Part 2

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.”