MAURICE LAZAR

The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, etc., translated by Constance Garnett. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Chiefly concerned with the fester of civilization, literature, music, painting, all the modern forms of individual expression are elliptical in the sense that the old Æsthetic values of emotional beauty seem to have become nullified, or else congealed, in the artist’s direct application of his instrument to the repudiation of fixed social values or moralities; to the expansion of life-interests. We today want more than beauty of external form; we want the beauty of depth!

The true artist is such primarily because of his engrossing appetite for life, because (as Flaubert said) of the chaos in his soul. And although Flaubert kept on chiseling words around the lives of men and women totally devoid of inspirating individuality, his dictum has been nobly exemplified in the life and writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, that great-hearted epileptic Russian of whose psychological powers Nietzsche admittedly availed himself.

Tolstoy was reported to have said, in conversation with a writer for Le Temps, “A woman who has never suffered pain is a beast.” He could have stretched the allegation to include the other sex, if only by way of illusion to that intense spiritual quality in modern Russian literature—a literature that has never been (notably) an off-shoot of, as much as a protest against, the retrogressive structures of its respective periods.

This spiritual, or psychical, concern with the individual’s adjustment to the functioning of life has been revealed to highest degree in Dostoevsky’s novels. It is also manifest in the analytical mould assumed by the creative arts of our time.

While Dostoevsky’s personality is separably bound up with his work, profitable appreciation of the latter can be considerably amplified with knowledge of the important facts of his life and the conditions with which he struggled. I will record the more essential facts of his life as I have gathered them, and try to explain the causes that have made for the distinction in his work from that of all other writers.

He was born in a charity-hospital in Moscow, in 1821. His father was an army-surgeon, his mother a store-keeper’s daughter. I like to think that he derived his expressive powers, or rather the nebulÆ out of which they subsequently developed, from his mother, perhaps partly because of my theory that men of acute genius ultimately do transcend the difference of sex in the quality of their personalities as well as in that of their work.

Like most imaginative youths who come into contact with fine art, Dostoevsky was stimulated to literary expression by his study of classical and contemporaneous European literature. He had lived twenty-three years when he graduated from a St. Petersburg school of military engineering. His first novel, Poor Folk, was published three years later, and served to focus upon him the attention of the critics.

In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested, with members of a radical organization, on governmental charges of sedition. The terrible suffering he sustained while awaiting his execution (he was first confined in prison for eight months) have been set forth in striking passages of his novels, The Idiot and Letters from a Dead House. The sentence of death was finally, and very unexpectedly, commuted to one of imprisonment in Siberia for four years. At the expiration of this period he served perforce as a private soldier in the Russian army for three more years. When he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg he was accompanied by his first wife, whom he had loved and married while in exile.

Dostoevsky’s interminable suffering from epileptic seizures (it has been suggested that these fits originated in a beating administered to him by his father when Fyodor was a boy); his poverty, and the constant accumulation of debt; the terrific haste with which he found it necessary to write his most profound books—all have made it natural to him, in dwelling upon any physiological aspect of his characters, to be as unconvincing as the eremite attempting an analysis of conditions of sex life.

In short, Dostoevsky’s nervous disorders pervaded his “sensual sense” of beauty—of beauty in all its manifestations. At the same time it must be remarked that this negation of physical responsiveness surely intensified the acuteness of his mental vision, which was otherwise refined emotionally by the results of his imprisonment and life-long hardships. And this also explains why Dostoevsky’s novels are lacking so singularly in the tingle of the physical contact of his characters; why the suffering of his men and women move us so profoundly; why his writings are so uneven, his dialogues of such elemental power, and his purely descriptive passages so ordinary.

The elemental power in his dialogues is due chiefly to the vigor of action accredited his characters. In his work is not to be found the picturesque phrase, the adroitly-turned period, the illuminating metaphor, the sequence of construction, the tone or shading offered by the commingling of his objects. Dostoevsky has no style of form, his outlines are amorphous. It is in his power of transcribing the living voice, of recording in never-failing reflex emotionalism the lives and deeds of his startling figures that he is supreme.

If you have read one of his books you know much of what he has to say. His other works are repetitions, mainly. For Dostoevsky does not attempt to paint character, and rarely does he stop to show the subtly-reacting influence of environment upon his men and women. Always he is concerned with the idea of the individual’s personal adjustments to life. Each book of his throbs with the discordant elements that clash over the establishment of this idea; and always its conclusions are recognized. That is why I regard Dostoevsky as an optimist. And his emphasis on humanity’s spiritual conception of life, no matter what the cost, grew more and more pronounced in his later works.

His faith in human beings is expressed in one set theme, which can be conveniently resolved into terms of comparison: on one hand the individual’s evasion of life’s realities by the exercise of material (and therefore fictitious) values; and on the other hand, the frank acceptance of life’s realities for the attainment of a proportionate spiritual balance.

In Crime and Punishment, Dr. Raskolnikov is in doubt as to the ultimate worth of this attainment, until he expiates his crime in killing the old moneylender (I forget her name) not by confessing,—Dostoevsky is too fine a realist for that,—but by obtaining personal solace from the regenerating qualities of his resignation. And it is characteristic of our writer’s method that Raskolnikov is assisted toward this state of resignation by his love, Sonia, the prostitute, whose regard for the murderer is based upon the confirmation evidenced in him of the faith that has been stimulated in herself.

Similar in thesis, though expressed in terms of minor differences, is Dostoevsky’s last and unquestionably finest work, The Brothers Karamazov. It is incomplete, actually one-third as long as he had intended it to be. He died before he could finish the book. Nevertheless it is compactly-formed material as the work now stands, and superior to his other novels not because his outlines are more constrained, his movement more co-ordinate, and the actual writing of a more intensive quality, but because here he defines his own conception of spiritual beauty in a distinctive fashion not to be found in his other books.

He offers us the history of a family,—and what a family! Each figure in this domestic (?) group embodies conflicting phases of his great idea. Fyodor Karamazov, the father, is a sensualist of the lowest type imaginable. His three sons are Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. There is also another (illegitimate) son, Smerdyakov, an epileptic.

Dmitri Karamazov inherits his father’s passion for wine, women, and song, but the son’s pursuit of this tame and conventional item is tempered by frequent lapses, by periods of misgiving. The second son is a materialist and a cynic. He changes his mind after a severe illness, and his materialistic beliefs are all but supplanted by intense spiritual curiosity. The third and youngest son is an idealist, lovable and loving. Here again we have Dostoevsky’s discordant elements conveyed in terms of human characterizations. The plot of the story is as formless as life itself, for it is with life, not with plots, that Dostoevsky deals.

Dmitri’s hatred of his father is intensified by the rivalry that exists between the two in their common pursuit of Grushenka’s affections. Grushenka is a woman of the demi-monde. The author, I think, tried to draw her in lines that would reveal a physical zest of life, as evidenced, for example, in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. His failure to make Grushenka a convincing individual, as an individual, is typical, for the reasons I have already advanced. Development of the story shows how Dmitri’s repeatedly avowed determination to kill his father bears fruit. The elder Karamazov is found dead one night, with his skull crushed. Dmitri is imprisoned. And the rest of the book, which is devoted to Dmitri’s trial, the moral regeneration of Ivan, and the urge of life in Alyosha, approaches psychological heights (or depths) that have not been surpassed to this day. Small wonder that Nietzsche referred so affectionately to the “giant spirit.”

I have made reference to Dostoevsky’s “optimism.” A better word for it is faith—faith of a new high order. He is the most cheerful, sunlight-giving writer in Russian literature. “The essence of religious feeling,” says Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, “does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors.”

Prince Myshkin is the central figure of the novel; he is the “idiot,” and everybody abuses him. He is insulted and beaten, and robbed and deceived and loved. He is the most singular figure in literature—he is Dostoevsky himself.

But he is not an idiot in any sense. He is so profoundly simple and wise, and has such great faith in human beings, that he is mistaken by the men and women of ordinary passions as a fool. While he can be readily toyed with by women—a significant phase of the writer’s own attitude toward the sex—Prince Myshkin is regarded by them from a common basis of understanding. For them he holds no quality of sex. “Perhaps you don’t know that, owing to my illness,” he says (he too is an epileptic), “I know nothing of women.”

It is in The Idiot that Dostoevsky’s women are at least life-like. The Epanchin sisters, especially the youngest, Aglaia, are not “types” in the usual sense, but preconceived studies. The pages devoted to Aglaia’s love affair with Prince Myshkin are of the happiest in the book.

Besides the books I have already mentioned, the more important works are The Possessed, in which national politics play a large part; Poor Folk, the story of a poor clerk’s love for a poor woman who eventually turns from him; and Letters from a Dead House. This last is a book of personal experiences, and reveals Dostoevsky’s relations with the criminals with whom he was imprisoned in Siberia. The mental temper of men who disregard and break the common and social laws, is set forth with the passionate curiosity that lies behind all his probings of the human soul. I am strongly tempted to offer quotations; to show, in this passage or that, how deeply Dostoevsky looked into the most extreme boundaries of human sensibilities; but on the whole extracts from his writings would do more harm than good. His work is so disconnected, though not in any sense detached, that extracts could not serve here to indicate the amazing clarity of his vision.

His books arouse a feeling of wonder that there can be so many things in our own individual emotions with which we never before came into contact. He moves us so profoundly because he tears his men and women out of their morally-bound lives and makes them confront stupendous questions—the questions of life. He plies detail upon detail of human misery until one feels that the whole world is reeling from him—then grows aware of the sweet white glow of Dostoevsky’s faith, and feels that life can hold no terrors—that he is above the petty miseries of human strife! That is why I say Dostoevsky’s optimism is of the new high order.

Dostoevsky purges one’s mind. He makes you conscious of the beauty of a soul.