7 best short stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky E-Book

Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Herausgeber: Tacet Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: 7 best short stories
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 601

Beschreibung

Welcome to the 7 Best Short Stories book series, were we present to you the best works of remarkable authors. This edition is dedicated to the russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature, as multiple of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces.

Works selected for this book:
- White Nights;
- An Honest Thief;
- The Christmas Tree and the Wedding;
- Notes From Underground;
- The Dream of a Ridiculous Man;
- A Little Hero;
- Mr. Prohartchin.

If you appreciate good literature, be sure to check out the other Tacet Books titles!

Leseprobe

Introduction

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow, Russia, on October 30, 1821. Son of Mikhail Dostoevsky and Maria Fyodorovna Nietcháieva. He was orphaned as a mother on February 27, 1837. That same year he was sent to Petersburg for the School of Military Engineering. In 1839, his father, who was a doctor, was murdered by the settlers of the farm where he lived. The fact provoked great upheavals in the life of Dostoevsky, who had the first attacks of epilepsy when it knew of the death of the father. His earliest letters show him to be a young man of passion and energy, as well as somewhat mentally unstable.

When Dostoyevsky finished school, he turned from the career he was trained and devoted himself to writing. In 1944, he resigned from public office and began writing his first novel, "Poor People," a novel that describes the mediocre environment in which he lived, published in 1846 in the "Petersburg Almanac".

In 1847 he published the second edition of "Poor People" and in 1948 he published "O Duplo", a novel that did not succeed. Doubts arise over his own capacity as a writer. The Double, however, has come to be known his best early work, and in many ways it was ahead of its time.

In 1847 he began to attend the socialist group of the revolutionary Pietrashevsky. He is considered subversive and is arrested. After eight months in prison, Dostoevsky was "sentenced" to death. In reality, though, this sentence was only a joke. At one point, however, Dostoevsky believed he had only moments to live, and he never forgot the feelings of that experience. He was sentenced to four years in prison and four years of forced service in the army in Siberia, Russia.

In November of 1859, returns to the city of Petersburg. The memories of life in prison are described in the books Memories of the House of the Dead (1861) and Memories of the Underground (1864).

In 1867, he published the novel "Crime and Punishment", which tells the story of the young Raskolnikov who commits a crime and begins to live from guilt for the act committed. The work is a great existential reflection on how the human being relates to the divine questions. "The Brothers Karamazov" is his last work, considered by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud one of the greatest masterpieces of Western literature. The novel is a true web of characters and the work is permeated by indirect discourse, with free reflections of the author himself on the characters.

Dostoevsky died in St. Petersburg, Russia, on January 28, 1881.

The Russian Point Of View

Virginia Woolf1

Doubtful as we frequently are whether either the French or the Americans, who have so much in common with us, can yet understand English literature, we must admit graver doubts whether, for all their enthusiasm, the English can understand Russian literature. Debate might protract itself indefinitely as to what we mean by "understand". Instances will occur to everybody of American writers in particular who have written with the highest discrimination of our literature and of ourselves; who have lived a lifetime among us, and finally have taken legal steps to become subjects of King George. For all that, have they understood us, have they not remained to the end of their days foreigners? Could any one believe that the novels of Henry James were written by a man who had grown up in the society which he describes, or that his criticism of English writers was written by a man who had read Shakespeare without any sense of the Atlantic Ocean and two or three hundred years on the far side of it separating his civilisation from ours? A special acuteness and detachment, a sharp angle of vision the foreigner will often achieve; but not that absence of self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of common values which make for intimacy, and sanity, and the quick give and take of familiar intercourse.

Not only have we all this to separate us from Russian literature, but a much more serious barrier--the difference of language. Of all those who feasted upon Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov during the past twenty years, not more than one or two perhaps have been able to read them in Russian. Our estimate of their qualities has been formed by critics who have never read a word of Russian, or seen Russia, or even heard the language spoken by natives; who have had to depend, blindly and implicitly, upon the work of translators.

What we are saying amounts to this, then, that we have judged a whole literature stripped of its style. When you have changed every word in a sentence from Russian to English, have thereby altered the sense a little, the sound, weight, and accent of the words in relation to each other completely, nothing remains except a crude and coarsened version of the sense. Thus treated, the great Russian writers are like men deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident not only of all their clothes, but also of something subtler and more important--their manners, the idiosyncrasies of their characters. What remains is, as the English have proved by the fanaticism of their admiration, something very powerful and very impressive, but it is difficult to feel sure, in view of these mutilations, how far we can trust ourselves not to impute, to distort, to read into them an emphasis which is false.

They have lost their clothes, we say, in some terrible catastrophe, for some such figure as that describes the simplicity, the humanity, startled out of all effort to hide and disguise its instincts, which Russian literature, whether it is due to translation or to some more profound cause, makes upon us. We find these qualities steeping it through, as obvious in the lesser writers as in the greater. "Learn to make yourselves akin to people. I would even like to add: make yourself indispensable to them. But let this sympathy be not with the mind--for it is easy with the mind--but with the heart, with love towards them." "From the Russian", one would say instantly, where-ever one chanced on that quotation. The simplicity, the absence of effort, the assumption that in a world bursting with misery the chief call upon us is to understand our fellow-sufferers, "and not with the mind--for it is easy with the mind--but with the heart"--this is the cloud which broods above the whole of Russian literature, which lures us from our own parched brilliancy and scorched thoroughfares to expand in its shade--and of course with disastrous results. We become awkward and self-conscious; denying our own qualities, we write with an affectation of goodness and simplicity which is nauseating in the extreme. We cannot say "Brother" with simple conviction. There is a story by Mr. Galsworthy in which one of the characters so addresses another (they are both in the depths of misfortune). Immediately everything becomes strained and affected. The English equivalent for "Brother" is "Mate"--a very different word, with something sardonic in it, an indefinable suggestion of humour. Met though they are in the depths of misfortune the two Englishmen who thus accost each other will, we are sure, find a job, make their fortunes, spend the last years of their lives in luxury, and leave a sum of money to prevent poor devils from calling each other "Brother" on the Embankment. But it is common suffering, rather than common happiness, effort, or desire that produces the sense of brotherhood. It is the "deep sadness" which Dr. Hagberg Wright finds typical of the Russian people that creates their literature.

A generalisation of this kind will, of course, even if it has some degree of truth when applied to the body of literature, be changed profoundly when a writer of genius sets to work on it. At once other questions arise. It is seen that an "attitude" is not simple; it is highly complex. Men reft of their coats and their manners, stunned by a railway accident, say hard things, harsh things, unpleasant things, difficult things, even if they say them with the abandonment and simplicity which catastrophe has bred in them. Our first impressions of Tchekov are not of simplicity but of bewilderment. What is the point of it, and why does he make a story out of this? we ask as we read story after story. A man falls in love with a married woman, and they part and meet, and in the end are left talking about their position and by what means they can be free from "this intolerable bondage".

"'How? How?' he asked, clutching his head. . . . And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found and then a new and splendid life would begin." That is the end. A postman drives a student to the station and all the way the student tries to make the postman talk, but he remains silent. Suddenly the postman says unexpectedly, "It's against the regulations to take any one with the post". And he walks up and down the platform with a look of anger on his face. "With whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the autumn nights?" Again, that story ends.

But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing, we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic--lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed--as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony. Probably we have to read a great many stories before we feel, and the feeling is essential to our satisfaction, that we hold the parts together, and that Tchekov was not merely rambling disconnectedly, but struck now this note, now that with intention, in order to complete his meaning.

We have to cast about in order to discover where the emphasis in these strange stories rightly comes. Tchekov's own words give us a lead in the right direction. ". . . such a conversation as this between us", he says, "would have been unthinkable for our parents. At night they did not talk, but slept sound; we, our generation, sleep badly, are restless, but talk a great deal, and are always trying to settle whether we are right or not." Our literature of social satire and psychological finesse both sprang from that restless sleep, that incessant talking; but after all, there is an enormous difference between Tchekov and Henry James, between Tchekov and Bernard Shaw. Obviously--but where does it arise? Tchekov, too, is aware of the evils and injustices of the social state; the condition of the peasants appals him, but the reformer's zeal is not his--that is not the signal for us to stop. The mind interests him enormously; he is a most subtle and delicate analyst of human relations. But again, no; the end is not there. Is it that he is primarily interested not in the soul's relation with other souls, but with the soul's relation to health--with the soul's relation to goodness? These stories are always showing us some affectation, pose, insincerity. Some woman has got into a false relation; some man has been perverted by the inhumanity of his circumstances. The soul is ill; the soul is cured; the soul is not cured. Those are the emphatic points in his stories.

Once the eye is used to these shades, half the "conclusions" of fiction fade into thin air; they show like transparences with a light behind them--gaudy, glaring, superficial. The general tidying up of the last chapter, the marriage, the death, the statement of values so sonorously trumpeted forth, so heavily underlined, become of the most rudimentary kind. Nothing is solved, we feel; nothing is rightly held together. On the other hand, the method which at first seemed so casual, inconclusive, and occupied with trifles, now appears the result of an exquisitely original and fastidious taste, choosing boldly, arranging infallibly, and controlled by an honesty for which we can find no match save among the Russians themselves. There may be no answer to these questions, but at the same time let us never manipulate the evidence so as to produce something fitting, decorous, agreeable to our vanity. This may not be the way to catch the ear of the public; after all, they are used to louder music, fiercer measures; but as the tune sounded so he has written it. In consequence, as we read these little stories about nothing at all, the horizon widens; the soul gains an astonishing sense of freedom.

In reading Tchekov we find ourselves repeating the word "soul" again and again. It sprinkles his pages. Old drunkards use it freely; ". . . you are high up in the service, beyond all reach, but haven't real soul, my dear boy . . . there's no strength in it". Indeed, it is the soul that is the chief character in Russian fiction. Delicate and subtle in Tchekov, subject to an infinite number of humours and distempers, it is of greater depth and volume in Dostoevsky; it is liable to violent diseases and raging fevers, but still the predominant concern. Perhaps that is why it needs so great an effort on the part of an English reader to read The Brothers Karamazov or The Possessed a second time. The "soul" is alien to him. It is even antipathetic. It has little sense of humour and no sense of comedy. It is formless. It has slight connection with the intellect. It is confused, diffuse, tumultuous, incapable, it seems, of submitting to the control of logic or the discipline of poetry. The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading. We open the door and find ourselves in a room full of Russian generals, the tutors of Russian generals, their step-daughters and cousins, and crowds of miscellaneous people who are all talking at the tops of their voices about their most private affairs. But where are we? Surely it is the part of a novelist to inform us whether we are in an hotel, a flat, or hired lodging. Nobody thinks of explaining. We are souls, tortured, unhappy souls, whose only business it is to talk, to reveal, to confess, to draw up at whatever rending of flesh and nerve those crabbed sins which crawl on the sand at the bottom of us. But, as we listen, our confusion slowly settles. A rope is flung to us; we catch hold of a soliloquy; holding on by the skin of our teeth, we are rushed through the water; feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now submerged, now in a moment of vision understanding more than we have ever understood before, and receiving such revelations as we are wont to get only from the press of life at its fullest. As we fly we pick it all up--the names of the people, their relationships, that they are staying in an hotel at Roulettenburg, that Polina is involved in an intrigue with the Marquis de Grieux--but what unimportant matters these are compared with the soul! It is the soul that matters, its passion, its tumult, its astonishing medley of beauty and vileness. And if our voices suddenly rise into shrieks of laughter, or if we are shaken by the most violent sobbing, what more natural?--it hardly calls for remark. The pace at which we are living is so tremendous that sparks must rush off our wheels as we fly. Moreover, when the speed is thus increased and the elements of the soul are seen, not separately in scenes of humour or scenes of passion as our slower English minds conceive them, but streaked, involved, inextricably confused, a new panorama of the human mind is revealed. The old divisions melt into each other. Men are at the same time villains and saints; their acts are at once beautiful and despicable. We love and we hate at the same time. There is none of that precise division between good and bad to which we are used. Often those for whom we feel most affection are the greatest criminals, and the most abject sinners move us to the strongest admiration as well as love.

Dashed to the crest of the waves, bumped and battered on the stones at the bottom, it is difficult for an English reader to feel at ease. The process to which he is accustomed in his own literature is reversed. If we wished to tell the story of a General's love affair (and we should find it very difficult in the first place not to laugh at a General), we should begin with his house; we should solidify his surroundings. Only when all was ready should we attempt to deal with the General himself. Moreover, it is not the samovar but the teapot that rules in England; time is limited; space crowded; the influence of other points of view, of other books, even of other ages, makes itself felt. Society is sorted out into lower, middle, and upper classes, each with its own traditions, its own manners, and, to some extent, its own language. Whether he wishes it or not, there is a constant pressure upon an English novelist to recognise these barriers, and, in consequence, order is imposed on him and some kind of form; he is inclined to satire rather than to compassion, to scrutiny of society rather than understanding of individuals themselves.

No such restraints were laid on Dostoevsky. It is all the same to him whether you are noble or simple, a tramp or a great lady. Whoever you are, you are the vessel of this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff, the soul. The soul is not restrained by barriers. It overflows, it floods, it mingles with the souls of others. The simple story of a bank clerk who could not pay for a bottle of wine spreads, before we know what is happening, into the lives of his father-in-law and the five mistresses whom his father-in-law treated abominably, and the postman's life, and the charwoman's, and the Princesses' who lodged in the same block of flats; for nothing is outside Dostoevsky's province; and when he is tired, he does not stop, he goes on. He cannot restrain himself. Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvellous, terrible, oppressive--the human soul.

There remains the greatest of all novelists--for what else can we call the author of War and Peace? Shall we find Tolstoi, too, alien, difficult, a foreigner? Is there some oddity in his angle of vision which, at any rate until we have become disciples and so lost our bearings, keeps us at arm's length in suspicion and bewilderment? From his first words we can be sure of one thing at any rate--here is a man who sees what we see, who proceeds, too, as we are accustomed to proceed, not from the inside outwards, but from the outside inwards. Here is a world in which the postman's knock is heard at eight o'clock, and people go to bed between ten and eleven. Here is a man, too, who is no savage, no child of nature; he is educated; he has had every sort of experience. He is one of those born aristocrats who have used their privileges to the full. He is metropolitan, not suburban. His senses, his intellect, are acute, powerful, and well nourished. There is something proud and superb in the attack of such a mind and such a body upon life. Nothing seems to escape him. Nothing glances off him unrecorded. Nobody, therefore, can so convey the excitement of sport, the beauty of horses, and all the fierce desirability of the world to the senses of a strong young man. Every twig, every feather sticks to his magnet. He notices the blue or red of a child's frock; the way a horse shifts its tail; the sound of a cough; the action of a man trying to put his hands into pockets that have been sewn up. And what his infallible eye reports of a cough or a trick of the hands his infallible brain refers to something hidden in the character, so that we know his people, not only by the way they love and their views on politics and the immortality of the soul, but also by the way they sneeze and choke. Even in a translation we feel that we have been set on a mountain-top and had a telescope put into our hands. Everything is astonishingly clear and absolutely sharp. Then, suddenly, just as we are exulting, breathing deep, feeling at once braced and purified, some detail--perhaps the head of a man--comes at us out of the picture in an alarming way, as if extruded by the very intensity of its life. "Suddenly a strange thing happened to me: first I ceased to see what was around me; then his face seemed to vanish till only the eyes were left, shining over against mine; next the eyes seemed to be in my own head, and then all became confused--I could see nothing and was forced to shut my eyes, in order to break loose from the feeling of pleasure and fear which his gaze was producing in me. . . ." Again and again we share Masha's feelings in Family Happiness. One shuts one's eyes to escape the feeling of pleasure and fear. Often it is pleasure that is uppermost. In this very story there are two descriptions, one of a girl walking in a garden at night with her lover, one of a newly married couple prancing down their drawing-room, which so convey the feeling of intense happiness that we shut the book to feel it better. But always there is an element of fear which makes us, like Masha, wish to escape from the gaze which Tolstoi fixes on us. Is it the sense, which in real life might harass us, that such happiness as he describes is too intense to last, that we are on the edge of disaster? Or is it not that the very intensity of our pleasure is somehow questionable and forces us to ask, with Pozdnyshev in the Kreutzer Sonata, "But why live?" Life dominates Tolstoi as the soul dominates Dostoevsky. There is always at the centre of all the brilliant and flashing petals of the flower this scorpion, "Why live?" There is always at the centre of the book some Olenin, or Pierre, or Levin who gathers into himself all experience, turns the world round between his fingers, and never ceases to ask, even as he enjoys it, what is the meaning of it, and what should be our aims. It is not the priest who shatters our desires most effectively; it is the man who has known them, and loved them himself. When he derides them, the world indeed turns to dust and ashes beneath our feet. Thus fear mingles with our pleasure, and of the three great Russian writers, it is Tolstoi who most enthralls us and most repels.

But the mind takes its bias from the place of its birth, and no doubt, when it strikes upon a literature so alien as the Russian, flies off at a tangent far from the truth.

Dostoyevsky and His Message to the World.

Zinaida Vengerova2

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.

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 "all-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?

"Poor Folks" is a very simple story, yet its very simplicity is one of the master achievements of Dostoyevsky, and the uneventful life of Dostoyevsky's pathetic and humble hero, Makar Dievushkin, widens in the narrative into a vision of broad and warm humanity. Makar is a weak character; he indulges in drink, and, worst of all, he is abjectly servile in his attitude towards his superiors. Yet, in the letters he writes to a young girl (the novel is written in the form of letters they exchange), every single event, every single emotion, shows the heroic self-denial of a quaintly free soul—free in spite of an almost slave-like psychology. There is one scene in the novel which had been particularly admired by Bielinsky, and remains in fact an immortal page in the works of Dostoyevsky. It is the description old Makar gives of the kindness shown to him by "His Excellency," the head of the department in Makar's office. The high official has noticed the shabbiness of Makar, and was attracted by the expression of Makar s face. In an impulse of generosity he summoned him to his office, said a few kind words to him, and presented him with a hundred rouble note as a friendly help. Makar was overpowered by so much condescension on the part of his chief. He felt the honor and the kindness much more keenly than the actual help. And a most pathetic thing happened. Just at the moment when "His Excellency" spoke so kindly to Makar, a loose button on Makar's outworn uniform fell on the floor. Makar was overcome with shame and terror, and before he could come to his senses, his chief picked up the button and handed it to him. Makar is full of painfully servile admiration for "His Excellency" when he describes the scene in the office, and feels tragically humble in regard to his own insignificance. Yet what would appear basely undignified on the surface of his emotions is magically transformed into a picture of a great soul—great in its love and its humility.

"Are you aware that you have discovered a sublime side in servility, the most abject of all instincts?" was Bielinsky's first question on that memorable night, after he had read the manuscript of "Poor Folks." This was the miracle worked by Dostoyevsky's penetrating pity. It made him see so deep into the human heart that he was able to discover the divine element hidden in all genuine emotions.

After the publication of his first novel there came a long break in the literary career of Dostoyevsky. That was the time of the great tragedy of his life, the one which became the source of the prophetic inspiration of his later works. In the lifetime of Dante the people of Florence used to say when they met him in the streets, "This is the man who has been to Hell." What was true in an imaginative sense as applied to Dante might be said more directly of Dostoyevsky in connection with what happened to him after he had so brilliantly started as a novelist. He had actually been in hell—in a hell upon earth, and the miracle is that he returned from it with a message of all-forgiving love.

Dostoyevsky was interested, as a young man, in social problems, yet chiefly in the humane side of them. He was haunted from the beginning of his conscious life with schemes and dreams of universal happiness for mankind, and was naturally attracted by the teachings of such idealistic social reformers as Fourier and Robert Owen. He joined a group of friends in a sort of debating society with the purpose of studying and discussing some works on social questions. The members of the group did not aim at any political propaganda, yet at that time all interest for social reform was regarded as criminal by the authorities. And what made the situation still more serious was the supposed circulation of Bielinsky's letter to Gogol, a letter accusing Gogol of reactionary tendencies and exposing a few liberal opinions. Dostoyevsky was actually not guilty even of what seems now such a trifling charge as having circulated a liberal pamphlet. Yet he was tried, together with the other members of the group, and was sentenced to death. In 1849, Dostoyevsky was brought to the scaffold, saw the car with the coffin prepared for his body, had his eyes bandaged, and lived through the agony of those minutes which he thought to be his last. A few moments before the execution, arrived the message of the amnesty and of the commutation of the death penalty into a sentence to four years of hard labor in the Siberian mines.

Dostoyevsky never forgot the scene on the Semenovsky Square. It was in all probability the primary cause of the epileptic fits from which he suffered all his life. The fits developed into a dironic disease during the years of Siberia, which again, as all that Dostoyevsky suffered in his body and mind, became a source of inspiration to his genius.

Dostoyevsky spent seven years in the exile to Siberia. He worked part of the time in the mines, and was then transferred to a Siberian regiment as a private. In 1856 he was restored in his civil rights and promoted to the rank of an office. In 1859 he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg and to settle there. It was then only that he was able to resume his literary work after the long years of enforced silence. He resumed it, however, in a very changed spirit. The time spent "tra la perduta gente" in the mines, in close communion with the worst criminals, and following that the hard military service as a common soldier, the humiliations to which he was subjected, the solitary thoughts and the nervous fits made a deep impression on his mind but did not break his spirit. On the contrary, his experiences brought him nearer to the soul of the Russian people. "The years of hard labor have taught me the essential truth," wrote Dostoyevsky after his return, "the truth hidden in the soul of the Russian people. It is there in spite of the fact that the masses of our peasants consist of drunkards and thieves." He returned from Siberia with the fortifying conviction that the knowledge of the Russian masses has deepened his insight into his own soul, and he strongly believed ever since that the Russian intellectuals will gain everything if they trust the wisdom of the common people, the light revealed by the endurance—the wisdom of the "Russian Christ." Before his exile Dostoyevsky was naturally inclined to see and to cherish the warm glow of love in humble and humiliated souls. After his hard experiences and trials he was ever anxious to discover the divine spark, the religious truth in souls possessed by the temptations of evil.

And even the harmful effect of the Siberian trials on the health of Dostoyevsky, his epileptic fits, "the sacred disease," as they were sometimes called, became an additional power of his genius. They opened to him visionary horizons which a more balanced mind would not have perceived. Dostoyevsky's favorite hero, Prince Myshkin, "the Idiot," is an epileptic, and Dostoyevsky describes in his name the strange ecstasy of just one moment before the unconsciousness brought about by an epileptic fit—the feeling of perfect harmony with the universe, a sensation as if time did no more exist, and all life was blended in complete unity. Dostoyevsky has many times experienced such a state of ecstasy. He considered it a foretaste of the ultimate divine absorption of the human soul in God, and he did not think too high the price of pain he had to pay for his mystic visions of harmony. He knew that all that is divine must arise from the bottom of deepest agony. He had discovered this truth in the soul of the Russian people.

The great productive epoch of Dostoyevsky's life began in the year 1860. All his great novels—most of them works of exceptional length—as well as a number of short stories, were written in the course of the following twenty years up to his death in 1881. He also was very active in other ways. He edited during a couple of years an important literary review, he spent several years abroad, and travelled a great deal in France, Germany, Italy, and England. He had a great admiration for the standards of Western culture as well as for the literature and art of Western Europe. His great object in going "to the West" was to find there the realization of his dream of universal happiness. He, however, experienced great disappointments when he came into closer touch with the different countries he visited. During the Franco-Prussian War, Dostoyevsky's attitude towards Western culture changed entirely. He became violently opposed to the spirit of European life; he thought it irreligious and materialistic. He denounced the perversity of Western morals with the passion of a Biblical prophet, and he believed with the passionate faith of a Biblical prophet that the nations of the West would be redeemed and the reign of the spirit would be restored by the light from the East, from Russia and her people. The novels of Dostoyevsky abound in arguments and in prophecies on national subjects. The full scope of his nationalistic teachings is given in the periodical called "The Diary of a Man of Letters," which Dostoyevsky published at varying intervals in the last ten years of his life. His extreme Slavophile views in politics were violently opposed by the so-called "Westerners," and his last years were very much embittered by the attacks of his political adversaries. Yet, viewed from a distance, the ideas of Dostoyevsky ought not to be judged by a political standard. He was not a politician, he was a prophet with a mission. And however wrong he might have been in his views on immediate political questions, he was right in the spirit.

"Crime and Punishment," "The Idiot," "The Possessed," "A Lad of Twenty," "The Brothers Karamazov," are the great novels of Dostoyevsky. The most accessible to Western readers is certainly "Crime and Punishment." Raskolnikov, who aspired to be a sort of Napoleon in the domain of moral problems, is more or less a universal type of the intellectual. He wished to assert his proud will, to dare to be free in his revolt. He was a super-man before Nietzsche. The Russian part of the Raskolnikov problem begins with his repentance which overflows his soul with an elemental force. "She was no better than vermin, the woman I killed—and yet I must atone for my crime as if it had been of the greatest consequence."

This is the central point of the novel. "Go at once," urges Sonia, who is Raskolnikov's spiritual guide, "go this very minute, stop at the crossing of the roads, bow to the earth, kiss the soil thou hast defiled, bow then to all the world, to all the four sides, and say in a loud voice: 'I have killed.'" Raskolnikov kisses the earth with an ecstasy of joy. His repentance and his atonement are his moral victory, the achievement of the heroic ideal he vainly aspired to achieve by violence.

"Crime and Punishment" is a complete novel in itself; it puts up a problem and solves it to the end. All the other novels are each part of Dostoyevsky's teaching, and the characters which appear in them are related to each other, some of them representing the aspiring mystic faith, and some the revolted agnosticism fighting against it. The hero of "The Idiot," Prince Myshkin, represents the fullest realization of Dostoyevsky's ideal of those "who are of the future city of light." He is an idiot, an epileptic, unsound in the eyes of ordinary people, but his "flaming' brain" sees visions of a harmonic universe, and he is ready to pay the price of his life for a moment of these revelations. His inner fight helps all the suffering humanity that surrounds him, all those who are entangled in the problems of their passions, whose love is a cruel desire to subjugate and to victimize the weaker souls or to fight the stronger ones. He loves no one with an exclusive love but he pities all, and his pity is a miraculous means to come to a simple harmony of life, to achieve in each single soul its individual problem. The character opposed to him, Rogozhine, is a man out of the "real city," a man rooted in reality with all his contradictory passions, a man of the Russian soil. Yet in the eyes of Dostoyevsky, Myshkin, who passes like a vision through the novel, represents the true—the mystic reality, and the real men and women are apparitions, "dreams in a dream."

"The Idiot," as well as "Crime and Punishment," deals chiefly and almost exclusively with individual problems. In "The Possessed" and in his most synthetic novel, "The Brothers Karamazov," Dostoyevsky plunges into the deepest religious and national problems. "The Possessed" was conceived partly as a satire against the Russian revolutionaries. In his strong opposition to all violence as being contrary to the spirit of Russia, Dostoyevsky became an adversary of revolutionary ways in politics; his chief grievance against the socialists was their agnosticism. This forms the foundation of "The Possessed" (the title points to the revolutionaries possessed by evil spirits), but the novel is much more than a satire. It contains the religious teaching of Dostoyevsky, the ideal of the "God-man," of the man who sees his salvation in the submergence of his human individuality in God, in the closest communion with Christ, in the readiness to take upon himself the sacrifice of Christ and to unite with the Son of the Lord in God the Father, to disappear as a personality for the supreme resurrection in the all-embracing unity of God. The contrast of the "God-man" in the teaching of Dostoyevsky is the "man-God" the Antichrist, the revolted agnostic whose desire is to destroy the faith in order to become God himself. No human being can exist without an ideal, without a symbol of sacredness. If his temple is empty he will put his own image on the altar. This is how Dostoyevsky explains the psychology of all the agnostics he pictures in "The Possessed." There is a large collection of them in the novel. The chief, the most fascinating, the real Antichrist is Nikolai Stavrogin, the leader of the socialist group. He wants to be the god of all those he fascinates and seduces by his intellectual power. He is ready to offer shrewd arguments to support the idea of "God-man" when he speaks to those whose faith is yet unshaken; but he does it in order to gain them over to his own proud agnosticism and to his self-assertion. He is an eloquent agnostic and preacher of a man-God ideal when addressing his followers. 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.

White Nights

And was it his destined partOnly one moment in his lifeTo be close to your heart?Or was he fated from the startto live for just one fleeting instant,within the purlieus of your heart.Ivan Turgenev, "The Flower"

First Night

It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humoured and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader, very youthful, but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart!... Speaking of capricious and ill-humoured people, I cannot help recalling my moral condition all that day. From early morning I had been oppressed by a strange despondency. It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who "every one" was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was; that was why I felt as though they were all deserting me when all Petersburg packed up and went to its summer villa. I felt afraid of being left alone, and for three whole days I wandered about the town in profound dejection, not knowing what to do with myself. Whether I walked in the Nevsky, went to the Gardens or sauntered on the embankment, there was not one face of those I had been accustomed to meet at the same time and place all the year. They, of course, do not know me, but I know them. I know them intimately, I have almost made a study of their faces, and am delighted when they are gay, and downcast when they are under a cloud. I have almost struck up a friendship with one old man whom I meet every blessed day, at the same hour in Fontanka. Such a grave, pensive countenance; he is always whispering to himself and brandishing his left arm, while in his right hand he holds a long gnarled stick with a gold knob. He even notices me and takes a warm interest in me. If I happen not to be at a certain time in the same spot in Fontanka, I am certain he feels disappointed. That is how it is that we almost bow to each other, especially when we are both in good humour. The other day, when we had not seen each other for two days and met on the third, we were actually touching our hats, but, realizing in time, dropped our hands and passed each other with a look of interest.