Although the ghastly details of this double murder are given with definite realism, Dostoevski’s interest is wholly in the criminal psychology of the affair, in the analysis of Raskolnikov’s mind before, during, and chiefly after the murder; for it is the mind, and not the bodily sensations that constitute the chosen field of our novelist. After this event, the student passes through almost every conceivable mental state; we study all these shifting moods under a powerful microscope. The assassin is redeemed by the harlot Sonia, who becomes his religious and moral teacher. The scene where the two read together the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, and where they talk about God, prayer, and the Christian religion, shows the spiritual force of Dostoevski in its brightest manifestations. At her persuasion, he finally confesses his crime, and is deported to Siberia, where his experiences are copied faithfully from the author’s own prison life. Sonia accompanies him, and becomes the good angel of the convicts, who adore her. “When she appeared while they were at work, all took off their hats and made a bow. ‘Little mother, Sophia Semenova, thou art our mother, tender and compassionate,’ these churlish and branded felons said to her. She smiled in return; they loved even to see her walk, and turned to look upon her as she passed by. They praised her for being so little, and knew not what not to praise her for. They even went to her with their ailments.”
It is quite possible that Tolstoi got the inspiration for his novel Resurrection from the closing words of Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov and Sonia look forward happily to the time when he will be released. “Seven years — only seven years! At the commencement of their happiness they were ready to look upon these seven years as seven days. They did not know that a new life is not given for nothing; that it has to be paid dearly for, and only acquired by much patience and suffering, and great future efforts. But now a new history commences; a story of the gradual renewing of a man, of his slow, progressive regeneration, and change from one world to another — an introduction to the hitherto unknown realities of life. This may well form the theme of a new tale; the one we wished to offer the reader is ended.”
It did indeed form the theme of a new tale — and the tale was Tolstoi’s Resurrection.
Sonia is the greatest of all Dostoevski’s woman characters. The professional harlot has often been presented on the stage and in the pages of fiction, but after learning to know Sonia, the others seem weakly artificial. This girl, whose father’s passion for drink is something worse than madness, goes on the street to save the family from starvation. It is the sacrifice of Monna Vanna without any reward or spectacular acclaim. Deeply spiritual, intensely religious, she is the illumination of the book, and seems to have stepped out of the pages of the New Testament. Her whole story is like a Gospel parable, and she has saved many besides Raskolnikov… . She dies daily, and from her sacrifice rises a life of eternal beauty.
Two years later came another book of tremendous and irregular power — The Idiot. With the exception of The Karamazov Brothers, this is the most peculiarly characteristic of all Dostoevski’s works. It is almost insufferably long; it reads as though it had never been revised; it abounds in irrelevancies and superfluous characters. One must have an unshakable faith in the author to read it through, and one should never begin to read it without having acquired that faith through the perusal of Crime and Punishment. The novel is a combination of a hospital and an insane asylum; its pages are filled with sickly, diseased, silly, and crazy folk. It is largely autobiographical; the hero’s epileptic fits are described as only an epileptic could describe them, more convincingly than even so able a writer as Mr. De Morgan diagnoses them in An Affair of Dishonour. Dostoevski makes the convulsion come unexpectedly; Mr. De Morgan uses the fit as a kind of moral punctuation point. The author’s sensations when under condemnation of death and expecting the immediate catastrophe are also minutely given from his own never paling recollection. Then there are allusions to Russian contemporary authors, which occur, to be sure, in his other books. One reason why Dostoevski is able to portray with such detail the thoughts and fancies of abnormal persons is because he was so abnormal himself; and because his own life had been filled with such an amazing variety of amazing experiences. Every single one of his later novels is a footnote to actual circumstance; with any other author, we should say, for example, that his accounts of the thoughts that pass in a murderer’s mind immediately before he assassinates his victim were the fantastical emanation of a diseased brain, and could never have taken place; one cannot do that in Dostoevski’s case, for one is certain that he is drawing on his Siberian reservoir of fact. These novels are fully as much a contribution to the study of abnormal psychology as they are to the history of fiction.
The leading character, the epileptic Idiot, has a magnetic charm that pulls the reader from the first, and from which it is vain to hope to escape. The “lovely goodness” that Stevenson found in Dostoevski’s Downtrodden and Oppressed shines in this story with a steady radiance. The most brilliant and beautiful women in the novel fall helplessly in love with the Idiot, and the men try hard to despise him, without the least success. He has the sincerity of a child, with a child’s innocence and confidence. His character is almost the incarnation of the beauty of holiness. Such common and universal sins as deceit, pretence, revenge, ambition, are not only impossible to him, they are even inconceivable; he is without taint. From one point of view, he is a natural-born fool; but the wisdom of this world is foolishness with him. His utter harmlessness and incapacity to hurt occasion scenes of extraordinary humour, scenes that make the reader suddenly laugh out loud, and love him all the more ardently. Dostoevski loved children and animals, and so-called simple folk; what is more, he not only loved them, he looked upon them as his greatest teachers. It is a delight to hear this Idiot talk: —
“What has always surprised me, is the false idea that grown-up people have of children. They are not even understood by their fathers and mothers. We ought to conceal nothing from children under the pretext that they are little and that at their age they should remain ignorant of certain things. What a sad and unfortunate idea! And how clearly the children themselves perceive that their parents take them for babies who can’t understand anything, when really they understand everything! Great folks don’t know that in even the most difficult affairs a child is able to give advice that is of the utmost importance. O God! when this pretty little bird stares at you with a happy and confiding look, you are ashamed to deceive him! I call them little birds because little birds are the finest things in the world.”
The Idiot later in the story narrates the following curious incident. Two friends stopping together at an inn retired to their room peacefully, when one of them, lusting to possess the other’s watch, drew a knife, sneaked up behind his victim stealthily, raised his eyes to heaven, crossed himself, and piously murmured this prayer: “O Lord, pardon me through the merits of Christ!” then stabbed his friend to death, and quietly took the watch. Naturally the listener roars with laughter, but the Idiot quietly continues: “I once met a peasant woman crossing herself so piously, so piously! ‘Why do you do that, my dear?’ said I (I am always asking questions). ‘Well,’ said she, ‘just as a mother is happy when she sees the first smile of her nursling, so God experiences joy every time when, from the height of heaven, he sees a sinner lift toward Him a fervent prayer.’ It was a woman of the people who told me that, who expressed this thought so profound, so fine, so truly religious, which is the very basis of Christianity, that is to say, the idea that God is our father, that He is delighted at the sight of a man as a mother is at the sight of her child, — the chief thought of Christ! A simple peasant woman! To be sure, she was a mother… . The religious sentiment, in its essence, can never be crushed by reasoning, by a sin, by a crime, by any form of atheism; there is something there which remains and always will remain beyond all that, something which the arguments of atheists will never touch. But the chief thing is, that nowhere does one notice this more clearly than in the heart of Russia. It is one of the most important impressions that I first received from our country.”
The kindness of the Idiot toward his foes and toward those who are continually playing on his generosity and exploiting him, enrages beyond all endurance some of his friends. A beautiful young society girl impatiently cries: “There isn’t a person who deserves such words from you! here not one of them is worth your little finger, not one who has your intelligence or your
