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

Pushkin was the masterful singer of Don Juan, of the glowing Spanish south and the distinctly catholic tragedy of passion in revolt against the rule of the Church. He found inspired melodies to express the ecstasy of a mediaeval knight who fights in the name of the Madonna and remains true to his vow of chastity and poverty. This stands in the eyes of Dostoyevsky for the all-embracing humanitarian spirit of Russia. And the other side of Pushkin's art appealed to Dostoyevsky even more than his "ail-humanity." Dostoyevsky inherited Pushkin's deep faith in the "Russian truth" of our peasants and developed it into a prophetic vision of the "Russian Christ" of a new Christianity based on the redeeming power of endurance and self-sacrifice. This religious teaching is at the bottom of every single work of Dostoyevsky, and none of his novels can be fully understood unless the mystic foundation of his art is taken into consideration. Dostoyevsky questions in all his novels the problem of suffering humanity, and insists with what could even seem a pathological inquisitiveness on the subtlest shades of moral pain. And in every single case his arguments point to the religious truth. He justifies and sanctifies all suffering, raising it to what would be a Slav climax of ecstatic agony.

The national and religious ideals of Dostoyevsky have evolved from Pushkin, but in his literary methods and as a novelist he is closely connected with another of his predecessors—with Gogol, the author of the famous novel, "Dead Souls," of the comedy, "The Inspector General," and, in fact, the father of the Russian realistic novel. Gogol has satirized the Russian bureaucracy of his time with its contrasts of arrogancy based on excessive arbitrary power, and of abject servility. He has created immortal types of Russian land- and serf-owners before the abolition of serfdom, some of them appallingly cruel and self-indulgent, and the majority petty, ignorant, ridiculously narrow-minded, and leading a sort of animal life, overeating, and punishing their serfs just to idle away the lazy hours.

Dostoyevsky took up the realistic vein of Gogol, but changed its spirit. He transformed Gogol's satirical vision of the "dead souls" into a mystic tale of humiliated and suffering souls redeemed by what they have endured. They both, Gogol and Dostoyevsky, have looked at the same realities of Russian life, and with the same sharp, uncompromising instinct of truth which detects all human failings. But Gogol laughed at what he discovered; he believed in the beneficial effect of sane, unprejudiced laughter. And Dostoyevsky loved erring humanity, and did better than to judge it; he pitied it. This did not stand in the way of his realism, as there certainly has never been a more true and outspoken painter of Russian life and psychology than Dostoyevsky, the "cruel genius," as he was called by the Russian critics. But his realism was strangely blended with a visionary mysticism. "They call me a psychologist," wrote Dostoyevsky himself, "but I think I am a realist in the higher sense of the word. I describe the depth of the human soul." And on another occasion, writing about himself in his "Diary of a Man of Letters" he said, "I am devoted to realism in art—to realism which reaches the borders of the fantastic. To my eyes there is nothing more fantastic than reality itself. What the majority of people call fantastic and exceptional is to me the very essence of actual reality."

The vast scope of Dostoyevsky's creations is due to his genius, but his amazing psychological knowledge of life and pain is also founded on the experiences of his own life. Not many writers have paid such a high price as Dostoyevsky in mental and physical agony for the revelations of their genius. His life is, in this respect, a striking contrast to the life of Tolstoy, and this again is highly characteristic of the mystic spirit of Russia. Tolstoy was a spoiled child of Fortune; in addition to his genius he had all the advantages of a high social standing and a happy, independent life. But in accordance with his deep national aspirations he longed for sacrifice, for his personal share of universal suffering. He did everything to get it; he was ready to give up his advantages, but all the anguish he could secure for himself was that of not having been able to sacrifice enough. This has become his intense tragedy which hastened his death. He suffered to see his followers persecuted for his own ideas whilst he himself seemed exempt from all responsibility, and in an impressive article, speaking of the frequent executions of political offenders in Russia, he exclaimed, "Oh, for a rope, a well-soaped rope, to have it put round my own neck to make me share the fate of those who suffer and are put to death in my country!"

All that was so ardently desired by Tolstoy in his longing for self-sacrifice was freely given to Dostoyevsky by fate. Tolstoy wanted to suffer, Dostoyevsky did suffer. Even the "well-soaped rope"—the supreme wish of Tolstoy—was not spared to the prophet of the "Russian Christ," who had been brought up for execution (not exactly to be hanged, but to be shot) to the Semenovsky Square in St. Petersburg. The Western mind might feel more keenly the opposition—the contrast in the lives of the two great writers, but Russians are more aware of what unites them in the essence of their different fates. The inner law of Russia is endurance, her moral impulses are rooted in the spirit of sacrifice, and Dostoyevsky, who had suffered in body and mind, as well as Tolstoy who felt the agonizing desire to suffer, represent to us the same national truth.

Dostoyevsky, Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, to call him by his full Russian name, was born in Moscow, in 1821, as the son of a hospital doctor. He received his primary and secondary education in his native town and came to the Engineering School in St. Petersburg when he was eighteen. He did not acquire much scientific knowledge at the school. The training there was too formalistic to be thorough, and he loathed the militaristic system of the place. Yet an important side of Dostoyevsky's genius is connected with his education at this particular school. In order to enter it he came to St. Petersburg and lived there all his life with the exception of the time of his exile and the years he spent abroad. This means that he left as a boy the more rationalistic and business-like atmosphere of Moscow, and that his self-consciousness developed in the intensely nervous and imaginative surroundings of Peter the Great's city. Dostoyevsky was attracted by all that is strange and exclusive in the town created out of a Finnish swamp by the imperative will of a genius. He found the reflection of his own soul in the atmosphere of the town, then called St. Petersburg, with its white nights and cruel frosts and the severe beauty of its magnificent river. All the heroes of Dostoyevsky seem to come out of the November fogs that envelop St. Petersburg described by Dostoyevsky as "the most abstract and most artificial town, a town of apparitions clad in flesh and blood which seems not to exist in reality but to be somebody's strange dream."

The first novel of Dostoyevsky, called "Poor Folks," appeared in 1844, and it was a masterpiece. He was far from being conscious of the merits and the promise of his first literary venture, and handed the manuscript with the greatest misgivings to the poet Nekrasov, the editor of an important literary review. Nekrasov began to read it together with his co-editor, the greatest literary critic of the period, Bielinsky. They both felt at once fascinated by the originality and the beauty of the novel. They went on reading it to the end, and it was two o'clock in the morning when they finished it. Bielinsky insisted on going at once to Dostoyevsky to tell him their impressions. He would not listen to Nekrasov who objected that it was too late and that Dostoyevsky had probably gone to bed. "We will wake him up if he sleeps!" exclaimed Bielinsky. "This is more important than sleep. This is genius." They actually went and roused Dostoyevsky out of his bed, to the young author's great surprise and still greater delight. The finest and subtlest Russian critic revealing to the future great writer of Russia the promise of his genius, at 3 A. M., on a fantastic night in St. Petersburg! Is not that a characteristic picture of the intensity and the nervous impatience of Russian intellectual life?