He dares much, he destroys many souls, but he is wrecked because he dared too much. He becomes a prey to the "evil spirits" and commits suicide. So does the other "possessed" of the novel, Kirilov. He preached the man-God theory all his life, but the desire to commune with the living God, the mystic thirst becomes such an agony to his soul that he puts an end to his doubts by taking his own life. And all the "possessed" are the victims of their doubts and their revolt against the divine truth of the universe.
"The Brothers Karamazov" contains the national message of Dostoyevsky, intimately connected with his religious ideals. Those of the future "city of light" are represented in the novel by the most inspired creations of Dostoyevsky, by the saintly recluse, Father Zosima, and the youngest of the Karamazovs, the pure boy, Alesha. They both know how the contest between the theories of God-man and man-God can and ought to be solved. They found the issue in the soul of the Russian peasant who unites the truth on earth, the truth of the earth, which is the life and the work on the land, with the divine truth which is not yet revealed but will be revealed. The almost identical Russian word for Christian and peasant (krestianin and khristianin) is in the eyes of Dostoyevsky a symbol of the mystic message of the Russian peasant to the universe. This message is, according to Dostoyevsky, the universal spiritual union of all men in Christ. The opposed element, the revolt against faith, is represented in the novel by powerful symbolic figures: by the devil who appears to Ivan Karamazov and tempts him with arguments of materialistic reason mystically tinged by revelations of supernatural truth. The other Antichrist of the novel is the Spanish Jesuit, the head of the Counsel of Inquisition. He defends the power of the Church against Christ himself. His argument is that the safeguard of the human conscience lies in the Church and that men are not prepared and not fit to exist on earth in the presence of Christ Between the two extremes of faith and revolt moves the criminal family of the Karamazovs, representing all of suffering and erring humanity. To them, to the whole of Russia, and to the whole universe does Dostoyevsky address his message of mystical pity and redeeming endurance and love which he has discovered in the soul of the Russian peasant.
In the rest of his novels Dostoyevsky studies the same problems, penetrating into all the shades of human passions, of human doubts and failings, and discovering the mystic issues they reveal. Dostoyevsky felt so absolutely united with all that is contained in the soul of the Russian people that we always think he was the truest mirror of Russia. The Western readers of his works must feel the truth of it. If they are won by the fascination of his genius, they certainly will love in his art his country, which was the greatest love of Dostoyevsky.
ON RUSSIAN NOVELISTS
by William Lyon Phelps
THE life of Dostoevski contrasts harshly with the luxurious ease and steady level seen in the outward existence of his two great contemporaries, Turgenev and Tolstoi. From beginning to end he lived in the very heart of storms, in the midst of mortal coil. He was often as poor as a rat; he suffered from a horrible disease; he was sick and in prison, and no one visited him; he knew the bitterness of death. Such a man’s testimony as to the value of life is worth attention; he was a faithful witness, and we know that his testimony is true.
Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevski was born on the 30 October 1821, at Moscow. His father was a poor surgeon, and his mother the daughter of a mercantile man. He was acquainted with grief from the start, being born in a hospital. There were five children, and they very soon discovered the exact meaning of such words as hunger and cold. Poverty in early years sometimes makes men rather close and miserly in middle age, as it certainly did in the case of Ibsen, who seemed to think that charity began and ended at home. Not so Dostoevski: he was often victimised, he gave freely and impulsively, and was chronically in debt. He had about as much business instinct as a prize-fighter or an opera singer. As Merezhkovski puts it: “This victim of poverty dealt with money as if he held it not an evil, but utter rubbish. Dostoevski thinks he loves money, but money flees him. Tolstoi thinks he hates money, but money loves him, and accumulates about him. The one, dreaming all his life of wealth, lived, and but for his wife’s business qualities would have died, a beggar. The other, all his life dreaming and preaching of poverty, not only has not given away, but has greatly multiplied his very substantial possessions.” In order to make an impressive contrast, the Russian critic is here unfair to Tolstoi, but there is perhaps some truth in the Tolstoi paradox. No wonder Dostoevski loved children, for he was himself a great child.
He was brought up on the Bible and the Christian religion. The teachings of the New Testament were with him almost innate ideas. Thus, although his parents could not give him wealth, or ease, or comfort, or health, they gave him something better than all four put together.
When he was twenty-seven years old, having impulsively expressed revolutionary opinions at a Radical Club to which he belonged, he was arrested with a number of his mates, and after an imprisonment of some months, he was led out on the 22 December 1849, with twenty-one companions, to the scaffold. He passed through all the horror of dying, for visible preparations had been made for the execution, and he was certain that in a moment he would cease to live. Then came the news that the Tsar had commuted the sentence to hard labour; this saved their lives, but one of the sufferers had become insane.
Then came four years in the Siberian prison, followed by a few years of enforced military service. His health actually grew better under the cruel régime of the prison, which is not difficult to understand, for even a cruel régime is better than none at all, and Dostoevski never had the slightest notion of how to take care of himself. At what time his epilepsy began is obscure, but this dreadful disease faithfully and frequently visited him during his whole adult life. From a curious hint that he once let fall, reënforced by the manner in which the poor epileptic in The Karamazov Brothers acquired the falling sickness, we cannot help thinking that its origin came from a blow given in anger by his father.
Dostoevski was enormously interested in his disease, studied its symptoms carefully, one might say eagerly, and gave to his friends minute accounts of exactly how he felt before and after the convulsions, which tally precisely with the vivid descriptions written out in his novels. This illness coloured his whole life, profoundly affected his character, and gave a feverish and hysterical tone to his books.
Dostoevski had a tremendous capacity for enthusiasm. As a boy, he was terribly shaken by the death of Pushkin, and he never lost his admiration for the founder of Russian literature. He read the great classics of antiquity and of modern Europe with wild excitement, and wrote burning eulogies in letters to his friends. The flame of his literary ambition was not quenched by the most abject poverty, nor by the death of those whom he loved most intensely. After his first wife died, he suffered agonies of grief, accentuated by wretched health, public neglect, and total lack of financial resources. But chill penury could not repress his noble rage. He was always planning and writing new novels, even when he had no place to lay his head. And the bodily distress of poverty did not cut him nearly so sharply as its shame. His letters prove clearly that at times he suffered in the same way as the pitiable hero of Poor Folk. That book was indeed a prophecy of the author’s own life.
It is impossible to exaggerate the difficulties under which he wrote his greatest novels. His wife and children were literally starving. He could not get money, and was continually harassed by creditors. During part of the time, while writing in the midst of hunger and freezing cold, he had an epileptic attack every ten days. His comment on all this is, “I am only preparing to live,” which is as heroic as Paul Jones’s shout, “I have not yet begun to fight.”
In 1880 a monument to Pushkin was unveiled, and the greatest Russian authors were invited to speak at the ceremony. This was the occasion where Turgenev vainly tried to persuade Tolstoi to appear and participate. Dostoevski paid his youthful debt to the ever living poet in a magnificent manner. He made a wonderful oration on Russian
