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Title: Dostoevsky

Author: André Gide

Author of introduction, etc.: Arnold Bennett

Release date: September 28, 2025 [eBook #76944]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926

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DOSTOEVSKY

D OS TOE V S KY
By André Gide
T R ANS L AT E D F R OM T HE F R E NC H

With an Introduction by
ARNOLD BENNETT

“Dostoevsky
was the only psychologist
from whom I had anything to learn:
he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life,
happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.”
Nietzsche

AL F RE D A. KNOP F
192 6

D O S T O E V S K
Y
By André Gide, was first
published in Paris by Plon-
Nourrit et Cie. in 1923

Made and Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London

INTRODUCTORY NOTE
ANDRÉ GIDE is now one of the leaders of French literature. The first book
of his to attract wide attention among the lettered was L’Immoraliste. Since
then, in some twenty years of productiveness, he has gradually consolidated
his position until at the present day his admirers are entitled to say that no
other living French author stands so firm and so passionately acknowledged
as an influence. His authority over the schools of young writers who
contribute to or are published by La Nouvelle Revue Française (with which
he has been intimately connected from its foundation) is quite unrivalled.
And it must be stated, as a final proof of mastership, that he has powerful
and not despicable opponents.
To my mind his outstanding characteristic is that he is equally interested
in the æsthetic and in the moral aspect of literature. Few imaginative writers
have his broad and vivacious curiosity about moral problems, and scarcely
any moralists exhibit even half his preoccupation with the æsthetic. He is a
distinguished, if somewhat fragmentary, literary critic—not merely of
French but of Russian, English and classical literatures. I shall not forget his
excitement when he first read Tom Jones. “Ce livre m’attendait,” said he,
with grave delight. His practical interest in the technique of fiction never
fades; indeed it grows. So much so that his latest novel, now appearing
serially in La Nouvelle Revue Française, really amounts to an essay in a
new form; and with startling modesty he has labelled it, in the dedication,
“my first novel.”
Of course no novelist can achieve anything permanent without a moral
basis or background. Balzac had it. De Maupassant had it to the point of
savagery. Zola had it, in his degree. Paul Bourget—a writer whom
highbrows French and English have still to reckon with—has it. But André
Gide writes in the very midst of morals. They are not only his background,
but frequently his foreground. Scarcely one of his books (the exception may

be Les Caves du Vatican) but poses and attempts to resolve a moral
problem.
It was natural and even necessary that such a writer as Gide should deal
with such a writer as Dostoevsky. They were made for each other—or
rather Dostoevsky was made for Gide. I first met Gide in the immense field
of Dostoevsky. He said, and I agreed, that The Brothers Karamazov was the
greatest novel ever written. This was ages ago, and years have only
confirmed us in the opinion.
“But,” said Gide, “everything that Dostoevsky ever wrote is worth
reading and must be read. Nothing can safely be omitted.”
At that period there was none but a mutilated French translation of The
Brothers Karamazov, and Gide had to read Dostoevsky in German. A
complete translation, I fear, still lacks in French, but André Gide can now
read him in full in English: which is to our credit and his. Let us, however,
not be too much uplifted. Dostoevsky’s important Journal d’un Ecrivain
exists in French but not in English.
Those who read Gide’s Dostoevsky will receive light, some of it
dazzling, on both Dostoevsky and Gide. I can recall no other critical work
which more cogently justifies and more securely establishes its subject. If
anyone wants to appreciate the progress made by Western Europe in the
appreciation of Russian psychology, let him compare the late Count
Melchior de Voguë’s Le Roman Russe with the present work. It is
impossible to read this Dostoevsky without enlarging one’s idea of
Dostoevsky and of the functions of the novel. All the conventional charges
against the greatest of the Russians—morbidity, etc., etc., fall to pieces
during perusal. They are not killed; they merely expire. And Dostoevsky in
the end stands out not simply as a supreme psychologist and narrator, but
also as a publicist of genius endowed with a prophetic view over the future
of the nations as astounding as his insight into the individual. “There never
was,” says Gide, “an author more Russian in the strictest sense of the word
and withal so universally European.”
Dostoevsky had various and distressing personal defects, but his
humanity and his wisdom, doubtless derived from the man Jesus who
delivered the Sermon on the Mount, are unique; and André Gide’s
demonstration of their worth is his invaluable contribution to Dostoevsky
literature.
A RNOL D B E NN E T T.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
IN the early months of 1922, M. André Gide delivered before M. Jacques
Copeau’s School of Dramatic Art at the Vieux-Colombier a series of six
addresses on Dostoevsky, first published from shorthand notes—with but
slender emendation, lest the style should lose in spontaneity—in the Revue
Hebdomâdaire, Nos. 2–8, 1923, then later in the same year in book form,
together with selected essays. These addresses form the basis of the present
translation from which two short chapters, Les Frères Karamazov and an
Allocution lue au Vieux-Colombier pour la Célébration du Centenaire de
Dostoïevsky, have been omitted by desire of the Author, who adapted his
original preface specially for this English edition.
By courtesy of Messrs. William Heinemann, we are permitted to quote
extensively from Mrs. Constance Garnett’s translations of Dostoevsky’s
Novels (12 vols., 1912–1920). We have utilized as far as possible Miss
Ethel Colburn Mayne’s Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his
Family and Friends (Messrs. Chatto and Windus, 1917): elsewhere we have
cited J. W. Bienstock’s Correspondance et Voyage à l’Étranger (Paris,
1908). Quotations are further made from Bienstock and Nau’s version of
the Journal (Paris, 1904), and from Th. M. Dostoevsky: eine biographische
Studie, by N. Hoffmann (Berlin, 1899).

CONTENTS

page

Introductory Note v
Translator’s Note ix
Author’s Preface 1
Dostoevsky in his Correspondence 8
(1908)
Addresses on Dostoevsky (1922)
I 45
II 76
III 99
IV 118
V 144
VI 170
Appendix 199

AUTHOR’S PREFACE
TOLSTOY in his immensity still overshadows our horizon; but as a
traveller in a land of mountains sees, with each receding step, appear above
the nearest peak one loftier yet, screened hitherto by the surrounding
heights, some eager spirits herald perchance the rise of Dostoevsky behind
Tolstoy’s giant figure. This cloud-capped summit is the secret heart of the
chain and source of many a generous stream in whose waters the Europe of
to-day may slake her strange new thirsts. Dostoevsky, not Tolstoy, merits
rank beside Ibsen and Nietzsche: great as they, mayhap the mightiest of the
three.
In Germany translations of Dostoevsky are multiplying, each an
advance on its predecessor as regards vigour and scrupulous accuracy.
England, stubborn and slow to move, yet makes it her concern not to be
outstripped. When he introduced Mrs. Constance Garnett’s translation in the
New Age, Arnold Bennett wished all English novelists and short story
writers could come under the influence of these “most powerful works of
the imagination ever produced.” Speaking more particularly of The
Brothers Karamazov, he declared this book, in which human passion
reaches its maximum intensity, contains about a dozen figures that are
simply colossal. Who can tell if these colossal figures have ever made, even
in Russia, so direct appeal as to us, whether their call sounded ever before
so pressing?
Dostoevsky’s admirers were recently rare enough, but as invariably
happens when the earliest enthusiasts are recruited from the élite, their
number goes on increasing steadily. First of all, I should like to inquire how
it is that certain minds are still obdurately prejudiced against his work,
admirable though it be. Because the best way to overcome a lack of
comprehension is to accept it as sincere and try to understand it.

The principal charge brought against Dostoevsky in the name of our
Western-European logic has been, I think, the irrational, irresolute, and
often irresponsible nature of his characters, everything in their appearance
that could seem grotesque and wild. It is not, so people aver, real life that he
unfolds, but nightmares. In my belief this is utterly mistaken; but let us
grant the truth of it for argument’s sake, and refrain from answering after
the manner of Freud that there is more sincerity in our dream-life than in
the actions of our real existence. Hear rather what Dostoevsky has to say for
himself on the subject of dreams: “These obvious absurdities and
impossibilities with which your dream was overflowing ... you accepted all
at once, almost without the slightest surprise, at the very time when, on
another side, your reason was at its highest tension and showed
extraordinary power, cunning, sagacity, and logic. And why, too, on waking
and fully returning to reality, do you feel almost every time, and sometimes
with extraordinary intensity, that you have left something unexplained
behind with the dream, and at the same time you feel that interwoven with
these absurdities some thought lies hidden, and a thought that is real,
something belonging to your actual life, something that exists and always
has existed in your heart. It’s as though something new, prophetic, that you
were awaiting, has been told you in your dream.”⁠[1]
What Dostoevsky says here about dreams we shall apply to his own
books, not for a moment that I would consider assimilating these stories to
the absurdities of certain dreams, because we feel when we leave one of his
books, even should our reason refuse complete agreement with it, that he
has laid his finger on some obscure spot “which is part of our actual life.”
In this, I think, we shall find explained the refusal of certain minds, in the
name of Western-European civilization, to admit Dostoevsky’s genius,
because I readily observe that in all our Western literature (and I do not
limit myself to French alone) the novel, with but rare exceptions, concerns
itself solely with relations between man and man, passion and intellect, with
family, social, and class relations, but never, practically never with the
relations between the individual and his self or his God, which are to
Dostoevsky all important. I fancy nothing could better illustrate my idea
than the reflection made by a Russian and quoted in Mme. Hoffmann’s
biography, the best by far I know, but which unfortunately has not yet been
translated. His reflection, she holds, will enable us to discern one of the
peculiarities of the Russian soul. Once reproached with his unpunctuality

this Russian gravely retorted: “Yes, life is difficult! There are moments that
must be lived well, and this is more important than the keeping of any
engagement.”⁠[2] The inner life is thus more highly prized than relations with
one’s fellow-man. Here lies Dostoevsky’s secret, the thing which makes
him for some so great, for many others so insufferable!
Not for a moment do I suggest that in Western Europe, in France, for
example, man is wholly a social being, ever dressed for a part. We have
Pascal’s Thoughts and the Fleurs du Mal, strangely solitary and profound,
yet as French as any other works in our literature. But a certain category of
problems, heart-searchings, passions, and associations seem to be the
province of the moralist and the theologian, and a novelist has no call to
burden himself with them. The miracle Dostoevsky accomplished consists
in this: each of his characters—and he created a world of them—lives by
virtue of his own personality, and these intimately personal beings, each
with his peculiar secret, are introduced to us in all their puzzling
complexity. The wonder of it is that the problems are lived over by each of
his characters, or rather let us say the problems exist at the expense of his
characters: problems which conflict, struggle, and assume human guise to
perish or triumph before our eyes.
No question too transcendent for Dostoevsky to handle in one of his
novels; but, having said this, I am bound at once to add that he never
approaches a question from the abstract, ideas never exist for him but as
functions of his characters, wherein lies their perpetual relativity and source
of power. One individual evolves a certain theory concerning God,
providence, and life eternal because he knows he must die in a few days’
time, in a few hours maybe (Ippolit in The Idiot): another (in The
Possessed) builds up an entire system of metaphysics, containing Nietzsche
in embryo, on the premise of self-destruction, for in a quarter of an hour he
is going to take his own life, and hearing him speak, it is impossible to
distinguish whether his philosophy postulates his suicide or his suicide his
philosophy. Prince Myshkin owes his most wonderful, most heavenly
raptures to the imminence of an epileptic fit. In conclusion I have only one
comment to offer: though pregnant with thought, Dostoevsky’s novels are
never abstract, indeed, of all the books I know, they are the most palpitating
with life.
Representative as Dostoevsky’s characters are, they never seem to
forsake their humanity to become mere symbols or the types familiar in our

classical drama. They keep their individuality which is as specific as in
Dickens’s most peculiar creations, and as powerfully drawn and painted as
any portrait in any literature.
Listen to this: “There are people whom it is difficult to describe
correctly in their typical and characteristic aspect. These are the people who
are usually called ‘the mass,’ ‘the majority,’ and who do actually make up
the vast majority of mankind. To this class of ‘commonplace’ or ‘ordinary’
people belong certain persons of my tale, such as Gavril Ardalionovitch.”⁠[3]
Now, this is a character particularly difficult to delineate. What will he
succeed in telling us about him?
“A profound and continual consciousness of his own lack of talent, and
at the same time the overwhelming desire to prove to himself that he was a
man of great independence, had rankled in his heart from boyhood up. He
was a young man of violent and envious cravings, who seemed to have
been positively born with his nerves overwrought. The violence of his
desires he took for strength. This passionate craving to distinguish himself
sometimes led him to the brink of most ill-considered actions, but our hero
was always at the last moment too sensible to take the final plunge. That
drove him to despair.”⁠[4] And this for one of the least important characters
in the book! I must add that the others, the chief protagonists, he does not
portray, leaving them to limn in their own portrait, never finished, ever
changing, in the course of the narrative. His principal characters are always
in course of formation, never quite emerging from the shadows. In passing,
note how profoundly different he is from Balzac, whose chief care seems
ever to be the perfect consistency of his characters. Balzac paints like
David; Dostoevsky like Rembrandt, and his portraits are artistically so
powerful and often so perfect that even if they lacked the depths of thought
that lie behind them, and around them, I believe that Dostoevsky would still
be the greatest of all novelists.

FOOTNOTES
[1] The Idiot, p. 455.
[2] Hoffmann, p. 7, “Es gibt Augenblicke, die richtig gelebt sein wollen.”
(Translator’s note.)
[3] The Idiot, pp. 461–462.

[4] The Idiot, p. 464.

DOSTOEVSKY IN HIS
CORRESPONDENCE
(1908)

I

YOU are prepared to find a super-man: you lay hold on a fellow mortal,
sick, poor, toiling without respite, and strangely lacking in that pseudo-
quality he himself criticized so strongly in the French—eloquence. In
dealing with a book so bare of all pretension, I shall hold remote every
consideration save one, straightforwardness. If some there be who seek in
these pages fine writing or intellectual entertainment, I warn them now, it
were well to read no further.
The text of the letters is often confused, inaccurate, unskilfully put
together, and we are grateful to Dostoevsky’s translator for having
renounced all idea of introducing a certain artificial elegance or attempting
to remedy their characteristic awkwardness.⁠[5]
The first contact is indeed discouraging. Mme. Hoffmann, Dostoevsky’s
German biographer, leads us to understand that the selection of letters
issued by the Russian editors might have been better made; but she entirely
fails to convince me that its keynote could have been different. As it stands,
the volume is bulky, and the reader gasps in astonishment less at the
number of the letters than at the vast formlessness of each one of them.
Perhaps we have never yet had an example of a literary man’s letters so
badly written, by that I mean written with so little regard for style. Ideas
seem to come from his pen not in ordered sequence, but in a rich confusion,
which, once it is brought under control, contributes powerfully to the
complexity of his novels. The same man who is so uncompromising and so

tenacious where his own work is concerned, correcting, destroying,
modifying his stories, page by page, until each becomes “the expression of
his very being,” writes his correspondence anyhow: never crossing a phrase
out, but constantly catching himself up, hurrying on as fast as he can, and
never able to bring his letter to a satisfactory close; and nothing helps us
better to estimate the distance between a work and its creator. Inspiration?
romantic and flattering convenience! The muse is not so readily wooed.
And if ever Buffon’s modest saying—“A patience that knows no
weariness”—were applicable, ’tis here.
“What theory is this you’ve got hold of?” he writes to his brother, on the
very threshold of his career.⁠[6] “A picture ought to be painted at one sitting,
you say? When did you acquire this conviction? Believe me, in all things,
labour, yes, prolonged labour, is indispensable. A few lines of Pushkin’s
verse, light and polished, truly seem the fruit of one effort, thanks to the
hours Pushkin spent arranging and revising them. It needs more than a
happy knack to produce mature work. We are told that Shakespeare’s work
bears no trace of correction: that is exactly why we find in it so many
imperfections and so much that is contrary to good taste. If he had spent
more time over it, the result would have been better.” Such is the keynote of
the whole correspondence. The best of his life and spirit Dostoevsky
devotes to his work. None of his letters was written from pleasure. He
constantly reverts to his “terrible, unmasterable, incredible distaste for
letter-writing.”—“Letters,” he declares, “have neither rhyme nor reason: it
is impossible to unburden oneself in them.” He goes even further: “I write
to you at great length, and I see that of the very essence of my moral or
spiritual life I have given you not a notion, and so it will remain as long as
we continue to correspond; I cannot write letters: I cannot write about
myself and be just.”⁠[7] Elsewhere he says that “in a letter it’s impossible to
write anything. There’s the secret of my dislike to Madame de Sévigné: the
woman wrote her letters too well!” Or with a touch of humour: “If ever I go
to the lower regions, I shall beyond a doubt be sentenced to write for my
sins some ten letters a day”—and I think this is the one flicker of humour
you can discern throughout the whole gloomy book.
So only direst compulsion will drive him to write a letter. His
correspondence (save during the last ten years of his life, when the tone is
altered—and of this period I shall speak apart) is one prolonged cry of
distress: he is penniless, desperate, and he seeks help. A cry, did I say? It is

one unending, monotonous lament. He is a beggar, and does not know how
to beg: he is all awkwardness, without pride, and innocent of irony. He
reminds me of the angel of whom we read in the Little Flowers of St.
Francis. This angel, in the form of a traveller who had lost his way, came to
the Val de Spolete and knocked at the door of the infant settlement. His
knocking was so loud, long, and precipitate that the brethren grew
indignant, and Brother Masseo (M. de Vogüé, I presume!) at last opened the
door, asking, “Whence comest thou to knock in so unseemly wise?” And
the angel inquired, “How then must I knock?” Brother Masseo replied,
“Knock thrice with deliberation, then pause. Leave the porter time to say a
pater-noster. Then if he comes not, knock again.” “But I am sore pressed,”
continued the angel.
“I am in such poverty that I am fit to hang myself,” writes Dostoevsky,
“I can neither pay my debts nor leave, lacking funds for the journey, and I
am in black despair.”—“What is to become of me between now and the
close of the year? Dear knows. My head is bursting. I have not a soul left
from whom I can borrow.”—(“Do you realize what it means, to have
nowhere to go?” says one of his characters.) “I’ve written to a relative to
ask him for six hundred roubles. If he doesn’t send them, then all is lost.”
His correspondence is so full of such laments and others in like strain that I
make my selection at random. Sometimes there is, every six months or so, a
note of greater insistence: “It is only once in a lifetime that money can
possibly be so cruelly needed.”
Towards the end—drunk with the humility he used to intoxicate the
heroes of his novels, that uncanny humility of the Russian, which may be
Christ-like, but, according to Mme. Hoffmann, is still found in the depths of
the Russian soul even when Christian faith is lacking, and which the
Western mind will never fully understand since it reckons self-respect a
virtue—towards the end, he asks, “Why should they deny me? I make no
demands. I am but a humble petitioner!”
But perhaps these letters furnish, wrongly, the impression of a human
creature ever deep in despair, seeing that they were written only when
despair was greatest. No: incoming moneys were immediately swallowed
up by debts, and thus, at the age of fifty, he could truthfully say of himself,
“My life long I have toiled for money, and my life long I have been in need,
more sorely now than ever.”⁠[8] Debts, or gambling, lack of restraint, and
that instinctive, prodigal generosity which made Riesenkampf, the

companion of his youth, say, “Dostoevsky is one of these people in whose
company a man lives well, but who himself will remain a needy creature till
the very end of his days.”
When fifty, he wrote: “This plan of a novel (i.e. The Brothers
Karamazov, not written till nine years later) has been tormenting me now
for more than three years; but I have not made a start with it, because I
should like to write it in my own good time, like Tolstoy, Turgeniev, and
Gontcharov. Let me write at least one of my works unhampered and without
the preoccupation of being ready at a fixed date.”⁠[9] But it is in vain that he
repeats, “I don’t understand hurriedly done work, written for money”: this
money question invariably obtrudes itself, together with the fear of not
being ready in time. “I dread not being ready in time, being late. I should
hate to spoil things by my haste. I admit the plan has been well conceived
and thought over; but haste can ruin all.”⁠[10]
The result of this is terrible overstrain, for he stakes his honour on an
ideal of faithfulness that is beset with difficulties, and he would die in
harness sooner than furnish imperfect work. Towards the close of his life he
can say: “Throughout my literary career, I have kept my agreements with
scrupulous exactness, not once have I broken my word; and what is more, I
have never written for money’s sake alone, nor in order to deliver myself
from accepted obligations,” and a little before, in the same letter: “I have
never invented a theme for money’s sake, to meet the obligation of writing
up to a previously agreed time-limit. I always made an agreement ... and
sold myself into bondage beforehand ... only when I already had my theme
in mind prepared for writing, and when it was one that I felt it necessary to
develop.”⁠[11] So if in one of his early letters (written at the age of twenty-
four) he makes protest: “Whatever befall me, my resolution will remain
unshaken; even if driven to the extreme limit of privation, I shall stand firm
and never compose to order. Constraint is pernicious and soul-destroying. I
want each of my works to be good in itself”⁠[12] ... we can, without cavilling,
admit that he did not break his vow.
But he cherished throughout his life the belief that with more time and
freedom he could have given better expression to his thought. “There is one
consideration that troubles one greatly: if I spent a year writing the novel
beforehand, and then two or three months in copying and revising it, I
guarantee the result would be very different.” Self-delusion, maybe? Who
can tell? With greater leisure, to what could he have attained? After what

was he still striving? Greater simplicity, no doubt, and a more complete
subordination of detail. As they are, his best works rise, almost throughout,
to a degree of precision and clarity that it is not easy to imagine excelled.
And to reach this, what expenditure of effort! It is only now and again
that sudden inspiration is vouchsafed; everything else means painful toil. To
his brother, who doubtless had reproached him with not writing “simply”
enough, meaning to say “quickly” enough, and with not “surrendering
himself to inspiration,” he replied, young as he was: “It is clear that you are
confusing, as often happens, inspiration, that is, the first momentary
creation of the picture, or the stirring of the soul, with work. Thus, for
instance, I make note at once of a scene just as it appeared to me, and I am
delighted: then, for months, for a year even, I work at it ... and believe me,
the finished article is much superior. Provided, of course, that the
inspiration is vouchsafed! Naturally without inspiration nothing can be
accomplished....” Must I crave pardon for this prodigality of quotation, or
will you not rather be grateful to me for allowing Dostoevsky to be his own
spokesman as much as possible? “At the beginning, that is at the end of last
year, I thought the novel (he refers to The Possessed) very made and
artificial and rather scorned it. But later I was overtaken by real enthusiasm.
I fell in love with my work of a sudden, and made a big effort to get all that
I had written into good trim....”⁠[13] “The whole year,” he goes on to say
(1870), “I have done nothing but destroy.... I have altered my plan at least
ten times, and I’ve re-written the first part entirely. Two or three months ago
I was in despair. Now everything has fallen into place together and cannot
be changed.” And again the ever-present obsession: “If I had had time to
write without hurrying myself, without a time-limit in view, it is possible
that something good might have developed out of it.”⁠[14]
This anguish and this dissatisfaction with himself were gone through for
every work that he wrote. “It is a long novel, in six parts (Crime and
Punishment). At the end of November a large part of it was written and
ready; I burned the lot! Now, I can frankly admit that it did not please me. A
new form, a new plan hurried me along. I have made a fresh start. I am
working night and day; still, progress is slow.”—“I am working hard and
little comes of it,” he says elsewhere: “I am constantly tearing my work up.
I am terribly discouraged.” And again: “I have done so much work that I’ve
become stupid, and my head is dazed.”—“I am working here (Staraia

Roussa) like a convict in spite of the fine weather to be taken advantage of;
I am tied night and day to my task.”
Sometimes a mere article gives him as much trouble as a book, because
his conscientiousness is as rigid in little things as in great.
“I have let it drag on till now” (i.e. a memoir on Bielinsky, which has
not been traced), “and at last I’ve finished it, gnashing my teeth the while.
Ten pages of a novel are more easily written than these two sheets.
Consequently I’ve written, all in all, this confounded article five times at
least, and even then I’ve scored everything out and changed what I’d
written. Finally I’ve completed the article after a fashion, but it is so bad
that I am full of disgust.”⁠[15] For while he clings to the profound belief in
his worth, in the worth of his ideas at least, he is always exacting while the
work is in progress, and never pleased when it is completed.
“I’ve seldom happened to have anything newer, more complete or more
original. I can say this without being accused of pride, because I am
speaking of the subject only, of the idea that has sprung up in my head, and
not of its realization; as for the latter, it lies with God. I can make a
complete mess of it—which has happened before to-day.”
“However wretched and abominable what I’ve written may be,” he says
in another passage, “the idea of the novel and the labour I expend on it are
to me, its unhappy author, my most precious possession in life.”
“My dissatisfaction with my novel amounts to disgust,” so he writes
when working at The Idiot. “I have made a terrible effort to work, but
simply could not; my heart is bad. Just now I am making a last effort for the
third part. If I succeed in polishing off this book, I’ll get better: if not, it is
all over with me.”
Having already written not only the three books M. de Vogüé reckons
his masterpieces, but Notes from Underground, The Idiot, and The Eternal
Husband, he concentrates all his efforts on a new theme (The Possessed),
exclaiming, “It’s high time I wrote something serious.”
And the year of his death, writing to Mlle. N——, he says: “I am
conscious that, as a writer, I have many defects, because I am the first to be
dissatisfied with my own efforts. You can just picture the times when I
cross-examine myself, to find that I have literally not expressed the
twentieth part of what was in my mind, and could, perhaps, have been
expressed! My salvation lies in the sure hope that one day God may grant

me such strength and inspiration that I shall find perfect self-expression and
be able to make plain all that I carry in my heart and imagination.”⁠[16]
How remote from Balzac with his self-assurance and rich imperfection!
Can even Flaubert have known what it is to make such demands upon
oneself, to struggle so hard and toil in such mad frenzies? I think not. His
exigencies are more purely literary, and if his uncompromising uprightness
as a writer and the tale of his prodigious labours are prominently displayed
in his letters, it is simply because he becomes attached to this very labour,
and without exactly vaunting it, he is at least uncommonly proud of it.
Besides, he suppressed all else, holding life so “loathsome a thing, that the
only way to bear it is to avoid it,” and compared himself to the “Amazons
who cut off their breasts, the better to bend the bow.” Dostoevsky
suppressed nothing; he had a wife and children, whom he adored, and life
he did not scorn. After his release from prison, he wrote: “At least, I have
lived; I have suffered, but I have lived!” His sacrifices for love of his art are
the nobler and the more tragic because less arrogant, less conscious, less
deliberate. He frequently quotes Terence, refusing to concede that anything
human should be foreign to himself either. “Man has not the right to turn
aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I
maintain on moral grounds of the highest order. Homo sum, et nihil
humanum....” He does not despise his suffering, but assumes the burden in
all its fullness. Losing wife and brother within the space of a few months,
he writes: “And then I was suddenly left alone, and I knew fear! It has
become terrible. My life broken in two! On one hand, the past, with all that
I had to live for, on the other, the unknown, with not one loving heart to
comfort me in my loss. There was literally no reason why I should go on
living. Forge new links, start a fresh existence? The very thought revolted
me! I realized then for the first time that I could not replace my lost ones,
they were all I held dear, and new loves could not, ought not to exist.”⁠[17]
But a fortnight later, this is what he wrote: “Of all my reserves of strength
and energy, there is nothing left save a vague uneasiness of soul, a state
bordering on despair. Bitterness and indecision—a mood foreign to me.
And then I’m utterly alone. Yet I always have the feeling that I am going to
begin to live! Ridiculous, isn’t it? The cat and its nine lives?”⁠[18] He was at
this moment forty-four years of age, and less than a year later, he married a
second time.

At twenty-eight years of age, confined in a fortress pending transfer to
Siberia, he cried, “I see I have within me resources of vitality that it will be
hard to exhaust.” And in 1856, still in Siberia, but released from prison, and
not long married to a widow, Marie Dimitrievna Issaïev by name, he wrote:
“Now things are different from what they used to be! So much more
reflection, effort and energy enters into my work. Can it be that after
struggling so resolutely and courageously for six long years I am incapable
of earning enough money to support my wife and myself? Impossible!
Nobody knows yet the worth of my powers or the extent of my talent, and
this is what I chiefly count on!”
But, alas! he has to struggle against other ills than poverty.
“My work is done in care and suffering, and I am always at high
nervous tension. When I do too much, I become physically ill.”—“Of late
I’ve been working literally day and night, in spite of my attacks.” And
again: “These attacks will make an end of me: after one, it takes me four
days to straighten out my thoughts.”
Dostoevsky was never reticent concerning his epilepsy; his attacks of
the falling sickness were, alas! all too frequent not to have been witnessed
at times by some of his intimates, aye, and by strangers too. Strakhov
describes one of these fits in his Reminiscences, unconscious, as the sufferer
himself was, that there could be the slightest shame attached to the epileptic
condition, or that it implied any moral or intellectual “inferiority” apart
from the resultant hindrances to work. Even to correspondents of the other
sex who were personally unknown to him and whom he was addressing for
the first time, he would apologize for his delay in writing, with the naïve
and simple remark: “I have just had three of my epileptic fits, uncommonly
violent and in rapid succession. But after the attacks, for two or three days I
was unable to work, write, or even read, because I am a wreck, body and
soul. So now I’ve told you, and I ask your forgiveness for leaving you so
long without a reply.”
This disease, from which he suffered even before Siberia, grew worse
during his imprisonment; it abated but very little during an occasional stay
abroad, renewing its force as soon as he returned home. Sometimes the
interval between the attacks is longer, but this only augments their violence.
“When the fits are infrequent and one suddenly comes over me, I am
subject to blackest melancholy. I am reduced to despair. Formerly (he was

fifty when he wrote this) this mood lasted three days after the attack,
nowadays, a week or more.”
Braving his attacks, he holds fast to his work, making huge efforts to
implement his promises: “The next instalment (of The Idiot) is announced
for April, and I’ve nothing ready, except one unimportant chapter. What am
I to send? I have no idea. The day before yesterday I did some writing all
the same, in a state bordering on madness.”
If the sole consequence were pain and discomfort! But, alas! “I notice to
my despair that I am no longer fit to work as quickly as of old, indeed, as up
till quite recently.” Again and again he laments the weakening of his
memory and his imagination, and at the age of fifty-eight, two years before
his death, he said: “For a long time I’ve been conscious that where work is
concerned, the longer, the more difficult, and so my thoughts are gloomy,
and there is nowhere solace for me.” And yet, he could write The
Karamazovs.
When Baudelaire’s Letters were published last year, M. Mendès was
shocked and protested, in no measured terms, either, invoking the poet’s
right to have his intimate concerns respected.
No doubt there will always be ultra-sensitive, easily shocked readers
who prefer to see only the heads and shoulders of great men, who rise up in
revolt at the publication of personal documents and private correspondence,
discerning in these only what can agreeably flatter a mediocre intelligence
which delights to find a hero bound by the same infirmities as itself. So they
talk of “indiscretion”; or if they are of a romantic turn of mind, of “ghouls”;
at the mildest, of “unhealthy curiosity.” “Leave the man in peace,” they say,
“his work alone is of account.” Agreed! but the wonder of it, and, to me, the
profound lesson of it, is, that the “work” should have been written in spite
of the “man.”
I am not writing Dostoevsky’s biography, I am merely drawing his
likeness from the elements of his Correspondence, so I have discussed only
the difficulties engendered by his very constitution. I think I am justified in
including amongst them his chronic poverty, so intimately connected with
him and which would seem to have met some secret need of his being....
But everything goes against him; at the outset of his career, in spite of his
delicacy in childhood, he is pronounced fit for military service, whereas his
brother, Michael, more robust in health, is rejected. Straying into a group of
political suspects, he is arrested, condemned to death, then respited and sent

to Siberia to expiate his offence. He spends ten years there: four in prison,
six at Semipalatinsk in a regiment of the line. While there he married;
perhaps not very much “in love” according to our usual interpretation of the
phrase, but out of a kind of burning compassion, out of pity or softened
feeling, out of a need for sacrificing himself and a natural propensity for
assuming burdens and shirking no issue. His wife was the widow of a
prisoner, Issaïev, and the mother of a growing boy (a good-for-nothing,
almost mentally defective), who there and then became dependent upon
Dostoevsky. In a letter to his friend Wrangel, after his wife’s death, he
wrote: “Ah, dear friend, she loved me deeply, and I returned her love; yet,
we did not live happily together. I shall tell you all about it when I see you.
Let me say just this, although we were unhappy (by reason of her difficult
character—she was hypochondriac, and full of a sick woman’s whims), we
could not cease to love each other. Indeed, the unhappier we became, the
more closely we drew together. Strange though it may seem, it’s true!”—“If
you question me about myself, what can I say? I have family cares, and
they press heavily. But I believe my day is not done, and I am determined
not to die,” he says elsewhere. After his brother Michael’s death, he has to
support his family too. As soon as he puts some money aside—which
means the possibility of some respite—he starts newspapers and
reviews,⁠[19] at once financing and editing the publications. “Energetic
measures were imperative. I started publications with three different
presses, and I have spared neither money, health, nor efforts. I ran
everything single-handed. I revised proofs, kept in touch with the authors
and with the Censorship, found the necessary money. I was up till six in the
morning, and took only five hours sleep. I at last managed to put the review
on its feet, but too late.” As a matter of fact, this review did collapse. “But
the worst of it,” he continues, “was, that working like a galley-slave at these
concerns, I could not write anything for the review: not a line from my pen.
My name was never in the public’s eye, and not only in the provinces, but
in Petersburg even, it was not known that I was the editor.”
He persists in spite of everything, and makes a fresh start; nothing can
discourage him or bring him down. In the last year of his life, however, he
is still struggling, not against public opinion which he has at length won
over, but against opposition papers. “For what I said in Moscow (his speech
on ‘Pushkin’), just look how I’ve been treated by almost the whole of the

press: it is as if I were a thief or had embezzled from some bank or other.
Ukhantsev (a notorious swindler of the time) is less foully abused than I.”
But it is not a reward that he is seeking, any more than it is amour-
propre or an author’s vanity that inspires his conduct. Nothing could be
more significant than his manner of accepting his first success: “I’ve been
writing for three years already, and it dazes me; I am not living. I haven’t
time to think.... A precarious reputation has been built up round me, and I
don’t know how long the damnable thing will last.”
He is so persuaded of the worth of his ideas that personal values are
absorbed and lost. “What have I done”, he wrote to his friend, Baron
Wrangel, “that you should bestow such affection upon me?” And near the
close of his life, writing to an anonymous correspondent: “Do you think I
am one of those who mend hearts, deliver the soul, and drive out suffering?
Many people write to tell me this, but I am certain I am more capable of
provoking disillusion and disgust. I have little skill in healing, although I
have sometimes tried it.” Such love in this tormented soul! “I dream of you
every night,” he writes from Siberia to his brother, “and I am terribly
worried. I do not want you to die; I must see you and kiss you again. Calm
my apprehensions for God’s sake. And for dear Christ’s sake, if you are
well, forget your business and your worries, and do write to me
immediately, else I shall go mad.”⁠[20]
Is there any help for him, this time, at least? “Write to me at once and in
detail how you found my brother,” he writes from Semipalatinsk, on March
23, 1856, to Baron Wrangel: “What does he think about me? He used to
love me passionately. He wept when he bade me good-bye. Has his feeling
towards me grown cold? Has his character changed? That would be a grief.
Has he forgotten all the past? I cannot believe it, but how else am I to
explain his not writing for seven or eight months? And I seem to see so little
warmth in him to remind one of days gone by! I shall never forget what he
said to K—— who delivered my message entreating him to exert himself
on my behalf: ‘The best thing for him to do is to remain in Siberia.’” He
actually wrote these words, but he would give anything to forget his
brother’s cruelty. The affectionate letter to Michael from which I quoted a
moment ago, is subsequent to this one.
During his four years in prison, Dostoevsky was left without news of his
family. On February 22, 1854, he wrote to his brother the first of the
Siberian letters preserved to us—and an admirable letter it was: “At last I

can talk with you somewhat more explicitly, and, I believe, in a more
reasonable manner. But before I write another line I must ask you: tell me,
for God’s sake, why you have never written me a single syllable till now?
Could I have expected this from you? Believe me, in my lonely and isolated
state, I sometimes fell into utter despair, for I believed that you were no
longer alive; through whole nights I would brood upon what was to become
of your children, and I cursed my fate because I could not help them....”⁠[21]
—“Can you possibly have been forbidden to write to me? Because writing
is actually permitted! All the political prisoners have several letters each
year.... But I think I have guessed the true cause of your silence: it is your
natural apathy.”
“Tell my brother”, he wrote later to Wrangel, “that I fold him in my
arms, that I ask his forgiveness for all the pain I’ve caused him, and kneel at
his feet”;⁠[22] and to his brother himself, on August 21, 1855: “Dear brother,
when in my letter of last October, I repeated my complaints at your silence,
you answered that these had made very painful reading for you. Oh, Mysha!
for the love of God, bear me no ill-will: remember my loneliness. I am like
a pebble cast aside. I’ve always been of a gloomy, sickly, susceptible
disposition: remember all that, and forgive me if my reproaches were unjust
and my fancies absurd. I am myself thoroughly convinced I was in the
wrong.”
Mme. Hoffmann was right, no doubt, and Western readers will protest
in face of such humility and contrition. Our literature, too often tinged with
Castillian pride, has so thoroughly taught us to see nobility of character in
the non-forgiveness of injury and insult!
But what will he have to say, the Western-European reader when he
reads this: “You write that everybody loves the Tsar. I venerate him.”? And
Dostoevsky was still in Siberia when he wrote these words. Irony,
perchance? No. In letter after letter he takes up the theme: “The Emperor is
infinitely generous and kind.” And this is what he says when, after ten
years’ imprisonment, he solicits permission to return to Petersburg and a
place for his stepson, Paul, at the Gymnasium: “I have been thinking if one
request is refused, maybe the other will be granted, and if the Emperor does
not think fit to allow me to live in Petersburg, perhaps he will agree to find
an opening for Paul, so that his refusal will not be absolute.”
Decidedly, submissiveness, to this degree, is disconcerting! Nothing
here for nihilists, anarchists, or even socialists, to use for their own ends.

What! not a cry of revolt? Perhaps it was prudent to show respect for the
Tsar, but why no revolt against society, or against the prison-cell from
which he emerged an aged man? Just listen to what he says about his
prison, in a letter to Michael dated February 22, 1856: “What has happened
to my soul and my beliefs, my intellect and my affections in the space of
these four years, I shall not tell you! The tale would be too long. The
unbroken meditation, wherein I found refuge from the bitterness of reality,
has surely not been vain. I now have hopes and desires which in bygone
days I did not even anticipate.” And in another passage: “Do not imagine, I
pray you, that I am still as moody and suspicious as I was in my last years
in Petersburg. All that has gone for ever. God, too, is leading us.” And not
long after, in another letter to S. D. Janovsky in 1872,⁠[23] we come across
this extraordinary confession (the italics are Dostoevsky’s!): “You loved
me, cared for me, and I was then sick in mind (I realize it now) before my
journey to Siberia, where I was cured.”
Not a word of protest; only gratitude. An unrepaying martyr, indeed! In
what faith does he live and move? What are the convictions that lend him
strength? Perhaps an examination of his opinions, so far as his letters make
them plain, will help us to understand the secret causes, already faintly
indicated, of his disfavour and lack of success with the public, and explain
why Dostoevsky still lingers on, as if in purgatory, in a middle state
between obscurity and fame.

II

Dostoevsky was no partisan. Dreading party feeling and the dissensions
it creates, he wrote: “My thoughts are chiefly concerned with what
constitutes our community of ideas, the common ground whereon we all
might meet, irrespective of tendency.” Profoundly convinced that “in
Russian thought lay reconciliation for Europe’s antagonisms”, “veteran
European Russian” as he termed himself, he devoted the whole strength of
his being to the Russian unity which was to confound party and faction in
one great love of country and of humanity. “Yes, I, too, hold your opinion
that in Russia, by the very nature of her mission, Europe will be
consummated. This has long been plain to me,” so he wrote from Siberia.
Elsewhere he describes Russia as “a nation awaiting her mission,” “fit to
lead the common interests of entire humanity.” And if, by virtue of a
conviction which, perchance, was no more than premature, he deceived
himself as to the importance of the Russian people (which is by no means
my opinion), it was not infatuated jingoism, but his intuition and the deep
understanding he had, simply because he himself was a Russian, of the
beliefs and party passions dividing Europe. Speaking of Pushkin, he credits
himself with the poet’s “gift of world-wide sympathy,” adding, “It is this
very faculty, his in common with all our people, which makes him truly
national.” He considers the Russian soul as “a meeting-ground whereon all
European aims may be reconciled,” exclaiming, “Where is the true Russian
who does not first and foremost think of Europe?” and uttering even these
strange words, “the Russian wanderer has need of world-wide happiness in
order to find peace himself.”
Persuaded that “Russia’s future activity must be in the highest degree
pan-human,” and that “maybe the Russian idea will be the synthesis of all
the ideas developed with such courage and persistence in the various
European nationalities,” his gaze is constantly directed outside Russia. His
political and social judgments of France and of Germany are, to us, perhaps
the most interesting passages of his correspondence. He travelled abroad,
lingering in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, attracted in the first instance
by his desire to know them, detained ultimately for months on end by the
eternal question of money, either having an insufficiency of funds to

continue his journey or fearing debts he has left behind in Russia, and the
possibility of tasting imprisonment again. “With my health in the state it is,”
he wrote when he was forty-nine, “I could not stand even six months’
confinement, nor, what is more, could I work.”
But in foreign parts he misses from the very first the air of Russia and
contact with the Russian people. For him, Sparta, Toledo and Venice might
as well not exist, he cannot become acclimatized, nor can he content
himself anywhere for a moment. “I have no words to tell you how
unbearable living abroad is to me,” he writes to his friend Strakhov. Not a
letter written in exile but breathes the same lament: “I must go back to
Russia; the monotony of life here is crushing.” And as though in Russia
were hidden the source of nourishment for his work, and the sap failed as
soon as he was torn from his native soil, he wrote: “I have no taste for
writing, or else, when I do write, it is with much suffering. I cannot think
what this means, except it be that I have need of Russia, to work and to
create.... I was only too clearly conscious that whether we lived at Dresden
or elsewhere was a matter of indifference, for I should always be a foreigner
in a foreign land.” Again: “If only you knew how good-for-nothing and
alien I feel here. I am growing stupid and dull, and am losing touch with
Russia. No breath of Russian air, no Russian spirit. I don’t understand the
Russian exiles: madmen all!”
And yet at Geneva, at Vevey, he wrote The Idiot, at Dresden The Eternal
Husband and The Possessed. “You have spoken golden words about my
work here. Right enough, I shall fall behind, not behind the times, but I
shall lose touch with what is happening at home (I know it better than you
do, because every day in life I read three Russian newspapers, every line of
them, and I take out a couple of reviews), I shall become deaf to the living
pulse of life, and how that tells on artistic creation!”
So this “world sympathy” exists together with and is strengthened by an
ardent nationalism—its natural complement in Dostoevsky’s mind. He
never wearies or flags in his protest against those that were at that time
called the “Progressists,” that is to say (I borrow this definition from
Strakhov), “the generation of politicians which expected the advancement
of Russian civilization to proceed not from an organic development of the
national character, but from an overhasty assimilation of Western
teachings.” “The Frenchman is first and foremost a Frenchman, and an
Englishman, an Englishman, and their highest aim is to remain true to

themselves. Therein lies their strength.” He takes his stand against the “men
who seek to uproot the Russians,” and does not wait for Barrès to warn the
young intellectual “who tears himself away from society and disowns it,
and does not ‘go to the people,’ but loses himself in foreign parts, in
‘Europeanism,’ in the kingdom of the universal man who has never existed,
and in so doing breaks with the people, scorns it and misjudges it.” Like
Barrès dealing with “sickly Kantism,” he writes in the preface to the
review⁠[24] he edits: “No matter how fertile an idea imported from abroad, it
can only strike root here, become acclimatized, and prove of genuine use to
us if our national life, spontaneously and without pressure from without,
made the idea grow up, naturally and practically, to meet its own needs—
needs which have been recognized by practical experience. No nation on
earth, no society with a certain measure of stability has been developed to
order, on the lines of a programme imported from abroad.”
Here follows a remark I regret not to have found in Barrès: “The
capacity for separating oneself temporarily from one’s mother-earth for the
purposes of self-contemplation, all prejudices apart, is the mark of a very
strong personality, just as the power to look on the foreigner with kindly
eyes is one of nature’s highest and noblest gifts.” And did Dostoevsky not
seem to foresee how this doctrine was to lead and blind us?—“It is
impossible to undeceive a Frenchman and prevent his believing himself the
most important being in the wide world. Besides, of the wide world he is
pretty ignorant. And what is more, he is not keen to be enlightened. This is a
characteristic common to the whole nation, and very typical.”
Dostoevsky’s individualism, too, differentiates him more sharply—and
more happily—from Barrès. And, set against Nietzsche, he becomes for us
a shining example of how little infatuation and self-sufficiency may at times
accompany belief in the value of the personality. “The hardest thing on
earth,” he writes, “is to remain yourself,” and “no high aim is worth a life
wrecked,” because for him, without individualism as without patriotism,
there exists no way of serving humanity. If some Barrès enthusiasts were
won over to him by the declarations I quoted a moment ago, is there one of
them who would not be alienated by these fresh statements?
So, too, on reading these words: “In the new humanity, the æsthetic idea
lacks clarity. The moral basis of society, held fast by positivism, not only
gives no results, but cannot define itself, for it is lost in cloudy aspirations
and ideals. Are there yet not enough facts to prove that society is not

established thus, that these are not the paths leading to happiness, and that
this is not, as has been believed till now, the source of happiness? But what
is its source then? So many volumes are written, and the essential point is
ever missed: the Western World has lost Christ Jesus—and for this, and this
alone, the Western World must perish.” Not a French Catholic but would
applaud—were he not drawn up sharply by the phrase I dropped at the
beginning: “Christ has been lost, by the error of Catholicism.”
What French Catholic will now dare let himself be touched by the tears
of devotion that are shed throughout these letters of Dostoevsky’s? Vain
hope, “to desire to reveal to the world a Russian Christ, unknown to the
wider world, and whose very being is contained in our orthodoxy.”
The French Catholic, by virtue of his own personal orthodoxy, will
refuse to listen, and for the moment, at least, Dostoevsky’s further remark is
made in vain: “In my opinion, here is found the principle of our future
civilizing force and of Europe’s resurrection at our hands, the very essence
of our future strength.”
Although Dostoevsky gives M. de Vogüé grounds for discerning in him
a “bitter animosity against thought and against life in its fullness,” a
“sanctification of the mindless, colourless, and invertebrate,” and so on, we
read in another passage from a letter to his brother: “Simple folk, you will
say. Aye, but I dread simple men more than complex ones.”⁠[25] This was his
reply to a girl who “was anxious to make herself useful,” and had expressed
her desire to become a midwife or hospital nurse: “By giving regular
attention to your general education you will fit yourself for an activity more
useful a hundred times. Would it not be better to give thought to the higher
branches of your general education?... The majority of our specialists are
fundamentally ignorant—and most of our students, of both sexes, are
absolutely uneducated. What good can they do to humanity?”⁠[26] Frankly I
did not need these words to realize M. de Vogüé’s mistake; but, all the
same, this mistake was possible.
Dostoevsky is not any more easily enrolled “for” or “against”
Socialism; for, if Mme. Hoffmann is justified in saying, “A Socialist, in the
most human acceptation of the word, Dostoevsky never for a moment
ceased to be!” do we not read in his letters, “Socialism has already
undermined Europe: if we delay too long, it will bring it to complete ruin”?
Conservative, but not hide-bound by tradition: monarchist, but of
democratic opinions: Christian, but not a Roman Catholic: liberal, but not a

progressive: Dostoevsky remains ever the man of whom there is no way to
make use! He is of the stuff which displeases every party. Why? Because he
never persuaded himself that less than the whole of his intelligence was
necessary to the part he chose to play, or that for the sake of immediate
issues he would be justified in forcing so delicate an instrument or upsetting
its balance. “À propos of all these possible tendencies,” he wrote (and the
italics are his own), “which were united in an expression of welcome to me
(April 9, 1876),⁠[27] I should gladly have written an article on the impression
made by the letters, but, on reflection, I realized that it would be impossible
to write it in all sincerity: now, lacking sincerity, could it be worth while?”
What does he mean? Doubtless this: to write a reasonable article so as to
please everybody and make a success of it, he would have to strain his
ideas, simplify them to excess, in short, force his convictions beyond
natural limits. And that is just what he cannot concede.
His individualism, while not harsh, and in reality one with his honesty
of thought, does not allow him to submit his idea unless in its integrity,
complex though this may be. And there is no stronger or subtler reason for
his unpopularity amongst us.
I do not mean to insinuate that strong convictions ordinarily involve a
certain dishonesty in reasoning; but they do willingly dispense with
intelligence. And yet, M. Barrès is too clever not to have quickly grasped
the fact that not by impartial illumination of all its aspects can we ensure
the speedy dissemination of an idea, but by giving it a definite bias.
If you want ideas to succeed, you must submit them one at a time; or,
better, to succeed, submit one idea and no more. It is not enough to invent a
good medium of expression; it is a question of never outgrowing it. The
public likes to know exactly where it stands when a great name is
mentioned. And tolerates ill what would congest its brain! At the mention of
Pasteur, it likes to be able to say to itself, without hesitation: Yes,
hydrophobia. Nietzsche? the superman. Curie? radium. Barrès? France and
her dead. Quinton? plasma. Just as if you were to say. Lazenby? pickles.
And Parmentier, if so be it that he did “invent” the potato, is better known,
thanks to this solitary vegetable, than if we had to thank him for the entire
produce of our kitchen gardens.
Dostoevsky all but reached success in France, when M. de Vogüé had
the bright idea of calling, and thus stereotyping in this handy phrase—the

religion of suffering—the doctrine he found worked into the closing
chapters of Crime and Punishment.
That it is there, I am willing to concede; also that the phrase was a
happy invention.... Unfortunately it did not contain the whole being of the
man: he was too great in every way to be compressed into such small bulk.
For if he was of these for whom “only one thing is needful: to know God,”
at least this knowledge of God he tried to diffuse throughout his works in all
its human and anxious complexity.
Ibsen was not easy to pin down either; like any other writer whose work
is interrogative rather than affirmative. The relative success of the two
plays, A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People, is due, certainly not to
their outstanding excellence, but to the shadow of a conclusion which
escaped Ibsen in them both. The public is but ill-pacified by the author who
does not come to a strikingly evident solution. In its eyes, it is the sin of
uncertainty, indolence of mind, lukewarmness of convictions. And most
often, having little liking for intelligence, the public gauges the strength of a
conviction by naught but the violence, persistence, and uniformity of the
affirmation.
Anxious not to extend a field already so vast, I shall not attempt to
define his doctrine here. I merely wanted to indicate its wealth of
contradictions to the Western mind, unused to this need of reconciling
extremes. Dostoevsky remains steadfast in the belief that between
nationalism and europeanism, individualism and self-abnegation, the
contradiction is apparent only. He holds that because each understands but
one aspect of this vital question, the opposing parties remain uniformly
remote from the truth. One more quotation: it will, I am sure, throw more
light on Dostoevsky’s position than any commentary. “To be happy must
one be impersonal? Does salvation lie in self-effacement? Far from it, I
should say. Not only must there be no self-effacement, but one must
become a personality, even in a degree beyond what is possible in the West.
Be clear as to my meaning: voluntary sacrifice, offered consciously and
without constraint, sacrifice of the individual for the good of mankind, is, to
my mind, the mark of personality in its noblest and highest development, of
perfect self-control ... the absolute expression of the will. A strongly
developed personality, conscious of its right to be such, having cast out fear,
cannot use itself, cannot be used, except in sacrifice for others, that these
may become, like unto itself, self-determining and happy personalities. It is

Nature’s law, and mankind tends to reach it.”⁠[28] This solution is taught him
by Christ: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever
shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.”
Back in Petersburg in the winter of 1871–2, being then fifty years of
age, he writes to Janovsky:⁠[29] “There is no use hiding the fact that old age
is coming near, and yet one doesn’t think of it, and makes preparation for a
new work (The Karamazovs), for at last publishing something that will
please; one still hopes for something out of life, and yet it is possible that
everything has already been received. I am speaking of myself! Well, I am
thoroughly happy!” This is the happiness, the joy beyond suffering latent in
all Dostoevsky’s life and work, a joy that Nietzsche had rightly sensed, and
which I charge M. de Vogüé with having missed entirely.
The tone of the letters changes brusquely at this period. His usual
correspondents being, like himself, in Petersburg, he is no longer writing to
them but to strangers, chance correspondents who turn to him for
edification, comfort, guidance. I should require to quote almost all the
letters; my better plan is to refer you to the book; I am writing this article
solely to bring my reader into touch with it.
At last, freed from his horrible financial worries, he busies himself
during the closing years of his life with editing the Journal of an Author,
published only at irregular intervals. “I confess,” he wrote to the well-
known Aksakov in November, 1880 (that is, three months before his death),
“I confess, in all friendship, that intending to undertake next year the
publication of the Journal, I have besought God often and long to make me
pure in heart and pure of lips; without sin or envy, and incapable of
wounding.”⁠[30]
In this Journal wherein M. de Vogüé could see only “obscure pæans,
evading alike analysis and discussion,” the Russian people happily
discovered something different, and Dostoevsky was able to feel that round
about his work his dream of spiritual harmony was almost being realized,
without any arbitrary unification.
When his death was announced, this communion and blending of spirits
was shiningly manifested, and if, at first, “subversive elements planned to
monopolize his dead body,” very soon, “by the miracle of one of these
unexpected fusions that are Russia’s secret, when a national conviction
rouses her, all parties, all antagonists, all scattered fragments of the empire
were seen to be joined in a fresh bond of enthusiasm by this death.” The

sentence is M. de Vogüé’s, and I rejoice after all the strictures I have made
concerning his study, to be able to quote such noble words. “As it was said
of the Tsars of old, that they gathered together the land of Russia,” he says
later, “this spiritual King had ‘gathered together’ the heart of Russia.”
The same rallying of individual energies is at work now throughout
Europe, slowly, mysteriously, almost—chiefly in Germany, where the
editions of his works are multiplying, in France, too, where the rising
generation recognizes and appreciates, better than that of M. de Vogüé, his
strength. The hidden reasons which delayed his success will be the builders
of a more enduring fame.

FOOTNOTES
[5] M. Gide refers to J. W. Bienstock’s translation, Correspondance et Voyage à
l’Étranger, Paris, 1908. (Translator’s note.)
[6] Letter to his brother Michael, Semipalatinsk, May 31, 1858.
[7] Bienstock, p. 122. Letter to A. N. Maïkov, Semipalatinsk, January 18, 1856.
[8] Bienstock, p. 364. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, February 26, 1870.
[9] Bienstock, p. 387–388. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, December 2,
1870.
[10] Bienstock, p. 415. Letter to A. N. Maïkov, Dresden, March 2, 1871.
[11] Bienstock, pp. 364–365. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, February 26,
1870.
[12] Bienstock, p. 55. Letter to his brother Michael, March 24, 1845.
[13] Mayne, p. 198. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, October 9, 1870.
[14] Bienstock, pp. 386–387. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, December 2,
1870.
[15] Bienstock, p. 267. Letter to A. N. Maïkov, Geneva, September 15, 1867.
[16] Bienstock, pp. 470–471. Letter to Mlle. N. N——, Petersburg, April 11,
1880.
[17] Bienstock, p. 235. Letter to Baron Alexander Wrangel, Petersburg, March
31, 1865.
[18] Bienstock, p. 239. Letter to Baron Alexander Wrangel, Petersburg, April 9,
1865.
[19] “To defend the theories he fancies are his,” says M. de Vogüé.
[20] Bienstock, p. 159. Letter to his brother Michael, Semipalatinsk, July 19,
1858.
[21] Mayne, p. 51.
[22] Bienstock, p. 135. Letter to Baron Alexander Wrangel, Semipalatinsk, May
23, 1856.
[23] Bienstock, p. 438.
[24] See Bienstock, pp. 592–598: Preface to The Epoch, 1865.
[25] Mayne, p. 62.

[26] Bienstock, pp. 447–448. Letter to Mlle. Guérassimov, Petersburg, March 7,
1877.
[27] Bienstock, p. 442. Letter to Mme. C. D. Altschevsky, Petersburg, April 9,
1876.
[28] Bienstock, p. 540.
[29] Bienstock, p. 437. Letter to S. D. Janovsky, Petersburg, February 4, 1872.
[30] Bienstock, p. 479. Letter to I. S. Aksakov, Petersburg, November 4, 1880.

ADDRESSES
(1922)

I

SOME time before the war I was preparing for Charles Péguy’s Cahiers de
la Quinzaine, a Life of Dostoevsky after the manner of Romain Rolland’s
fine monographs on Beethoven and Michelangelo. War came, and I was
forced to lay aside the notes I had taken. For long other cares and duties
absorbed me and my project was to all intents and purposes abandoned,
when recently at the celebration of Dostoevsky’s Centenary, Jacques
Copeau asked me to address a meeting in his theatre, the Vieux Colombier. I
brought my packet of notes out into the light of day again, and re-reading
them after the lapse of time, I found the ideas I had jotted down seemed
worth our attention, but that chronological order, though necessary for
biographical purposes, was perhaps not the most advisable on this occasion.
It is often a difficult task to separate the ideas Dostoevsky weaves, as it
were, into a fine web in each of his novels, but we never lose track of them.
In my eyes these ideas are all that is most precious in Dostoevsky and I
have made them my own. If I took up each of his works in turn, I could not
possibly avoid repeating myself. There is, however, another—and better—
way: pursuing his ideas from one novel to another, I shall try to lay hold of
them and set them forth as plainly as is possible despite their apparent
confusion. Psychologist, sociologist, moralist—Dostoevsky is all three, and
novelist as well. Whereas in his works ideas are never presented in their
crude state, but always through the medium of the character expressing
them (which accounts for their confusion and relativity), I, for my part, will
try to avoid abstractions and outline the ideas as sharply as possible. I

should like first of all to introduce you to Dostoevsky in person, and speak
of some incidents in his life that reveal his character and help us to draw a
clear likeness of him.
My pre-war plan of the biography comprised an introduction in which I
proposed to discuss the commonly accepted idea of him. To throw light on
the subject, I should have drawn a parallel between him and Rousseau—and
no arbitrary one, I can assure you. Their natures reveal such deep-laid
analogies that Rousseau’s Confessions were able to exert an extraordinary
influence on Dostoevsky. But in my opinion Rousseau, from the very
beginning of his life, was poisoned, as it were, by Plutarch, through whom
he fashioned for himself a somewhat rhetorical and pompous notion of a
“great man.” He set up before himself the image of a fancied hero, and his
life was one prolonged effort to be like it. He tried hard to be what he
wanted to seem. I allow that his painting of his own character may be
sincere, but he is ever thinking of his pose, which pride alone dictates.
“False greatness,” in the admirable words of La Bruyère, “is shy and
inaccessible. Conscious of its foible, it hides away, or at least never shows
an open face, letting be seen only as much as will make an impression and
save it from being revealed for what it really is, something mean and
small.”
And if I do not go so far as to recognize Rousseau in this description, I
do think of Dostoevsky when a little farther on I read:
“True greatness is free, gentle, familiar, unaffected; it can be touched
and handled, and loses nothing when seen at close quarters. The better you
are acquainted with it, the more you admire it. It bends out of goodness of
heart to its inferiors, and returns to its own level without effort. Sometimes
it lets itself go, neglecting and surrendering its natural advantages, but ever
ready to recover them and put them to use.”
With Dostoevsky there is this complete absence of pose or stage-
management. He never considers himself a superman. He is most humbly
human, and I do not think that pride of intellect could ever properly
understand him.
The word humility comes up again and again in his letters and works.
“Why should they deny me? I make no demands. I am but a humble
petitioner.” (November 23, 1869.)—“I do not demand, I only seek in all
humility.” (December 7, 1869.)—“I have made the humblest of requests.”
(February 12, 1870.)

“He often astonished me by a kind of humility,” says the Raw Youth in
speaking of his father, and in his effort to understand the possible relations
between his father and mother, and the quality of their love, he recollects
his father’s phrase, “She married me out of humility.”
I read lately in an interview with M. Henry Bordeaux a sentence which
surprised me somewhat: “Seek first to know yourself.” The literary creator
who seeks himself runs a great risk—the risk of finding himself. From then
onwards he writes coldly, deliberately, in keeping with the self he has
found. He imitates himself. If he knows his path and his limitations, it is
only to keep strictly to them. His great dread is no longer insincerity, but
inconsistency. The true artist is never but half-conscious of himself when
creating. He does not know exactly who he is. He learns to know himself
only through his creation, in it, and after it. Dostoevsky never set out to find
himself; he gave himself without stint in his works. He lost himself in each
of the characters of his books, and, for this reason, it is in them that he can
be found again. Presently we shall see how painfully awkward he is when
speaking in his own name, how eloquent, on the other hand, when his own
ideas are expressed by those whom he inspires. It is in endowing them with
life that he finds himself. He lives in each of them, and the most obvious
result of merging himself in their diversity is the masking of his own
inconsistencies.
I know no writer richer in contradictions and inconsistencies than
Dostoevsky: Nietzsche would describe them as antagonisms. Had he been
philosopher instead of novelist, he would certainly have attempted to bring
his ideas into line, whereby we should have lost the most precious of them.
The happenings in Dostoevsky’s life, however tragic, are but surface
disturbances. The passions overwhelming him seem to shake him to the
depths; but beyond, there remains an inner chamber, unreached by outside
happenings or by passion. In this connection a few of his own words will
seem a revelation, if read in conjunction with another passage:
“Without some goal and some effort to reach it, no man can live. When
he has lost all hope, all object in life, man often becomes a monster in his
misery.”⁠[31]
But then he seems still in error where his real goal is concerned, for he
adds immediately after: “The one object of the prisoners was freedom and
to get out of prison.”

These words were written in 1861. Such then was his idea of an aim in
life. Of course he was suffering in that dread captivity! (He spent ten years
in Siberia: four in prison, then six more in forced military service.) He was
suffering; but once more a free man, he could realize that the real goal, the
freedom he really longed for, was something deeper and had no connection
with the throwing wide of prison gates. In 1874 he could write this
extraordinary sentence, which I like to compare with what I read to you a
moment ago:
“No aim can possibly be worth a wrecked existence.”⁠[32]
So, according to Dostoevsky, we have each our reason for living,
superior, hidden—hidden often from ourselves—certainly far different from
the ostensible goal assigned by most of us to our existence.
Let us first of all try to picture Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky. His
friend Riesenkampf delineates him as he was at twenty years of age, in
1841:
“The face was rounded and full; the nose slightly retroussé; the hair
light brown, worn short. A broad forehead, and beneath thin eyebrows, little
grey eyes, set deep in the head. Pale cheeks, covered with freckles. A sickly,
almost livid complexion, and very thick lips.”
It is sometimes asserted that his first epileptic attacks occurred in
Siberia; but he was a sick man even before sentence was passed on him, and
the disease certainly made progress in Siberia. “A sickly complexion.”
Dostoevsky had always had poor health. And yet he, weak and
complaining, was singled out for military service while his robust brother
was exempted.
In 1841, that is, at twenty years of age, he was promoted non-
commissioned officer, and then, in 1843, he took the examinations and was
commissioned ensign. We learn that his officer’s pay amounted to 3,000
roubles, and although he had come into his share of the father’s fortune
after the latter’s death, he led a free life, and had to take a younger brother
in charge, consequently he was always falling into debt. This money
question turns up again and again in his letters, much more urgently than in
Balzac’s. It plays an extremely important part almost to the very end of his
life, and it was not until the closing years that he was really freed from his
financial worries.
In his young days Dostoevsky indulged in every dissipation. He was
assiduous at the play, at concerts, at the ballet. Not a care in the world! He

chooses to rent a flat simply because he has taken a fancy to the landlord’s
appearance. His servant robs him, and he finds entertainment in watching
the pilfering continue. His mood changes abruptly, according as fortune
smiles or frowns. Faced with his utter inability to steer a course in life, his
family and friends are anxious to see him share quarters with Riesenkampf.
“Take this real methodical German as your model,” they tell him.
Riesenkampf, slightly older than Dostoevsky, was a physician, and came to
settle down in Petersburg in the year 1843. At this moment, Dostoevsky has
not a penny to his name. He is living on bread and milk—both unpaid for.
“Fyodor is one of these people in whose company a man lives well, but who
himself will remain a needy creature till the very end of his days.” They set
up quarters together, but Dostoevsky proves himself impossible as a
companion. He receives Riesenkampf’s patients in the waiting-room, and
each time one of them appears needy, Dostoevsky succours him with
Riesenkampf’s funds or with his own, when he has any. One fine day he
receives a thousand roubles from Moscow, the bulk of which sum is
immediately employed in settling some debts; then, the very same evening,
Dostoevsky gambles away the rest, at billiards, by his own account, and the
following morning is obliged to borrow five roubles from his friend. I
forgot to tell you that the last fifty roubles had been stolen by a patient of
Riesenkampf’s, whom Dostoevsky, in a sudden manifestation of
friendliness, had shown into his room. Riesenkampf and Dostoevsky parted
in March, 1844, without much apparent improvement in the latter’s ways.
In 1846, he published Poor Folk. This book had sudden and
considerable success. Dostoevsky’s manner of speaking about his success is
significant of the man. We read in a contemporary letter:
“It dazes me: I am not living. I haven’t time to think.... A precarious
reputation has been built up around me, and I don’t know how long the
damnable thing will last.”⁠[33]
In 1849, along with a group of suspects, he is taken by the police. This
is the affair known as the Petrachevsky Plot.
It is difficult to say what exactly were at this time Dostoevsky’s political
and social opinions. From this frequenting of suspected individuals we are
to infer a great measure of intellectual curiosity and a certain generous
warm-heartedness which ran him into unconsidered risks. But we have no
authority for believing that Dostoevsky ever was what can be termed an
anarchist, a being threatening the safety of the state.

Numerous passages in his letters and in the Journal of an Author show
him as entertaining quite the opposite ideas, and the whole of The
Possessed is, as it were, a speech for the prosecution against anarchism. At
any rate, taken he was amongst these suspects meeting round Petrachevsky.
He was thrown into prison, sent to trial, and heard himself condemned to
death. It was only at the eleventh hour that the death sentence was
commuted and he was exiled to Siberia. All this is already familiar to you.
In these causeries I should like to speak only of what you could not find
elsewhere; but, for the sake of such as are unfamiliar with them, I shall read
to you some passages from his letters dealing with his sentence and his life
in the penal settlement. I consider them very self-revealing. In them we
shall see, through the portrayal of his sufferings, appear again and again the
optimism that supported him all his days. This is what he wrote, on July 18,
1849, from the fortress where he lay awaiting the verdict.
“Human beings have an incredible amount of endurance and will to
live; I should never have expected to find so much in myself; now I know
from experience that it is there.”⁠[34]
Then in August, weighed down by ill-health:
“To lose courage is to sin ... work, ever more work, con amore, therein
lies real happiness.”⁠[35]
And again, on September 14, 1849:
“I had expected worse. And I know now that I have in me such reserves
of vitality that it would be difficult to exhaust.”⁠[36]
I shall read almost the whole of his short letter dated December 22.
“To-day, December 22, we were led out to Semionovsky Square. There
the death warrant was read over to us all, we were given the cross to kiss,
swords were snapped above our heads, and our last toilet was performed
(white shirts). Then, three of us were placed against posts for execution. I
was the sixth; we were called up in threes, so I came in the second group,
and I had a few moments left to live. I thought of you, brother, and of
yours; at that last moment you alone were in my thoughts, and then I
realized how much I loved you, beloved brother! I had time to kiss
Plestcheyev and Dourov, who were beside me, and bid them farewell. At
last the retreat was sounded, those tied to the posts were fetched back, and it
was read out to us that His Imperial Majesty was pleased to spare our
lives.”⁠[37]

In Dostoevsky’s novels we shall come across again and again more or
less direct allusions to the death sentence and to the condemned man’s last
hours. I cannot dwell on this for the moment.
Before starting out for Semipalatinsk, he was granted half an hour to
take leave of his brother Michael. Of the two, he was the calmer, a friend
relates, and said:
“In the settlement, dear brother, the convicts are not wild beasts, just
men, better men than I perhaps, more deserving, too, maybe. Yes, we shall
meet again, I hope: I am sure we shall see each other again. Only do write
to me and send me books. I shall soon let you know which to send: surely
reading is permitted there.” (This, says the narrator, was a white lie to
comfort his brother.) “As soon as I am released, I shall begin to write. I
have lived during these last months, and in the days before me, what shall I
not see and live through? After all that I shall not lack material for
writing.”⁠[38]
During the four years of Siberia which followed, Dostoevsky was not
permitted to write to his family. At any rate the existing volume of
correspondence contains no letters from this period, nor do Orest Müller’s
Documents (Materialen), published in 1883, indicate any. But since the
issue of these Documents numerous Dostoevsky letters have been found
and published; doubtless still more will yet be discovered.
According to Müller, Dostoevsky left the penal settlement on March 2,
1854: according to official records, on January 23. These same archives
mention nineteen letters written by Fyodor Dostoevsky between March 16,
1854 and September 11, 1856 to his brother, relatives, and friends during
the years of military service at Semipalatinsk, where his sentence was
completed. The French translation gives only twelve of these letters,
omitting (and why I cannot tell) that admirable letter dated February 22,
1854, which, originally translated and printed in Numbers 12 and 13 of La
Vogue, 1886, now only with difficulty accessible, was reprinted in the
February issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française, 1922.
Seeing this letter is not to be found in the published volume of
Dostoevsky’s correspondence, allow me to read some lengthy extracts from
it:⁠[39]
(February 22, 1854.) “At last I can talk with you somewhat more
explicitly, and, I believe, in a more reasonable manner. But before I write

another line I must ask you: tell me, for God’s sake, why you have never
written me a single syllable till now? Could I have expected this from you?
Believe me, in my lonely and isolated state, I sometimes fell into utter
despair, for I believed that you were no longer alive; through whole nights I
would brood upon what was to become of your children, and I cursed my
fate because I could not help them....”
You see his keenest suffering is not in the consciousness of his own
abandonment, but in the realization of his powerlessness to help.
“How can I impart to you what is now in my mind—the things I
thought, the things I did, the convictions I acquired, the conclusions I came
to? I cannot even attempt the task. It is absolutely impossible. I don’t like to
leave a piece of work half done; to say only a part is to say nothing. At any
rate, you now have my detailed report in your hands: read it, and get from it
what you will. It is my duty to tell you all, and so I will begin with my
recollections. Do you remember how we parted from each other, dear
beloved fellow? You had scarcely left me when we three, Dourov,
Yastrembsky, and I, were led out to have the irons put on. Precisely at
midnight on that Christmas Eve (1849) did chains touch me for the first
time. They weigh about ten pounds, and make walking extraordinarily
difficult. Then we were sent into open sledges, each with a gendarme; and
so, in four sledges, the orderly opening the procession, we left Petersburg. I
was heavy-hearted, and the many different impressions filled me with
confused and uncertain sensations. My heart beat with a peculiar flutter, and
that numbed its pain. Still, the fresh air was reviving in its effect, and, since
it is usual before all new experiences to be aware of a curious vivacity and
eagerness, so I was at the bottom quite tranquil. I looked attentively at all
the festively-lit houses of Petersburg, and said good-bye to each. They
drove us past your abode, and at Krayevsky’s the windows were brilliantly
lit. You had told me he was giving a Christmas party and tree, and that your
children were going to it, with Emilie Fyodorovna; I did feel dreadfully sad
as we passed that house. I took leave, as it were, of the little ones. I felt so
lonely for them, and even years afterwards I often thought of them with
tears in my eyes. We were driven beyond Yaroslavl; after three or four
stations we stopped, in the first grey of morning, at Schlüsselburg, and went
into an inn. There we drank tea with as much avidity as if we had not

touched anything for a week. After the eight months’ captivity, sixty versts
in a sledge gave us appetites of which, even to-day, I think with pleasure.
“I was in a good temper. Dourov chattered incessantly, and
Yastryembsky expressed unwonted apprehensions for the future. We all laid
ourselves out to become better acquainted with our orderly. He was a good
old man, very friendly inclined towards us: a man who had seen a lot of
life; he had travelled all over Europe with dispatches. On the way he
showed us many kindnesses. His name was Kusma Prokofyevitch
Prokofyev. Among other things he let us have a covered sledge, which was
very welcome, for the frost was fearful.
“The second day was a holiday; the drivers, who were changed at the
various stations, wore cloaks of grey German cloth and bright red belts; in
the village streets there was not a soul to be seen. It was a splendid winter
day. They drove us through the remote parts of the Petersburg, Novgorod,
and Yaroslavl Governments. There were quite insignificant little towns, at
great distances from one another. But as we were passing through on a
holiday, there was always plenty to eat and drink; we drove—drove terribly.
We were warmly dressed, it is true, but we had to sit for ten hours at a time
in the sledges, halting at only five or six stations; it was almost
unendurable. I froze to the marrow, and could scarcely thaw myself in the
warm rooms at the stations. Strange to say, the journey completely restored
me to health. Near Perm, we had a frost of 40 degrees during some of the
nights. I don’t recommend that to you. It was highly disagreeable.
“Mournful was the moment when we crossed the Ural. The horses and
sledges sank deep in the snow; a snowstorm was raging. We got out of the
sledge—it was night—and waited, standing, till they were extricated. All
about us whirled the snowstorm. We were standing on the confines of
Europe and Asia; before us lay Siberia and the mysterious future—behind
us, our whole past; it was very melancholy. Tears came to my eyes. On the
way, the peasants would stream out of all the villages to see us; and
although we were fettered, prices were trebled to us at all the stations.
Kusma Prokofyevitch took half our expenses on himself, though we tried
hard to prevent him; in this way each of us, during the whole journey, spent
only fifteen roubles.
“On January 12, 1850, we came to Tobolsk. After we had been paraded
before the authorities, and searched, in which proceeding all our money was
taken from us, myself, Dourov and Yastryembsky were taken into one cell;

the others, Spejechynov, etc., who had arrived before us, were in another
section, and during the whole time we hardly once saw each other. I should
like to tell you more of our six days’ stay in Tobolsk, and of the impression
it made upon me. But I haven’t room here. I will only tell you that the great
compassion and sympathy which was shown to us there, made up to us, like
a big piece of happiness, for all that had gone before. The prisoners of
former days⁠[40] (and still more their wives) cared for us as if they had been
our kith and kin. Those noble souls, tested by five-and-twenty years of
suffering and self-sacrifice! We saw them but seldom, for we were very
rigidly guarded; still they sent us clothes and provisions, they comforted
and encouraged us. I had brought far too few clothes, and had bitterly
repented it; but they sent me clothes. Finally we left Tobolsk, and reached
Omsk in three days.
“While I was in Tobolsk, I gathered information about my future
superiors. They told me that the Commandant was a very decent fellow, but
that the Major, Krivzov, was an uncommon brute, a petty tyrant, a drunkard,
a trickster—in short, the greatest horror that can be imagined. From the
very beginning, he called both Dourov and me blockhead, and vowed to
chastise us bodily at the first transgression. He had already held his position
for two years, and done the most hideous and unsanctioned things; two
years later he was court-martialled for them. So God protected me from
him! He used to come to us mad drunk (I never once saw him sober), and
would seek out some inoffensive person and flog him on the pretext that he
—the prisoner—was drunk. Often he came at night and punished at random
—say, because such and such a one was sleeping on his left side instead of
his right, or because he talked or moaned in his sleep—in fact, anything that
occurred to his drunken mind. I should have had to break out in the long run
against such a man as that, and it was he who wrote the monthly reports of
us to Petersburg.
“I spent the whole four years behind dungeon walls, and only left the
prison when I was taken on ‘hard labour.’ The work was hard, though not
always; sometimes in bad weather, in rain, or in winter during the
unendurable frosts, my strength would forsake me. Once I had to spend four
hours at a piece of extra work, and in such frost that the quicksilver froze; it
was perhaps 40 degrees below zero. One of my feet was frost-bitten. We all
lived together in one barrack-room. Imagine an old, crazy, wooden
building, that should long ago have been broken up as useless. In the

summer it is unbearably hot, in the winter unbearably cold. All the boards
are rotten; on the ground filth lies an inch thick; every instant one is in
danger of slipping and coming down. The small windows are so frozen over
that even by day one can hardly read. The ice on the panes is three inches
thick. The ceilings drip, there are draughts everywhere. We are packed like
herrings in a barrel. The stove is heated with six logs of wood, but the room
is so cold that the ice never thaws; the atmosphere is unbearable—and so
through all the winter long.
“In the same room, the prisoners wash their linen, and thus make the
place so wet that one scarcely dares to move. From twilight till morning we
are forbidden to leave the barrack-room; the doors are barricaded; in the
ante-room a great wooden trough for the calls of nature is placed; this
makes one almost unable to breathe. All the prisoners stink like pigs; they
say that they can’t help it, for they must live, and are but men. We sleep
upon bare boards; each man was allowed one pillow only. We covered
ourselves with short sheepskins, and our feet were outside the covering all
the time. It was thus that we froze night after night. Fleas, lice, and other
vermin by the bushel. In the winter we got thin sheepskins to wear, which
didn’t keep us warm at all, and boots with short legs; thus equipped, we had
to go out into the frost.
“To eat we got bread and cabbage soup; the soup should, by the
regulations, have contained a quarter pound of meat per head; but they put
in sausage-meat, and so I never came across a piece of genuine flesh. On
feast days we got porridge, but with scarcely any butter. On fast days,
cabbage and nothing else. My stomach went utterly to pieces, and I suffered
tortures from indigestion.
“From all this you can see yourself that one couldn’t live there at all
without money; if I had had none, I should most assuredly have perished;
no one could endure such a life. But every convict does some sort of work
and sells it, thus earning, every single one of them, a few pence. I often
drank tea and bought myself a piece of meat; it was my salvation. It was
quite impossible to do without smoking, for otherwise the stench would
have choked one. All these things were done behind the backs of the
officials.
“I was often in hospital. My nerves were so shattered that I had some
epileptic fits—however, that was not often. I have rheumatism in my legs
now, too. But except for that, I feel right well. Add to all these discomforts

the fact that it was almost impossible to get one’s self a book, and that when
I did get one, I had to read it on the sly; that all around me was incessant
malignity, turbulence, and quarrelling; then perpetual espionage, and the
impossibility of ever being alone, even for an instant—and so without
variation for four long years. You’ll believe me when I tell you I was not
happy! And imagine, in addition, the ever-present dread of drawing down
some punishment on myself, the irons, and the utter oppression of spirits—
and you have the picture of my life.
“I won’t even try to tell you what transformations were undergone by
my soul, my faith, my mind, and my heart, in those four years. It would be a
long story. Still, the eternal concentration, the escape into myself from bitter
reality, did bear its fruit. I now have many new needs and hopes of which I
never thought in other days. But all this will be pure enigma for you, and so
I’ll pass to other things. I will say only one word: do not forget me, and do
help me! I need books and money. Send them me, for Christ’s sake.
“Omsk is a hateful hole. There is hardly a tree there. In summer, heat
and winds that bring sandstorms; in winter, snowstorms. I have scarcely
seen anything of the country around. The place is dirty, almost exclusively
inhabited by military, and dissolute to the last degree. I mean the common
people. If I hadn’t discovered some human beings here, I should have gone
utterly to the dogs.
“Constantine Ivanovitch Ivanov is like a brother to me. He has done
everything that he in any way could for me. I owe him money. If he ever
goes to Petersburg, show him some recognition. I owe him twenty-five
roubles. But how can I repay his kindness, his constant willingness to carry
out all my requests, his attention and care for me, just like a brother’s? And
he is not the only one I have to thank in that way. Brother, there are very
many noble natures in the world.
“I have already said that your silence often tortures me. I thank you for
the money you sent. In your next letter (even if it’s ‘official,’ for I don’t
know yet whether it is possible for me to correspond with you)—in your
next, write as fully as you can of all your affairs, of Emilie Fyodorovna, the
children, all relations and acquaintances; also of those in Moscow—who is
alive and who is dead; and of your business; tell me what capital you started
with, whether it is lucrative, whether you are in funds, finally, whether you
will help me financially, and how much you will send me a year. But send
no money with the official letter—particularly if I don’t find a covering

address. For the present, give Michael Petrovitch as the consignor of all
packets (you understand, don’t you?). For the time, I have some money, but
I have no books. If you can, send me the magazines for this year, or at any
rate the O.Z.
“But what I urgently need are the following: I need (very necessary!)
ancient historians (in French translation), modern historians: Guizot,
Thierry, Thiers, Ranke, and so forth; national studies, and the Fathers of the
Church. Choose the cheapest and most compact editions. Send them by
return.
“People try to console me: ‘They’re quite simple sort of fellows there.’
But I dread simple men more than complex ones. For that matter, men
everywhere are just—men. Even among the robber-murderers in the prison,
I came to know some men in those four years. Believe me, there were
among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often gave me great joy
to find gold under a rough exterior. And not in a single case, or even two,
but in several cases. Some inspired respect, others were downright fine. I
taught the Russian language to a young Circassian—he had been
transported to Siberia for robbery with murder. How grateful he was to me!
Another convict wept when I said good-bye to him. Certainly I had often
given him money, but it was so little, and his gratitude so boundless! My
character, though, was deteriorating; in my relations with others I was ill-
tempered and impatient. They accounted for it by my mental condition, and
bore all without grumbling. Apropos, what a number of national types and
characters I became familiar with in prison! I lived into their lives, and so I
believe I know them really well. Many tramps’ and thieves’ careers were
laid bare to me, and above all, the whole wretched existence of the common
people. Decidedly I have not spent my time there in vain. I have learnt to
know the Russian people as only a few know them. I am a little vain of it. I
hope that such vanity is pardonable....
“Send me the Koran, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and if you
have the chance of sending me anything not officially, then be sure to send
Hegel, but particularly Hegel’s History of Philosophy. Upon that depends
my whole future. For God’s sake, exert yourself to get me transferred to the
Caucasus; try to find out from well-informed sources whether I shall be
permitted to print my works, and in what way I should seek this sanction. I
intend to try for permission in two or three years. I beg you to sustain me so
long. Without money I shall be destroyed by military life. So please!...

“Now I mean to write novels and plays. But I must still read a great
deal. Don’t forget me.
“Once again farewell.
“F. D.”⁠[41]

This letter, like so many others, remained unanswered. It is evident that
Dostoevsky was left without news from his family during his whole term of
imprisonment. Are we to suppose, on his brother’s part, prudence, fear of
compromising himself, or maybe indifference? I cannot tell. Mme.
Hoffmann, in her biography, inclines to the last-mentioned supposition.
The first we know of Dostoevsky’s letters subsequent to his release and
enlistment in the 7th Siberian Line Regiment is dated March 27, 1854. It
does not appear in the French edition of his correspondence. In this letter
we read as follows:
“Send me—not newspapers, but European histories. Economists—
Church Fathers—as many of the classics as possible. Herodotus,
Thucydides, Tacitus, Pliny, Flavius, Plutarch, Diodorus, etc., in French
translations. And the Koran and a German Dictionary. Not all at once, of
course, but as much as you can. Send me Pissaren’s Physics too, and a
manual of physiology, any one, in French if better than in Russian. All in
the cheapest editions. Not in one consignment, but slowly, one book after
another. I shall be grateful for every little thing you can do for me. Do
realize how urgently I need this intellectual food!...”
“Now you know my chief occupations,” he writes a little later. “Really I
have none but these connected with my duty. No outside events, no
disturbances in my life, no mishaps. But what is happening in soul, heart,
and mind, what has sprung up, ripened or been blighted, what has been cast
aside with the tares, that cannot be told and written down on a scrap of
paper. Here I live in isolation; I shrink out of sight, as usual. Moreover, for
five years I lived with an escort, and there are times when it is pure bliss for
me to be alone. On the whole, prison has destroyed many things in me and
created new. For example, I’ve already spoken about my illness: strange
attacks resembling epilepsy. And yet not epilepsy. Some day I shall give
you particulars.”⁠[42]
In the last of these causeries we shall come back to this terrible question
of his illness.
In a letter dated November 6 of the same year we find:

“It will soon be ten months since I took up my new life. As for the other
four years, I look upon them as a period when I was buried alive and closed
in a coffin. What terrible years! I cannot, my friend, tell you how terrible.
Unspeakable suffering without end, for every hour, every minute lay heavy
on my soul. During the whole of these four years, not a moment but what I
was conscious of my prison walls.”⁠[43]
But, immediately after, watch how far his optimism rises above it all:
“I was so busy all summer that I had scarcely time for sleep. But now I
have grown used to things. My health too has improved slightly. And, hope
not wholly lost, I can look at the future with moderate fortitude.”⁠[44]
Three letters from the same period were given in the Niva, April, 1898.
Of these the French edition of Dostoevsky’s Correspondence includes the
first only. In one (August 21, 1855) there is reference to a letter of the
previous October, which has not been traced.
“When, in my letter of last October, I repeated my complaints at your
silence, you answered that these had made very painful reading for you. Oh,
Mysha! for the love of God, bear me no ill-will; remember my loneliness. I
am like a pebble cast aside. I’ve always been of a gloomy, sickly,
susceptible disposition. I am myself thoroughly convinced I was in the
wrong.”
Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg on November 29, 1859. At
Semipalatinsk he had married the widow of a deportee, mother of a growing
son whose intelligence seemingly was less than mediocre. Dostoevsky
adopted the boy, for whom he made himself answerable. He had a perfect
mania for assuming burdens.
“He was but little altered,” his friend Miliukov tells us. “His mien is
more confident than of yore, and his features have lost none of the energy
they used to express.”
In 1861 he published Insulted and Injured; in 1861–2 his Memories of
the House of the Dead. Crime and Punishment, the first of his great novels,
did not appear till 1866.
During the years 1863–1865, he busied himself actively with a review.
One of his letters speaks so eloquently of the years between that I must read
further passages: this is, I think, the last time I shall quote to you from his
correspondence! This particular letter is dated March 31, 1865.
“I am going to recount my life during this time. Not the whole of it,
though. That is impossible, for in such a case one never tells in letters the

essential facts. There are things I cannot narrate simply. That’s why I shall
confine myself to a summary account of the past year of my life.
“You probably know that four years ago my brother Michael undertook
the publication of a review, wherein I collaborated. Everything was going
well. My House of the Dead had met with considerable success and given a
fresh lease of life to my literary reputation. When my brother began
publication, he owed a lot of money; his debts were being paid off when
suddenly, in May, 1863, the review was suspended on account of a strong
and patriotic article, which, misinterpreted, was read as a protest against the
conduct of the Government and public opinion. The blow killed him; debt
after debt accumulated, and his health became impaired. At the moment, I
was far away, in Moscow, at the bedside of my dying wife. Yes, dear friend,
you wrote to sympathize in my cruel loss, the death of my beloved brother,
but you did not know how heavy the hand of fate was upon me. Another
creature who loved me, and whom I loved infinitely—my wife—died of
consumption in Moscow, where she had been settled for a twelvemonth.
The whole winter of 1864 I never left her bedside....
“... Ah, dear friend, she loved me deeply, and I returned her love; yet,
we did not live happily together. I shall tell you all about it when I see you.
Let me say just this. Although we were unhappy (by reason of her difficult
character—she was hypochondriac, and full of a sick woman’s whims), we
could not cease to love each other. Indeed, the unhappier we grew, the
closer we were drawn together. Strange though it may seem, it is true. She
was the best, the noblest, the most generous-hearted woman I have ever
known. After she was gone (despite all my anxieties during the
twelvemonth I watched her dying), although I felt and painfully realized
what I was burying with her, I could not picture the emptiness and misery
of my life. That is a year ago now, and the feeling is still the same.
“Immediately after the funeral, I hastened to Petersburg to my brother.
He alone was left me! Three months later he, too, was no more. His illness
lasted only a month. It did not appear serious and the attack which carried
him off in three days was practically unforeseen.
“Then I was suddenly left alone; and I knew fear! It has become
terrible! My life is broken in two. On one hand, the past, with all that I had
to live for; on the other, the unknown, with not one loving heart to comfort
me in my loss. There was literally no reason why I should go on living.
Forge new links, start a fresh existence? The very thought revolted me!

Then I realized for the first time that I could not replace my loved ones;
they were all I held dear, and new loves could not, ought not to exist.”⁠[45]
This letter was continued in April, and a fortnight after this cry of
despair, we read, under the date April 14: “Of all my reserves of strength
and energy, there is nothing left save a vague uneasiness of soul, a state
bordering on despair. Bitterness and indecision—a mood foreign to me.
And then I’m utterly alone. I’ve lost the friend of a lifetime. Yet I always
have the feeling that I am going to begin to live! Ridiculous, isn’t it? The
cat and its nine lives?”⁠[46]
He adds these words: “I write to you at great length, and I see that of the
very essence of my moral or spiritual life I have given you not a notion,”
which passage I should like to set side by side with an extraordinary
paragraph I find in Crime and Punishment.
In this novel Dostoevsky tells us the story of Raskolnikov, who commits
a crime and is sent to Siberia. In the last pages he speaks of the strange
feeling that takes possession of his hero’s being, the feeling that at last he is
going to live. “And what were all, all the agonies of the past! Everything,
even his crime, sentence, and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first
rush of feeling an external, strange fact, with which he had no concern. But
he could not think for long together of anything that evening, and he could
not have analysed consciously, he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into
the place of theory.”⁠[47]
These sentences I have read to you in justification of my opening
remarks. The great external events of Dostoevsky’s life, tragic though they
were, are less important than this one small fact which it is now time to
consider. During his years in Siberia, Dostoevsky made the acquaintance of
a woman who put the New Testament into his hand—this, by the way, being
the only officially sanctioned reading matter in gaol. This reading and
meditating the Gospels was of vital importance to Dostoevsky. All his
subsequently written works are steeped in the teaching of the Gospels, and
we shall be obliged again and again to revert to the truths he discovered in
reading them.
I find it highly interesting to observe and compare in two natures akin in
so many respects, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the very different reactions to
contact with the Gospels. With Nietzsche the reaction, immediate and
marked, was, we may as well admit, jealousy. It does not seem to me
possible to understand Nietzsche’s works without taking account of this

feeling. Nietzsche was jealous of Jesus Christ, jealous to the point of
madness. In writing his Zarathustra, Nietzsche is ever harassed by his
desire to write a counterpart to the Gospels. He even adopts at times the
form of the Beatitudes the better to make mockery of them. He wrote the
Anti-Christ, and in his last work, Ecce Homo, he poses as the adversary
triumphant of Him he sought to oust.
With Dostoevsky the reaction is far different. He felt at once that he was
face to face with something superior, not only to himself, but to entire
mankind, something divine.... The humility of which I spoke earlier in the
day, and to which I shall time and again return, predisposed him to making
submission before what was avowedly better and higher than himself. He
bowed his head humbly before Jesus Christ, and the first, the greatest
consequence of his submission and self-surrender was the safeguarding
intact his nature’s rich complexity. No artist ever more truly practised the
teaching of the Gospel: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but
whosoever will lose his life for My sake, the same shall save it.”
By reason of this sacrifice and renunciation the most discordant
elements are able to live side by side in Dostoevsky’s soul, and the
extraordinary wealth of antagonisms is preserved.
At our next meeting we shall inquire whether several of Dostoevsky’s
characteristics, which to us Westerners seem perchance more than strange,
are not common to all Russians, and by so inquiring we may be enabled to
discern such features as are more purely individual and personal.

II

THE few psychological and moral truths Dostoevsky’s works will permit us
to touch upon are in my estimation so important that I am all eagerness to
reach them. By their very boldness and originality they would seem
paradoxical to you if I approached them directly. I needs must proceed
warily.
In our last talk I spoke to you of the figure of the man himself. The
moment is favourable, I think, for presenting it in its own atmosphere the
better to bring its particular features into relief.
I have been on intimate terms with some Russians, but I have never
been in Russia; hence, without help, my task would be extremely difficult. I
shall first of all submit a few observations on the Russian people that I
found in a German monograph on Dostoevsky. Mme. Hoffmann, in her
excellent biography, insists first and foremost on the solidarity, the common
brotherhood between all classes of Russian society, which end in sweeping
away social barriers and facilitate naturally the freedom of intercourse we
find in all Dostoevsky’s novels. An introduction, a sudden feeling of
sympathetic understanding; and we have at once what one of his heroes so
expressively describes as “chance relationships.” Homes are transformed
into hostelries, the stranger of yesterday becomes the honoured guest of to-
day: a friend’s friend visits you, and immediately everything between you is
on a footing of intimacy.
Another observation of Mme. Hoffmann’s concerning the Russian
people. It is inherently incapable of leading a strict and methodical
existence, of being punctual even. It would seem as if the Russian did not
suffer much in consequence of his own improvidence, for he makes no
great effort to free himself from it. And if I may be permitted to seek an
excuse for the lack of order in my causeries, I shall find it in the very
confusion of Dostoevsky’s ideas, in their extreme entanglement and in the
peculiar difficulties experienced in trying to hold them to a plan which
satisfies our Western logic. This wavering and indecision Mme. Hoffmann
ascribes partly to the weakening of time sense due to the endless summer
days and interminable winter nights, when the rhythm of the passing hours
is lost. In a short address delivered at the Vieux Colombier I already quoted

Mme. Hoffmann’s illustration of the Russian who met reproaches on
account of his unpunctuality with “Yes, life is difficult! There are moments
which must be lived well, and this is more important than the punctual
keeping of any engagement!”—a sentence full of significance, for it reveals
at the same time the strange consciousness a Russian has of his inner life,
more important to him than all social connections.
I should like to point out, with Mme. Hoffmann, the propensity to pity
and suffering, Leiden und Mitleiden, to compassion extending even to the
criminal. In Russia there exists but one word to designate the poor and the
criminal, but one to cover actual crime and ordinary offences. Add to this an
almost religious contrition and we shall the better understand the Russian’s
ineradicable mistrustfulness in all his relations with strangers, with
foreigners in particular. Westerners often complain of this mistrustfulness,
which proceeds, so Mme. Hoffmann maintains, from the uneasy
consciousness of his own insufficiency and proneness to sin, rather than
from any feeling that other people are of no account: it is a mistrust that
springs from humility of spirit.
Nothing could better throw light on this strange religiosity of the
Russian, which persists even when belief is long since dead, than the four
conversations of Prince Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot. These I shall now
read to you.
“‘As to the question of faith,’ he began, smiling, ... ‘I had four different
conversations in two days last week. I came in the morning by the new
railway and talked for four hours with a man in the train. We made friends
on the spot. I had heard a great deal about him beforehand and had heard he
was an atheist, among other things. He really is a very learned man. What’s
more, he’s an unusually well-bred man, so that he talked to me quite as if I
were his equal in ideas and attainments. He doesn’t believe in God. Only,
one thing struck me: that he seemed not to be talking about that at all the
whole time; and it struck me, just because whenever I have met unbelievers
before, or read their books, it always seemed to me that they were speaking
and writing in their books about something quite different, although it
seemed to me about that on the surface. I said so to him at the time, but I
suppose I didn’t say so clearly, or did not know how to express it, for he
didn’t understand. In the evening, I stopped for the night at a provincial
hotel, and a murder had just been committed there the night before, so that
every one was talking about it when I arrived. Two peasants, middle-aged

men, friends who had known each other for a long time, and were not
drunk, had had tea and were meaning to go to bed in the same room. But
one had noticed during those last two days that the other was wearing a
silver watch on a yellow bead chain, which he seems not to have seen on
him before. The man was not a thief: he was an honest man, in fact, and by
a peasant’s standard by no means poor. But he was so taken by the watch,
and so fascinated by it, that at last he could not restrain himself. He took a
knife, and when his friend had turned away, he approached him cautiously
from behind, and praying fervently, “God forgive me for Christ’s sake!” he
cut his friend’s throat at one stroke like a sheep and took his watch.’
“Rogozhin went off into peals of laughter; he laughed as though he were
in a sort of fit. It was positively strange to see such laughter after the
gloomy mood that had preceded it.
“‘I do like that! Yes, that beats everything!’ he cried convulsively,
gasping for breath. ‘One man doesn’t believe in God at all, while the other
believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!... You could
never have invented that, brother! Ha!—ha!—ha! That beats everything!’
“‘Next morning I went out to walk about the town,’ Myshkin went on,
as soon as Rogozhin was quiet again, though his lips still quivered with
spasmodic convulsive laughter. ‘I saw a drunken soldier in a terribly
disorderly state staggering about the wooden pavement. He came up to me.
“Buy a silver cross, sir?” said he. “I’ll let you have it for twenty kopecks.
It’s silver.” I saw in his hand a cross—he must have just taken it off—on a
very dirty blue ribbon; but one could see at once it was only tin. It was a big
one with eight corners, of a regular Byzantine pattern. I took out twenty
kopecks and gave them to him, and at once put the cross round my neck;
and I could see from his face how glad he was that he had cheated a stupid
gentleman, and he went off immediately to drink what he had got for it,
there was no doubt about that. At that time, brother, I was quite carried
away by the rush of impressions that burst upon me in Russia; I had
understood nothing about Russia before. I had grown up, as it were,
inarticulate, and my memories of my country were somehow fantastic
during those five years abroad. Well, I walked on, thinking, “Yes, I’ll put
off judging that man who sold his Christ. God only knows what’s hidden in
these weak drunken beasts.” An hour later, when I was going back to the
hotel, I came upon a peasant woman with a tiny baby in her arms. She was
quite a young woman, and the baby was about six weeks old. The baby

smiled at her for the first time in its life. “What are you doing, my dear?” (I
was always asking questions in those days.) “God has just such gladness
every time He sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to him with all his
heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s face.”
That was what the woman said to me almost in those words, this deep,
subtle, and truly religious thought—a thought in which all the essence of
Christianity finds expression; that is the whole conception of God as our
Father and of God’s gladness in man, like a father’s in his own child—the
fundamental idea of Christ! A simple peasant woman! It’s true she was a
mother ... and who knows, very likely that woman was the wife of that
soldier. Listen, Parfyon! You asked me a question just now; here is my
answer. The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of
reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or
misdemeanours. There is something else here, and there will always be
something else—something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they
will always be talking of something else. But the chief thing is that you will
notice it more clearly and quickly in the Russian heart than anywhere else.
And this is my conclusion. It’s one of the chief convictions I’ve gathered
from our Russia. There is work to be done, Parfyon! There is work to be
done in our Russian world, believe me.’”⁠[48]
And we see at the end of this story another characteristic reveal itself:
the belief in the special mission of the Russian people.
This belief we find in several Russian writers: in Dostoevsky it becomes
an active and painful conviction, and his chief grievance against Turgeniev
was simply that he could not trace in him this national feeling, his opinion
being that Turgeniev was too westernized.
In his speech at the Pushkin celebrations, Dostoevsky declared that
Pushkin, still in flush of imitating Byron and Chénier, suddenly found what
Dostoevsky calls the “Russian note,” a note “fresh and sincere.” Replying
to the question (which he describes as “accursed”) “What faith can we have
in the Russian people and in its worth?” Pushkin exclaimed, “Humble
thyself, thou son of arrogance, and first conquer thy pride. Humble thyself
and before the people, bend thy neck towards thy mother earth.”
Never perhaps are ethnic differences more clearly marked than when the
manner of interpreting honour is involved. The hidden mainspring of
civilized man’s conduct seems to me to be less a matter of amour-propre, as
La Rochefoucauld would have said, than a feeling for what we call the

“point of honour.” This feeling for personal honour, this sensitive spot, is
not exactly alike for Frenchman, Englishman, Italian, and Spaniard. But
contrasted with the Russian conception, the codes of honour of all Western
nations seem to fuse practically into one. When we appreciate the Russian’s
idea of honour, we see at once how often the code of the Western world is
opposed to the teaching of the Gospels. And the Russian idea of honour is
as much closer to the Gospels by virtue of its remoteness from Western
nations; in other words, Christian feeling is predominant in the Russians,
and often takes precedence of “honour” as we Westerners interpret the idea.
Faced with the choice of seeking revenge or asking pardon by admitting
himself in the wrong, the Westerner will often consider the second
alternative lacking in dignity, the attitude of a coward or a nonentity. The
Westerner tends to esteem unwillingness to forgive, forget, or remit
offences a mark of strength of character, and certainly he tries never to put
himself in the wrong; but, should he have done so, it would appear that the
most unpleasant thing that could befall him would be the necessity for
admitting the fact! The Russian, on the other hand, is ever ready to admit
himself in the wrong—and even before his enemies—equally willing to
humble himself and seek forgiveness.
The Greek Orthodox religion, no doubt, is only encouraging a national
inclination by tolerating, nay, approving, public confession. The notion of
confession, not murmured low into priestly ears, but made openly, before
any and all, comes up again and again, almost with the quality of an
obsession, in Dostoevsky’s novels. When Raskolnikov has confessed his
crime to Sonia, in Crime and Punishment, she advises him, as the one
means of unburdening his soul, at once to prostrate himself in the public
street and cry aloud, “I have the blood of a fellow-being on my hands.”
Most of Dostoevsky’s characters are seized at certain moments—and almost
invariably in unexpected and ill-advised fashion—with the urgent desire to
make confession, to ask pardon of some fellow-creature who often has not a
notion what it is all about, the desire to place themselves in a posture of
inferiority to the person addressed.
You remember, I am sure, the extraordinary scene in The Idiot, in the
course of an evening party at Nastasya Filippovna’s house. To pass the time
someone suggested in place of parlour games or charades that each guest
should confess the vilest act he ever committed; and the wonderful part is
that the suggestion was not scouted, and that each one present commenced

his or her confession, with varying degree of sincerity, no doubt, but almost
without a vestige of shame.
And more curious still, an anecdote from Dostoevsky’s own life, which
I have from a Russian in his intimate circle. I was imprudent enough to tell
it to several individuals and already it has been made use of; but in the form
I found it retailed, it was fast approaching unrecognizability. Hence my
anxiety to give the exact facts here.
There are, in Dostoevsky’s life, certain extremely obscure episodes.
One, in particular, already alluded to in Crime and Punishment and which
seems to have served as theme for a certain chapter in The Possessed. This
chapter does not figure in the novel, having been so far withheld in Russia
even. It has, I believe, been printed in Germany, but in an edition for private
circulation only.⁠[49] It deals with the rape of a young girl. The child victim
hangs herself, and in the next room, Stavrogin, the guilty man, knowing that
she is hanging herself, waits until life has left her little body. What measure
of truth is there in this sinister tale? For the moment, it is not for me to say.
The fact remains that Dostoevsky, after an adventure of this nature, was
moved to what one must needs describe as remorse. This remorse preyed
upon him for a while, and doubtless he said to himself what Sonia said to
Raskolnikov. The need for confession became urgent, but confession not
merely to a priest. He sought to find the person before whom confession
would cause him the acutest suffering. Turgeniev, without the shadow of a
doubt! Dostoevsky had not seen him for long, and was on uncommonly bad
terms with him. M. Turgeniev was a respectable man, rich, famous, and
held in wide esteem. Dostoevsky summoned up all his courage, or rather, he
succumbed to a kind of giddiness, to a mysterious and awful attraction.
Picture Turgeniev’s comfortable study: the author himself at his desk.—The
bell rings.—A manservant announces Fyodor Dostoevsky.—What is his
business?—He is shown in, and at once begins to tell his tale.—Turgeniev
listens, dumb with stupefaction. What business of his is all this? No doubt
the other man is mad!—After the confession, a great silence. Dostoevsky
waits for some word or sign from Turgeniev, believing no doubt that like in
his own novels, Turgeniev will take him in his arms, kiss him and weep
over him, and be reconciled ... but nothing happens:
“Monsieur Turgeniev, I must tell you how deeply I despise myself....”
He pauses again.... The silence remains unbroken until Dostoevsky,
unable to contain himself any longer, bursts out in wrath: “But you I despise

even more! That’s all I wanted to say to you,” and off he goes, slamming
the door behind him.
Here we see how humility is suddenly displaced by a very different
feeling. The man who in his humility was abasing himself, draws up in
revolt at the humiliation. Humility opens the gates of Heaven: humiliation
the gates of Hell. Humility implies a measure of free-will submission; it is
accepted without constraint and proves the truth of the Gospel teaching:
“For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased: and he that humbleth
himself shall be exalted.” Humiliation, on the other hand, degrades the soul,
warping and deforming it; it irritates, impoverishes, and blights, inflicting a
moral hurt most ill to heal.
There is not, I believe, one single deformation or deviation of character
—these kinks that make so many of Dostoevsky’s characters so strangely
morbid and disturbing—but which has its beginning in some humiliation.
Insulted and Injured is the title of one of his first books, and his work as
a whole is obsessed without ceasing by the idea that humiliation damns,
whereas humility sanctifies. Heaven, as Alyosha Karamazov dreams and
describes it to us, is a world where there will be no injured, neither insulted.
The strangest, most disturbing figure of these novels, the terrible
Stavrogin in The Possessed, whose character at first is so different from all
others, is explained, and his demoniac nature accounted for, by certain
passages in the book:
“Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin,” says one of the other characters,
“was leading at that time in Petersburg a life, so to say, of mockery. I can’t
find another word to describe it, because he is not a man who falls into
disillusionment, and he disdained to be occupied with work at that time.”⁠[50]
And Stavrogin’s mother, to whom these remarks were addressed, says a
little farther on:
“No, it was something more than eccentricity, and I assure you,
something sacred even! A proud man who has suffered humiliation early in
life and reached the stage of ‘mockery,’ as you so subtly called it.”⁠[51]
And later:
“And if Nikolay had always had at his side (Varvara Petrovna almost
shouted) a gentle Horatio, great in his humility—another excellent
expression of yours, Stepan Trofimovitch!—he might long ago have been
saved from the sad and sudden demon of irony, which has tormented him
all his life.”⁠[52]

It happens that some of Dostoevsky’s characters, whose natures have
been profoundly warped by humiliation, find as it were delight and
satisfaction in the resultant degradation, loathsome though it be.
“Was there resentment in my heart?” says the hero of A Raw Youth just
when his amour-propre had been cruelly wounded, “I don’t know. Perhaps
there was. Strange to say, I always had, perhaps from my earliest childhood,
one characteristic; if I were ill-treated, absolutely wronged and insulted to
the last degree, I always showed at once an irresistible desire to submit
passively to the insult, and even to accept more than my assailant wanted to
inflict on me, as though I would say: ‘All right, you have humiliated me, so
I will humiliate myself even more; look and enjoy it.’”⁠[53]
For if humility be a surrender of pride, humiliation, on the other hand,
but serves to strengthen it.
Listen to the tale told by the wretched hero of the Notes from
Underground:
“One night, as I was passing a tavern, I saw through a lighted window
some gentlemen fighting with billiard cues, and saw one of them thrown out
of the window. At other times, I should have felt very much disgusted, but I
was in such a mood at the time, that I actually envied the gentleman thrown
out of the window—and I envied him so much that I even went into the
tavern and into the billiard-room. ‘Perhaps,’ I thought, ‘I’ll have a fight, too,
and they’ll throw me out of the window.’
“I was not drunk—but what is one to do?—depression will drive a man
to such a pitch of hysteria! But nothing happened. It seemed that I was not
even equal to being thrown out of the window, and I went away without
having my fight.
“An officer put me in my place from the first moment. I was standing
by the billiard-room tables and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and
he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word, without
warning or explanation, moved me from where I was standing to another
spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven
blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me.
“Devil knows what I would have given for a real, regular quarrel—a
more decent, a more literary one, so to speak. I had been treated like a fly.
This officer was over six foot, while I was a spindly little fellow. But the
quarrel was in my hands. I had only to protest and I certainly would have

been thrown out of the window. But I changed my mind, and preferred to
beat a resentful retreat.”⁠[54]
But if we carry the story further, we shall soon see the excess of hatred
to be nothing other than love inverted.
“... I often met that officer afterwards in the street, and noticed him very
carefully. I am not quite sure whether he recognized me: I imagine not, I
judge from certain signs. But I—I stared at him with spite and hatred, and
so it went on—for several years! My resentment grew even deeper with
years. At first I began making stealthy inquiries about this officer. It was
difficult for me to do so, for I knew no one. But one day I heard one shout
his name in the street as I was following him at a distance, as though I was
tied to him,—and so I learned his surname. Another time I followed him to
his flat, and for ten kopecks learned from the porter where he lived, on
which storey, whether he lived alone or with others, and so on—in fact,
everything one could learn from a porter. One morning, though I had never
tried my hand with the pen, it suddenly occurred to me to write a satire on
this officer in the form of a novel which would unmask his villainy; I even
exaggerated it: at first I so altered his surname that it could not easily be
recognized, but on second thoughts I changed it, and sent the story to the
O.Z.
“But at that time such attacks were not the fashion and my story was not
printed. That was a great vexation to me. Sometimes I positively choked
with resentment. At last I determined to challenge my enemy to a duel. I
composed a splendid, charming little letter to him, imploring him to
apologize to me, and hinting rather plainly at a duel in case of refusal. The
letter was so composed that if the officer had had the least understanding of
the good and beautiful, he would certainly have flung himself on my neck
and offered his friendship. And how fine that would have been! How we
should have got on together!”⁠[55]
So often in Dostoevsky one particular feeling is suddenly supplanted in
this way by its direct opposite! We can find example after example of it. For
instance, that unhappy child (in The Karamazovs) biting with hatred into
Alyosha’s finger when the latter holds out his hand to him, just at the time
when the child, though he does not recognize it, is developing for the same
Alyosha a shy, wild affection.
And what, in this young child, could have caused such a warping of
affection?

He had seen Dmitri Karamazov, Alyosha’s brother, come drunk out of
an inn, thrash his father, and pull him insolently by the beard: “Papa, papa,
how he humiliated you!” he cried later.
Thus, over against humility—on the same moral plane, if I may be
permitted to say so, but at the other extreme of the scale—there is pride,
which humiliation exaggerates, exasperates, and deforms, sometimes
hideously.
Certainly, psychological axioms appear to Dostoevsky for what they
really are, special definitions of truth. As novelist (for Dostoevsky is no
mere theoretician, he is an explorer) he steers clear of induction and realizes
how imprudent (on his part, at least) any attempts to formulate general
laws.⁠[56] It is for us, if we choose, to discover these laws in his books, by
cutting, as it were, paths through the thicket. Here is one of the laws we can
establish: the man who has suffered humiliation seeks to inflict humiliation
in his turn.⁠[57]
Despite the extraordinarily rich diversity of his Comédie Humaine,
Dostoevsky’s characters group and arrange themselves always on one plane
only, that of humility and pride. This system of grouping discomfits us;
indeed, at first, it appears far from clear, for the very simple reason that we
do not usually approach the problem of making a division at such an angle
and that we distribute mankind in hierarchies. Let me explain my idea: in
Dickens’s wonderful novels, for instance, I am often uneasy at the
conventionality, childishness even, of his hierarchy, or to use Nietzsche’s
phrase, scale of values. While reading him I have the impression that I am
contemplating one of Fra Angelico’s Last Judgements where you have the
redeemed, the damned, and the indeterminate (not too numerous!) over
whom angel and demon struggle. The balance that weighs them all, like in
an Egyptian bas-relief, reckons only the positive or negative quality of their
virtue. Heaven for the just: for the wicked, Hell. Herein Dickens is true to
the opinion of his countrymen and of his time. It does happen that the evil
prosper, while the just are sacrificed—to the great shame of this earthly
existence and of society as we have organized it. All his novels endeavour
to show us and make us realize the shining superiority of qualities of heart
over qualities of head. I have selected Dickens as a type because of all the
great novelists we know he uses this classification in its simplest form:
which—if I may say in conclusion—is the secret of his popularity.

Now, after reading in close succession practically all Dostoevsky’s
works, I have the impression that there exists in them, too, a similar
classification: less apparent, no doubt, although almost as simple, and, in
my estimation, much more significant. For it is not according to the positive
or negative quality of their virtue that one can hierarchize (forgive me this
horrible word!) his characters: not according to their goodness of heart, but
by their degree of pride.
Dostoevsky presents on one side the humble (some of these are humble
to an abject degree, and seem to enjoy their abasement); on the other, the
proud (some to the point of crime). The latter are usually the more
intelligent. We shall see them, tormented by the demon of pride, ever
striving after something higher still:
“There, I’ll bet anything—that you’ve been sitting side by side in the
drawing-room all night wasting your precious time discussing something
lofty and elevated,” says Stavrogin to the abominable Pyotr Stepanovitch in
The Possessed.⁠[58] Or again:
“In spite of the terror which I detected in her myself, Katerina
Nikolaevna has always from the first cherished a certain reverence and
admiration for the nobility of Andrey Petrovitch’s principles and the
loftiness of his mind.... In his letter he gave her the most solemn and
chivalrous promises that she should have nothing to fear—she responding
with the same heroic feelings. There may have been a sort of chivalrous
rivalry on both sides.”⁠[59]
“There is nothing in it to fret your vanity,” said Elizabeth to Stavrogin:
“The day before yesterday when I ‘insulted’ you before everyone and you
answered me so chivalrously, I went home and guessed at once that you
were running away from me because you were married, and not from
contempt for me, which, as a fashionable young lady, I dreaded more than
anything,” adding by way of conclusion, “Anyhow, it eases our vanity.”⁠[60]
His women, even more so than his characters of the other sex, are ever
moved and determined by considerations of pride. Look at Raskolnikov’s
sister, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaïa Epantchin in The Idiot, Elizabeth
Nikolaïevna in The Possessed, and Katerina Ivanovna in The Karamazovs!
But, by an inversion which I make bold to describe as inspired by the
New Testament, the most abject characters are nearer the Kingdom of
Heaven than the noblest. To such a degree is Dostoevsky’s work dominated

by these profound truths. “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the
humble.”—“For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost.”
On the one hand, denial and surrender of the self; on the other,
affirmation of the personality, the will to power, an exaggerated loftiness of
sentiment. And take due note of this fact; in Dostoevsky’s novels, the will to
power leads inevitably to ruin.
M. Souday recently accused me of sacrificing, indeed, of immolating
Balzac to Dostoevsky. Need I protest? My admiration of Dostoevsky is
certainly fervent, but I do not think I am blinded by it. I readily agree that
Balzac’s creations surpass the Russian novelist’s in their diversity, and that
his Comédie Humaine is the more varied. Dostoevsky certainly goes deeper
and touches more important points than any other author, but we can admit
that his characters are one and all cut from the same cloth. Pride and
humility! these hidden reagents never change, although by graduating the
doses of them, we obtain reactions that are infinitely rich and minutely
varied in colour.
With Balzac (as invariably in Western society, in French especially, to
which his novels hold a mirror) two factors are active which in
Dostoevsky’s work practically do not exist: first, the intellect, second, the
will. I do not pretend that in Balzac will-power always urges a man towards
what is good, and that his strong-willed characters are never but virtuous.
But at least consider how many of his characters attain to what is of good
repute by effort of will and open up a glorious career by dint of
perseverance, cleverness, and determination. Think of his David Séchards,
his Bianchons, Joseph Brideaus, and Daniel d’Arthez—and there are twenty
such I could name!
In all Dostoevsky we have not a single great man. “But what about that
splendid Father Zossima in The Karamazovs?” you may say. Yes, he is
certainly the noblest figure the Russian novelist had drawn; he far and away
dominates the whole tragedy, and once we have entered into possession of
the promised complete version of The Karamazovs, we shall understand
still better his importance. At the same time we shall realize what in
Dostoevsky’s eyes constitutes his real greatness. Father Zossima is not of
the great as the world reckons them. He is a saint—no hero! And he has
reached saintliness by surrender of will and abdication of intellect.
If I examine along with Balzac’s the resolute characters that Dostoevsky
presents, I suddenly realize what terrible creatures they are, one and all.

Look at Raskolnikov, heading the list; in his beginnings, a miserable worm
—with ambitions, who would like to be a Napoleon, and only attains to
being the murderer of an old broker-woman and of an innocent girl. Look at
Stavrogin, Pyotr Stepanovitch, Ivan Karamazov, the hero of A Raw Youth
(the only one of Dostoevsky’s characters who, from his earliest days, at
least since consciousness dawned, lived with a fixed determination, to wit,
in this case, of becoming a Rothschild, and, by mockery as it were, in all the
books of Dostoevsky nowhere is there a more pithless creature, at the mercy
of his fellow-beings, individually and collectively). His heroes’
determination, every particle of cleverness and will-power they possess,
seem but to hurry them onward to perdition, and if I seek to know what part
mind plays in Dostoevsky’s novels, I realize that its power is demonic.
His most dangerous characters are the strongest intellectually, and not
only do I maintain that the mind and the will of Dostoevsky’s characters are
active solely for evil, but that, when urged and guided towards good, the
virtue to which they attain is rotten with pride and leads to destruction.
Dostoevsky’s heroes inherit the Kingdom of God only by the denial of mind
and will and the surrender of personality.
We can without hesitation affirm that Balzac, too, is, to a certain degree,
a Christian author. But only by confronting the two ethical points of view,
the French author’s and the Russian’s, can we realize the chasm between
the former’s Catholicism and the latter’s purely evangelical doctrine, and
how widely the Catholic spirit can differ from the purely Christian. Or, to
offend none, let me express myself thus: Balzac’s Comédie Humaine sprang
from the contact between the Gospels and the Latin mind: Dostoevsky’s
from the contact between the Gospels and Buddhism, the Asiatic mind.
These are merely preliminary considerations which will help us at our
next meeting to probe deeper into the souls of these strange creations.

III

WHAT we have accomplished so far has been a mere clearing of the
ground. Before attacking the problem of Dostoevsky’s philosophy, I should
like to warn you against a grave misconception. During the last fifteen years
of his life, Dostoevsky busied himself considerably with the editing of a
review. The articles he wrote for this periodical have been collected in what
is known as the Journal of an Author. In these articles Dostoevsky sets forth
his ideas. It would seem the simplest and most natural thing in the world to
make constant reference to this book; but I may as well admit at once that it
is profoundly disappointing. In it we find an exposé of his social theories,
which, however, never emerge from the nebulous state and are most
awkwardly expressed. We find, too, political prophecies not one of which
has come true. Dostoevsky tries to foretell the future state of Europe and
goes far astray in practically every instance.
M. Souday, who recently devoted one of his literary reviews in the
Temps to Dostoevsky, takes a delight in pointing out his mistakes. In these
articles of Dostoevsky’s he sees nothing more than journalism of the most
everyday type, which fact I am prepared to concede. But I do protest when
he goes on to say that these same articles are a wonderful revelation of
Dostoevsky’s ideas. As a matter of fact, the problems Dostoevsky handles
in his Journal of an Author are not the problems that interest him most.
Political questions are frankly less important in his estimation than social
problems, these in turn far less important than moral and individual
problems. The rarest and deepest truths we can expect from him are
psychological, and I add that in this province the ideas he submits are most
often left in the problematic state, in the form of a question. He is seeking
not so much a solution as an exposition of these very questions which, by
reason of their complexity, confusion, and interdependence, are as a rule left
ill-defined. In a word, Dostoevsky is not, strictly speaking, a thinker but a
novelist. His favourite theories, and all that is subtle and novel in them,
must be sought in the speeches of his characters, and not always of his most
important ones even. It often happens that his most valuable and daring
ideas are attributed to subordinate characters. Dostoevsky is awkwardness
itself when speaking in his own name. To his own case might well be

applied the sentence he puts into Versilov’s mouth. “Explain?” he said. “No,
it’s better not to; besides, I’ve a passion for talking without explanations.
That’s really it. And there’s another strange thing; if it happens that I try to
explain an idea I believe in, it almost always happens that I cease to believe
what I have explained.”⁠[61]
We can even say that it is exceptional for Dostoevsky not to turn against
his own theory as soon as formulated. It seems as if for him it immediately
breathed an odour of decay, like that which emanated from Father
Zossima’s dead body—the body expected to work miracles—and made the
deathwatch so painful for Alyosha Karamazov, his disciple.
It is evident that for a philosopher this feature would be something of a
drawback. His ideas are practically never absolute, remaining relative
always to the characters expressing them. I shall press the point even further
and assert their relativity not merely to these characters, but to a specific
moment in the lives of these characters. The ideas are, as it were, the
product of a special and transitory state of his dramatis personæ, and
relative they remain, subservient to and conditioned by the particular fact or
action which determines them or by which they are determined. As soon as
Dostoevsky begins to theorize, he disappoints us. Thus even in his article,
Of the Nature of Lying,⁠[62] despite his prodigious skill in exhibiting
falsehood in all its forms and making us realize thereby what prompts the
untruthful to their falsehoods (and how differently he proceeds from
Corneille!), as soon as he begins to account for it all, as soon as he theorizes
on the strength of his examples, he becomes stale and unprofitable.
This Journal is proof that Dostoevsky’s genius is essentially as a
novelist, for although in theoretical or critical articles he never rises above
mediocrity, he becomes excellent as soon as a character appears on the
scene. It is in this Journal that we come across these admirable tales of The
Peasant Marey⁠[63] and Krotchkaya,⁠[64] the latter outstandingly fine and
powerful, in its way a novel that is really but one long monologue, like the
Notes from Underground, written about the same period.
Better still, or rather, more significant, are the two instances in this
Journal when Dostoevsky allows us to watch the almost involuntary, almost
subconscious activity of his mind engaged in the construction of a narrative.
After he tells us his delight in watching people walking in the streets
and occasionally in following them, we see him suddenly attach himself to
a chance passer-by:

“I notice a workman passing; he has no wife leaning on his arm, but he
has a child with him, a little boy. Both are sad and lonely looking. The man
is about thirty years of age: his face is worn and of an unhealthy tinge. He is
wearing his Sunday best, a top-coat, rubbed at the seams and with buttons
worn almost bare of cloth. The collar of the coat is very soiled, the trousers
are cleaner, but look as if they had come straight from the broker’s. His top-
hat is very shabby. I have the idea he is a printer. His expression is hard,
gloomy, almost sullen. He holds the boy by the hand; the youngster lags
behind a little. The child is two, or not much more, very pale and delicate
looking, neatly dressed in a tunic, little boots with red uppers, and a hat
tricked out with a peacock’s feather. He is weary. The father speaks to him,
making fun maybe of his feeble little legs. The youngster makes no reply,
and a few paces farther on, his father bends down, lifts him up in his arms
and carries him. The child seems pleased, and throws his arms round his
father’s neck. He catches sight of me, and from his perch stares down at me
in astonishment and curiosity. I give him a little nod, but he frowns and
clings closer still to his father’s neck. They must love each other dearly,
these two!
“In the streets I love to watch the passers-by, gaze into their unknown
features, guess their identity, imagine how they exist and what can be their
interest in life. To-day I have eyes for none but this father and child. I
imagine that the wife and mother had died not long since, that the father is
busy working the whole week in the shop, while the child is left to the care
of some elderly woman. They probably live in a basement where the father
rents or even only shares a room, and to-day, being Sunday, the father is
taking the boy to see some relative, the mother’s sister probably. I’m sure
this aunt of whom they don’t see much must be married to a non-
commissioned officer and live in the basement of the barracks, but in a
separate apartment. She mourns her dead sister, but not for long. The
widower does not show much grief either, during this visit anyway. He
remains preoccupied, has little to say for himself, and replies only to
personal questions. Soon he falls silent altogether. Then the samovar is
brought in and they all take tea. The boy is left sitting on a bench in the
corner, shy and frowning, and he finally drops off to sleep. The aunt and her
husband take scant notice of him, except for passing him a cup of milk and
a piece of bread. The husband, with not a word to say for himself at first,
comes out suddenly with a coarse joke, savouring of the barrack-room, and

makes fun of the youngster whom his father begins to scold. The child
wants to leave at once, and the father fetches him home from Vyborg to
Liteinyi.
“To-morrow the father will be back at his workshop, and the youngster
left once more with the old woman.”⁠[65]
In another passage of the same book,⁠[66] we read an account of his
meeting with a woman a hundred years old. As he passed along the street,
he noticed her sitting on a bench. He spoke to her, then went on his way.
But in the evening, after the day’s work was done, the old woman came
back to his mind. He imagined her home-coming and what her family said
to her. He describes her death: “I take a delight in inventing the end of the
story. Of course I am a novelist and love a tale.”
Besides, Dostoevsky never invents by chance. In one of the articles in
this same Journal, à propos of the Kornilov trial, he reconstitutes and
rebuilds the story in his own way, and after the process of the law has
thrown light on every aspect of the crime, he writes: “I divined almost
everything,” and adds: “Chance enabled me to go and see Madame
Kornilova. I was astonished to see that my suppositions were almost
identical with the true facts. I had, I admit, made a few errors of detail: for
instance, Kornilov, though from the country, wore the townsman’s dress,
etc.,” and Dostoevsky concludes: “All in all, my errors have been slight; the
basis of my suppositions remains accurate.”⁠[67]
With such gifts as an observer, such powers as a narrator and
reconstructor of actual events, and an added degree of sensitiveness, you
can make a Gogol or a Dickens. Perhaps you remember the beginning of
the Old Curiosity Shop where Dickens, too, is busy following up the
passers-by, and after he has left them, goes on to imagine their lives? But
such gifts, remarkable as they are, do not wholly account for a Balzac, a
Thomas Hardy, a Dostoevsky. They would certainly not suffice to make
Nietzsche write: “Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had
anything to learn; he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier
even than the discovery of Stendhal.”⁠[68]
Long ago I copied from Nietzsche a page I should like to read to you.
When he wrote it, had Nietzsche not in view what constitutes the essential
value of the great Russian novelist, what opposes him diametrically to
many of our modern novelists, to the Goncourts, for example, whom
Nietzsche seems to indicate in these lines? “A Moral for Psychologists.—

Do not go in for any notebook psychology! Never observe for the sake of
observing! Such things lead to a false point of view, to a squint, to
something forced and exaggerated! To experience things on purpose—this
is not a bit of good. In the midst of an experience a man should not turn his
eyes upon himself; in such cases any eye becomes the ‘evil eye.’ A born
psychologist instinctively avoids seeing for the sake of seeing. And the
same holds good of the born painter. Such a man never works ‘from
Nature’—he leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura to sift and to
define the ‘fact,’ ‘nature,’ the ‘experience.’ The general idea, the conclusion,
the result is the only thing that reaches his consciousness. He knows
nothing of that wilful process of deducing from particular cases. What is the
result when a man sets about the matter differently?—When, for instance,
after the manner of Parisian novelists, he goes in for notebook psychology
on a large and small scale? Such a man is constantly spying on reality, and
every evening he bears home a handful of fresh curios.... But look at the
result!”⁠[69]
Dostoevsky never observes for observation’s sake. His work is not the
result of observations of the real; or at least, not of that alone. Nor is it the
fruit of a preconceived idea, and that is why it is never mere theorizing, but
remains steeped in reality. It is the fruit of intercourse between fact and
idea, a blending, in the proper English sense of the word, of the one with
the other, so perfect that it can never be said that one element outweighs the
other. Hence the most realistic scenes in his novels are the most pregnant
with psychological and moral import. To be precise, each work of
Dostoevsky’s is produced by the crossing of fact and idea. “The germ of the
novel has been in me for the last three years,” he wrote in 1870,⁠[70] referring
to The Brothers Karamazov, not written until nine years later. In another
letter he says: “The chief problem dealt with throughout this particular work
is the very one which has, my whole life long, tormented my conscious or
subconscious being: the question of the existence of God.”⁠[71]
But the idea is present only cloudily in his mind until it comes into
contact with some fact from real life (in this instance, a criminal court case,
a cause célèbre) which will make it fructify. Then—and not till then—can
we speak of the work as conceived. “I am writing with a purpose,” he says
in the same letter, speaking of The Possessed which reached fruition about
the same period as The Karamazovs, another novel with a purpose. Nothing
less gratuitous, in the modern acceptation of the term, than Dostoevsky’s

work. Each of his novels is in its way a demonstration, I might even say a
speech for the defence, or better still, a sermon. And if I dared find in this
wonderful artist any grounds for reproach, I might suggest that he sought to
prove only too well.
Let there be no disagreement on this score: Dostoevsky never tries to
influence our opinion unduly. He seeks to bring light into dark places, to
make plain certain hidden truths, which to him appear already dazzlingly
clear and of paramount importance, the most important, no doubt, to which
the mind of man can attain: not truths of an abstract nature, beyond human
grasp, but truths secret and intimately personal. On the other hand, what
saves his work from the disfigurements inseparable from all writing with a
purpose, is the fact that these truths are ever subordinated to fact, and his
ideas infused with reality. Towards these realities of human experience, his
attitude is ever humble and obedient; he never applies pressure nor turns a
happening to his own advantage. It would seem that even to his very
thought he applied the Gospel precept: “For whosoever will save his life
shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for My sake, the same shall
save it.”
Before attempting to trace some of Dostoevsky’s ideas in his books, I
should like to speak of his method of working. Strakhov tells us that
Dostoevsky worked almost exclusively at night: “About midnight, when
everything was becoming still, there was Dostoevsky left alone with his
samovar, and he used to go on working till five or six in the morning,
sipping at intervals cold, mild-drawn tea. He rose about two or three in the
afternoon, spent the rest of the day entertaining guests, walking, or visiting
friends.” Dostoevsky was not always able to content himself with mild-
drawn tea; during the last years of his life, he lost grip of himself, and
drank, we are told, a great quantity of spirits. One day, so the story runs,
Dostoevsky came out of his study, where he was busy writing The
Possessed, in a state of remarkable mental exhilaration, obtained in some
degree by artificial stimulus. It was Madame Dostoevsky’s “at home” day.
Dostoevsky, wild-eyed, burst into the drawing-room where several ladies
were sitting, one of whom, cordiality itself, hastened forward to him with a
cup of tea. “Devil take you and your dish-water,” he shouted.
You remember Abbé de Saint-Réal’s words?—and meaningless they
might well appear did not Stendhal make use of them as a cover for his own
æsthetic principles: “A novel is the mirror of one’s walks abroad.” In France

and in England the novels that can be classed under this rubric are
numerous indeed. What of Lesage, Voltaire, Fielding, Smollett? But nothing
could be more remote from this category than a novel of Dostoevsky’s.
Between his novels and those of the authors quoted above, aye, and
Tolstoy’s too, and Stendhal’s, there is all the difference possible between a
picture and a panorama. Dostoevsky composes a picture in which the most
important consideration is the question of light. The light proceeds from but
one source. In one of Stendhal’s novels, the light is constant, steady, and
well-diffused. Every object is lit up in the same way, and is visible equally
well from all angles; there are no shadow effects. But in Dostoevsky’s
books, as in a Rembrandt portrait, the shadows are the essential.
Dostoevsky groups his characters and happenings, plays a brilliant light
upon them, illuminating one aspect only. Each of his characters has a deep
setting of shadow, reposes on its own shadow almost. We notice in
Dostoevsky a strange impulse to group, concentrate, centralize: to create
between the varied elements of a novel as many cross-connections as
possible. With him, events instead of pursuing their calm and measured
course, as with Stendhal or Tolstoy, mingle and confuse in turmoil; the
elements of the story—moral, psychological, and material—sink and rise
again in a kind of whirlpool. With him there is no attempt to straighten or
simplify lines; he is at his happiest in the complex; he fosters it. Feelings,
thoughts, and passions are never presented in the pure state. He never
isolates them. And now I come to make an observation on Dostoevsky’s
manner of drawing his characters. But first of all let me read these very
pertinent remarks of Jacques Rivière’s: “Once the idea of a character has
taken shape in his mind, a novelist has to choose between two ways of
materializing it. He can either insist on its complexity, or emphasize its
cohesiveness; in this soul he is about to create, he can deliberately
reproduce its absolute darkness, or for the reader he can dispel such
darkness by his very description of it; he will either respect the soul’s
hidden depths, or lay them open.”
You see what Rivière’s theory is: the French school explores the
unplumbed depths, whereas certain foreign novelists, Dostoevsky in
particular, respect and cherish their gloom.
“In any case,” Rivière continues, “it is these black gulfs that interest
Dostoevsky most, and his whole effort is directed towards suggesting how
utterly unreachable they are.... We, on the other hand, faced with a soul’s

complexity and endeavouring to give a picture of it, instinctively seek to
organize our material.” Serious enough! But there is more to come. “At
need, we force things a trifle; we suppress a few small divergencies, and
interpret certain obscure details in the sense most useful towards
establishing a psychological unity. The ideal we strive towards is the
complete closing up of every gulf.”⁠[72]
I am not so sure that we do not find some gulfs in Balzac, inexplicably
abrupt; nor am I sure either that Dostoevsky’s are as unfathomed as at first
would be imagined. Shall I give you an example of Balzac’s gulfs? I see
one in La Recherche de l’Absolu. Balthazar Claès is seeking the
philosopher’s stone: apparently he has completely forgotten the religious
training of his childhood. He is absorbed by his quest. He neglects his wife,
Josephine, whose religious mind is horror-stricken at her husband’s
disbelief. One day she enters the laboratory without warning. The draught
of the opening door causes an explosion, and Madame Claès falls
fainting.... What is the cry that escapes Balthazar’s lips? One wherein
suddenly reappears his childhood’s belief, long overlaid by the dross of his
atheism. “Thank God you’re still alive! The Saints have preserved you from
death!” Balzac does not press the incident any further, and no doubt
nineteen out of every twenty readers will never even detect the fault. The
abyss of which it gives a glimpse is left unexplained: maybe no explanation
is possible. As a matter of fact, that was of no interest to Balzac. His one
concern was to produce characters free of all inconsequences, wherein he
was in perfect accord with French feeling; for what we French require most
of all is logic.
I can say with respect not only to the Comédie Humaine, but also to the
comedy of everyday life as we live it, that the dramatis personæ (for we
French delineate ourselves as we see ourselves) are after a Balzacian ideal.
The inconsequences of our nature, should such exist, seem to us awkward
and ridiculous. We deny them. We try to ignore them, to palliate them. Each
of us is conscious of our unity, our continuity even, and everything we
repress and thrust beneath our consciousness, like the feeling that suddenly
reasserts itself in Claès, we try to suppress completely, and failing this, we
cease to hold it of any account. We consistently behave as the character we
are—or fancy we are—ought to behave. The majority of our actions are
dictated, not by the pleasure we take in doing them, but by the need of

imitating ourselves and projecting our past into the future. We sacrifice
truth (that is to say, sincerity) to purity and continuity of line.
And in face of all this, what does Dostoevsky offer? Characters that,
without any thought for consistency, yield with facility to every
contradiction and negation of which their peculiar constitution is capable.
This seems to be Dostoevsky’s chief interest—inconsequence. Far from
concealing it, he emphasizes and illuminates it without ceasing.
There is admittedly much that he fails to explain. I do not think there is
much that could not be explained were we prepared to concede, as
Dostoevsky invites us to do, that man is the dwelling place of conflicting
feelings. Such cohabitation is often in Dostoevsky the more paradoxal that
his characters’ feelings are forced to their extremest intensity and
exaggerated to the point of absurdity.
I believe it right to press this point, for you may be thinking that this is
an old story, just the conflict between passion and duty as we see it in
Corneille. The problem is really different. The French hero, as Corneille
depicts him, throws before himself the image of an ideal: there is not a little
of himself in it, himself as he desires and strives to be, not as Nature made
him, or as he would be if he yielded to his instincts. The inward struggle
Corneille pictures is the fight between the ideal being to which the hero
tries to conform, and the natural being, which he seeks to deny. In short, we
are not so far removed in this instance from what Jules de Gaultier terms
bovarysm—a name given, after Flaubert’s heroine, to the tendency of
certain human beings towards complementing their real life by a purely
imaginary existence, in which they cease to be what they are and become
what they would like to be.
Every hero, every man who is not content merely to drift, but struggles
towards some ideal and tries to achieve it, offers us an example of this
bovarysm.
What we find in Dostoevsky’s works, the examples of dual existence
submitted to us, how far different! They have no connection, or at least but
little, with the frequently observed pathological states, where a second
personality is grafted upon the original, the one alternating with the other
and two groups of sensations and associations of ideas being formed, the
one unknown to the other, so that ere long we have two distinct
personalities sharing the one fleshly tenement. They change places, the one
succeeding the other in turn, all the time ignorant of its neighbour. Think

how admirably Stevenson illustrates this condition in his phantastic tale of
the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
But in Dostoevsky the most disconcerting feature is the simultaneity of
such phenomena, and the fact that each character never relinquishes
consciousness of his dual personality with its inconsistencies.
It so happens that one of his heroes, in great stress of feeling, is
uncertain whether it is love or hate that moves him, for these opposing
emotions are mingled and confounded within him.
“And suddenly a strange surprising sensation of a sort of bitter hatred
for Sonia passed through his (Raskolnikov’s) heart. As it were wondering
and frightened of this sensation, he raised his head and looked intently at
her; but he met her uneasy and painfully anxious eyes fixed on him: there
was love in them; his hatred vanished like a phantom. It was not the real
feeling—he has taken the one feeling for the other.”⁠[73]
Of this misinterpretation of feeling by the person concerned we should
find examples in Marivaux, and in Racine as well.
At times one of these feelings exhausts itself by its very exaggeration. It
seems as if the expression of the feeling disconcerts the character
expressing it. With this we are not yet come to duality of feeling; but here is
something more definite! Listen to Versilov, the Raw Youth’s father:
“If only I were a weak-willed nonentity and suffered from the
consciousness of it! But you see that’s not so. I know I am exceedingly
strong, and in what way do you suppose? Why, just in that spontaneous
power of accommodating myself to anything whatever, so characteristic of
all intelligent Russians of our generation. There’s no crushing me, no
destroying me, no surprising me. I’ve as many lives as a cat. I can with
perfect convenience experience two opposite feelings at one and the same
time, and not, of course, through my own will.”⁠[74]
“I do not undertake to account for this co-existence of conflicting
feelings,” deliberately says the narrator in The Possessed.
Versilov goes on to say: “I should like to say something nice to Sonia,
and I keep trying to find the right word, though my heart is full of words
which I don’t know how to utter; do you know I feel as if I were split in
two?”—He looked round at us all with a terribly serious face and with
perfectly genuine candour.—“Yes, I am really split in two mentally, and I’m
horridly afraid of it. It’s just as though one’s second self were standing
beside one; one is sensible and rational oneself, but the other self is

impelled to do something perfectly senseless, and sometimes very funny;
and suddenly you notice that you are longing to do that amusing thing,
goodness knows why; that is, you want to, as it were, against your will;
though you fight against it with all your might, you want to. I once knew a
doctor who suddenly began whistling in church, at his father’s funeral. I
really was afraid to come to the funeral to-day, because, for some reason, I
was possessed by a firm conviction that I should begin to laugh or whistle
in church, like that unfortunate doctor, who came to rather a bad end....”⁠[75]
Listen now to Stavrogin, the strange hero of The Possessed: “I am still
capable, as I always was, of desiring to do something good, and of feeling
pleasure from it; at the same time I desire evil and feel pleasure from that
too.”⁠[76] As Baudelaire says, no man but is ever entreating God and the
Devil at one and the same time.⁠[77]
With the help of some passages from William Blake, I shall try to throw
some light on these apparent contradictions, and especially on Stavrogin’s
strange declaration. But this attempt at explanation I shall hold over till
later.

IV

AT our last meeting we noticed the disquieting duality by which most of
Dostoevsky’s characters are racked and driven, and which prompts
Raskolnikov’s friend to say à propos of the hero of Crime and Punishment:
“It really looks as if there were in him two opposite natures showing
themselves in turn.”
And were these natures never visible but in turn, all would still be well,
but we have seen how they often come to manifest themselves
simultaneously. We have watched each of these contradictory impulses
exhausted, depreciated, and inhibited by its own expression and
manifestation, giving way to its opposite, and the hero is never nearer love
than when he has just given exaggerated expression to his hatred, never
nearer hatred than in the exaggeration of his love.
In all Dostoevsky’s creations, in his women characters especially, we
detect an uneasy presentiment of their own instability. The dread of being
unable to maintain for long the same mood or resolve drives them often to
disconcertingly abrupt action. For instance, Lizaveta in The Possessed
makes up her mind with great alacrity, because she knows from long
experience that her resolutions never last more than a minute.
To-day I propose to study some of the results of this strange duality; but
first of all let me ask whether this duality really exists, or whether
Dostoevsky only imagines it? Does life provide him with any examples? Is
it observed from Nature, or does he merely obligingly yield to his
imaginative bent?
Nature, according to Oscar Wilde’s Intentions, copies the model set her
by Art, and this apparent paradox he delights in illustrating by several
specious insinuations, the gist of his argument being that Nature—“as you
will not have failed to observe”—has taken to imitating Corot’s landscapes
nowadays!
His meaning is undoubtedly that, accustomed to looking at Nature in a
manner that is become conventional, we recognize only what Art has
educated us to discern. When a painter essays to transmute and express in
his work a personal vision, Nature’s new aspect seems at first brush
paradoxal, insincere, freakish even. However, we speedily grow used to

contemplating her with the bias given by this new method, and recognize
only what the artist pointed out to us. Hence, to eyes unprejudiced, Nature
would really seem to imitate Art.
What I have said about painting applies equally to novels and the
intimate landscapes of psychology. We exist on given premises, and readily
acquire the habit of seeing the world, not so much as it actually is, but as we
have been told and persuaded it is. How many diseases were non-existent,
so to speak, until diagnosed and described! How many strange,
pathological, abnormal states we identify round us, aye, within us, once our
eyes have been opened by reading Dostoevsky! Yes, I firmly believe he
opens our eyes to certain phenomena;—I do not necessarily mean rare ones,
but simply phenomena to which we had been so far blind.
Faced with the complexity almost every human being offers, the eye
tends inevitably, spontaneously, unconsciously almost, to simplify to some
extent.
Such is the French novelist’s instinctive effort. He singles out the chief
elements in a character, tries to discern clear-cut lines in a figure and
reproduce the contours unbroken. Whether Balzac or another, no matter: the
desire, the need, even, for stylisation is all-important. None the less I
believe it would be a gross mistake—one to which I fear many a foreigner
is prone—to scorn and discredit the psychology of French literature on
account of the sharp outlines it presents, the complete absence of
indistinctness, and the lack of shading.
Remember that Nietzsche with rare perspicacity recognized and
proclaimed the extraordinary superiority of our French psychologists,
judging them—and to an even greater degree perhaps our moralists—
Europe’s most eminent masters. True that in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries we had authors of unrivalled analytical powers: I have our
moralists chiefly in mind. But I am not wholly satisfied that our present-day
novelists are able to compete with them, for here in France we have an
unfortunate habit of keeping to formulæ which soon become mechanical,
and of resting content with them instead of pressing onwards.
I have already remarked elsewhere that La Rochefoucauld, while
rendering splendid service to psychology, had in a measure arrested its
development by reason of the very perfection of his Maxims. I must
apologize for quoting myself, but I should find some difficulty in improving
on these lines I wrote in 1910:

“When La Rochefoucauld bethought himself of reducing and ascribing
every generous impulse of the human heart to the solicitations of personal
vanity, I doubt whether it was not less a proof of rare insight than a check to
further and more pertinent investigation. The formula, once found, was
strictly adhered to, and for two hundred years people lived content with this
interpretation. The most sceptical of psychologists passed as the most
highly enlightened could he but detect in the noblest, most forgiving actions
the hidden promptings of selfishness—losing sight thereby of all that is
contradictory in the human soul. I do not make bold to criticize La
Rochefoucauld’s impeachment of personal vanity, but I most definitely take
exception to his limiting himself to this one consideration and believing that
with amour propre the final word had been spoken. I blame still more his
successors for carrying the question no further.”⁠[78]
Throughout French literature we find a horror of the formless, a certain
impatience with what is not yet formed. This is how I account for the very
small place taken by the child in French novels as compared with English or
Russian. Scarcely a child is to be met with in our novels, and such authors
as do introduce children—all too infrequently at that—are conventional,
dull, and awkward.
In Dostoevsky’s works children are numerous, and it is worth noting
that the majority of his characters—and of these the most important—are
still young, hardly set. It seems to be the genesis of feelings that interests
him chiefly, for he depicts them as indistinct, in their larval state, so to
speak.
He has a predilection for baffling cases that challenge accepted
psychology and ethics. It is plain that in the midst of everyday morality and
psychology he himself does not feel at his ease. His temperament clashes
painfully with certain rules accepted as established, which neither please
nor satisfy him.
We find a similar uneasiness and lack of satisfaction in Rousseau. We
know that Dostoevsky was an epileptic and that Rousseau went mad. I shall
dwell later on the function of the morbid state in shaping their thought. Let
us rest content to-day with recognizing in this abnormal physiological
condition an invitation, as it were, to rebel against the psychology and the
ethics of the common herd.
In man are many things unexplained, aye, unexplainable maybe, but
once we admit the duality I discussed a moment ago, we cannot but admire

the logic with which Dostoevsky pursues its consequences. In the first
place, note that nearly all Dostoevsky’s characters are polygamists; I mean
that by way of satisfying, doubtless, the complexity of their natures, they
are almost all capable of several attachments simultaneously. Another
consequence, and, if I may use the term, corollary to this argument, is the
practical impossibility of producing jealousy. These creatures simply do not
know what jealousy means!
Consider, first of all, the cases of multiple attachments he puts before
us. Prince Myshkin is divided between Aglaïa Epantchin and Nastasya
Filippovna. “I love her with my whole heart,” he says, referring to
Nastasya.
“And at the same time you have declared your love for Aglaïa
Ivanovna?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
“How so? Then you must want to love both of them?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
“Upon my word, Prince, think what you are saying.... Do you know
what, the most likely thing is that you have never loved either of them! And
how can you love two at once? That’s interesting!”⁠[79]
And each of the two heroines is likewise torn between two loves. Think
too of Dmitri Karamazov between Grushenka and Natasya Ivanovna, and
do not forget Versilov. Many another instance I could quote!
You may think one of their loves was of the flesh, the other of the spirit.
Much too obvious a solution, I consider. Besides, on this score, Dostoevsky
is never perfectly straightforward. He leads us on to numerous suppositions,
then leaves us in the lurch. It was not until I was reading The Idiot for the
fourth time that I became conscious of a fact now plain as daylight: all the
whims and moods in Madame Epantchin’s attitude towards Prince
Myshkin, all the hesitancy of Aglaïa, her daughter and the Prince’s
betrothed, might well be due to the intuition these two women had (the
mother in particular, of course) of some mystery in his character, and to
their uncertainty whether he could prove an effectual husband. Dostoevsky
lays stress several times on Prince Myshkin’s chastity, and doubtless this
very chastity filled Madame Epantchin, his future mother-in-law, with
uneasiness.
“There is no doubt that the mere fact he could come and see Aglaïa
without hindrance, that he was allowed to talk to her, sit with her, walk with

her, was the utmost bliss to him; and who knows, perhaps he would have
been satisfied with that for the rest of his life. It was just this contentment
that Lizaveta Prokofyevna (Madame Epantchin) secretly dreaded. She
understood him; she dreaded many a thing in secret, which she could not
have put into words herself.”⁠[80]
And note what to me seems most important: in this instance, as indeed
frequently, the less physical love is the stronger.
I have no wish to force Dostoevsky’s idea. I do not suggest that divided
love and absence of jealousy open up the way to complaisant community of
possession, at least not always, no, nor necessarily: they lead rather to
renunciation. But, as I reminded you, Dostoevsky is not over frank on this
subject....
The question of jealousy preoccupied Dostoevsky unceasingly. In one
of his first books, Another Man’s Wife, we find this paradox: Othello must
not be looked upon as a typical example of real jealousy. Perhaps it
behoved us to see in this contention nothing more than an urgent desire to
go against current opinion.
But later on Dostoevsky comes back to the point, and speaks again of
Othello in A Raw Youth, one of this last books. “Versilov said once that
Othello did not kill Desdemona and afterwards himself because he was
jealous, but because he had been robbed of his ideal.”⁠[81]
Is this really a paradox? I recently came across a similar assertion in
Coleridge—the similarity is so marked that I wonder if Dostoevsky had not
perchance been familiar with it.
“Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced
upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago.... Othello had no life but in
Desdemona: the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the heaven of her
native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart.... But yet the pity of it,
Iago. Oh, Iago, the pity of it!”
Constitutionally incapable of jealousy, then, Dostoevsky’s heroes?
Perhaps I am going a little too far, or, at least, it would be seemly to modify
my statement slightly. It may be said that of jealousy these creatures know
only the suffering it brings, a suffering which is not complicated by any
feeling of hatred for their rivals: this point is of primary importance. If
hatred there be, as in the Eternal Husband, which case we shall examine
presently, the hatred is counterbalanced and restrained by a strange,
imperious affection for the rival. But most frequently there is no suspicion

of hatred, nor even suffering. And now we are venturing on a precipitous
path where we have every chance of overtaking Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
equably tolerating the favours shown by Madame de Warens to his rival,
Claude Anet, or, his thoughts full of Madame d’Houdetot, writing in his
Confessions:
“Anyway, no matter how ardent the passion I had conceived for her, I
found it as sweet to be the confidant as to be the object of her affections,
and never for a moment did I consider her lover as my rival, I always held
him my friend. (He refers to Saint-Lambert.) People will say this is not
love: maybe not, perhaps it is more than love.”
Similarly, in The Possessed, we are told that Stavrogin, far from feeling
jealous, developed a great friendship for his rival.
At this point I propose a short detour to help us probe the question more
deeply and grasp Dostoevsky’s conception. When I recently re-read most of
his novels, I was fascinated by Dostoevsky’s manner of passing from one
book to another. Undoubtedly it was natural that after The House of the
Dead he should write Raskolnikov’s story in Crime and Punishment, the
story of the crime that sent the latter to Siberia. More absorbing still to
watch how the last pages of this novel lead up to The Idiot. You remember
we left Raskolnikov in Siberia so completely regenerated in mind that he
said the happenings of his past life had lost all importance for him: his
crimes, his repentance, his martyrdom, even, seemed to him like the life-
history of a stranger.
“He was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of feeling.”⁠[82]
This is the frame of mind in which we find Prince Myshkin at the beginning
of The Idiot, a frame of mind which could be, and in Dostoevsky’s eyes
doubtless was, the Christian state par excellence. I shall revert to this point.
Dostoevsky seems to establish in the human soul—or simply recognizes
as already existing—a kind of stratification. I can distinguish in the
characters of his novels three strata or regions. First the intellectual, remote
from the soul and whence proceed the worst temptations. Therein dwells,
according to Dostoevsky, the treacherous demonic element. For the moment
I am concerned only with the second region, the region of passion, ravaged
and desolated by storms; but tragic though the happenings be that these
storms determine, the very soul of Dostoevsky’s characters is scarcely
affected. There is a region deeper still, where passion exists not. This is the
region that resurrection (and I grant the word the full significance bestowed

on it by Tolstoy), re-birth, in Christ’s words, enables us to reach as
Raskolnikov reached it. In this region Myshkin lives and moves.
The transition from The Idiot to the Eternal Husband is more interesting
still. You surely remember that at the close of The Idiot we leave Prince
Myshkin at the bedside of Nastasya Filippovna whom her lover Rogozhin,
the prince’s rival, has just murdered. There stand the rivals, face to face,
close to each other. Will they kill each other? No, indeed! They weep
together, and spend a wakeful night stretched out side by side at the foot of
Nastasya’s bed.
“Every time the delirious man (Rogozhin) broke into screaming or
babble, he hastened to pass his trembling hand softly over his hair and
cheeks, as though caressing and soothing him.”⁠[83]
Almost the theme of The Eternal Husband! The Idiot dates from 1868,
The Eternal Husband from 1870. Some men of letters—and as clever a
critic as Marcel Schwob was amongst them—consider the latter novel
Dostoevsky’s masterpiece. His masterpiece! Perhaps that is excessive. But,
at any rate, it is a masterpiece, and it is interesting to hear what Dostoevsky
himself had to say about the book.
“I have a story,” he wrote to his friend Strakhov on March 18, 1869,
“not a very long one. I had already thought of writing it three or four years
ago, the year my brother died, encouraged by some words of Apollon
Gregoriev who, praising my Notes from Underground, said to me, ‘Just
write something in this style.’ But it will be something quite different, as far
as form goes: the foundation, however, will still be the same. My
everlasting theme.... I can write the story very quickly, because there is not
a word or line of it but what is clear to me. It is already written in my head,
although nothing is down on paper so far.”⁠[84]
And in a letter dated October 27, 1869, he continues:
“Two-thirds of the story are almost completely written and recopied.
I’ve done my best to cut it down, but that was impossible. It is not a
question, though, of quantity, but of quality. Of its quality I cannot speak,
for I have no notion myself: others will decide that point.”⁠[85]
And here is what the others have to say:
“Your short story,” writes Strakhov, “is making a very lively impression
here, and will, in my opinion, have an unchallenged success. It is one of the
best worked-out of your novels, and by reason of its subject, one of the
most interesting you have ever written. I am speaking of Trusotsky: the

majority will have difficulty in understanding this character, but the book is
being read and will be read eagerly.”
Notes from Underground appeared a short time before this volume. I
believe that with these Notes we reach the height of Dostoevsky’s career. I
consider this book (and I am not alone in my belief) as the keystone of his
entire works. But with it we return to the intellectual region, so I shall not
speak further of it to-day. Let us linger with The Eternal Husband in the
realm of passion. In this short tale there are but two characters, the husband
and the lover. Concentration could be carried no further. The whole book
responds to an ideal we should nowadays call classical: the action itself, or
at least the initial fact that provokes the drama, had already taken place, like
in one of Ibsen’s plays.
Velchaninov is come to that time of life when the past begins to look
different to his eyes:
“Now that he was verging on the forties, the brightness and good
humour were almost extinguished. These eyes, which were already
surrounded by tiny wrinkles, had begun to betray the cynicism of a worn-
out man of doubtful morals, a duplicity, an ever-increasing irony, and
another shade of feeling, which was new: a shade of sadness and of pain—a
sort of absent-minded sadness as though about nothing in particular, and yet
acute. This sadness was specially marked when he was alone.”⁠[86]
What is happening with Velchaninov? What does happen at this age, at
this turning point in life? So far, we have had the joy out of life; but
suddenly we realize that our actions, the happenings we have brought about,
once separated from us and launched out into the world, like a skiff on the
sea, continue a separate existence often unknown to us. George Eliot speaks
admirably of this in Adam Bede. Yes, the events in his own past no longer
appear to Velchaninov in quite the same light, because he suddenly realizes
his responsibility. At this period he meets one whom he knew in bygone
days, the husband of a woman who had been his mistress. This husband
appears in rather whimsical fashion. It is impossible to decide whether he is
avoiding Velchaninov or pursuing him. He seems to spring up without
warning from between the very paving stones in the street. He wanders
around mysteriously, haunting the vicinity of Velchaninov’s house,
unrecognized at first.
I shall not attempt to recount the gist of the book, nor how after a late
night visit from Pavel Pavlovitch Trusotsky, the husband, Velchaninov

decides to call upon him. Their standpoints, obscure at first, become clearer:
“‘Tell me, Pavel Pavlovitch, you are not alone here, then? Whose little
girl is that I found with you just now?’
“Pavel Pavlovitch was positively amazed and raised his eyebrows, but
he looked frankly and pleasantly at Velchaninov.
“‘Whose little girl? Why, it’s Liza!’ he said, with an affable smile.
“‘What Liza?’ muttered Velchaninov, with a sort of inward tremor. The
shock was too sudden. When he came in and saw Liza, just before, he was
surprised, but had absolutely no presentiment of the truth, and thought
nothing particular about her.
“‘Yes, our Liza, our daughter Liza!’ Pavel Pavlovitch smiled.
“‘Your daughter? Do you mean that you and Natalya Vassilyevna had
children?’ Velchaninov asked timidly and mistrustfully in a very low voice.
“‘Why, of course! But there, upon my word, how should you have heard
of it? What am I thinking about! It was after you went away God blessed us
with her!’
“Pavel Pavlovitch positively jumped up from his chair, in some
agitation, though it seemed agreeable too.
“‘I heard nothing about it,’ said Velchaninov, and he turned pale.
“‘To be sure, to be sure, from whom could you have heard it?’ said
Pavel Pavlovitch, in a voice weak with emotion, ‘My poor wife and I had
lost all hope, as no doubt you remember, and suddenly God sent us this
blessing, and what it meant to me He only knows! Just a year after you
went away, I believe. No, not a year, not nearly a year. Wait a bit—why, you
left us, if my memory does not deceive me, in October or November, I
believe.’
“‘I left T—— at the beginning of September, the twelfth of September, I
remember it very well.’
“‘In September, was it? H’m! what was I thinking about?’ cried Pavel
Pavlovitch, much surprised. ‘Well, if that’s so, let me see, you went away
on the twelfth of September, and Liza was born on the eighth of May, so—
September—October—November—December—January—February—
March—April—a little over eight months! And if you only knew how my
poor wife ...’
“‘Show me—call her,’ Velchaninov faltered in a breaking voice.”⁠[87]
And thus Velchaninov learns that his passing whim, by which he had set
so little store, has left its mark. At once the question presents itself—does

the husband know? Almost to the very end of the book the reader is left in
doubt. Dostoevsky keeps us undecided, and this very indecision tortures
Velchaninov. He does not know where he is. Or rather, it seems to us early
in the day that Pavel Pavlovitch knows, but feigns ignorance, precisely in
order to torture the lover by the indecision he skilfully maintains in his
mind.
Here is one way of considering this strange book. The Eternal Husband
depicts the struggle between genuine and sincere feeling on one hand, and
conventional feeling, accepted and current psychology on the other.
“There is but one way out—a duel,” cries Velchaninov. But you realize
what a base issue that is, bringing satisfaction to no existing feeling, and
simply pandering to an artificial conception of honour, one I touched on
lately, a Western conception, for which we have no use here. We soon
realize that, in his heart of hearts, Pavel Pavlovitch hugs his very jealousy.
Yes, he positively loves and welcomes his suffering. This eagerness to
suffer played already an important part in Notes from Underground.
In France, where the Russians are concerned, there has been much talk,
in imitation of De Vogüé, of a religion of suffering. We French love to hear
a formula, and to use one! It is one easy way of naturalizing an author and
assigning him to his place in the show-case. Our mind likes precise data to
hold fast by; and once satisfied, what need for thought or personal contact?
—Nietzsche? Oh, yes! “The superman. Be ruthless. Live dangerously.”—
Tolstoy? “Non-resistance to evil.”—Ibsen? “Northern mists.”—Darwin?
“Man is descended from the monkey. The struggle for life.”—D’Annunzio?
“The religion of beauty.” Woe betide the authors whose ideas refuse to be
reduced to a formula! The bulk of the reading public simply cannot tolerate
them (and Barrès realized this when to his merchandise he affixed the label:
La Terre et Les Morts).
Yes, in France we tend to deceive ourselves with words, and believe that
everything possible has been achieved and that it is time to apply the
closure and pass on, once the formula has been found. In the same way we
believed victory already in our grasp, thanks to Joffre and his “wearing
down the enemy,” or to Russia and her “steam-roller advance.”
A religion of suffering ... let us eliminate at once the possibility of
misinterpretation. It is not a question, or rather not solely a question, of
vicarious suffering, the world-wide suffering before which Raskolnikov
humbles himself to lie at Sonia the prostitute’s feet, or Father Zossima at

Dmitri Karamazov the predestined parricide’s, but a theory of personal
suffering.
Throughout the whole book, Velchaninov keeps asking himself whether
Trusotsky is jealous or not, whether he knows all or nothing. The question
is absurd: of course Trusotsky knows! Of course he is jealous, but with the
jealousy he fosters and cherishes within himself. It is the torment of
jealousy that Trusotsky desires and enjoys, just as we saw the attachment of
the hero of the Underground to his toothache.
Of the hideous torment of the jealous husband we learn practically
nothing. Dostoevsky reveals it only indirectly, by virtue of the cruel
suffering Trusotsky inflicts on the creatures round about him, especially on
the little girl whom he adores in spite of all. The child’s anguish helps us to
measure the intensity of the father’s own suffering. Pavel Pavelovitch
tortures the child, whom he loves passionately; he can no more hate her
than he can hate his wife’s lover:
“‘Do you know what Liza has been to me?’—he suddenly recalled the
drunkard’s exclamation and felt that that exclamation was sincere, not a
pose, and that there was love in it. How could that monster be so cruel to a
child whom he loved so much? Is it credible? But every time he made haste
to dismiss that question, and, as it were, brush it aside; there was something
awful in that question, something he could not bear and could not solve.”⁠[88]
We may rest assured that the keenest of his suffering is due to his
inability to become jealous: of jealousy he has only the suffering, and he
cannot hate the man who was preferred to himself. The very sufferings he
inflicts on his rival, those he would fain inflict upon him, the torments he
inflicts on his little daughter, are a kind of mystic counterpart that he sets to
the horror and the anguish in whose depths he is struggling. None the less,
he dreams of revenge: not that he has any precise desire to avenge himself,
but he tells himself that he must seek revenge, as perhaps the sole means of
freeing himself from such awful torments.
“Habit is everything, even in love,” says Vauvenargues,⁠[89] and you
remember La Rochefoucauld’s maxim? “How many men would never have
known love if they had never heard of love?” Are we not justified in asking:
How many would never be jealous, if they did not hear jealousy spoken
about, and had not persuaded themselves that it was imperative to be
jealous?

Yes, convention is the great breeder of falsehood. How many are forced
to play their life long a part strangely foreign to themselves? And how
difficult it is to discern in ourselves a feeling not previously described,
labelled, and present before us as a model! Man finds it easier to imitate
everything than to invent anything. How many are content to live their lives
warped by untruth, and find, none the less, in the very falsity of convention
more comfort and less need for effort than in straightforward affirmation of
their personal feelings! Such affirmation would require of them an effort of
invention utterly beyond them.
“‘I’ll tell you a killing little anecdote, Alexey Ivanovitch,’ said
Trusotsky. ‘I thought of it this morning in the carriage. I wanted to tell you
of it then. You said just now “hangs on people’s necks.” You remember
perhaps Semyon Petrovitch Livstov, he used to come and see us when you
were in T——: well, his younger brother, who was also a young Petersburg
swell, was in attendance on the Governor at V——, and he too was
distinguished for various qualities. He had a quarrel with Gobulenko, a
colonel, and considered himself insulted, but he swallowed the affront and
concealed it, and meanwhile Gobulenko cut him out with the lady of his
heart and made her an offer. And what do you think? This Livtsov formed a
genuine friendship with Gobulenko, he quite made it up with him, and,
what’s more, insisted on being his best man: he held the wedding crown and
when they came out from under it, he went up to kiss and congratulate
Gobulenko. And in the presence of the Governor and all the honourable
company, with his swallow-tail coat, and his hair in curl, he sticks the
bridegroom in the stomach with a knife—so that he rolled over! His own
best man! What a disgrace! And, what’s more, when he’d stabbed him like
that, he rushed about crying: “Alas, what have I done! Oh, what is it that
I’ve done!” with floods of tears, trembling all over, flinging himself on
people’s necks, even ladies. “Ah, what have I done!” he kept saying, “what
have I done now!” He—he—he! he was killing. Though one feels sorry for
Gobulenko, perhaps, but after all, he recovered.’
“‘I don’t see why you told me this story,’ observed Velchaninov,
frowning sternly.
“‘Why, all because he stuck the knife in him, you know,’ Pavel
Pavlovitch tittered....”⁠[90]
And in similar fashion, Pavel Pavlovitch’s real spontaneous feeling
expresses itself, when he is unexpectedly obliged to nurse Velchaninov,

down with a liver complaint.
“The sick man fell asleep suddenly, a minute after lying down. The
unnatural strain upon him that day, in the shattered state of his health, had
brought on a sudden crisis, and he was as weak as a child. But the pain
asserted itself again and weariness; and an hour later he woke up and
painfully got up from the sofa. The storm had subsided, the room was full
of tobacco smoke, on the table stood an empty bottle, and Pavel Pavlovitch
was asleep on another sofa. He was lying on his back, with his head on the
sofa cushion, fully dressed and with his boots on. His lorgnette had slipped
out of his pocket, and was hanging down almost to the floor.”⁠[91]
Strange how Dostoevsky, when leading us through the strangest by-
paths of psychology, ever must needs add the most precise and infinitesimal
of realistic details, in order to make more secure an edifice which otherwise
would appear the extreme expression of phantasy and imagination.
Velchaninov is in great pain, and immediately Trusotsky applies every
possible means of alleviating it.
“But Pavel Pavlovitch, goodness knows why, seemed beside himself as
though it were a question of saving his own son. Without heeding
Velchaninov’s protests, he insisted on the necessity of compresses and also
of two or three cups of weak tea to be drunk on the spot, ‘and not simply
hot, but boiling.’ He ran to Mavra, without waiting for permission, with her
laid a fire in the kitchen, which always stood empty, and blew up the
samovar; at the same time he succeeded in getting the sick man to bed, took
off his clothes, wrapped him up in a quilt, and within twenty minutes had
prepared tea and compresses.
“‘This is a hot plate, scalding hot!’ he said, almost ecstatically, applying
the heated plate, wrapped up in a napkin, on Velchaninov’s aching chest.
‘There are no other compresses, and plates, I swear on my honour, will be
even better; they were laid on Pyotr Kuzmitch, I saw it with my own eyes,
and did it with my own hands. One may die of it, you know. Drink your tea,
swallow it; never mind about scalding yourself! Life is too precious for one
to be squeamish.’
“He quite flustered Mavra, who was half asleep; the plates were
changed every two or three minutes. After the third plate, and the second
cup of tea, swallowed at a gulp, Velchaninov felt a sudden relief.
“‘If once they’ve shifted the pain, thank God, it’s a good sign!’ said
Pavel Pavlovitch, and he ran joyfully to fetch a fresh plate and a fresh cup

of tea.
“‘If only we can ease the pain, if only we can keep it under!’ he kept
repeating.
“Half an hour later the pain was much less, but the sick man was so
exhausted that, in spite of Pavel Pavlovitch’s entreaties, he refused to put up
with ‘just one more nice little plate.’ He was so weak that everything was
dark before his eyes.
“‘Sleep, sleep!’ he repeated in a faint voice.
“‘To be sure,’ Pavel Pavlovitch assented.
“‘You’ll stay the night—what time is it?’
“‘It’s nearly two o’clock, it’s quarter to.’
“‘You’ll stay the night?’
“‘I will, I will.’
“A minute later the sick man called Pavel Pavlovitch again. ‘You, you,’
he muttered, when the latter had run up and was bending over him: ‘You are
much better than I am! I understand it all—all.... Thank you.’
“‘Sleep, sleep,’ whispered Pavel Pavlovitch, and he hastened on tiptoe
to his sofa.
“As he fell asleep, the invalid heard Pavel Pavlovitch noiselessly
making a bed for himself, and taking off his clothes. Finally, putting out the
candle, and almost holding his breath for fear of waking the patient, he
stretched himself on his sofa.”⁠[92]
And yet, a quarter of an hour later, Velchaninov catches Trusotsky, who
believes him sound asleep, bending over him with intent to murder him.
“Pavel Pavlovitch wanted to kill him, but didn’t know he wanted to kill
him! ‘It’s senseless, but that’s the truth,’ thought Velchaninov.”⁠[93]
And yet he is not satisfied!
“‘And can it be that it was all true?’ he exclaimed again, suddenly
raising his head from the pillow and opening his eyes. ‘All that madman
told me yesterday about his love for me, when his chin quivered and he
thumped himself on the breast with his fist?’
“‘It was the absolute truth,’ he decided, still pondering and analysing.
‘That quasimodo from T—— was quite sufficiently stupid and noble to fall
in love with the lover of his wife, about whom he noticed nothing
suspicious in twenty years! He had been thinking of me with respect,
cherishing my memory and brooding over my “utterances” for nine years.
Good Heavens! And I had no notion of it! He could not have been lying

yesterday. But did he love me yesterday when he declared his feeling and
said, “Let us settle our account!” Yes, it was from hatred that he loved me;
that’s the strongest of all loves....
“‘... Only he didn’t know then whether he would end by embracing me
or murdering me. Of course, it’s turned out that the best thing was to do
both. A most natural solution’.”⁠[94]
If I have lingered so long over this slender book, it is because it is more
accessible than the rest of Dostoevsky’s novels, and helps us to win, beyond
love and hate, to that wider region I spoke about not long since: a region
where love is not, nor passion, so easily and so simply reached: the region
Schopenhauer spoke of, the meeting-place of human brotherhood, where
the limits of existence fade away, where the notion of the individual and of
time is lost, the place wherein Dostoevsky sought—and found—the secret
of happiness.

V

AT our last meeting I spoke of the three strata or regions Dostoevsky seems
to discern in the human personality: first, the province of intellectual
speculation, then the domain of the passions, midway between the former
and the third region, a vast realm remote from the play of passion.
It is plain that these three strata are not isolated or even strictly limited,
but interpenetrate.
The intermediate region, the domain of passion, I have already
discussed. Here, and on this plane, the play is staged, not merely the play
Dostoevsky presents in each of his works, but the drama of entire mankind.
We observed, too, what at first wore the air of a paradox: no matter how
restless and powerful, the passions after all are of but slender importance, or
at least do not stir the soul’s utmost depths. Events have no hold on the soul
—they are simply outwith its province. To support my assertion, what
instance could I more aptly adduce than war? Investigations have been
carried out in regard to the terrible struggle through which we have but
lately passed. Literary men were asked to estimate its real or apparent
moment, its moral after-effects, its influence on literature. The answer is
simple: to all intents and purposes its influence has been nil.
Consider for a moment the Napoleonic wars: endeavour to trace their
repercussion in literature and determine in what way they have modified the
soul of humanity. I admit there exist poems inspired by the imperial epic as
there exist only all too many with the Great War for theme. But where is
there a deeper note, a spiritual transformation? No exterior event, whatever
its tragedy or magnitude, can effect such a change. On the other hand, the
French Revolution is different, but here we are concerned with a
disturbance that is more than physical, a traumatism, if I may use the word.
This time the convulsion proceeds from the very soul of the nation. The
influence of the French Revolution on the writings of Montesquieu,
Voltaire, and Rousseau is enormous, although their works date from before
the event for which they prepared the way. And we shall observe the same
order of things in Dostoevsky’s novels: the idea is not consecutive to the
event, but precedes it. In most cases passion has to serve as intermediary
between thought and action.

At any rate, in Dostoevsky’s novels we shall see the intellectual element
comes at times into touch with that deeper region, which is not the soul’s
hell, but its heaven.
In Dostoevsky we find the mysterious inversion of values already
noticed in William Blake, the great mystic amongst English poets. Hell,
according to Dostoevsky, is the first region, the realm of mind and reason.
Throughout his works, if our attention be at all alert, we shall become
conscious of a depreciation of mental powers which is not so much
systematic as involuntary and inspired by the spirit of the Gospel.
Dostoevsky never deliberately states, although he often insinuates, that
the antithesis of love is less hate than the steady activity of the mind. In his
eyes it is intellect which individualizes, which is the enemy of the Kingdom
of Heaven, life eternal, and that bliss where time is not, reached only by
renouncing the individual self and sinking deep in a solidarity that knows
no distinctions.
This passage from Schopenhauer will prove illuminating: “He sees that
the difference between him who inflicts suffering and him who must bear it
is only the phenomenon; and does not concern the thing in itself, for this is
the will living in both, which here deceived by the knowledge which is
bound to its service, does not recognize itself, and seeking an increased
happiness in one of its phenomena, produces great suffering in another, and
thus, in the presence of excitement, buries its teeth in its own flesh, not
knowing that it always injures only itself, revealing in this form, through
the medium of individuality, the conflict with itself, which it bears in its
inner nature. The inflicter of suffering and the sufferer are one. The former
errs in believing that he is not a partaker in the guilt. If the eyes of both
were opened, the inflicter of suffering would see that he lives in all that
suffers pain in the wide world, and which if endowed with reason, in vain
asks why it was called into existence for such great suffering, its desert of
which it does not understand, and the sufferer would see that all the
wickedness which is, or ever was, committed in this world, proceeds from
that will which constitutes his nature also, appears also in him, and that
through this phenomenon and its assertion he has taken upon himself all the
sufferings which proceed from such a will, and bears them as his due, so
long as he is this will.”⁠[95]
But this pessimism (which in Schopenhauer can at times virtually have
the air of a disguise) yields place in Dostoevsky to a boundless optimism.

“If you were to give me three lives, it wouldn’t be enough for me,”⁠[96]
says one of his characters in A Raw Youth. In another passage of the same
book:
“You so want to live and are so thirsting for life that I do believe three
lives would not be enough for you.”⁠[97]
I should like to investigate further this blissful state Dostoevsky depicts,
or of which he gives us a glimpse, in each of his works, a state wherein we
lose all sense of personal limitation and of the flight of time.
“At that moment,” said Prince Myshkin to Rogozhin, “I seem somehow
to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be no more time.”⁠[98]
And compare this eloquent passage from The Possessed:
“‘Are you fond of children?’ asked Stavrogin.—‘I am,’ answered
Kirillov, though rather indifferently.—‘Then you are fond of life?’—‘Yes,
I’m fond of life. What of it?’—‘Though you’ve made up your mind to shoot
yourself?’—‘What of it? Why connect it? Life’s one thing, and that’s
another. Life exists, but death doesn’t at all.’—‘You’ve begun to believe in
future eternal life?’—‘No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life
here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands
still and it will become eternal.’”⁠[99]
I could multiply my quotations, but these doubtless will suffice.
I am struck, every time I read the Gospels, by the insistence with which
the words, “Et nunc,” “And now,” are repeated over and over again. And
certainly Dostoevsky too was struck by it. Everlasting bliss, the bliss
promised by Jesus Christ, can be attained here and now, if only the human
soul will forswear and deny itself. Et nunc....
Eternal life is not, or rather is more than, a thing of the future, and if we
do not reach it in this world, there is little hope of our ever attaining to it.
Listen to these admirable pages from Mark Rutherford’s Autobiography:
“As I got older, I became aware of the folly of this perpetual reaching
after the future, and of drawing from to-morrow—and from to-morrow only
—a reason for the joyfulness of to-day. I learned, when, alas! it was almost
too late, to live in each moment as it passed over my head, believing that
the sun as it is now rising is as good as it ever will be, and blinding myself
as much as possible to what may follow. But when I was young I was the
victim of that illusion, implanted for some purpose or other in us by Nature,
which causes me on the brightest morning in June to think immediately of a
brighter morning which is to come in July. I say nothing now for or against

the doctrine of immortality. All I say is, that men have been happy without
it, even under the pressure of disaster, and that to make immortality a sole
spring of action here is an exaggeration of the folly which deludes us all
through life with endless expectation, and leaves us at death without the
thorough enjoyment of a single hour.”
Cheerfully would I cry: “What betides life eternal, without ever-present
consciousness of that eternity even now? Eternal life can be present in us
here below. We are partakers in it from the moment we are resigned to die
to ourselves and accomplish the surrender which enables us to resurrect
straightway into eternity!”
Neither behest nor ruling: simply the secret of the supreme felicity
revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospels. “If ye know these things, happy are
ye if ye do them” (John xiii. 17). Not “happy shall ye be” but “happy are
ye.” Here and now we can share in that perfect bliss.
What serenity! Time indeed ceases to exist: eternity lives, we inherit the
Kingdom of God.
Yes, here is the mysterious essence of Dostoevsky’s philosophy and of
Christian ethics too; the divine secret of happiness. The individual triumphs
by renunciation of his individuality. He who lives his life, cherishing
personality, shall lose it: but he who surrenders it shall gain the fullness of
life eternal, not in the future, but in the present made one with eternity.
Resurrection in the fullness of life, forgetful of all individual happiness.—
Oh! perfect restoration!
Such glorification of feeling and inhibition of thought is nowhere better
indicated than in the following passage from The Possessed which
complements the one I read a few moments since:
“‘You seem to be very happy, Kirillov,’ said Stavrogin.
“‘Yes, very happy,’ he answered, as though making the most ordinary
reply.
“‘But you were distressed so lately, angry with Liputin?’
“‘H’m!... I’m not scolding now, I didn’t know then I was happy. Have
you seen a leaf, a leaf from a tree?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘I saw one lately, a little green. It was decayed at the edges. It was
blown by the wind. When I was ten years old I used to shut my eyes in the
winter on purpose and fancy a green leaf, bright, with veins on it, and the

sun shining. I used to open my eyes and not believe them, because it was
very nice, and I used to shut them again.’
“‘What’s that? An allegory?’
“‘N-no.... Why? I’m not speaking of an allegory, but of a leaf, only a
leaf. The leaf is good: everything’s good.’
“‘When did you find out you were so happy?’
“‘Last week, on Tuesday—no, Wednesday, for it was Wednesday by
that time, in the night.’
“‘By what reasoning?’
“‘I don’t remember. I was walking about the room ... never mind. I
stopped my clock. It was thirty-seven minutes past two.’”⁠[100]
But, you may well contend, if feeling is to overcome thought, and the
soul know no state but this vague expectancy susceptible to every outside
influence, what can result except complete anarchy? It has been said, and of
late more frequently, that anarchy is the consummation of Dostoevsky’s
doctrine. A discussion of his beliefs would lead us into a far country, for I
can anticipate the storm of protest I should provoke if I dared affirm that
Dostoevsky does not plunge us into anarchy, but simply and naturally leads
us to the Gospels. On this point we must be clear. Christian doctrine as
contained in the New Testament is usually seen by people of our nation
through the medium of the Roman Catholic Church, as she has modified it,
moreover, in harmony with her own needs. Now, Dostoevsky abhors all
churches, the Church of Rome in particular. He claims it his right to accept
Christ’s teaching directly from the Scriptures, and from them alone, which
is precisely what the Catholic cannot possibly concede.
In his letters we come across countless passages inveighing against the
Roman Catholic Church, accusations so vehement and so categorical that I
dare not repeat them to you here. But they confirm the general impression I
gather at each fresh reading of Dostoevsky and help me to a better
understanding of him. I know no author at once more Christian and less
Catholic in spirit.
“But you have put your finger on the very crux of the question,” Roman
Catholics will say, “and you have yourself explained it, many and many a
time, seemingly with full understanding. The Gospels, the words of our
Lord Jesus Christ, considered apart, lead but to anarchy, whence the need
for St. Paul, for the Church, for Catholicism as a whole....” I shall not
attempt to argue with them.

Dostoevsky leads us, we may take it, if not to anarchy, to a sort of
Buddhism, or at least quietism, and we shall see that in the judgment of the
orthodox, this is not his only heresy. He draws us far away from Rome—the
Rome of the Encyclicals, I mean—far, too, from worldly codes of honour.
“But look here, Prince, are you a man of honour?” cries one of his
characters to Prince Myshkin, the hero who best embodied his philosophy
until the day when he wrote The Karamazovs and presented to us these
angelic creatures, Alyosha and Father Zossima. What then does Dostoevsky
exalt as his ideal? The life contemplative? A life wherein man, renouncing
reason and will, shall know love alone?
Perhaps Dostoevsky would find personal happiness in such an
existence, but certainly not man’s higher destiny. As soon as Prince
Myshkin, far from his native land, reaches the higher plane, he is urgently
impelled to turn his steps homeward, and when young Alyosha confides to
Father Zossima his secret aspirations towards ending his days in the
monastery, his confessor says to him: “Go hence from this house, thou wilt
be of greater use out in the world! Thy brothers have need of thee!”... “I
pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou
shouldest keep them from evil.”
I notice (and with this remark I come to treat of the demonic element in
Dostoevsky’s works) that most translations of the Bible render Jesus’s
words “But deliver them from evil,” which is not quite accurate. The
translations I mean are Protestant versions. Protestantism is inclined to
leave out of the reckoning angel and demon alike. By way of experiment I
have often asked Protestants if they believed in the Devil, and invariably
my question has been received with bewilderment. Then I realized that in
most cases this was a question the Protestant had never put to himself. In
the end he replied that he did, of course, believe in evil, and when I pressed
him, he admitted that in evil he discerned only the absence of good, as in
darkness the absence of light. Now, we are here far removed indeed from
the Gospel texts which mention time and again a diabolic force, real,
present, and defined. “Deliver them from evil?”... No! “Deliver them from
the Evil One.” This problem of the Devil occupies, I may say, an important
place in Dostoevsky’s work. Some no doubt will see in him a Manichean.
We are aware that the great heresiarch, Mani, recognized two principles
controlling the universe—the Power of Good and the Power of Evil, equally
active, independent, and indispensable, by which belief the Manichean

doctrine is directly associated with the teaching of Zarathustra. We observed
(and on this point I am bound to insist) how Dostoevsky assigns the Devil’s
habitation, not to the baser elements in man, but to the very noblest—the
realm of intellect, the seat of reason, although man’s entire being even can
become the Archfiend’s dwelling-place and prey. The most cunning snares
laid for us by the Evil One are, in Dostoevsky’s reckoning, intellectual
temptations and problems. I do not think it will be going far astray from my
subject if I consider first of all the problems expressing mankind’s torturing
obsessions.... What is Man? Whence comes he and whither does he return?
What was he before birth, what becomes of him after death? To what Truth
can mankind attain?—or even more pertinently—What is Truth?
With Nietzsche a new problem arose, completely different from the rest,
and far from being absorbed amongst these others, it pressed straight to the
forefront. As a problem it, too, has its torturing uncertainty—an uncertainty
that drove Nietzsche to madness. “What can mankind accomplish? What
can one single man accomplish?” The question implies the terrible
apprehension that man could have been other than he is, could have
accomplished—could yet accomplish—greater things, whereas he is
content to take his graceless ease at the first halting-place without thought
of crowning his progress.
Was Nietzsche actually the first to formulate this question? I dare not
affirm that he was, for I am confident he had already come across the
problem amongst the Greeks and amongst the Italians of the Renaissance.
But with the latter the question was answered immediately, and man turned
eagerly to the domain of practical activity. The solution was sought and
found unerringly in action and in the practice of the arts. I have in mind
Alexander and Cæsar Borgia, Frederick II, King of the Two Sicilies,
Leonardo da Vinci, and Goethe—creators, men of a superior race. For
artists and for men of action the problem of the superman does not exist, or
is at least readily solved. Their very lives and activity provide an answer in
themselves. The torturing dread begins when the problem is left unsolved,
or when the interval between question and answer is protracted. The being
who thinks and invents and does not act brews his own poison draught.
Hearken again to William Blake: “He who desires but acts not, breeds
pestilence”—the pestilence that proved mortal to Nietzsche.
“What can a man accomplish?” is the atheist’s characteristic query, and
Dostoevsky exquisitely realized the fact that to deny God is inevitably to

exalt man.
God a myth?... Then everything is lawful! We find this idea in The
Possessed and it is repeated in The Karamazovs:
“If God exists, all is His will, and from His will I cannot escape. If not;
it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will.”⁠[101] How can a man
assert his independence? Again begins that torturing dread. Everything is
possible. Is it? Everything? What can one man accomplish?
Whenever we see one of Dostoevsky’s characters ask himself this
question, we can be sure of witnessing ere long his utter downfall. Take
Raskolnikov, for instance, the first of them to formulate the idea clearly, the
very idea which Nietzsche transformed into his theory of the superman.
Raskolnikov is responsible for an article somewhat subversive in tone,
dividing, according to Porfiry’s version of it, all men into ordinary and
extraordinary.
“Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress
the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men
have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just
because they are extraordinary.”—“That wasn’t quite my conclusion,”
began Raskolnikov, simply and modestly. “Yet I admit that you have stated
it almost correctly; perhaps, if you like, perfectly so.” (It almost gave him
pleasure to admit this.) “The only difference is that I don’t contend that
extraordinary people are always bound to commit breaches of morals, as
you call it. In fact, I doubt whether such an argument could be published. I
simply hinted that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right ... that is, not an
official right but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep
certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment
of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity)....
Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that all—well, legislators and
leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on—
were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new
law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors,
and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed
either, if that bloodshed (often of innocent persons fighting bravely in
defence of ancient law) were of use to their cause. It’s remarkable, in fact,
that the majority, indeed, of those benefactors and leaders of humanity were
guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men, or even a
little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word,

must from their very nature be criminals—more or less, of course.
Otherwise, it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in
the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their very nature again,
and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it.”⁠[102]
Observe, however, that in the face of this profession Raskolnikov
confesses his abiding faith in God—a testimony which differentiates him
from Dostoevsky’s other supermen.
“Do you believe in God? Excuse my curiosity!”
“I do,” repeated Raskolnikov, raising his eyes to Porfiry.
“And do you—believe in Lazarus’s rising from the dead?”
“I do! Why do you ask all this?”
“You believe it literally?”
“Literally.”⁠[103]
“One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression”, says William Blake.
But the very fact that Raskolnikov puts himself the question, instead of
making action his answer, proves that he is no real superman. His
bankruptcy is complete. Not for one moment can he rid himself of the
conviction of his own mediocrity. He excites himself to commit a crime in
order to satisfy himself that he is a superman. “I divined then ... that power
is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is
only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! Then for the first
time in my life an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever
thought of before me, not one! I saw as clear as daylight how strange it is
that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go
straight for it all and send it flying to the devil. I wanted to have the daring
... and I killed her. I only wanted to have the daring.”⁠[104]
Later, after the crime, he says: “Perhaps I should never have committed
a murder again. I wanted to find out something else; it was something led
me on. I wanted to find out then, and quickly, whether I was a louse like
everybody else or a man, whether I can step over barriers or not, whether I
dare to stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a trembling creature or
whether I have the right....”⁠[105]
Moreover he is unwilling to accept the idea of his own failure. He
refuses to acknowledge he had not the right to dare.
“I couldn’t carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible,
that’s what’s the matter!... If I had succeeded I should have been crowned

with glory, but now I’m trapped.”⁠[106]
After Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Kirillov, Ivan Karamazov and the
Raw Youth will have their turn.
The utter inefficiency of every one of his intellectual heroes is rooted in
Dostoevsky’s belief that the man of active brain is wellnigh incapable of
action.
Notes from Underground, the little book he wrote shortly before The
Eternal Husband, marks for me the height of his career. It is the keystone of
his whole work, the clue to his thought. “He who thinks, acts not....” ’Tis
but a step then to the insinuation that action presupposes a certain
intellectual inferiority.
From first page to last, this little volume, Notes from Underground, is a
monologue pure and simple, and it really seems a trifle daring to assert, as
did our friend Valery Larbaud recently, that James Joyce, the author of
Ulysses, devised this form of narrative. Had he forgotten Dostoevsky, Poe
even, and Browning, of whom I cannot help but think as I read these Notes
from Underground anew? Browning and Dostoevsky seem to me to bring
the monologue straightway to perfection, in all the diversity and subtlety to
which this literary form lends itself.
Perhaps I shock the literary sense of some of my audience by coupling
these two names, but I can do no other, nor help being struck by the
profound resemblance, not merely in form, but in substance between certain
Browning monologues (I am thinking especially of My Last Duchess,
Porphyria’s Lover, and the two depositions of Pompilia’s husband in the
Ring and the Book) and that admirable little story in Dostoevsky’s Journal,
Krotchkaya, which means, I am told, Faint Heart, the title it bears in the
latest edition of the volume.
But to an even greater degree than the form and the manner of their
work, what urges my comparison of Browning and Dostoevsky is their
optimism—an optimism which has no affinity with Goethe’s, but brings
them both very close to Nietzsche and to William Blake, of whom I shall
have occasion to speak again.
Yes, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Browning, and Blake, are four stars of one
single constellation. For long Blake was completely unknown to me, then
recently I discovered him, and as an astronomer can sense the influence of a
star and determine its position before he has even glimpsed it, I can say that
Blake I had long anticipated. Is this equivalent to saying his influence was

considerable? No, indeed! I am not aware he ever exerted any. Even in
England, till late years, Blake remained practically unknown, a pure and
distant star whose rays are only now reaching us.
The most significant of his works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
from which I shall quote passages now and again, will help us, I am sure, to
a better understanding of certain traits in Dostoevsky.
That sentence I quoted a moment ago from his Proverbs of Hell, as he
entitles some of his aphorisms, would be a fitting device to introduce
Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground—or else this other saying of Blake’s
—“Expect poison from standing water.”
“Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-
eminently a characterless creature,” declares the hero (save the mark!) of
the Underground. The man of action according to Dostoevsky must be
mediocre in intellect, for the proud in mind are withheld from action which
they deem a compromise, a limitation to thought. He who acts will be a
Pyotr Stepanovitch, as in The Possessed, or a Smerdiakov, for in Crime and
Punishment Dostoevsky had not yet established the division between
thought and action.
The mind does not act; it conditions action. In several of Dostoevsky’s
novels we come across an odd distribution of rôles, the uneasy relationship
and hidden connivance between a thinking being and another acting under
its influence, vicariously almost. Think of Ivan Karamazov, Smerdiakov,
Stavrogin, and Pyotr Stepanovitch, whom Stavrogin called his “shadow.”
Strange, is it not, to find what I may term a first version of the queer
relationship between Ivan Karamazov the thinker and Smerdiakov the
lackey in Crime and Punishment, the first of his great novels? Dostoevsky
tells us of one Filka, a serf, Svidrigaïlov’s servant, who hanged himself to
escape, not blows, but his master’s mockery of him. “Filka was a sort of
hypochondriac, a sort of domestic philosopher.” The other servants used to
say “he read himself silly.”⁠[107]
These lackeys, these shadows, these puppets that act in place of the
thinking beings, have one and all a love amounting to veritable devotion for
the diabolical superiority of intellect. Stavrogin’s prestige in the eyes of
Pyotr Stepanovitch is as exaggerated as that intellectual’s scorn for his
miserable inferior.
“‘Do you want the whole truth?’ said Pyotr Stepanovitch to Stavrogin.
‘You see the idea really did cross my mind—you hinted it yourself, not

seriously, but teasing me (for of course you would not hint it seriously); but
I couldn’t bring myself to it, and wouldn’t bring myself to it for anything,
not for a hundred roubles....’
“In the heat of his talk, he went close up to Stavrogin and took hold of
the revers of his coat (really, it may have been on purpose). With a violent
movement Stavrogin struck him on the arm: ‘Come, what is it? ... give over,
you’ll break my arm.’”⁠[108] (Ivan Karamazov’s conduct towards
Smerdiakov is marked by like brutality.)
“Nicolay Vsyevolodovitch, tell me, as before God, are you guilty or not,
and I’ll swear I’ll believe your word as though it were God’s, and I’ll follow
you to the end of the earth. Yes, I will, I’ll follow you like a dog.... I am a
buffoon, but I don’t want you, my better half, to be one! Do you understand
me?”⁠[109]
The thinking being enjoys his domination of the other: yet this very
domination is a source of constant exasperation. For his creature’s fumbling
actions are served up as the caricature of his own thoughts.
Dostoevsky’s letters enlighten us concerning the elaboration of his
novels, The Possessed in particular. Personally, I judge this work to be most
extraordinarily powerful and wonderful. In it we are vouchsafed to witness
a rare literary phenomenon. The book Dostoevsky planned to write was
very different from that we actually have. While he was putting it into shape
a new character, of which at first he had scarcely dreamed, asserted itself,
gradually took front rank, and ousted the intended hero!
“None of my works has given me so much trouble as this one,” he wrote
from Dresden to his friend Strakhov in October, 1870. “At the beginning,
that is, at the end of last year, I thought the novel made and artificial, and
rather scorned it. But later I was overtaken by real enthusiasm. I fell in love
with my work of a sudden and made a big effort to get all that I had written
into good trim. Then in the summer came a transformation, up started a
new, vital character, who insisted on being the hero of the book, the original
hero (a most interesting figure, but not worthy to be called a hero) fell into
the background. The new one so inspired me that I once more began to go
over the whole book afresh.”⁠[110]
The new character, to which all his attention is now devoted, is
Stavrogin, the strangest perhaps and the most terrifying of Dostoevsky’s
creations. Stavrogin reads his own riddle towards the end of the book. It is
seldom that a character of Dostoevsky’s fails to give, sooner or later, the

key, as it were, to his nature, often in most unexpected fashion, by some
words he lets slip all of a sudden. Listen, for instance, to Stavrogin’s
account of himself:
“I have no ties in Russia—everything is as alien to me there as
everywhere. It’s true that I dislike living there more than anywhere, but I
can’t hate anything even there! I’ve tried my strength everywhere. You
advised me to do this, ‘that I might learn to know myself.’ As long as I was
experimenting for myself and for others, it seemed infinite, as it has all my
life. Before your eyes I endured a blow from your brother; I acknowledged
my marriage in public. But to what to apply my strength, that is what I’ve
never seen, and do not see now in spite of all your praises in Switzerland,
which I believed in. I am still capable, as I always was, of desiring to do
something good, and of feeling pleasure from it; at the same time I desire
evil, and feel pleasure from that too.”⁠[111]
At our last meeting we shall come back to the first item in this
declaration—a very important one in Dostoevsky’s estimation. Stavrogin
had no ties in his native land. To-day let us consider only this double-
headed hydra of desire that is gnawing Stavrogin. Man ever entreats, says
Baudelaire, God and the Devil at one and the same time.
At the bottom, what Stavrogin worships is energy. William Blake will
give us the key to this baffling character: “Energy is the only Life—Energy
is Eternal Delight.” Aye, hearken further to his proverbs: “The road of
excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” or “If the fool would persist in his
folly he would become wise.”—“You never know what is enough unless you
know what is more than enough.” Blake’s glorification of energy expresses
itself in divers forms. “The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the
raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of eternity
too great for the eye of man.”
We further read: “The cistern contains: the fountain overflows,” and
“The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” And the
formula which introduces his Marriage of Heaven and Hell seems to have
been appropriated all unconsciously by Dostoevsky: “Without Contraries is
no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and
Hate, are necessary to human existence.” “These two classes of men are
always upon earth, and they should be enemies: whoever tries to reconcile
them seeks to destroy existence.”

Allow me to add to Blake’s proverbs two of my own invention: “Fine
feelings are the stuff that bad literature is made on,” and “The Fiend is a
party to every work of art.” Yes, of a truth, every work of art is a Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, and William Blake tells us: “The reason Milton wrote
in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils
and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without
knowing it.”
Dostoevsky was tormented his life long by his horror of evil and by his
sense of its inevitability. By evil I mean suffering also. I think of him when
I read the parable of the man which sowed good seed in his field, but while
men slept his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his
way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then
appeared the tares also.... And the servants said unto him, Wilt thou then
that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay: lest while ye gather up the
tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let them both grow together
until the harvest.
Two years ago, in neutral territory, I met Walther Rathenau. He spent
two days with me, I remember, and I questioned him on the events of the
time, seeking in particular his opinion of Bolshevism and the Russian
Revolution. His answer was that naturally he suffered at the horrible
abominations practised by the revolutionaries. “But, believe me,” he added,
“a nation learns to know itself, as a man his own soul, only by passing
through the depths of suffering and the abyss of sin.... And America has not
yet gained a soul because she refuses to accept sin and suffering.”
Now you know my grounds for saying, when we saw Father Zossima
kneel before Dmitri and Raskolnikov before Sonia, that they were humbling
themselves, not merely before suffering, but before sin.
Let us make no mistake as regards what was in Dostoevsky’s mind. I
repeat that even though he clearly formulates the problem of the superman
which insidiously reappears in each of his works, we witness the glorious
vindication of none but Gospel truths. Dostoevsky perceives and imagines
salvation only in the individual’s renunciation of self; but, on the other
hand, he gives us to understand that man is never nearer God than in his
extremity of anguish. Then and not till then does he cry: “Lord, to whom
shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”
He knows this imploring cry cannot proceed from the lips of the
righteous man who has ever been sure of his course and confident he has

acquitted his obligations to God and to himself alike, but from those of the
unhappy creature “who has nowhere left to turn.”... “Do you understand
what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn? No, that you
don’t understand yet!”⁠[112] Only through anguish and crime, after his
expiation even, cut off from the society of his fellow-men, did Raskolnikov
come face to face with the Gospel.
There has no doubt been a measure of desultoriness in the ideas I have
submitted to you to-day—but maybe responsibility for the confusion falls in
part to Dostoevsky’s share as well. “Improvement makes straight roads; but
the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.”
At all events, Dostoevsky was convinced, as I too am convinced, that in
the Gospel truths is no confusion—the one consideration of moment!

VI

I AM overwhelmed by the number and importance of the things I have still
left to say to you. You have grasped, have you not, what I meant in my
introduction when I said that Dostoevsky was often an excuse for
expressing my own ideas? I should crave your pardon did I think that
thereby I had presented Dostoevsky’s in a false light. No, like the bees
Montaigne tells of, I have but gathered from his works what I needed to
make my own honey. However life-like a portrait, there is always much of
the artist in it, as much of him almost as of the sitter. The most precious
model is undoubtedly that which warrants the widest diversity of likeness
and lends itself to the greatest number of portraits. I have attempted
Dostoevsky’s likeness; I know I have not exhausted his semblance.
Overwhelming, too, the number of touches I should like to add to my
preceding papers. After each one I have felt there was something I had
forgotten to tell you. At our last meeting, for example, I wanted to make
plain the meaning of my two “proverbs”: “Fine feelings are the stuff bad
literature is made on,” and “The Fiend is party to every work of art.” What
to me seems transparent may appear a paradox to you, and as such to call
for elucidation. I loathe paradoxes and never seek effect in surprises, but
had I nothing new to suggest I should not attempt these papers; and
remember, a new idea wears invariably the guise of a paradox. To help you
acknowledge the truth of what I am saying, I proposed to call your attention
to two figures, St. Francis of Assisi and Fra Angelico. If it was vouchsafed
the latter to be a great artist (the better to prove my contention I choose as
my example the most shiningly pure figure in the whole history of art), it
was because, in spite of his purity, his art permitted of demonic
collaboration. There is no work of art to which the Demon is not a co-
signatory. The true saint is not Fra Angelico, but Francis of Assisi. There are
no artists amongst the saints, no saints amongst the artists.
Creative art may be likened to the box of sweet spices which Mary
Magdalene brake not. I have already quoted that strange dictum of Blake’s:
“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and
at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the
Devil’s party without knowing it.”

There are three threads in the loom on which every work of art is
woven, the three lusts pointed out by the apostle: “... the lust of the flesh,
and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.”
Remember Lacordaire’s remark when congratulated upon an admirable
sermon he had just delivered: “The Devil has forestalled you.” The Devil
would not have told him his sermon was fine, indeed, he would have been
there to speak, had he not been party to it.
After citing lines from Schiller’s Hymn to Joy, Dmitri Karamazov
exclaims: “And the awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as
terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart
of man.”⁠[113]
No artist, I am sure, has given the demonic so large a share in his work
as Dostoevsky, unless Blake himself, who concluded his admirable little
book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with these words:
“This Angel who is now become a Devil is my particular friend. We
often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the
world shall have if they behave well.”
After leaving you, I realized that in quoting the strangest of William
Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, I had omitted to read to you the entire passage
from The Possessed which had called forth these very quotations. May I
atone for my omission? In this one page from The Possessed you will
marvel at the fusion—not to say confusion—of the divers elements I sought
to point out in my previous papers: optimism first and foremost, the wild
love of life we come across again and again in Dostoevsky’s works, love of
life and all the world, Blake’s vast delectable world wherein dwells the tiger
as well as the lamb.
“Are you fond of children?”
“I am,” answered Kirillov, though rather indifferently.
“Then you’re fond of life?”
“Yes, I’m fond of life! What of it?”
“Though you’ve made up your mind to shoot yourself?”
“What of it? Why connect it? Life’s one thing, and that’s another. Life
exists, but death doesn’t at all....”⁠[114]
We saw too Dmitri Karamazov ready to take his life in a fit of
optimism, beside himself with enthusiasm.
“You seem to be very happy, Kirillov?”
“Yes, very happy,” he answered, as though making the ordinary reply.

“But you were distressed so lately, angry with Liputin?”
“H’m!... I’m not scolding now. I did not know then that I was
happy.”⁠[115]
Do not draw a mistaken conclusion from this seeming ferocity which is
frequent in Dostoevsky. It is an integral part of his quietism, as of Blake’s.
You remember my saying that Dostoevsky’s Christianity had closer
affinities with Asia than with Rome? Yet his acceptance of the doctrine of
energy, a doctrine positively glorified by Blake, is rather of the West than of
the East.
But for Blake and Dostoevsky both, the truth of New Testament
teaching is too radiantly clear for them to deny this ferocity as but a
transitory phase, the short-lived consequence of a passing blindness.
And to reveal to you only the vision of his cruelty would be an act of
treachery towards Blake. I wish I could counter my quotations from his
terrible Proverbs of Hell by reading one of the loveliest of his Songs of
Innocence—alas! its aëry form eludes translation—the poem where he
foretells the time when the lion in his strength will lie down with the lamb
and watch over the fold.
But let us continue with our reading from The Possessed.
“They’re bad because they don’t know they’re good; when they find out
they won’t outrage a little girl. They’ll find out that they’re good and they’ll
all become good, every one of them,” declares Kirillov.⁠[116]
And so the conversation continues until we stumble across the singular
conception of the man-God.
“Here you’ve found it out! So you’ve become good then?”
“I am good.”
“That I agree with, though,” muttered Stavrogin, frowning.
“He who teaches that all are good will end the world.”
“He who taught it was crucified.”
“He will come, and his name will be the man-God.”
“The God-man?”
“The man-God! That’s the difference.”⁠[117]
The notion of a man-God succeeding the God-man brings us round
again to Nietzsche. À propos of the superman theory, I should like to
contribute one emendation in protest against an opinion which is only too
current and too easily accepted. Nietzsche’s superman (observe, pray,
wherein he differs from the superman of Raskolnikov’s or Kirillov’s

vision), though ruthlessness is his motto, is ruthless not to others but to
himself. The humanity he aspires to outstrip is his own. In short: to one and
the same problem Nietzsche and Dostoevsky propose different, radically
opposed solutions. Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of the personality—
for him it is the one possible aim in life: Dostoevsky postulates its
surrender. Nietzsche presupposes the heights of achievement where
Dostoevsky prophesies utter ruin.
At the darkest hour of the War, I read in the letters of a Red Cross
orderly (his modesty forbids me to name him), living in the midst of
agonizing sufferings and hearing but the voice of despair, “Ah, if only they
could make a sacrifice of their sufferings!”—a thought so luminous that all
commentary were a matter for reproach. I shall only compare it with this
sentence from The Possessed:
“Every earthly woe and every earthly tear is a joy for us. And when you
water the earth with your tears a foot deep, you will rejoice at everything at
once, and your sorrow will be no more, such is the prophecy.”⁠[118] Are not
we very near to Pascal’s “sweet and perfect resignation” and his cry of
“Joy! Joy! Tears of joy!”?
Is not this state of bliss depicted by Dostoevsky the very one exalted by
the Gospel, a state into which we are born anew, the joy whose fulfilment is
possible only through renunciation of self, for it is love of self which
prevents us from leaping into Eternity, from entering into the Kingdom of
God and communing in the mystery of life universal?
The first consequence of such regeneration is that man becomes as a
little child. “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall
not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” In the words of La Bruyère, “Little
children have neither past nor future, for they live in the present,” which
man has lost the power to do.
“At that moment,” said Prince Myshkin to Rogozhin—“at that moment
I seem somehow to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be
no more time.”⁠[119]
This direct participation is, as I have earlier indicated, taught by the
Gospel, unwearying in its insistence upon these words, “Et nunc” ... “And
now.” The perfect joy Christ means is not of the future, but of the
immediate present.
“You’ve begun to believe in future eternal life?”

“No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are
moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still and it will
become eternal.”⁠[120]
And towards the end of The Possessed Dostoevsky reverts once more to
Kirillov’s uncanny rapture. Let us read the passage in question. It will help
us to appreciate Dostoevsky’s idea, and prepare the way for one of the most
essential truths I have left to discuss.
“There are seconds—they come five or six at a time—when you
suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained. It’s
something not earthly—I don’t mean in the sense that it’s heavenly—but in
that sense that man cannot endure it in his earthly aspect. He must be
physically changed or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable; it’s as
though you apprehend all nature and suddenly say, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ God,
when He created the world, said at the end of each day of creation, ‘Yes, it’s
right, it’s good.’ It—it’s not being deeply moved, but simply joy. You don’t
forgive anything, because there is no more need of forgiveness. It’s not that
you love—oh, there’s something in it higher than love—what’s most awful
is that it’s terribly clear and such joy. If it lasted more than five seconds, the
soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live
through a lifetime, and I’d give my whole life for them, because they are
worth it. To endure ten seconds one must be physically changed. I think
man ought to give up having children—what’s the use of children, what’s
the use of evolution when the goal has been attained? In the Gospel it is
written that there will be no child-bearing in the resurrection, but that man
will be like the angels of the Lord....”⁠[121]
“‘Kirillov, does this often happen?’
“‘Once in three days, or once a week.’
“‘Don’t you have fits, perhaps?’
“‘No.’
“‘Well, you will. Be careful, Kirillov. I’ve heard that’s just how fits
begin. An epileptic described exactly that sensation before a fit, word for
word as you’ve done. He mentioned five seconds too, and said that more
could not be endured. Remember Mahomet’s pitcher from which no drop of
water was spilt while he circled Paradise on his horse. That was a case of
five seconds too; that’s too much like your eternal harmony, and Mahomet
was an epileptic. Be careful, Kirillov, it’s epilepsy.’
“‘It won’t have time.’ Kirillov smiled gently.”⁠[122]

In The Idiot we hear Prince Myshkin connect this condition of euphoria,
familiar to him too, with the epileptic attacks to which he is subject.
So there we have Prince Myshkin an epileptic, Kirillov an epileptic,
Smerdiakov an epileptic. There is an epileptic in each of Dostoevsky’s great
works. We know Dostoevsky himself was thus afflicted, and his persistence
in making epilepsy intervene as a factor in his novels sufficiently indicates
the rôle he assigned this disease in moulding his ethical conceptions and
directing the course of his thought.
If we seek far enough, we shall invariably find the genesis of every
serious moral reform in some physiological enigma, some non-satisfaction
of the flesh, irritation, or anomaly. Forgive me for quoting myself again, but
if I am to express my idea as explicitly as before, I must use the same
phraseology as on that previous occasion.
“It is natural that every important moral change, or, as Nietzsche would
say, transmutation of values, should be due to some physiological
disturbance. With physical well-being, mental activity is in abeyance, and
as long as conditions continue to be satisfactory, no change can possibly be
contemplated. By conditions I mean spiritual circumstance, for where the
external and material are implicated, the reformer’s motive is utterly
different: the one readjustment involved is chemical, the other mechanical.
There lies at the root of every reform a distemper. The reformer is a sick
man by reason of some ill-adjustment in his spiritual balance. Densities,
ratios, and moral values present themselves to him in different perspectives,
so he exerts himself to establish a fresh accord. He aims at a new co-
ordination. His work is nothing but an attempt to reorganize, in the light of
his logic and reasoning, the elements of confusion he senses within himself,
for the unsystematic he cannot tolerate. Of course I do not suggest that lack
of balance is the necessary condition for the making of a reformer, but I do
contend that every reformer starts out with a lack of balance.”⁠[123]
So far as I know, it would be impossible to find, amongst the reformers
who have held up to humanity a new measure of values, one single instance
where we could fail to discern what Dr. Binet-Sanglé is pleased to qualify a
hereditary taint.⁠[124]
Mahomet was an epileptic. Epileptics, too, the Prophets of Israel, and
Luther, and Dostoevsky. Socrates had his demon, Saint Paul his mysterious
“thorn in the flesh,” Pascal his abyss, Nietzsche and Rousseau their mania.

I can hear you say, “But what is there new in this theory? It belongs
properly to Lombroso and Max Nordau. Genius is a neurosis.” No, not so
fast! I must insist on this point, for it is extraordinarily important.
There do exist geniuses, Victor Hugo for example, sane and whole.
Their perfect spiritual poise precludes the possibility of any fresh problem.
Rousseau, without his leaven of madness, would, I am sure, be no better
than an undigested Cicero. It is pointless to lament the infirmity but for
which he would never have sought to analyse the problem raised by his own
anomaly or find a harmony which would not reject his discord. Sound and
healthy reformers do undoubtedly exist, but such are lawgivers. The man
whose inner balance is perfect can well contribute reforms—reforms which
touch the outer man: he draws up new constitutions. But the individual who
is abnormal refuses to submit to laws already established.
From knowledge of his own case, Dostoevsky supposes a pathological
condition which, for a space, imposes and suggests to one or other of his
characters a new formula of existence. To take a concrete instance, let us
consider Kirillov, who carries on his shoulders the entire plot of The
Possessed. We are aware he intends to take his life, but not that his suicide
is imminent: self-destruction is, however, certainly in his mind. Why? The
motive is withheld almost till the very end of the book.
“I don’t understand what fancy possesses you to put yourself to death,”
says Pyotr Stepanovitch to him. “It wasn’t my idea; you thought of it
yourself before I appeared, and talked of your intention to the committee
abroad before you said anything to me. And you know, no one has forced it
on you; no one of them knew you, but you came to confide in them
yourself, from sentimentalism. And what’s to be done if a plan of action
here, which can’t be altered now, was founded upon that with your consent
and upon your suggestion?—your suggestion, mind that!”⁠[125]
Kirillov’s suicide is absolutely gratuitous. I mean to say there is an
absence of outward motivation. We shall presently see what absurdities are
introduced into this world under cover of a gratuitous act.
After Kirillov resolves to take his life, everything becomes a matter of
profound indifference to him. His peculiar state of mind which sanctions
and accounts for his suicide (gratuitous, but not without a motive) will leave
him unmoved by the imputation of a crime others will commit and which he
will calmly suffer to be laid at his own door. Such at least is Pyotr
Stepanovitch’s belief.

Pyotr Stepanovitch imagines the crime he is planning will strengthen
the bonds between the conspirators he heads and over whom he feels his
control weakening. He reckons that each individual party to the plot, having
shared in the crime, will feel his complicity and be unable, indeed will not
dare, to break away. Who is to be sacrificed?
Pyotr Stepanovitch is still undecided. It is necessary that the victim
should present himself spontaneously.
The conspirators are met together in a large room; in the course of
conversation, the question is asked, “Can there be, even now, an informer in
our midst?” An extraordinary commotion follows this remark: everybody
begins to talk at once.
“‘Gentlemen, if that is so,’ Verhovensky went on, ‘I have compromised
myself more than anyone, and so I will ask you to answer one question, if
you care to, of course. You are all perfectly free.’
“‘What question? What question?’ every one clamoured.
“‘A question that will make it clear whether we are to remain together,
or take up our hats and go our several ways without speaking.’
“‘The question! The question!’
“‘If any one of us knew of a proposed political murder, would he, in
view of the consequences, go to give information, or would he stay at home
and await events? Opinions may differ on this point. The answer to the
question will tell us clearly whether we are to separate, or to remain
together, and for far longer than this one evening.’
“After which Pyotr Stepanovitch begins to interrogate apart several
members of this secret society. He is interrupted.
“‘It’s an unnecessary question. Every one will make the same answer.
There are no informers here.’
“‘What’s that gentleman getting up for?’ cried the girl student.
“‘That’s Shatov. What are you getting up for?’ cried the lady of the
house.
“Shatov did, in fact, stand up. He was holding his cap in his hand and
looking at Verhovensky. Apparently he wanted to say something to him, but
was hesitating. His face was pale and wrathful, but he controlled himself.
He did not say one word, but in silence walked towards the door.
“‘Shatov, this won’t make things better for you!’ Verhovensky called
after him enigmatically.

“‘But it will for you, since you are a spy and a scoundrel!’ Shatov
shouted to him from the door as he went out.
“Shouts and exclamations again.
“‘That’s what comes of a test,’ cried a voice.”⁠[126]
Thus the victim is marked, and by his own hand. Haste is imperative:
Shatov’s murder must anticipate his denunciation.
We must admire Dostoevsky’s art in this, because constantly carried
away in my enthusiasm to discuss his ideas, I am afraid I have neglected all
too much his wonderful skill in exposition.
At this juncture in the narrative, an astounding thing comes to pass
which raises a particular artistic problem. It is a commonplace that, passed a
certain point in the evolution of the plot, there must be nothing to deflect
attention: events must move more quickly and lead straight to the ultimate
issue. Well, this is the moment, when the action has entered on its phase of
maximum rapidity, that Dostoevsky contrives to introduce the most startling
interruptions. He is conscious that so tense is his reader’s attention
everything will assume an importance out of all proportion. With this
knowledge, he does not hesitate to distract attention from the main course
of events by brusque modulations which develop his most cherished ideas.
The very night Shatov is destined to turn informer or be murdered, his wife,
whom he has not seen for years, suddenly reappears at his house. Her time
is at hand, but at first Kirillov does not realize her condition.
Inadequately handled, this scene could become grotesque. It ranks
amongst the finest in the book. In theatrical jargon it would be described as
a utility, in literature as a cheville, but it is precisely one of the rarest
manifestations of Dostoevsky’s artistry. Like Pushkin he could say, “I have
never treated anything lightly,” which is the hallmark of a great artist,
utilizing everything, transforming disadvantage into opportunity. At this
stage the pace needs must slacken, and every detail that can arrest events in
their precipitancy becomes of supreme importance. The passages where
Dostoevsky describes the arrival, unannounced, of Shatov’s wife, the
conversation between husband and wife, Kirillov’s interposition, and the
prompt establishment of an intimacy between the two men, constitute
perhaps the most moving chapter in the book. We marvel anew at the utter
absence of jealousy I discussed with you on a previous occasion. Shatov
knows that his wife is going to have a child, but the father of this child she

expects is not even mentioned. Shatov is consumed with love for this
suffering creature who can find none but words that wound.
“It was only that fact [i.e. his wife’s reappearance] that saved the
scoundrels from Shatov’s carrying out his intention, and at the same time
helped them to get rid of him. To begin with, it agitated Shatov, threw him
out of his regular routine, and deprived him of his usual clear-sightedness
and caution. Any idea of his own danger would be the last thing to enter his
head at this moment when he was absorbed with such different
considerations.”⁠[127]
But to come back to Kirillov: the time is at hand when Pyotr
Stepanovitch calculates personal advantage from the other man’s suicide.
What grounds has Kirillov for taking his own life? Pyotr Stepanovitch
questions him: he has no clear idea, and is seeking clumsily to get at the
truth. Up till the last minute, he is in terror lest Kirillov change his mind and
thus escape him. But no!
“I won’t put it off. I want to kill myself now,”⁠[128] says Kirillov.
The conversation between Verhovensky and Kirillov is especially
obscure, obscure even in Dostoevsky’s own mind. As we have earlier
observed, Dostoevsky never expresses his ideas as ideas pure and simple,
but always through the medium of his characters who become their
interpreters. Kirillov is in a highly unusual pathological state, for in a
moment or two he is going to take his own life, and his talk is agitated and
incoherent. We are left to unravel in it the clue to Dostoevsky’s own
thought.
The idea which prompts Kirillov’s suicide is of a mystic nature and
closed to Pyotr Stepanovitch’s comprehension.
“If God exists, all is His will, and from His will I cannot escape. If not,
it’s all my will, and I am bound to show self-will.... I am bound to show
myself because the highest point of my self-will is to kill myself with my
own hands....”
“‘God is necessary and so must exist,’ said Kirillov.
“‘Well, that’s all right then,’ encouraged Pyotr Stepanovitch.
“‘But I know He doesn’t and can’t.’
“‘That’s more likely.’
“‘Surely you must understand that a man with two such ideas can’t go
on living?’
“‘Must shoot himself, you mean?’

“‘Surely you understand that one might shoot oneself for that alone?’
“‘But you won’t be the only one to kill yourself: there are lots of
suicides.’
“‘With good cause! But to do it without any cause at all, simply for self-
will, I am the only one.’
“‘He won’t shoot himself,’ flashed across Pyotr Stepanovitch’s mind
again.
“‘Do you know,’ he observed irritably, ‘if I were in your place, I should
kill someone else to show my self-will, not myself. You might be of use. I’ll
tell you whom, if you are not afraid. Then you needn’t shoot yourself to-
day, perhaps. We may come to terms.’”⁠[129]
For a moment Pyotr Stepanovitch dreams, in the event of Kirillov’s
refusing to carry out his plan of self-destruction, of using him as the
instrument to murder Shatov, instead of merely imputing the crime to him.
“‘To kill someone else would be the lowest point of self-will, and you
should show your whole soul in that. I am not you; I want the highest point,
and I’ll kill myself.... I am bound to show my unbelief,’ said Kirillov,
walking about the room. ‘I have no higher idea than disbelief in God. I have
all the history of mankind on my side. Man has done nothing but invent
God so as to go on living, and not kill himself: that’s the whole of universal
history up till now. I am the first one in the whole history of mankind who
would not invent God.’”⁠[130]
Do not forget Dostoevsky’s Christianity is real. What he reveals in
Kirillov’s declaration is again a case of moral bankruptcy. Dostoevsky, I
repeat, has visions of salvation only through renunciation. But a fresh idea
has crept in to complicate his theory: to illuminate it, I must have recourse
once more to William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell.
“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” In order that we might
be spared foolishness, others consented to foolishness before us.
Into Kirillov’s half-mad brain enters the idea of sacrifice: “I will begin
and open the door and save—mankind.”
If it is necessary that Kirillov be abnormal in order to entertain such
ideas—ideas moreover which Dostoevsky does not unreservedly sanction
since they betoken insubordination—there is none the less a particle of truth
in his conception, and if it is necessary that Kirillov be abnormal in order to
entertain such ideas, it is that we also may have them in our day, yet be in
our right mind.

“‘So at last you understand!’ cried Kirillov rapturously. ‘So it can be
understood if even a fellow like you understands. Do you understand now
that salvation for all consists in proving this idea to every one? Who will
prove it? I! I can’t understand how an atheist could know that there is no
God and not kill himself on the spot. To recognize that there is no God, and
not to recognize at the same instant that one is God oneself is an absurdity,
else one would certainly kill oneself. If you recognize it, you are sovereign,
and then you won’t kill yourself, but live in the greatest glory. But one, the
first, must kill himself, for else who will begin and prove it? So I must
certainly kill myself, to begin and prove it. Now I am only a God against
my will, and I am unhappy, because I am bound to assert my will. All are
unhappy because all are afraid to express their will. Man has hitherto been
so unhappy and so poor because he has been afraid to assert his will up to
the highest point, and has shown his self-will only in little things, like a
schoolboy.... But I will assert my will, I am bound to believe that I don’t
believe. I will begin and will make an end of it and open the door, and save
—mankind. For three years I’ve been seeking the attribute of my Godhead
and I’ve found it; the attribute of my Godhead is self-will. That’s all I can
do to prove in the highest point my independence and my new terrible
freedom. For it is very terrible, and I am killing myself to prove my
independence and my new terrible freedom.’”⁠[131]
Blasphemous as Kirillov’s words may appear, rest assured that
Dostoevsky, in drawing his figure, was possessed by the idea of Christ, by
the necessity of the Crucifixion as a sacrifice to redeem mankind. If Christ
had to be offered up, was it not that we, Christians, might be such without
dying His death? “If Thou be Christ, save Thyself!” If Christ had saved
Himself, mankind would have been lost: to save it, He surrendered His own
life.
These few lines of Dostoevsky’s, taken from his Essay on the
Bourgeoisie, throw fresh light on Kirillov’s figure.
“Be clear as to my meaning! Voluntary sacrifice, offered consciously
and without constraint, the sacrifice of the individual for the good of
mankind, is to my mind the mark of personality in its noblest and highest
development, of perfect self-control—the absolute expression of free will.
To offer one’s life for others, to suffer for others on the cross or at the stake,
is possible only when there is a powerful development of the personality. A
strongly-developed personality, conscious of its right to be such, having

cast out fear, cannot use itself, cannot be used except in sacrifice for others,
that these become like unto itself, self-determinate and happy. It is Nature’s
law, and mankind tends to reach it.”⁠[132]
At last you see why behind Kirillov’s talk, which seemed at first hearing
somewhat incoherent, we succeed in discerning what was the philosophy of
Dostoevsky himself.
I am conscious how far I am from having exhausted the teaching that
can be found in his books. I insist once more on the fact that I have sought,
consciously or unconsciously, what had most intimate connection with my
own ideas. Others no doubt will be able to discern different things. And
now that I am come to the end of my last paper, you are awaiting, I am sure,
a conclusion of some kind from me. Whither does Dostoevsky lead us?
What precisely is his teaching?
Some will say that he leads us straight to Bolshevism, although they
know the horror Dostoevsky professed for anarchy. The whole of The
Possessed prophesies the revolution of which Russia is at present in the
throes. But every man who, in defiance of existing systems, contributes new
tables of values is bound to seem, in the eyes of the conservative, an
anarchist. Conservative and nationalist, deigning to see no more than what
is chaotic in Dostoevsky, conclude he can be of no service whatsoever to us.
To which my reply is that their opposition seems to do great hurt to the
genius of France. By our unwillingness to accept anything foreign unless it
reflects our system and logic, our whole likeness, in short, we err most
grievously. His conception of beauty happens to differ from our
Mediterranean standards, and were the divergence even greater, of what use
would our national genius be, how could we apply our logic practically,
unless in instances which clamour for regulation? In meditating none but
her own likeness, the reflection of her past, France is exposed to a mortal
danger. Let me explain my meaning as accurately and temperately as
possible. It is well that France should have conservative elements reacting
and taking a stand against what savours of foreign invasion. But what
justifies the existence of these elements if not this fresh contribution
without which French culture would ere long be nothing but a hollow form,
a hardened shell? What do they know of France’s genius? What do we
know, except its past? It is the same with national feeling as with the
Church. I mean the conservative elements often mete out to genius the same

treatment as the Church to her saints at times. Many who were rejected,
repulsed, denied in the name of tradition, are become its very corner-stones.
My opinion of intellectual protectionism I have often voiced: I believe it
presents a great peril; on the other hand, any essay in intellectual
denationalization involves a risk no less considerable. I am merely
expressing what was Dostoevsky’s finding likewise. There never was an
author more Russian in the strictest sense of the word and withal so
universally European. Because it is essentially Russian, his humanity is all-
embracing and touches each one of us personally.
“Veteran European Russian” he chose to describe himself. I shall let
Versilov of A Raw Youth develop Dostoevsky’s idea this time!
“The highest Russian thought is the reconciliation of ideas, and who in
the whole world could understand such a thought at that time? I was a
solitary wanderer: I am not speaking of myself personally—it’s the Russian
idea I’m speaking of. There all was strife and logic; there the Frenchman
was nothing but a Frenchman, the German nothing but a German, and this
more intensely so than at any time in their history. Consequently never had
the Frenchman done so much harm to France, or the German to Germany,
as just at that time! In these days in all Europe there was not one European!
I alone of all the vitriol-throwers could have told them to their face that
their Tuileries was a mistake. And I alone among the avenging reactionists
could have told them that the Tuileries, although a crime, was none the less
logical. And that, my boy, was because I, as a Russian, was the only
European in Russia. I am not talking of the whole Russian idea....
“Europe has created a noble type of Frenchman, of Englishman, and of
German, but of the man of the future she scarcely knows at present. And, I
fancy, so far she does not want to know. And that one can well imagine;
they are not free, and we are free. I, with my Russian melancholy, was the
only one free in Europe.... Take note, my dear, of a strange fact: every
Frenchman can serve not only his France, but humanity, only on condition
that he remains French to the utmost possible degree, and it’s the same for
the Englishman and the German. Only to the Russian, even in our day, has
been vouchsafed the capacity to become most of all Russian only when he
is most European, and this is true even in our day, that is, long before the
millennium has been reached.”⁠[133]
But, to offset this declaration and show how acutely conscious
Dostoevsky was of the danger to any country in too marked

europeanization, I must read you this remarkable passage from The
Possessed:
“‘Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a
secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be till the end
of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force which sways and
dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and inexplicable; that
force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the
same time it denies that end. It is the force of persistent assertion of one’s
own existence, and a denial of death. It’s the spirit of life, as the Scriptures
call it, the river of living water, the drying up of which is threatened in the
Apocalypse. It’s the æsthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the
ethical principle with which they identify it, “the seeking for God,” as I call
it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and
at every period of its existence, is only the seeking for its God, who must be
its own God, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic
personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has
never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had one common god,
but each has always had its own. It’s a sign of the decay of nations when
they begin to have gods in common. When gods are common to several
nations the gods are dying and the faith in them, together with the nations
themselves. The stronger a people, the more individual their God. There
never has been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good
and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own
good and evil. When the same conception of good and evil become
prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very
distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear.⁠[134]... These are
your own words, Stavrogin.... I haven’t altered anything of your ideas, or
even of your words, not a syllable.’
“‘I don’t agree that you’ve not altered anything,’ Stavrogin observed
cautiously. ‘You accepted them with ardour, and in your ardour have
transformed them unconsciously. The very fact that you reduce God to a
simple attribute of nationality....’
“He suddenly began watching Shatov with intense and peculiar
attention, not so much his words as himself.
“‘I reduce God to an attribute of nationality?’ cried Shatov. ‘On the
contrary, I raise the people to God. And has it ever been otherwise? The
people is the body of God. Every people is only a people so long as it has

its own God and excludes all other gods on earth irreconcilably, so long as
it believes that by its God it will conquer and drive out of the world all
other gods. Such, from the beginning of time, has been the belief of all great
nations, all, anyway, who have been specially remarkable, all who have
been leaders of humanity. There is no going against facts. The Jews lived
only to await the coming of the true God and left the world the true God.
The Greeks deified nature and bequeathed the world their religion, that is,
philosophy and art. Rome deified the people in the State, and bequeathed
the idea of the State to the nations. France throughout her long history was
only the incarnation and development of the Roman God....
“‘If a great people does not believe that the truth is only to be found in
itself (in itself alone and in it exclusively), if it does not believe that it alone
is fit and destined to raise up and save all the rest by its truth, it would at
once sink into being ethnographical material, and not a great people. A
really great people can never accept a secondary part in the history of
humanity, nor even one of the first, but will have the first. A nation which
loses this belief ceases to be a nation.’”⁠[135]
And by the way of corollary, we have Stavrogin’s reflection which
might be a fitting conclusion: “An individual out of touch with his country
has lost God.”
What would Dostoevsky think of Russia to-day and of her people? It is
a painful speculation.... Did he apprehend, was he able to foresee her
ghastly torments?
In The Possessed we find all the seeds of Bolshevism. You need only
listen to Shigalev’s exposition of his theory and the admission he makes at
its close:
“I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is a direct
contradiction to the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited
freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”⁠[136] And that loathsome Pyotr
Stepanovitch Verhovensky exults: “There’s going to be such an upset as the
world has never seen before.... Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness,
the earth will weep for its old gods.”⁠[137]
Imprudent, dishonest even, I admit, to impute to the author himself the
thoughts expressed by the characters in his novels or tales. But we know
this was Dostoevsky’s medium of expression, often utilizing a colourless
individual to formulate one of his cherished truths. We seem to hear him

speak from the lips of a secondary character in The Eternal Husband when
the “malady of the age” is mentioned.
“To be a good citizen is better than being in aristocratic society. I say
that because in Russia, nowadays, one doesn’t know whom to respect.
You’ll agree that it’s a serious malady of the age, when people don’t know
whom to respect, isn’t it?”⁠[138]
I am sure that beyond the darkness enveloping tortured Russia to-day
Dostoevsky would still see the light of hope. Perhaps too he would think
(the idea appears several times in his novels and in his letters) that Russia is
offering herself in sacrifice like Kirillov, and for the salvation, perhaps, of
the rest of Europe, and of humanity.

FOOTNOTES
[31] House of the Dead, p. 240.
[32] Bienstock, p. 449. Letter to Mlle. Guérassimov, Petersburg, March 7, 1877.
[33] Bienstock, p. 94. Letter to his brother Michael, spring of 1847.
[34] Bienstock, p. 98. Letter to his brother Michael, from the fortress, July 18,
1849.
[35] Bienstock, p. 100. Letter to his brother Michael, from the fortress, August
27, 1849.
[36] Bienstock, p. 101. Letter to his brother Michael, from the fortress,
September 14, 1849.
[37] Bienstock, p. 103. Letter to his brother Michael, from the fortress,
December 22, 1849.
[38] A. P. Miliukov in his Reminiscences, 1881.
[39] See Mayne, pp. 51 sqq.
[40] The Decembrists.
[41] Mayne, pp. 51–65.
[42] Bienstock, pp. 104–105. Letter to his brother Michael, Semipalatinsk, July
30, 1854.
[43] Bienstock, p. 106. Letter to his brother Andrey, Semipalatinsk, November 6,
1854.
[44] Bienstock, p. 107. Letter to his brother Andrey, Semipalatinsk, November 6,
1854.
[45] Bienstock, pp. 233–235. Letter to Baron Alexander Wrangel, Petersburg,
March 31, 1865.
[46] Bienstock, p. 239. Letter to Baron Alexander Wrangel, Petersburg, April 14,
1865.
[47] Crime and Punishment, p. 492.
[48] The Idiot, pp. 217–220.
[49] See Nouvelle Revue Française, June-July, 1922, and Stavrogin’s
Confession, translated, with introductory and explanatory notes, by S. S.

Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf, 1922. (Translator’s note.)
[50] The Possessed, p. 172.
[51] The Possessed, p. 175.
[52] The Possessed, p. 175.
[53] A Raw Youth, p. 327.
[54] Notes from Underground, pp. 86–87.
[55] Notes from Underground, pp. 88–89.
[56] “However adventurous the Russian genius,” wrote Boris de Schloezer in the
Nouvelle Revue Française, February, 1922, “it characteristically chooses a firm
foundation in concrete fact and living reality: this basis once assured, it launches
out into speculation of the most abstract and daring nature, returning in the end,
rich with the gathered spoils of thought, to the fact and reality from which it
started and in which it is perfected.”
[57] E.g. Lebedyev in The Idiot. See Appendix (2), the admirable chapter
describing Lebedyev’s enjoyment in torturing General Ivolgin.
[58] The Possessed, p. 495.
[59] A Raw Youth, p. 507.
[60] The Possessed, pp. 489–490.
[61] A Raw Youth, p. 215.
[62] See the Journal.
[63] Garnett, Vol. XI.
[64] Garnett, Vol. X.
[65] Bienstock and Nau, pp. 99–100.
[66] Bienstock and Nau, pp. 176–181.
[67] Bienstock and Nau, pp. 294 et seq., 450–452.
[68] Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici,
1911, p. 104.
[69] Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici,
1911, pp. 64–65.
[70] Bienstock, p. 367. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, March 24, 1870.
[71] Bienstock, p. 374. Letter to A. N. Maïkov, Dresden, March 25, 1870.
[72] Nouvelle Revue Française, February, 1922, pp. 176–177.
[73] Crime and Punishment, p. 369.
[74] A Raw Youth, pp. 205–206.
[75] A Raw Youth, p. 503. Compare this other passage (ibid., p. 548) dealing
with one of these pathological cases I mentioned a little space ago. “Versilov can
have had no definite aim, and I believe, indeed, he did not reflect on the matter
at all, but acted under the influence of a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. But
the theory of actual madness I cannot accept, especially as he is not in the least
mad now. But the ‘second self’ I do accept unquestionably. What is a second self
exactly? The second self, according to a medical book, written by an expert,
which I purposely read afterwards, is nothing else than the first stage of serious
mental derangement, which may lead to something very bad.”
[76] The Possessed, p. 635.
[77] Journaux Intimes, p. 57.
[78] André Gide, Morceaux Choisis, pp. 102–103.
[79] The Idiot, pp. 587–588.
[80] The Idiot, p. 519.
[81] A Raw Youth, p. 253.
[82] Crime and Punishment, p. 492.

[83] The Idiot, p. 616.
[84] Bienstock, pp. 319–320.
[85] Bienstock, p. 343. Letter to A. N. Maïkov, Dresden, October 27, 1869.
[86] The Eternal Husband, p. 2.
[87] The Eternal Husband, pp. 35–36.
[88] The Eternal Husband, p. 75.
[89] Vauvenargues, Maxim xxxix; Œuvres, p. 377.
[90] The Eternal Husband, pp. 65–66.
[91] The Eternal Husband, pp. 116–117.
[92] The Eternal Husband, pp. 117–118.
[93] The Eternal Husband, p. 124.
[94] The Eternal Husband, pp. 124–126.
[95] Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, translated by Haldane and
Kemp; Bk. IV, p. 457.
[96] A Raw Youth, p. 68.
[97] A Raw Youth, p. 130.
[98] The Idiot, p. 225.
[99] The Possessed, p. 219.
[100] The Possessed, pp. 220, 221.
[101] The Possessed, p. 580.
[102] Crime and Punishment, pp. 236, 237.
[103] Crime and Punishment, p. 238.
[104] Crime and Punishment, p. 377.
[105] Crime and Punishment, p. 378.
[106] Crime and Punishment, p. 467.
[107] Crime and Punishment, p. 272.
[108] The Possessed, pp. 492, 493.
[109] The Possessed, pp. 498, 499.
[110] Mayne, p. 198. Letter to N. N. Strakhov, Dresden, October 9, 1870.
[111] The Possessed, pp. 634, 635.
[112] Crime and Punishment, p. 14.
[113] The Brothers Karamazov, p. 110.
[114] The Possessed, p. 219.
[115] The Possessed, p. 220.
[116] The Possessed, p. 221.
[117] The Possessed, p. 221.
[118] The Possessed, p. 133.
[119] The Idiot, p. 225.
[120] The Possessed, p. 219.
[121] The Possessed, pp. 554–5.
[122] The Possessed, p. 555.
[123] André Gide, Morceaux Choisis, p. 101, §1.
[124] Dr. Binet-Sanglé is the author of a blasphemous work to which he has
given the title La Folie de Jésus-Christ: he attempts to deny the importance of
Christ and of Christianity by showing that Christ was mad and a degenerate.
[125] The Possessed, p. 577.
[126] The Possessed, pp. 383, 385.
[127] The Possessed, p. 540.
[128] The Possessed, p. 275.
[129] The Possessed, pp. 579, 580.

[130] The Possessed, p. 580.
[131] The Possessed, pp. 582, 583.
[132] Bienstock, pp. 540–2.
[133] A Raw Youth, pp. 462–4.
[134] Reclus, Geography, XIV, 931. “The island populations of Oceania are fast
dying out, for they have lost the body of ideas which governed their actions, and
lack a common measure to judge good and evil.”
[135] The Possessed, pp. 232–234.
[136] The Possessed, p. 376.
[137] The Possessed, p. 395.
[138] The Eternal Husband, p. 128.

APPENDIX

I

“AND now I will tell two anecdotes to wind up my account of the ‘idea,’
that it may not hinder my story again.
“In July, two months before I came to St. Petersburg, when my time was
all my own, Marie Ivanovna asked me to go to see an old maiden lady who
was staying in the Troitsky suburb to take her a message of no interest for
my story. Returning the same day, I noticed in the railway carriage an
unattractive-looking young man, not very poorly though grubbily dressed,
with a pimply face and a muddy dark complexion. He distinguished himself
by getting out at every station, big and little, to have a drink. Towards the
end of the journey he was surrounded by a merry throng of very low
companions. One merchant, also a little drunk, was particularly delighted at
the young man’s power of drinking incessantly without becoming drunk.
Another person, who was awfully pleased with him, was a very stupid
fellow who talked a great deal. He was wearing European dress and smelt
most unsavoury—he was a footman, as I found out afterwards: this fellow
got quite friendly with the young man who was drinking and, every time the
train stopped, roused him with the invitation, ‘It’s time for a drop of vodka,’
and they got out with their arms round each other. The young man who
drank scarcely said a word, but yet more and more companions joined him.
He only listened to their chatter, grinning incessantly with a drivelling
snigger, and only from time to time, always unexpectedly, brought out a
sound something like ‘Ture-lure-loo!’ while he put his finger up to his nose
in a very comical way. This diverted the merchant, and the footman and all
of them, and they burst into a very loud and free and easy laughter. It is
sometimes impossible to understand why people laugh. I joined them, too,

and I don’t know why, the young man attracted me too, perhaps by his very
open disregard for the generally accepted conventions and proprieties. I
didn’t see, in fact, that he was simply a fool. Anyway, I got on to friendly
terms with him at once, and as I got out of the train, I learnt from him that
he would be in the Tverskoy Boulevard between eight and nine. It appeared
that he had been a student. I went to the boulevard, and this was the
diversion he taught me. We walked together up and down the boulevards,
and, a little later, as soon as we noticed a respectable woman walking along
the street, if there were no one else near, we fastened upon her. Without
uttering a word we walked one on each side of her, and with an air of
perfect composure, as though we didn’t see her, began to carry on a most
unseemly conversation. We called things by their names, preserving
unruffled countenances as though it were the natural thing to do; we entered
into such subtleties in our description of all sorts of filth and obscenity as
the nastiest mind of the lewdest debauchee could scarcely have conceived.
(I had, of course, acquired all this knowledge at the boarding school, before
I went to the Grammar School, though I knew only words, nothing of the
reality.) The woman was dreadfully frightened, and made haste to try and
get away, but we quickened our pace too, and went on in the same way. Our
victim, of course, could do nothing; it would be no use to cry out, there
were no spectators; besides, it would be a strange thing to complain of. I
repeated this diversion for eight days. I can’t think how I can have liked
doing it; although, indeed, I didn’t like doing it—I simply did it. At first I
thought it original, as something outside everyday conventions and
conditions, besides, I couldn’t endure women. I once told the student that in
his Confessions Jean Jacques Rousseau describes how, as a youth, he used
to behave indecently to women. The student responded with his ‘Ture-lure-
loo!’ I noticed that he was extraordinarily ignorant, and that his interests
were astonishingly limited. There was no trace of any latent idea such as I
hoped to find in him. Instead of originality, I found nothing but a wearisome
monotony. I disliked him more and more. The end came quite unexpectedly.
One night when it was quite dark, we persecuted a girl who was quickly and
timidly walking along the boulevard. She was very young, perhaps sixteen,
or even less, very tidily and modestly dressed, possibly a working girl
hurrying home to an old widowed mother with other children; there is no
need to be sentimental though. The girl listened for some time, and hurried
fast as she could with her head bowed and her veil drawn over her face,

frightened and trembling. But suddenly she stood still, threw back her veil,
showing, as far as I remember, a thin but pretty face, and cried with flashing
eyes:
“‘Oh, what scoundrels you are!’
“She may have been on the verge of tears, but something different
happened. Lifting her thin little hand, she gave the student a slap in the face
which could not have been more dexterously delivered. It did come with a
smack! He would have rushed at her, swearing, but I held him back, and the
girl had time to run away. We began quarrelling at once. I told him all that I
had been saving up against him in those days. I told him that he was the
paltriest commonplace fool without the trace of an idea. He swore at me....
(I had once explained to him that I was illegitimate.) Then we spat at each
other, and I’ve never seen him since. I felt frightfully vexed with myself
that evening, but not so much the next day, and by the day after that had
quite forgotten it. And though I sometimes thought of the girl again, it was
only casually, for a moment. It was only after I’d been a fortnight in
Petersburg I suddenly recalled the whole scene. I remembered it, and I was
suddenly so ashamed that tears of shame literally ran down my cheeks. I
was wretched the whole evening, and all that night, and I am rather
miserable about it now. I could not understand at first how I could have
sunk to such a depth of degradation, and still less how I could have
forgotten it without feeling shame or remorse. It is only now that I
understand what was at the root of it; it was all due to my ‘idea.’... The
‘idea’ comforted me in disgrace and insignificance. But all the nasty things
I did took refuge, as it were, under the ‘idea.’ It, so to speak, smoothed over
everything, but it also put a mist before my eyes, and such a misty
understanding of things and events may, of course, be a great hindrance to
the ‘idea’ itself, to say nothing of other things.
“Now for another anecdote.
“On the 1st of April last year, Marie Ivanovna was keeping her name
day; some visitors, though only a few, came for the evening. Suddenly
Agrafena rushed in, out of breath, announcing that a baby was crying in the
passage before the kitchen, and that she didn’t know what to do. We were
all excited at the news. We went out and saw a bark basket, and in the
basket a three- or four-week-old child, crying. I picked up the basket and
took it into the kitchen. Then I immediately found a folded note:

“‘Gracious benefactors, show kind charity to the girl christened
Arina, and we will join with her to send our tears to the Heavenly
Throne for you for ever, and congratulate you on your name day.
“‘Persons unknown to you.’

“Then Nikolay Semyonovitch, for whom I have such a respect, greatly
disappointed me. He drew a very long face, and decided to send the child at
once to the Foundling Home. I felt very sad. They lived frugally and had no
children and Nikolay Semyonovitch was always glad of it. I carefully took
the little Arina out of the basket and held her up under the arms. The basket
had that sour, pungent odour characteristic of a small child which has not
been washed for a long time. I opposed Nikolay Semyonovitch and
suddenly announced that I would keep the child at my expense. In spite of
his gentleness he protested with some severity, and, though he ended by
joking, he adhered to his intention in regard to the foundling. I got my way,
however. In the same block of buildings, but in a different wing, lived a
very poor carpenter, an elderly man, given to drink, but his wife, a very
healthy and still youngish woman, had only just lost a baby, and what is
more, the only child she had had in eight years of marriage, also a girl, and
by a strange piece of luck also called Arina. I call it good luck, because
while we were arguing in the kitchen, the woman, hearing of what had
happened, ran in to look at the child, and when she learned that it was called
Arina, she was greatly touched. She still had milk, and unfastening her
dress, she put the baby to her breast. I began persuading her to take the
child home with her, saying I would pay for it every month. She was afraid
her husband would not allow it, but she took it for the night. Next morning,
her husband consented to her keeping it for eight roubles a month, and I
immediately paid him for the first month in advance. He at once spent the
money on drink. Nikolay Semyonovitch, still with a strange smile, agreed
to guarantee that the money would be paid regularly every month. I would
have given my sixty roubles into Nikolay Semyonovitch’s keeping as
security, but he did not take it. He knew, however, that I had the money, and
trusted me. Our momentary quarrel was smoothed over by this delicacy on
his part. Marie Ivanovna said nothing, but wondered at my undertaking
such a responsibility. I particularly appreciated their delicacy in refraining
from the slightest jest at my expense, but on the contrary, taking the matter
with proper seriousness. I used to run over to the carpenter’s wife three

times a day, and at the end of the week I slipped an extra three roubles into
her hand without her husband’s knowledge. For another three I bought a
little quilt and swaddling clothes. But ten days later little Arina fell ill. I
called in a doctor at once, he wrote a prescription, and we were up all night
tormenting the mite with horrid medicine. Next day he declared that he had
been sent for too late, and answered my entreaties—which I fancy were
more like reproaches—by saying with majestic evasiveness: ‘I am not
God.’ The baby’s little tongue and lips and whole mouth were covered with
a minute white rash and towards evening she died, gazing at me with her
big black eyes as though she understood already. I don’t know why I never
thought to take a photograph of the dead baby. But will it be believed that I
cried that evening, and, in fact, I howled as I had never let myself do before,
and Marie Ivanovna had to try to comfort me, again without the least
mockery either on her part or on Nikolay Semyonovitch’s. The carpenter
made a little coffin, and Marie Ivanovna finished it with a frill and a pretty
little pillow, while I bought flowers and strewed them on the baby. So they
carried away my poor little blossom, whom it will hardly be believed I can’t
forget even now. A little afterwards, however, this sudden adventure made
me reflect seriously. Little Arina had not cost me much, of course, the
coffin, the burial, the doctor, the flowers, and the payment of the carpenter’s
wife came altogether to thirty roubles. As I was going to Petersburg I made
up this sum from the forty roubles sent to me by Versilov for the journey
and from the sale of various articles before my departure, so that my capital
remained intact. But I thought: ‘If I am going to be turned aside like this, I
shan’t get far.’ The affair with the student showed that the ‘idea’ might
absorb me till it blurred my impressions and drew me away from the
realities of life. The incident with little Arina proved, on the contrary, that
no ‘idea’ was strong enough to absorb me, at least so completely that I
should not stop short in the face of an overwhelming fact and sacrifice to it
at once all that I had done for the ‘idea’ by years of labour. Both
conclusions were nevertheless true.”⁠[139]

II

“‘In what way can I be of use to you, honoured prince, since anyway
you ... called me just now,’ he said at last after a brief silence.

“‘Why, I asked you about the general,’ Myshkin, who had been musing
for a moment, answered hurriedly, ‘and ... in regard to that theft you told me
about.’
“‘In regard to what?’
“‘Why, as though you don’t understand me now! Oh dear, Lukyan
Timofeyitch, you’re always acting a part! The money, the money, the four
hundred roubles you lost, that day in your pocket-book, and about which
you came to tell me in the morning, as you were setting off for Petersburg.
Do you understand at last?’
“‘Ah, you’re talking about that four hundred roubles!’ drawled
Lebedyev, as though he had only just guessed. ‘I thank you, prince, for your
sincere sympathy: it is too flattering for me, but ... I’ve found it some time
since.’
“‘Found it? Ah, thank God!’
“‘That exclamation is most generous on your part, for four hundred
roubles is no small matter for a poor man who lives by his hard work, with
a large family of motherless children....’
“‘But I didn’t mean that! Of course, I am glad you found the money,’
Myshkin corrected himself quickly, ‘but how did you find it?’
“‘Very simply. I found it under the chair on which my coat had been
hung, so that the pocket-book must have slipped out of the pocket on to the
floor!’
“‘Under the chair? It’s impossible! Why, you told me yourself you had
hunted in every corner. How was it you came to overlook the most obvious
place?’
“‘I should think I did look! I remember only too well how I looked! I
crawled on all fours, felt the place with my hands, moving back the chairs
because I couldn’t trust my own eyes: I saw there was nothing there, for the
place was as smooth and empty as my hands, and yet I went on fumbling.
You always see that weakness in anyone who is very anxious to find
anything, when anything serious and important has been lost. A man sees
there’s nothing there, the place is empty, and yet he peeps into it a dozen
times.’
“‘Yes, I dare say; only, how was it seen?... I still don’t understand,’
muttered Myshkin, disconcerted. ‘You told me before it wasn’t there, and
you had looked in that place, and then it suddenly turned up!’
“‘And then it suddenly turned up.’

“Myshkin looked strangely at Lebedyev. ‘And the general?’ he asked
suddenly. ‘What about the general?...’ Lebedyev seemed at a loss again.
“‘Oh dear! I ask you what did the general say when you found the
pocket-book under the chair? You looked for it together, you know.’
“‘We did look together before. But that time, I confess, I held my
tongue, and preferred not to tell him that the pocket-book had been found
by me and alone.’
“‘But ... why? And the money—was it all there?’
“‘I opened the pocket-book. The money was untouched, every rouble of
it.’
“‘You might have come to tell me,’ Myshkin observed thoughtfully.
“‘I was afraid to disturb you, prince, in your personal and, so to say,
absorbing interests, and besides, I made as though I had found nothing. I
opened the pocket-book and looked at it, then I shut it and put it back under
the chair.’
“‘But what for?’
“‘Oh, n-nothing, from curiosity,’ chuckled Lebedyev, rubbing his hands.
“‘Then it has been lying there since the day before yesterday?’
“‘Oh, no; it only lay there for a day and a night. You see it was partly
that I wanted the general to find it. For since I had found it, why should not
the general notice the object, which lay conspicuous under the chair, so to
speak, catching the eye.
“‘I lifted that chair several times and put it so that the pocket-book was
completely in view, but the general simply didn’t notice it, and so it went on
for twenty-four hours. He seems to be extraordinarily unobservant now, and
there’s no making him out. He talks, tells stories, laughs, chuckles, and then
flies into a violent temper with me. I don’t know why. At last, as we were
going out of the room, I left the door open on purpose; he hesitated, would
have said something, most likely he was uneasy about the pocket-book with
such a sum of money in it, but suddenly flew into an awful rage and said
nothing. Before we had gone two steps in the street, he left me and walked
away in the other direction. We only met in the evening in the tavern.’
“‘But in the end you did take the pocket-book from under the chair?’
“‘No, it vanished from under the chair that same night.’
“‘Then where is it now?’
“‘Oh, here,’ cried Lebedyev, laughing suddenly, drawing himself up to
his full height and looking amiably at Myshkin. ‘It suddenly turned up here,

in the lappet of my coat. Here; won’t you look, feel?’
“The left lappet of the coat had indeed been formed into something like
a bag in front, in the most conspicuous place, and it was clear at once to the
touch that there was a leather pocket-book there that had fallen down from a
torn pocket.
“‘I took it out and looked. The money’s all there. I dropped it in again,
and so I’ve been walking about since yesterday morning. I carry it in my
coat and it knocks against my legs.’
“‘And you take no notice of it?’
“‘And I take no notice of it. He-he! And would you believe it, honoured
prince, though the subject is not worthy of so much notice on your part, my
pockets were always perfectly good, and then a hole like that, all of a
sudden, in one night! I began to look at it more curiously; it’s as though
someone had cut it with a penknife. Isn’t it almost incredible?’
“‘And ... the general?’
“‘He’s been angry all day; both yesterday and to-day: fearfully ill-
humoured. At one time he’d be beaming and hilarious till he began to pay
me compliments, then he’d be sentimental to tears, then suddenly angry: so
much so that I’d be frightened really, for I’m not a military man, after all.
We were sitting yesterday in the tavern, and the lappet of my coat stood out
as though by chance, in the most prominent way: a perfect mountain. He
looked at it on the sly and was angry. He hasn’t looked me straight in the
face for a long time, unless he’s very drunk or sentimental, but yesterday he
gave me a look that made a shudder run down my spine. To-morrow,
though, I mean to find the pocket-book, but I shall have an evening’s fun
with him before then.’
“‘Why are you tormenting him so?’ cried Myshkin.
“‘I’m not tormenting him, prince, I’m not tormenting him,’ Lebedyev
replied with warmth. ‘I sincerely love and—respect him; and now, whether
you believe it or not, he’s dearer to me than ever. I have come to appreciate
him even more.’
“‘You love him and you torment him like this! Why, by the very act of
putting the lost pocket-book where it could be seen under the chair and in
your coat, by that alone he shows you that he doesn’t want to deceive you,
but with your open-hearted simplicity asks your forgiveness. Do you hear?
He’s asking your forgiveness. So he relies on the delicacy of your feelings,

so he believes in your friendship for him. And yet you reduce to such
humiliation a man like that—a most honest man!’
“‘Most honest prince, most honest.’ Lebedyev assented, with sparkling
eyes. ‘And you, most noble prince, are the only person capable of uttering
that true word about him! For that, I am devoted to you, and ready to
worship you, though I am rotten to the core with vices of all sorts! That’s
settled it! I will find the pocket-book now, at once, not to-morrow. Look, I
will take it before your eyes; here it is. There’s the money, untouched here.
Take it, most noble prince, take care of it till to-morrow. To-morrow or next
day I’ll have it. And, you know, prince, it’s evident that it must have been
lying somewhere in my garden, hidden under some stone, the first night it
was lost. What do you think?’
“‘Mind you don’t tell him directly to his face that you’ve found the
pocket-book. Let him simply see that there’s nothing in the lappet of your
coat, and he’ll understand.’
“‘You think so? Wouldn’t it be better to tell him I have found it, and to
pretend I had not guessed about it till now?’
“‘N-no,’ Myshkin pondered, ‘n-no; it’s too late for that now. That’s
more risky. You’d really better not speak of it. Be kind to him, but—don’t
show too much, and—and—you know....’
“‘I know, prince, I know. That is, I know that I shan’t do it properly,
perhaps, for one needs to have a heart like yours to do it. Besides, he’s
irritable and prone to it himself, he has begun to treat me too superciliously
sometimes of late. One minute he is whimpering and embracing me, and
then he’ll suddenly begin to snub me, and sneer at me contemptuously, and
then I just show him the lappet on purpose. He-he! Good-bye, prince; for
it’s dear I’m keeping you and interrupting you in your most interesting
feelings, so to say....’
“‘But for goodness’ sake, the same secrecy as before.’
“‘Treading softly, treading softly!’
“But, though the matter was settled, Myshkin remained almost more
puzzled than before. He awaited with impatience his interview with the
general next day.”⁠[140]

FOOTNOTES

[139] A Raw Youth, pp. 88–93.
[140] The Idiot, pp. 490–494.

Tra n s c ri b e r ’s No t e s
Footnotes renumbered consecutively and moved to the end of their respective
chapters.
Obvious typographic errors silently corrected.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation kept as in the original.

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