Quite one of the most remarkable things about Dostoievsky is his complete antithesis to Tolstoy in everything. Tolstoy is healthy, Dostoievsky epileptic. Tolstoy's life was strangely uneventful; Dostoievsky was condemned to death after a youth spent in poverty and misery: he endured four years' hard labour, six years in exile; he was for ever on the verge of financial ruin; his wife, his brother and his best friend all died within a very short time of one another; he was attacked and harassed on all sides; he wrote under the very worst possible conditions, starving, ill and pressed for time. Tolstoy was a heretic and a materialist; Dostoievsky was a devout believer in Christianity; and a mystic. Tolstoy was narrow, while Dostoievsky was one of the most broadminded men who ever lived. Tolstoy hated the supernatural. Dostoievsky lived as Blake did among the unknown, and seemed to regard this world only as fantastic and unreal. Tolstoy was eaten up with pride; Dostoievsky preached and practised a humility almost Christ-like. Tolstoy hated and did not understand Art; Dostoievsky was superbly Catholic and cosmopolitan in his tastes. Tolstoy was characterised by a magnificent intolerance, Dostoievsky by a sweet reasonableness. Tolstoy dreamt of giving all to the poor, and did nothing, while Dostoievsky shared every moment of his life with the lowest criminals: and finally Tolstoy was purposely autobiographical from start to finish, whereas from Dostoievsky we learn nothing whatever from his books. He was as objective as Shakespeare. He does not care to talk about himself. This does not mean that he does not reveal himself in his books. He does, and Christ-like indeed is the character that emanates as the result ... but he does not see himself in all his main characters as Tolstoy does. His sufferings did not make him cynical or cruel; once when a gushing young lady accosted him with "Gazing at you I can trace your suffering," he replied: "What suffering?" He drew but little on his personal experiences. He was passionately Slavophil, and therefore opposed in that to Turgenev, whose genius none the less he perceived and revered.

He was the son of a staff-surgeon and a tradesman's daughter, born in a charity hospital at Moscow, brought up in the direst penury. He was, like Goldsmith, quite thriftless, and unable to realise the value of money. Of a confiding nature and withal kindly, he was at the mercy of all those who found it worth while to take advantage of him. Tolstoy, as you will remember, was thrifty and domestic, while Dostoievsky was profuse and a houseless vagabond. Yet another point of divergence. Tolstoy thinks that he hates money, but money loves him. Dostoievsky thinks that he loves money, and money flees from him. As MerejkÒvski so neatly puts it, all worldly advantages in Tolstoy are centripetal, in Dostoievsky centrifugal. Tolstoy was careful in spite of the apparent passionateness of his impulses never to overstep the mark; Dostoievsky was for ever giving rein to irregularities and vices: Middleton Murry suggests that he gave way to these on purpose to show his oneness with man in a world to which he could never accustom himself. His first novel, Poor Folk, was a prodigious success, which made the failure of the second, The Double, all the more terrible to him. From this time his literary career became a life-long and desperate struggle to re-establish himself in the good graces of his fellow-countrymen. Having allied himself about this time with the Petrachevsky circle of socialists and Slavophils, he was one evening led to declaim Pushkin's Ode on the Abolition of Serfdom, and in the discussion that followed is said to have declared that if reform could only come through insurrection, "Then insurrection let it be." This was enough to lead to his arrest, and on 22nd December 1849 he was taken with twenty-one others to the scaffold to be executed. All the prisoners were stripped to their shirts in twenty-one degrees of frost and the death sentence was read out. They were then bound in threes to stakes and prepared themselves for death. Suddenly they were unbound and informed that the Tsar had commuted the penalty of death to that of hard labour. But the strain had been too much. From this moment Dostoievsky looks back on a world that he had so nearly left that he could never quite believe that he belonged to it. His four years in Siberia is turned to magnificent use, as we see in The House of The Dead, where we see criminals behave exactly as English Public School boys: we never regard them as miscreants, always as unfortunate victims of adverse circumstances. After these terrible times were over he served for three years as a private soldier and was promoted to be an officer. He turned his back on Socialism because of its materialism and atheistic tendency. He had only joined this section of the community because his nature ever made him seek out what was most difficult, disastrous, hard and terrible. During his imprisonment his epilepsy became more pronounced and his fits recurred with alarming frequency. But there was something lofty and jubilant, a sort of religious revelation which he experienced when the sacred sickness was on him that coloured all the rest of his life.

Then suddenly it was as if something had been rent asunder before him, an unwonted inward light dawned upon his soul, he says in one of his descriptions. Again we are led to a comparison with Tolstoy, for whom with his superb animal vitality the light of death is thrown on life from without, whereas for Dostoievsky the revealing light comes from within. Life and death are one to him; to Tolstoy they are in eternal antagonism.

The former with the eyes of the spirit world looks on life from a footing which to those who live seems death, while the latter looks at death from within the house of life with the eyes of this world.

From his earliest youth Dostoievsky was an omnivorous reader, revelling in and appreciating not only Homer, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Schiller and Hoffmann, but also all the great French classics of the seventeenth century: throughout his life he kept alive his passion for universal culture. He is at once that most curious anomaly, the most Russian of the Russians, and yet the greatest cosmopolitan, and herein once more shows his complete difference from Tolstoy, who, trying to become cosmopolitan, ended by living more completely limited by place and time and nationality than almost any other writer we know. The enthusiasm for the distant simply did not exist for him: every fibre and root in him is fixed in the present. He visited Italy and brought therefrom no impressions. He is unable to appreciate either Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Wagner or Beethoven. He even comes to regard all his own work as bad art, with the exception of two tales which are easily his weakest. He was never a man of letters as Dostoievsky was. All his life he was ashamed of literature, while Dostoievsky loved it. He was proud of his calling and counted it high and sacred, though he valued his creations in terms of cash.

"Many a time," he writes, "the beginning of a chapter of a novel was already at the printer's and being set up while the end was still in my brain and had to be ready without fail next day. Work out of sheer want has crushed and eaten me up."

He complains that Turgenev, who has two thousand serfs, gets a hundred and fifty pounds, while he, needy as he was, got only thirty-eight pounds. "Poverty forces me to hurry, and so, of course, spoils my work." Endlessg rows of figures and accounts, interspersed with desperate entreaties for help, fill all his letters.

He edited a paper, the Vremya, which met with some success and promised a regular income. Without warning the periodical was prohibited by the censor for publishing a quite harmless article on Poland. Undaunted, he started another venture, the Epocha, which incurred the wrath not only of the Government but also of the Liberal party. It was at this time that his brother Michael, his dearest friend Grigoviev, and his first wife, Maria, all died.

"And here I am left all alone," he writes, "and I feel simply broken. I have, literally, nothing left to live for." The Epocha failed, its editor became temporarily insolvent, having debts amounting to one thousand four hundred pounds in bills and seven hundred pounds in debts of honour. He starts feverishly on a novel to begin to pay the load off. In the end, to avoid the debtors' prison, he is forced to fly the country. He spent four years of incredible extremes of want abroad, pawning even his "last linen" to keep going.

"They expect literature of me now," he moans. "Why, how can I write at all? I walk about and tear my hair and cannot sleep of nights. They point to Turgenev and Goncharov. Let them see the state in which I have to work."

And yet in spite of all this he takes a pride in his work, recasting cherished chapters again and again, burning what failed to satisfy him, starting afresh times without number. His attacks were in the meantime on the increase and he worked with ever greater difficulty. In spite of all he never lost heart. It is impossible to imagine circumstances which would have crushed him.

"I can bear everything, any suffering, if I can only keep on saying to myself, 'I live: I am in a thousand torments, but I live. I am on the pillar, but I exist. I see the sun, or I do not see the sun, but I know that it is. And to know that there is a sun, that is life enough.'"

And it is at this time (1865-1869), misunderstood by his readers, harassed by creditors, overwhelmed by the deaths of his nearest and dearest, in solitude, poverty and sickness, that he wrote Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Possessed, and even planned The Brothers Karamazov.

He was not merely a man of letters, he is a true hero of literature, as heroic as any warrior or martyr. He fathomed the most dangerous and criminal depths of the human heart, especially the passion of love in all its manifestations. At one end of his gamut he touches the highest, most spiritual passion bordering on religious enthusiasm in Alyosha Karamazov, at the other that of the evil insect, "the she-spider who devours her own mate," in Smerdyakov, Ivan, Dmitri, Fedor.

At times he descends to depths which can only be accounted for as autobiographical fragments. As he himself confesses:

"At times I suddenly plunged into a sombre, subterranean, despicable debauchery. My squalid passions were keen, glowing with morbid irritability. I felt an unwholesome thirst for violent moral contrasts, and so I demeaned myself to animality. I indulged in it by night, secretly, fearfully, foully, with a shame that never left me, even at the most degrading moments. I carried in my soul the love of secretiveness: I was terribly afraid that I should be seen, met, recognised."

Sexual passion appears with him at times a cruel, coarse, even animal force, but never unnatural or perverted.

To Tolstoy the greatest of human sins is the infringement of conjugal fidelity. On the other hand, we hear self-condemnation on the lips of Dostoievsky in the words, "Live decently I cannot."

He gave way to the vice of gambling, and begs for loans with as much absence of self-respect as his own creation, Marmelador. Tolstoy, who also lost heavily at the tables, is able to pull himself up sharp, give up playing and live with the greatest frugality on sixteen shillings a month. He never lost his sense of proportion. Dostoievsky never had any.

"'Everywhere and in everything I go to extremes: all my life I have overshot the mark.'"

The life of Tolstoy was a pure and virgin water of a spring, that of Dostoievsky is the upgush of fire from elemental depths, mixed with lava, ashes, smoke and sulphur.

When his child dies, Dostoievsky, utterly self-forgetting, loves the child of his flesh, not according to the flesh, but the spirit, as a separate, eternal, irreplacable personality.

"But where is Sonia? I want Sonia."

On 26th January 1881 he died, leaving it to future generations to understand and appreciate the greatness of his genius. And what is the message that he leaves for us to pick up?

"'Love all God's creation—every grain of sand,'" says Zossima, "'every leaf, every ray of God, you should love. Love animals, love plants, love everything. Love everything, and you will arrive at God's secret in things.'"

Every one of his characters shows the conflict of heroic will: he concentrates all the artistic powers of his delineation into his dialogues, which are as fine as Tolstoy's are feeble. All Tolstoy's characters talk so alike that if we did not know who was speaking we should not be able to distinguish them at all by the language, whereas as soon as the first words are uttered in a novel of Dostoievsky we realise at once who it is that is talking. Hence Dostoievsky has no need to describe the appearance of his characters, for by their peculiar form of language and tones of voices they lay themselves bare before us. With Tolstoy we hear because we see; with Dostoievsky we see because we hear.

Then, too, we lose all sense of time in Dostoievsky: in the events of a single day he can make us feel that we have lived through Æons.

Added to this is the strange ethereal quality that marks out his characters from the normal. In Tolstoy we feel that the air is rare; we cannot breathe; it is the stage of calm before the storm: in Dostoievsky we feel the reviving freshness and the freedom of the storm itself.

Of one of Tolstoy's characters we read that "she does not condescend to be clever." Tolstoy seems himself to overlook the existence of the human mind altogether: Dostoievsky is pre-eminently a master of the mental rapier of feeling; he may lack many valuable qualities, but one never doubts his intelligence; all his characters are clever men first and foremost. Dostoievsky shows us how, contrary to popular opinion, abstract thought may be passionate: all passions and misdeeds in his work are the natural outcome of dialectic. Life is a tragedy to those who feel. And his characters feel deeply because they think deeply. They suffer endlessly because they deliberate endlessly: they dare to will because they dare to think. And the subject of their thought? In the main, God. They are all "God-tortured." This insatiable religious thirst is one of the most remarkable traits of the Russian spirit: when two or more Russians meet they immediately begin to discuss the immortality of the soul.

Most uncompromising of the realists, he yet ventures into depths hitherto undreamt of and unplumbed.

He seems to dwell with morbid intensity on hysterical women, sensualists, deformed creatures, idiots ... there is scarcely a healthy man or woman among his gallery of portraits. In Tolstoy there is scarcely one which does not emanate strength, physical perfection and complete self-control. Of a truth in Dostoievsky by his sickness we are healed. There is a sickness unto life, and this is the sickness that he depicts for us.

"What matter if it be a morbid state?" he writes. "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?"

This is all of a piece with the theory that great pain alone is the final emancipator of the soul. In other words, where Tolstoy has to content himself with the fame of a mere artist, Dostoievsky can look forward to recognition as a prophet.

Another point of divergence presents itself when we try to glean a picture of Moscow or Petrograd from these two writers. In Tolstoy we have only the country, the land, the dark, primitive soul of Russia, whereas in Dostoievsky we actually realise the towns in which he lays his action. And yet of these he draws such a picture that they become strangely fantastic and bizarre.

"I am dreadfully fond of realism in Art," he confessed, "when, so to speak, it is carried to the fantastic. What can be more fantastic and unexpected than reality? What most people call fantastic is, in my eyes, often the very essence of the real."

This is true not merely of places, but of people. When Svidrigailov seems to be most fantastic, then he becomes most real.

The demon Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov pines for solidity, corporal reality, call it what you will. In almost the very words quoted above from Dostoievsky himself the Demon makes his confession.

"'I am dreadfully fond of realism—realism, so to speak, carried to the fantastic. What most people call fantastic to me forms the very essence of the real, and therefore I love your earthly realism. Here with you everything is marked out, here are formulas and geometry, but with us all is a matter of indefinite equations. On earth I become superstitious. I accept all your habits here: I have got to like going to the tradesmen's baths, and I like steaming in company with tradesmen and priests. My dream is to be incarnated, but finally, irrevocably, and therefore in some fat eighteen-stone tradesman's wife, and to believe in all that she believes.'"

As it is, he is in a state of metaphysical ennui—magnificently bored. Eternity may after all be something by no means vast. Say a neglected village Turkish bathroom, with musty cobwebs in all its corners. Dostoievsky is always trying to probe into the unknown: his Demon really tries to explain his point of view.

"'I swear by all that is holy I wished to join the choir and cry with them all "Hosanna," there already escaped, there already broke from my breast ...

"'I am very sentimental, you know, and artistically susceptible. But common-sense—my most unfortunate quality—kept me within due limits, and I let the moment pass. For what, I asked myself at the time, what would have resulted after my "Hosanna"? That instant all would have come to a standstill in the world, and no events would have taken place. And so, simply from a sense of duty and my social position, I was forced to suppress in myself the good impulse and stick to villainy. Someone else takes all the honour of doing good to himself, and I am left only the bad for my share. I know, of course, there is a secret there, but they will not reveal it to me at any price, because, forsooth, if I found out the actual facts I should break out into a "Hosanna" and instantly the indispensable minus quantity would vanish. Reason would begin to reign all over the earth, and with it, of course, there would be an end of everything. But as long as this does not happen, as long as the secret is kept, there exist for me two truths, one up yonder, Theris, which is quite unknown to me, and another which is mine. And it is still unknown which will be the purer of the two.'"

Samuel Butler in a note called An Apology for the Devil says: "It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books." After reading The Brothers Karamazov we may take leave to doubt Butler's aphorism. There are certainly occasions in Dostoievsky's books where the Devil has taken the pen out of the writer's hand and made a distinctly fine case for his side.

That he came nearer than most great thinkers to a solution of the mystery of life which is nearly Christian does not alter the fact that he faced the issue bravely and tried not to square his reason with his beliefs, but to evolve from his reason and experience a sound religion. And what is that religion? Ivan, the embodiment of pure intellect, finds that he cannot accept the world as God has made it. That any innocent child should have to suffer makes any question of future recompense intolerable. It is not that he does not accept God, he most respectfully hands back his ticket. No reward, calculable or incalculable, can obliterate needless suffering.

Father Zossima, on the other hand, says to Alyosha: "'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 secret of Dostoievsky's greatness. Paradoxical as it may sound, out of the mud and filth, from a world full of the diseased and mad he extracts sweetness and light, good cheer and reasonableness.

In spite of the inferno in which he lived, stricken by poverty, crime and disease, he yet blessed life and caused others to bless it: he loved humanity: his charity was boundless, his good-nature omnipotent. "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 be not afraid of their sins, love man in his sin: be cheerful as the children and as the birds."

The Russian thought which shall renew humanity finds its ultimate and perfect expression in Dostoievsky. In spite of incoherence and an amazing formlessness, talk and description so unending that it takes us longer to read them than it actually took the characters to live through the events described ... in spite of a million petty artistic mistakes we are yet carried off our feet by him; there have, we feel, been greater artists but very few greater men. "It is not before you I am kneeling," says Raskolnikov to Sonia, "but before all the suffering of mankind," and this might be taken as the text of all his work.