, are most liable to become demented early. But that all epileptics with such warnings do not suffer this degradation is attested by the life of Dostoievsky, who was in his mental summation when death seized him in his sixtieth year.
Another phenomenon of epilepsy that Dostoievsky makes many of his characters display is detachment of the spirit from the body. They cease to feel their bodies at supreme moments, such as at the moment of condemnation, of premeditated murder, or planned crime. In other words, they are thrown into a state of ecstasy similar to that responsible for the mystic utterances of St. Theresa, or of insensibility to obvious agonies such as that of Santa Fina. He not only depicts the phenomena of the epileptic attack, its warnings, and its after-effects in the most masterful way, as they have never been rendered in literature, lay or scientific, but he also describes many varieties of the disease. Before he was exiled, in 1847, he gave a most perfect description of the epileptic constitution as it was manifested in Murin, a character in “The Landlady.” The disease, as it displays itself in the classical way, is revealed by Nelly in “The Insulted and Injured,” but it is in Myshkin, in “The Idiot,” that we see epilepsy transformingthe individual from adult infantilism, gradually, almost imperceptibly, to imbecility, the victim meantime displaying nobility and tender-mindedness that make the reader's heart go out to him.
The first fruits of Dostoievsky's activities after he had obtained permission to publish were inconsequential. It was not until the appearance of “Letters from a Deadhouse,” which revealed his experiences and thoughts while in prison, and the volume called “The Despised and the Rejected,” that the literary world of St. Petersburg realised that the brilliant promise which he had given in 1846 was realised. Some of his literary adventures, especially in journalism, got him into financial difficulties, and he began to write under the lash, as he described it, and against time.
In 1865 appeared the novel by which he is widely known, “Crime and Punishment,” in which Dostoievsky's first great antinomian hero, Raskolnikov, a repentant nihilist, is introduced to the reader. He believes that he has a special right to live, to rebel against society, to transgress every law and moral precept, and to follow the dictates of his own will and the lead of his own thought. Such a proud, arrogant, intellectual spirit requires to be cleansed, and inasmuch as the verity, the essence of life, lies in humility, Dostoievsky makes his hero murder an old pawnbroker and his sister and then proceeds to put him through the most excruciating mental agony imaginable. At the same time his mother and sister undergo profound vicarious suffering, while a successor of Mary Magdalene succours him in his increasingly agonised state and finally accompanies him to penal servitude. Many times Raskolnikov appears upon the point of confessing his crime from the torments of his own conscience, but, in reality, Svidrigailov, a strange monster of sin and sentiment, and the police officer, Petrovitch, a forerunner of Sherlock Holmes, suggest the confession to him, and between the effect of theirsuggestion and the appeal of Sonia, whose love moves him strangely, he confesses but does not repent. He does not repent because he has done no sin. He has committed no crime. The scales have not yet fallen from his eyes. That is reserved for the days and nights of his prison life and is to be mediated by Sonia's sacrificial heroism.
It is interesting to contemplate Dostoievsky at the state of development when he wrote “Crime and Punishment,” or rather the state of development of his idea of free will. Raskolnikov has the same relation to Stavrogin of “The Possessed” and to Kirillov, the epileptic of the same book, as one of the trial pictures of the figures in the Last Supper has to Leonardo's masterpiece. Dostoievsky apparently was content to describe a case of moral imbecility in its most attractive way, and then when he had outlined its lineaments, to leave it and not adjust it to the other groupings of the picture that was undertaken. It would seem that his interest had got switched from Raskolnikov to Svidrigailov, who has dared to outrage covenants and conventions, laws and morality, and has measured his will against all things. Svidrigailov knows the difference between good and evil, right and wrong; indeed he realises it with great keenness, and when he finds that he is up against it, as it were, and has no escape, he puts the revolver to his temple and pulls the trigger. Death is the only thing he has not tried, and why wait to see whether eternity is just one little room like a bathhouse in the country, or whether it is something beyond conception? Why not find out at once as everything has been found out? Svidrigailov is Dostoievsky's symbol of the denial of God, the denial of a will beyond his own.
“If there is a will beyond my own, it must be an evil will because pain exists. Therefore I must will evil to be in harmony with it. If there is no will beyond my own, then I must assert my own will until it is free of all check beyond itself. Therefore I must will evil.”
“If there is a will beyond my own, it must be an evil will because pain exists. Therefore I must will evil to be in harmony with it. If there is no will beyond my own, then I must assert my own will until it is free of all check beyond itself. Therefore I must will evil.”
Raskolnikov represents the conflict of will with the element of moral duty and conscience, and Svidrigailov represents its conflict with defined, deliberate passion. This same will in conflict with the will of the people, the State, is represented by Stavrogin and Shatov, while its conflict with metaphysical and religious mystery is represented by Karamazov, Myshkin, and Kirillov. Despite the fact that they pass through the furnace of burning conflicts and the fire of inflaming passions, the force of dominant will is ever supreme. Their human individuality, as represented by their ego, remains definite and concrete. It is untouched, unaltered, undissolved. Though they oppose themselves to the elements that are devouring them, they continue to assert their ego and self-will even when their end is at hand. Myshkin, Alyosha, and Zosima submit to God's will but not to man's.
“Crime and Punishment” and “The Brothers Karamazov” are the books by which Dostoievsky is best known in this country, and the latter, though unfinished, was intended by him to be his great work, “a work that is very dear to me for I have put a great deal of my inmost self into it,” and it has been so estimated by the critics. Indeed, it is the summary of all his thoughts, of all his doubts, of all his fancies, and such statement of his faith as he could formulate. It is saturated in mysticism and it is avade mecumof psychiatry. It is the narrative of the life of an egotistic, depraved, sensuous monster, who is a toad, a cynic, a scoffer, a drunkard, and a profligate, the synthesis of which, when combined with moral anæsthesia, constitutes degeneracy; of his three legitimate sons and their mistresses; and of an epileptic bastard son who resulted from the rape of an idiot girl.
The eldest son, Dimitri, grows up unloved, unguided, unappreciated, frankly hostile to his father whom he loathes and despises, particularly when he is convinced that the father has robbed him of his patrimony. He has had a rake's career, but when Katerina Ivanovna puts herself unconditionally in hispower to save her father's honour he spares her. Three months later, when betrothed to her, he has become entangled in Circe's toils by Grushenka, for whose favour Fyodor Pavlovitch, his father, is bidding.
The second son, Ivan, half brother to Dimitri, whose mother was driven to insanity by the orgies staged in her own house and by the lusts and cruelties of her husband, is an intellectual and a nihilist. He is in rebellion against life, but he has an unquenchable thirst for life, and he will not accept the world. To love one's neighbours is impossible; even to conceive of it is repugnant. He will not admit that all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, and he insists “while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures.” He does not want forgiveness earned for him vicariously. He wants to do it himself. He wants to avenge his suffering, to satisfy his indignation, even if he is wrong. Too high a price is asked for harmony; it is beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. “And so,” he says to his younger brother, the potential Saint Alyosha, “I hasten to give back my entrance ticket. It's not God that I don't accept, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”
Dostoievsky speaks oftener out of the mouth of Ivan than of any of his other characters. When some understanding Slav like Myereski shall formulate Dostoievsky's religious beliefs it will likely be found that they do not differ materially from those of Ivan, as stated in the chapter “Pro and Contra” of “The Brothers Karamazov.” He sees in Christ the Salvation of mankind, and the woe of the world is that it has not accepted Him.
The third brother, Alyosha, is the prototype of the man's redeemer—a tender-minded, preoccupied youth, chaste and pure, who takes no thought for the morrow and always turns the other cheek, and esteems his neighbour far more than himself. At heart he is a sensualist. “All the Karamazovs are insects to whom God has given sensual lust which will stir upa tempest in your blood,” said Ivan to Alyosha when he was attempting to set forth his philosophy of life. But this endowment permits him the more comprehensively to understand the frailties of others and to condone their offences. The monastic life appeals to him, but he is warded off from it by Father Zosima, the prototype of Bishop Tikhon, in “Stavrogin's Confession,” whose clay was lovingly moulded by Dostoievsky, but into whose nostrils he did not blow the breath of life. This monk, who had been worldly and who, because of his knowledge, forgives readily and wholly, is a favourite figure of Dostoievsky, and one through whom he frequently expresses his sentiments and describes his visions. His convictions, conduct and teaching may be summarised in his own words:
“Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don't fret. If only your penitence fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not. Be not bitter against men. Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the dead man in your heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in truth. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.”
“Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don't fret. If only your penitence fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not. Be not bitter against men. Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the dead man in your heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in truth. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.”
Alyosha is Dostoievsky's attempt to create a superman. He is the most real, the most vital, the most human, and, at the same time, the most lovable of all his characters. He is theessence of Myshkin and Stavrogin and Karamazov and Father Zosima, the residue that is left in the crucible when their struggles were reduced, their virtues and their vices distilled. He is Myshkin whose mind has not been destroyed by epilepsy, he is Stavrogin who has seen light before his soul was sold to the devil, he is Ivan Karamazov redeemed by prayer and good works, he is the apotheosis of Father Zosima. “He felt clearly and as it were tangibly that something firm and unshakable as the vault of heaven had entered into his soul. It was as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his mind—and it was for all his life and for ever and for ever.” In other words, Alyosha realises in a mild form and continuously that which Myshkin realises as the result of disease and spasmodically. Alyosha goes into a state of faith, of resignation, of adjustment with the Infinite, and Myshkin goes into dementia via ecstasy.
As a peace-maker, adjuster, comforter, and inspiration he has few superiors in profane literature. His speech at the Stone of Ilusha embodies the whole doctrine of brotherly love.
Dimitri's hatred of his father becomes intense when they are rivals for Grushenka's favours, so that it costs him no pang to become potentially a parricide on convincing himself that the father has been a successful rival. Psychologically he represents the type of unstable, weak-willed, uninhibited being who cannot learn self-control. Such individuals may pass unmarked so long as they live in orderly surroundings, but as soon as they wander from the straight path they get into trouble. Their irritability, manifested for the smallest cause, may give rise to attacks of boundless fury which are further increased by alcohol, and the gravest crimes are often committed in these conditions. The normal inhibitions are entirely absent; there is no reflection, no weighing of the costs. The thought which develops in the brain is at once translated into action. Their actions are irrational, arbitrary, dependent upon the moment, governed by accidental factors.
Despite overwhelming proof, Dimitri denies his guilt from the start. It is an open question if the motive of this denial is repentance, shame, love for Grushenka, or fear. The three experts of the trial each has his own opinion. The first two declare Dimitri to be abnormal. The third regards him as normal. The author himself has made it easy to judge of Dimitri's state of mind. Though on the boundary line of accountability, he is not in such a pathological condition as to exclude his free determination; however, he is not fully responsible for the crime, and extenuating circumstances have to be conceded by the judge.
Smerdyakov, the illegitimate child of the idiot girl whom Karamazovpereraped on a wager and who eventually murders his father (vicariously, as it were, his morality having been destroyed by Ivan), is carefully delineated by Dostoievsky. He is epileptic. Not only are the disease and its manifestations described, but there is a masterly presentation of the personality alteration which so often accompanies its progress. In childhood he is cruel, later solitary, suspicious, and misanthropical. He has no sense of gratitude and he looks at the world mistrustfully. When Fyodor Pavlovitch hears he has epilepsy he takes interest in him, sees to it that he has treatment, and sends him to Moscow to be trained as cook. During the three years of absence his appearance changes remarkably. Here it may be remarked that though Dostoievsky lived previous to our knowledge of the rôle that the ductless glands play in maintaining the appearance and conserving the nutritional equilibrium of the individual, he gives, in his delineation of Smerdyakov, an extraordinarily accurate description of the somatic and spiritual alteration that sometimes occurs when some of them cease functioning. It is his art also to do it in a few words, just as it is his art to forecast Smerdyakov's crime while discussing the nature and occurrence of epileptic-attack equivalents, which he called contemplations.
The way he disentangles the skeins from the confused mass of putridity, disease, and crime of which this novel is constituted, has been the marvel and inspiration of novelists the world over for the past fifty years. Dimitri wants to kill his father for many reasons, but the one that moves him to meditate it and plan it is: Grushenka, immoral and unmoral, will then be beyond the monster's reach; Grushenka whose sadism peeps out in her lust for Alyosha and who can't throw off her feeling of submission for the man who had violated her when she was seventeen. Dimitri loves Grushenka and Grushenka loves Dimitri “abnormals with abnormal love which they idealised.” During an orgy which would have pleased Nero, Dimitri lays drunken Grushenka on the bed, and kisses her on the lips.
“'Don't touch me,' she faltered in an imploring voice. 'Don't touch me till I am yours.... I have told you I am yours, but don't touch me ... spare me.... With them here, with them close you mustn't. He's here. It's nasty here.'”
“'Don't touch me,' she faltered in an imploring voice. 'Don't touch me till I am yours.... I have told you I am yours, but don't touch me ... spare me.... With them here, with them close you mustn't. He's here. It's nasty here.'”
He sinks on his knees by the bedside. He goes to his father's house at a propitious time and suitably armed for murder; he hails him to the window by giving the signal that he has learned from Smerdyakov would apprise him of the approach of Grushenka; but before he can strike him Smerdyakov, carrying out a plan of his own, despatches him, and Dimitri flees. The latter half of the book is taken up with the trial of Dimitri and the preliminaries to it, which give Dostoievsky an opportunity to pay his respects to Jurisprudence and to medicine and to depict a Slav hypocrite, Rahkitin. Smerdyakov commits the crime to find favour in the eyes of his god Ivan. He knows that Ivan desired it, suggested it, and went away knowing it was going to be done—at least that is the impression the epileptic mind of Smerdyakov gets—and under that impression he acts when he despatches his father withthe three-pound paper weight. The unprejudiced reader will feel the sympathies that have gradually been aroused for Smerdyakov because of his disease fade as he reads of the plan that the murderer made, and when he has hung himself after confessing to Ivan. In proportion as they recede for the valet, they will be rearoused for Ivan whose brain now gives away under the hereditary and acquired burden. This gives Dostoievsky the opportunity to depict the prodromata and early manifestations of acute mania as they have never, before or since, been depicted in lay literature.
Description of the visual hallucination which Ivan has in the early stages, that a “Russian gentleman of a particular kind is present,” and the delusion that he is having an interview with him, might have been copied from the annals of an asylum, had they been recorded there by a master of the narrative art. It is one of the first, and the most successful attempts to depict dual personality, and to record the beliefs and convictions of each side of the personality. He listens to hisalter egosit in judgment upon him and his previous conduct, and is finally goaded by him to assault, as was Luther under similar though less dramatic circumstances. “Voices,” as the delirious and insane call them, have never been more accurately rendered than in the final chapters of the Ivan section of the book.
An exhaustive psychosis displaying itself in intermittent delirium, and occurring in a profoundly psychopathic individual, is the label that a physician would give Ivan's disorder. Alyosha saw in it that God, in whom Ivan disbelieved, and His truth were gaining mastery over his heart, which still refused to submit.
“The Idiot” was one of Dostoievsky's books which had a cold reception from the Russian reading public, but which has been, next to “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Crime and Punishment,” the most popular in this country. The basic idea is the representation of a truly perfect and noble man, and it isnot at all astonishing that Dostoievsky made him an epileptic. He had been impressed, he said, that all writers who had sought to represent Absolute Beauty were unequal to the task. It is so difficult, for the beautiful is the ideal, and ideals have long been wavering and waning in civilised Europe. There is only one figure of absolute beauty, Christ, and he patterns Prince Myshkin upon the Divine model. He brings him in contact with Nastasya Filipovna, who is the incarnation of the evil done in the world, and this evil is represented symbolically by Dostoievsky as the outrage of a child. The nine years of brooding which had followed the outrage inflicted upon Nastasya as a child by Prince Tosky had imprinted upon her face something which Myshkin recognises as the pain of the world, and from the thought of which he cannot deliver himself, and which he cannot mitigate for her. She marries him after agonies of rebellion, after having given him to heralter egoin virginal state, Aglaia Epanchin, and then takes him away to show her power and demonstrate her own weakness; but she deserts him on the church steps for her lover Rogozhin, who murders her that night. Myshkin, finding Rogozhin next morning, says more than “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” He lies beside him in the night and bathes his temples with his tears, but fortunately in the morning when the murderer is a raving lunatic a merciful Providence has enshrouded Myshkin in his disease.
As Dimitri Merejkowski, the most understanding critic and interpreter of Dostoievsky who has written of him, truthfully says, his works are not novels or epics, but tragedies. The narrative is secondary to the construction of the whole work, and the keystone of the narrative is the dialogue between the characters. The reader feels that he hears real persons talking and talking without artifice, just as they would talk in real life; and they express sentiments and convictions which one would expect from individuals of such inheritance, education, development, and environment, obsessed particularly with theinjustices of this world and the uncertainties of the world to be, concerned day and night with the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the future of civilisation.
It has been said that he does not describe the appearance of his characters, for they depict themselves, their thoughts and feelings, their faces and bodies, by their peculiar forms of language and tones of voice. Although he does not dwell on portraiture, he has scarcely a rival in delineation, and his portraits have that quality which perhaps Leonardo of all who worked with the brush had the capacity to portray, and which Pater saw in theGioconda; the revelation of the soul and its possibilities in the lineaments. The portrait of Mlle. Lebyadkin, the imbecile whom the proud Nikolay Stavrogin married, not from love or lust, but that he might exhaust the list of mortifications, those of the flesh, for himself, and those of pride for his family; that he might kill his instincts and become pure spirit, is as true to life as if Dostoievsky had spent his existence in an almshouse sketching the unfortunates segregated there. The art of portraiture cannot surpass this picture of Shatov, upon whose plastic soul Stavrogin impressed his immoralities in the shape of “the grand idea” and who said to Stavrogin in his agony, “Sha'n't I kiss your foot-prints when you've gone? I can't tear you out of my heart, Nikolay Stavrogin:”
“He was short, awkward, had a shock of flaxen hair, broad shoulders, thick lips, very thick overhanging white eyebrows, a wrinkled forehead, and a hostile, obstinately downcast, as it were shamefaced, expression in his eyes. His hair was always in a wild tangle and stood up in a shock which nothing could smooth. He was seven or eight and twenty.”
“He was short, awkward, had a shock of flaxen hair, broad shoulders, thick lips, very thick overhanging white eyebrows, a wrinkled forehead, and a hostile, obstinately downcast, as it were shamefaced, expression in his eyes. His hair was always in a wild tangle and stood up in a shock which nothing could smooth. He was seven or eight and twenty.”
It is not as a photographer of the body that Dostoievsky is a source of power and inspiration in the world today, and will remain so for countless days to come—for he has depicted the Russian people as has no one else save Tolstoi, and his picturesconstitute historical documents—but as a photographer of the soul, a psychologist. Psychology is said to be a new science, and a generation ago there was much ado over a new development called “experimental psychology,” which was hailed as the key that would unlock the casket wherein repose the secrets of the mind; the windlass that would lift layer by layer the veil that has, since man began, concealed the mysteries of thought, behaviour, and action. It has not fulfilled its promise. It would be beyond the truth to say that it has been sterile, but it is quite true to say that the contributions which it has made have been as naught compared with those made by abnormal psychology. Some, indeed, contend that the only real psychological contributions of value have come from a study of disease and deficiency, and their contentions are granted by the vast majority of those entitled to opinion.
Dostoievsky is the master portrayer of madness and of bizarre states of the soul and of the mind that are on the borderland of madness. Not only has he depicted the different types of mental alienation, but by an intuition peculiar to his genius, by a species of artistic divination, he has understood and portrayed their display, their causation, their onset—so often difficult to determine even for the expert—and finally the full development of the disease. Indeed, he forestalled the description of the alienists. “They call me a psychologist,” says Dostoievsky; “it is not true. I am only a realist in the highest sense of the word, that is I depict all the soul's depth. Arid observations of every-day trivialities I have long ceased to regard as realism—it is quite the reverse.”
It is the mission of one important branch of psychology to depict the soul's depth, the workings of the conscious mind, and as the interior of a house that one is forbidden to enter is best seen when the house has been shattered or is succumbing to the incidences of time and existence, so the contents of the soul are most discernible in the mind that has some of its impenetralia removed by disease. It was in this laboratory that Dostoievskyconducted his experiments, made his observations, and recorded the results from which he drew conclusions and inferences. “In my works I have never said so much as the twentieth part of what I wished to say, and perhaps could actually have said. I am firmly convinced that mankind knows much more than it has hitherto expressed either in science or in art. In what I have written there is much that came from the depth of my heart,” he says in a letter to a friendly critic, to which may be added that what he has said is in keeping with the science of today, and is corroborated by workers in other fields of psychology and psychiatry.
“The Possessed,” in which Dostoievsky reached the high-water mark of personality analysis, has always been a stumbling block to critics and interpreters. The recent publication by the Russian Government of a pamphlet containing “Stavrogin's Confession” sheds an illuminating light on the hero; and even second-hand knowledge of what has gone on in Russia, politically and socially, during the past six years facilitates an understanding of Pyotr Stepanovitch, Satan's impresario, and of Kirillov, nihilist.
The task that Dostoievsky set himself in “The Possessed” was not unlike that which the Marquis de Sade set himself in “Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue,” and Sacher-Masoch in “Liebesgeschichten”; viz., to narrate the life of an unfortunate creature whose most important fundamental instinct was perverted and who could get the full flavour of pleasure only by inflicting cruelty, causing pain, or engendering humiliation.
“Every unusually disgraceful, utterly degrading, dastardly, and above all, ridiculous situation in which I ever happened to be in my life, always roused in me, side by side with extreme anger, an incredible delight.”
“Every unusually disgraceful, utterly degrading, dastardly, and above all, ridiculous situation in which I ever happened to be in my life, always roused in me, side by side with extreme anger, an incredible delight.”
Stavrogin was apparently favoured by fortune: he had charm, education, wealth, and health. In reality he was handicapped to an incalculable degree. After a brilliant briefcareer in the army and in St. Petersburg society, he withdrew from both and associated with the dregs of the population of that city, with slip-shod government clerks, discharged military men, beggars of the higher class, and drunkards of all sorts. He visited their filthy families, spent days and nights in dark slums and all sorts of low haunts. He threw suspicion of theft on the twelve-year-old daughter of a woman who rented him a room for assignations that he might see her thrashed, and a few days later he raped her. The next day he hated her so he decided to kill her and was preparing to do so when she hanged herself. This is not featured in the novel as it now stands. Until the publication of “Stavrogin's Confession” interpreters of Stavrogin's personality who maintained that he was a sadist were accused of having read something into his character that Dostoievsky did not intend him to have. After committing this “greatest sin in the world,” he determined to cripple his life in the most disgusting way possible, that he might pain his mother, humiliate his family, and shock society. He would marry Marya, a hemiplegic idiot who tidied up his room. After the ceremony he went to stay with his mother, the granddame of their province. He went to distract himself, which included seducing and enslaving Darya, Shatov's sister, a ward of his mother, and a member of the family.
Suddenly, apropos of nothing, he was guilty of incredible outrages upon various persons and, what was most enigmatic, these outrages were utterly unheard of, quite inconceivable, entirely unprovoked and objectless. For instance, one day at the club, he tweaked the nose of an elderly man of high rank in the service. When the Governor of the club sought some explanation Stavrogin told him he would whisper it in his ear.