Fyodor Dostoyevsky - THE COMPLETE WORKS OF FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

"Poor Folks" is a very simple story, yet its very simplicity is one of the master achievements of Dostoyevsky, and the uneventful life of Dostoyevsky's pathetic and humble hero, Makar Dievushkin, widens in the narrative into a vision of broad and warm humanity. Makar is a weak character; he indulges in drink, and, worst of all, he is abjectly servile in his attitude towards his superiors. Yet, in the letters he writes to a young girl (the novel is written in the form of letters they exchange), every single event, every single emotion, shows the heroic self-denial of a quaintly free soul—free in spite of an almost slave-like psychology. There is one scene in the novel which had been particularly admired by Bielinsky, and remains in fact an immortal page in the works of Dostoyevsky. It is the description old Makar gives of the kindness shown to him by "His Excellency," the head of the department in Makar's office. The high official has noticed the shabbiness of Makar, and was attracted by the expression of Makar s face. In an impulse of generosity he summoned him to his office, said a few kind words to him, and presented him with a hundred rouble note as a friendly help. Makar was overpowered by so much condescension on the part of his chief. He felt the honor and the kindness much more keenly than the actual help. And a most pathetic thing happened. Just at the moment when "His Excellency" spoke so kindly to Makar, a loose button on Makar's outworn uniform fell on the floor. Makar was overcome with shame and terror, and before he could come to his senses, his chief picked up the button and handed it to him. Makar is full of painfully servile admiration for "His Excellency" when he describes the scene in the office, and feels tragically humble in regard to his own insignificance. Yet what would appear basely undignified on the surface of his emotions is magically transformed into a picture of a great soul—great in its love and its humility.

"Are you aware that you have discovered a sublime side in servility, the most abject of all instincts?" was Bielinsky's first question on that memorable night, after he had read the manuscript of "Poor Folks." This was the miracle worked by Dostoyevsky's penetrating pity. It made him see so deep into the human heart that he was able to discover the divine element hidden in all genuine emotions.

After the publication of his first novel there came a long break in the literary career of Dostoyevsky. That was the time of the great tragedy of his life, the one which became the source of the prophetic inspiration of his later works. In the lifetime of Dante the people of Florence used to say when they met him in the streets, "This is the man who has been to Hell." What was true in an imaginative sense as applied to Dante might be said more directly of Dostoyevsky in connection with what happened to him after he had so brilliantly started as a novelist. He had actually been in hell—in a hell upon earth, and the miracle is that he returned from it with a message of all-forgiving love.

Dostoyevsky was interested, as a young man, in social problems, yet chiefly in the humane side of them. He was haunted from the beginning of his conscious life with schemes and dreams of universal happiness for mankind, and was naturally attracted by the teachings of such idealistic social reformers as Fourier and Robert Owen. He joined a group of friends in a sort of debating society with the purpose of studying and discussing some works on social questions. The members of the group did not aim at any political propaganda, yet at that time all interest for social reform was regarded as criminal by the authorities. And what made the situation still more serious was the supposed circulation of Bielinsky's letter to Gogol, a letter accusing Gogol of reactionary tendencies and exposing a few liberal opinions. Dostoyevsky was actually not guilty even of what seems now such a trifling charge as having circulated a liberal pamphlet. Yet he was tried, together with the other members of the group, and was sentenced to death. In 1849, Dostoyevsky was brought to the scaffold, saw the car with the coffin prepared for his body, had his eyes bandaged, and lived through the agony of those minutes which he thought to be his last. A few moments before the execution, arrived the message of the amnesty and of the commutation of the death penalty into a sentence to four years of hard labor in the Siberian mines.

Dostoyevsky never forgot the scene on the Semenovsky Square. It was in all probability the primary cause of the epileptic fits from which he suffered all his life. The fits developed into a dironic disease during the years of Siberia, which again, as all that Dostoyevsky suffered in his body and mind, became a source of inspiration to his genius.

Dostoyevsky spent seven years in the exile to Siberia. He worked part of the time in the mines, and was then transferred to a Siberian regiment as a private. In 1856 he was restored in his civil rights and promoted to the rank of an office. In 1859 he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg and to settle there. It was then only that he was able to resume his literary work after the long years of enforced silence. He resumed it, however, in a very changed spirit. The time spent "tra la perduta gente" in the mines, in close communion with the worst criminals, and following that the hard military service as a common soldier, the humiliations to which he was subjected, the solitary thoughts and the nervous fits made a deep impression on his mind but did not break his spirit. On the contrary, his experiences brought him nearer to the soul of the Russian people. "The years of hard labor have taught me the essential truth," wrote Dostoyevsky after his return, "the truth hidden in the soul of the Russian people. It is there in spite of the fact that the masses of our peasants consist of drunkards and thieves." He returned from Siberia with the fortifying conviction that the knowledge of the Russian masses has deepened his insight into his own soul, and he strongly believed ever since that the Russian intellectuals will gain everything if they trust the wisdom of the common people, the light revealed by the endurance—the wisdom of the "Russian Christ." Before his exile Dostoyevsky was naturally inclined to see and to cherish the warm glow of love in humble and humiliated souls. After his hard experiences and trials he was ever anxious to discover the divine spark, the religious truth in souls possessed by the temptations of evil.

And even the harmful effect of the Siberian trials on the health of Dostoyevsky, his epileptic fits, "the sacred disease," as they were sometimes called, became an additional power of his genius. They opened to him visionary horizons which a more balanced mind would not have perceived. Dostoyevsky's favorite hero, Prince Myshkin, "the Idiot," is an epileptic, and Dostoyevsky describes in his name the strange ecstasy of just one moment before the unconsciousness brought about by an epileptic fit—the feeling of perfect harmony with the universe, a sensation as if time did no more exist, and all life was blended in complete unity. Dostoyevsky has many times experienced such a state of ecstasy. He considered it a foretaste of the ultimate divine absorption of the human soul in God, and he did not think too high the price of pain he had to pay for his mystic visions of harmony. He knew that all that is divine must arise from the bottom of deepest agony. He had discovered this truth in the soul of the Russian people.

The great productive epoch of Dostoyevsky's life began in the year 1860. All his great novels—most of them works of exceptional length—as well as a number of short stories, were written in the course of the following twenty years up to his death in 1881. He also was very active in other ways. He edited during a couple of years an important literary review, he spent several years abroad, and travelled a great deal in France, Germany, Italy, and England. He had a great admiration for the standards of Western culture as well as for the literature and art of Western Europe. His great object in going "to the West" was to find there the realization of his dream of universal happiness. He, however, experienced great disappointments when he came into closer touch with the different countries he visited. During the Franco-Prussian War, Dostoyevsky's attitude towards Western culture changed entirely. He became violently opposed to the spirit of European life; he thought it irreligious and materialistic. He denounced the perversity of Western morals with the passion of a Biblical prophet, and he believed with the passionate faith of a Biblical prophet that the nations of the West would be redeemed and the reign of the spirit would be restored by the light from the East, from Russia and her people. The novels of Dostoyevsky abound in arguments and in prophecies on national subjects. The full scope of his nationalistic teachings is given in the periodical called "The Diary of a Man of Letters," which Dostoyevsky published at varying intervals in the last ten years of his life. His extreme Slavophile views in politics were violently opposed by the so-called "Westerners," and his last years were very much embittered by the attacks of his political adversaries. Yet, viewed from a distance, the ideas of Dostoyevsky ought not to be judged by a political standard. He was not a politician, he was a prophet with a mission. And however wrong he might have been in his views on immediate political questions, he was right in the spirit.