Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Novels, Short Stories and Autobiographical Writings

Dostoévsky, in all his important novels, has much to say about religion, and his personages all illustrate some phase of religious life. This is nowhere more apparent than in his last novel, “The Karamázoff Brothers,” wherein the religious note is more powerfully struck than in any of the others. The ideal of the Orthodox Church of the East is embodied in Father Zosím, and in his gentle disciple, Alexyéi (Alyósha) Karamázoff; the reconciling power of redemption is again set forth over the guilty soul of the principal hero, Dmítry Karamázoff, when he is overtaken by chastisement for a suspected crime. The doubting element is represented by Iván Karamázoff, who is tortured by a constant conflict with anxious questions. In “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” which the author puts into Iván’s mouth, Dostoévsky’s famous and characteristic power of analysis reached its greatest height.

Belonging to no class, and famous for but one book, which does not even count as literature, yet chronologically a member of this period, was Nikolái Gavrílovitch Tchernyshévsky (1828-1889). After 1863 he exerted an immense influence on the minds of young people of both sexes; and of all the writers of the “storm and stress” period, he is the most interesting, because, in his renowned book, “What Is to Be Done?” he applied his theories to practical life. His success was due, not to the practicability of his theories, to his literary qualities, to his art, but to the fact that he contrived to unite two things, each one of which, as a rule, is found in a writer; he simultaneously touched the two most responsive chords in the human heart — the thirst for easy happiness, and the imperative necessity for ascetic self-sacrifice. Hence, he won a response from the most diametrically conflicting natures.

“What Is to Be Done” is the story of a young girl who, with the greatest improbability, is represented as being of the purest, most lofty character and sentiments, yet the daughter of two phenomenally (almost impossibly) degraded people. Instead of marrying the rich and not otherwise undesirable man whom her parents urge on her, and who is deeply in love with her, she runs away with her teacher, and stipulates in advance for life in three rooms. She is only seventeen, yet she promptly establishes a fashion-shop which thrives apace, and puts forth numerous branches all over the capital. Her working-girls are treated ideally and as equals, she working with them, in which lies the answer to “What Is to Be Done?” After a while she falls in love with her husband’s dearest friend, who is described as so exactly like him that the reader is puzzled to know wherein she descried favorable difference, and the husband, perceiving this, makes things easy by pretending to drown himself, but in reality going off to America. Several years later he returns — as an American — and his ex-wife’s present husband, having become a medical celebrity, helps him to a bride by informing her panic-stricken parents (who oppose the match, although they are ignorant at first of any legal impediment to the union), that she will certainly die if they do not yield. The two newly assorted couples live in peace, happiness, and prosperity ever after. Work and community life are the chief themes of the preachment. He was exiled to Siberia in 1864, and on his return to Russia (when he settled in Ástrakhan, and was permitted to resume his literary labors), he busied himself with translations, critical articles, and the like, but was unable to regain his former place in literature.

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I often wonder what quality of Russian literature is the one which appeals more particularly to English readers. Russian literary types have certainly a universal scope, but Russian writers seem to attract much more by their originality than by what they have in common with the western ideals. There is another peculiarity of all our best literature which accounts with more right for its bearing on the Western mind. It is the tense atmosphere of Russian novels, of Russian poetry and drama. They all deal with vast problems—social, moral, as well as religious ones—and this is due to a large extent to the rather abnormal conditions of Russian life.

In all the countries of western Europe literature is a world in itself and pursues its own calling. It is not concerned with immediate issues of any kind. The situation in Russia is quite different. We are deprived of free speech and of free action in our public life, and the social progress of Russia is mainly due to the high standard of our literature which is the true mirror of national aspirations and national ideals. The free and progressive instincts of the Russian mind crave to assert themselves; their realization in actual life is still some way off, and literature remains the only means to solve, at least in an ideal way, the problems which some day will be solved in reality. That is the reason why Russian novelists, Russian poets, and even philosophers dealing in metaphysics are imbued with a profound sense of national duties and responsibilities. There is always lurking behind every Russian work of art a sort of mystic image, that of Russia which longs to express her soul, and the highest aim of all Russian literature is to redeem the national spirit from the silence to which it is doomed by the conditions of Russian life. Every Russian author, if he is of any consequence whatever, longs to express the spiritual essence of Russia and to solve her problems.

When it comes to the greatest of our writers, to those who have a world-wide fame, this fundamental tendency of Russian literature rises to its highest expression. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are not only our social and religious reformers; they are the prophets of the Russian land. They reflect the destinies of Russia and show the way to the fulfillment of Russia's message to the world. Different as their ideas are, they represent the two sides of the national spirit, the rationalistic and the mystic one, and we look up to their teachings to help us in our national needs and in the inner battles of every individual conscience. In the life-time of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky both of them had been approached by more men and women in Russia with the question: "How ought I to live?" than any priest had ever been asked the question by his flock: "What must I do to save my soul?"

Now the prophets are dead, but the prophetic value of their work still remains. The mystic genius of Dostoyevsky is even more closely linked with the national problems than that of Tolstoy. He has taken up the revelations of national character from some of the earlier Russian writers and has carried them on to deeper truths and to vaster issues.

Two writers must be taken into consideration if we want to get at the roots of the problems evolved by Dostoyevsky—Pushkin and Gogol. The poet Pushkin died in 1837, slain in a duel. He is the head of modern Russian literature and has created our literary language and style, both in poetry and in prose. His greatest achievement was to have raised Russian literature to the level of universal art, and, on the other hand, to have gone deep into the source of Russian genius, to have discovered the creative power of the Russian peasantry. He found in the Russian folklore, in the fairy tales, the songs, the habits of the peasants, an inexhaustible source for his art.

Dostoyevsky did not only admire these qualities of Pushkin; he saw in them the revelation of the national ideal—a revelation and a prophecy. The prophetic spirit hovers over all Russian literature, or, at least, is perceptible in it to the Russian mind. In 1881, a few months before his death, Dostoyevsky delivered a speech on Pushkin, in connection with a celebration of the poet's memory. The speech is famous and is generally considered one of the deepest manifestations of Dostoyevsky's genius. It is an extraordinarily lucid and inspired expression of what Dostoyevsky calls the national ideal of Russia and of his own intimate relation to it. Speaking of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky points to the universality, to what he calls the "all-humanity" of the great poet, meaning Pushkin's wonderful gift of assimilation with the genius and the emotions of other nations. Dostoyevsky considers this quality of Pushkin as deeply characteristic of the Russian mind.