great sun it lovesFrom the inch-height whence it looks and longs!”
No one can read a book like this without being better for it, and without loving its author.
It is unfortunate that Dostoevski did not learn from his first little masterpiece the great virtue of compression. This story is short, but it is long enough; the whole history of two lives, so far as their spiritual aspect is concerned, is fully given in these few pages. The besetting sin of Dostoevski is endless garrulity with its accompanying demon of incoherence: in later years he yielded to that, as he did to other temptations, and it finally mastered him. He was never to write again a work of art that had organic unity.
Like all the great Russian novelists, Dostoevski went to school to Gogol. The influence of his teacher is evident throughout Poor Folk. The hero is almost an imitation of the man in Gogol’s short story, The Cloak, affording another striking example of the germinal power of that immortal work. Dostoevski seemed fully to realise his debt to Gogol, and in particular to The Cloak; for in Poor Folk, one entire letter is taken up with a description of Makar’s emotions after reading that extraordinary tale. Makar assumes that it is a description of himself. “Why, I hardly dare show myself in the streets! Everything is so accurately described that one’s very gait is recognisable.”
Dostoevski’s consuming ambition for literary fame is well indicated in his first book. “If anything be well written, Varinka, it is literature. I learned this the day before yesterday. What a wonderful thing literature is, which, consisting but of printed words, is able to invigorate, to instruct, the hearts of men!”
So many writers have made false starts in literature that Dostoevski’s instinct for the right path at the very outset is something notable. His entire literary career was to be spent in portraying the despised and rejected. Never has a great author’s first book more clearly revealed the peculiar qualities of his mind and heart.
But although he struck the right path, it was a long time before he found again the right vein. He followed up his first success with a row of failures, whose cold reception by the public nearly broke his heart. He was extremely busy, extremely productive, and extremely careless, as is shown by the fact that during the short period from 1846 to 1849, he launched thirteen original publications, not a single one of which added anything to his fame. It was not until after the cruel years of Siberia that the great books began to appear.
Nor did they appear at once. In 1859 he published The Uncle’s Dream, a society novel, showing both in its humour and in its ruthless satire the influence of Gogol. This is an exceedingly entertaining book, and, a strange thing in Dostoevski, it is, in many places, hilariously funny. The satire is so enormously exaggerated that it completely overshoots the mark, but perhaps this very exaggeration adds to the reader’s merriment. The conversation in this story is often brilliant, full of unexpected quips and retorts delivered in a manner far more French than Russian. The intention of the author seems to have been to write a scathing and terrible satire on provincial society, where every one almost without exception is represented as absolutely selfish, absolutely conceited, and absolutely heartless. It is a study of village gossip, a favourite subject for satirists in all languages. In the middle of the book Dostoevski remarks: “Everybody in the provinces lives as though he were under a bell of glass. It is impossible for him to conceal anything whatever from his honourable fellow-citizens. They know things about him of which he himself is ignorant. The provincial, by his very nature, ought to be a very profound psychologist. That is why I am sometimes honestly amazed to meet in the provinces so few psychologists and so many imbeciles.”
Never again did Dostoevski write a book containing so little of himself, and so little of the native Russian element. Leaving out the exaggeration, it might apply to almost any village in any country, and instead of sympathy, it shows only scorn. The scheming mother, who attempts to marry her beautiful daughter to a Prince rotten with diseases, is a stock figure on the stage and in novels. The only truly Russian personage is the young lover, weak-willed and irresolute, who lives a coward in his own esteem.
This novel was immediately followed by another within the same year, Stepanchikovo Village, translated into English with the title The Friend of the Family. This has for its hero one of the most remarkable of Dostoevski’s characters, and yet one who infallibly reminds us of Dickens’s Pecksniff. The story is told in the first person, and while it cannot by any stretch of language be called a great book, it has one advantage over its author’s works of genius, in being interesting from the first page to the last. Both the uncle and the nephew, who narrate the tale, are true Russian characters: they suffer long, and are kind; they hope all things, and believe all things. The household is such a menagerie that it is no wonder that the German translation of this novel is called Tollhaus oder Herrenhaus? Some of the inmates are merely abnormal; others are downright mad. There is not a natural or a normal character in the entire book, and not one of the persons holds the reader’s sympathy, though frequent drafts are made on his pity. The hero is a colossal hypocrite, hopelessly exaggerated. If one finds Dickens’s characters to be caricatures, what shall be said of this collection? This is the very apotheosis of the unctuous gasbag, from whose mouth, eternally ajar, pours a viscous stream of religious and moral exhortation. Compared with this Friend of the Family, Tartuffe was unselfish and noble: Joseph Surface modest and retiring; Pecksniff a humble and loyal man. The best scene in the story, and one that arouses outrageous mirth, is the scene where the uncle, who is a kind of Tom Pinch, suddenly revolts, and for a moment shakes off his bondage. He seizes the fat hypocrite by the shoulder, lifts him from the floor, and hurls his carcass through a glass door. All of which is in the exact manner of Dickens.
One of the most characteristic of Dostoevski’s novels, characteristic in its occasional passages of wonderful beauty and pathos, characteristic in its utter formlessness and long stretches of uninspired dulness, is Downtrodden and Oppressed. Here the author gives us the life he knew best by actual experience and the life best suited to his natural gifts of sympathetic interpretation. Stevenson’s comment on this story has attracted much attention. Writing to John Addington Symonds in 1886, he said: “Another has been translated — Humiliés et Offensés. It is even more incoherent than Le Crime et le Châtiment, but breathes much of the same lovely goodness, and has passages of power. Dostoevski is a devil of a swell, to be sure.” There is no scorn and no satire in this book; it was written from an overflowing heart. One of the speeches of the spineless young Russian, Alosha, might be taken as illustrative of the life-purpose of our novelist: “I am on fire for high and noble ideals; they may be false, but the basis on which they rest is holy.”
Downtrodden and Oppressed is full of melodrama and full of tears; it is four times too long, being stuffed out with interminable discussions and vain repetitions. It has no beauty of construction, no evolution, and irritates the reader beyond all endurance. The young hero is a blazing ass, who is in love with two girls at the same time, and whose fluency of speech is in inverse proportion to his power of will. The real problem of the book is how either of the girls could have tolerated his presence for five minutes. The hero’s father is a melodramatic villain, who ought to have worn patent-leather boots and a Spanish cloak. And yet, with all its glaring faults, it is a story the pages of which ought not to be skipped. So far as the narrative goes, one may skip a score of leaves at will; but in the midst of aimless and weary gabble, passages of extraordinary beauty and uncanny insight strike out with the force of a sudden blow. The influence of Dickens is once more clearly seen in the sickly little girl Nelly, whose strange caprices and flashes of passion are like Goethe’s Mignon, but whose bad health and lingering death recall irresistibly Little Nell. They are similar in much more than in name.
Dostoevski told the secrets of his prison-house in his great book Memoirs of a House of the Dead — translated into English with the title Buried Alive. Of the many works that have come from prison-walls to enrich literature, and their number is legion, this is one of the most powerful, because one of the most truthful and sincere. It is not nearly so well written as Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis; but one cannot escape
