CHAPTER LXXXIV
THE DEAD-HOUSE
A dozen years ago in Holland, talking about Dostoievski with my friend Frederik van Eeden, I remarked that I had made several attempts, but had never been able to read one of his novels through. Van Eeden replied that Dostoievski was the world’s greatest novelist; and that is high praise, because van Eeden is a great novelist himself. Now, under the strain of the war, my old friend has turned into a Catholic mystic; and so I understand his passion for the dark Russian, another of those over-burdened spirits who despair of the human intellect, and seek refuge in that most powerful auto-suggestion known as God.
Feodor Dostoievski was born in a hospital, his father being a poor surgeon with a big family. As a child he knew cold and hunger, and was living in a garret when he wrote his first novel, “Poor People,” at the age of twenty-four. It is a picture of two suffering, will-less creatures; and so genuine, so completely “lived,” that it made an instant impression.
Its author was drawn into literary circles--which in those days meant also revolutionary circles. In his feeble way he took up the ideas of Fourier; he attended some radical gatherings, and went so far as to identify himself with a printing press. The group were arrested, and Dostoievski lay in a dungeon for many months, and finally with twenty companions was brought out upon a public square before a scaffold and prepared for death. At the last moment there came a reprieve from the tsar, but meantime one of the victims had gone insane. The shock to Dostoievski’s mind was such that he comes back to the incident again and again in his books.
He was sent to Siberia at hard labor; herded with common felons, beaten and tormented--in short, receiving exactly the same treatment now meted out to social idealists by the states of California and Washington, and recently by the United States government at Leavenworth. After a few years the tsar pardoned Dostoievski and impressed him into the army; he was allowed to come back to Russia after ten years, and wrote the story of his experiences in a book called “Memoirs of a Dead-House.”
Dostoievski now took up the life of a hack writer. He had a large following, but somebody else got the money; he was always in debt, his wife and children starving and freezing. He wrote at terrific speed and never stopped to revise. He was ill all the time, suffering an attack of epilepsy every ten days. All this is in his writing; his characters are drunkards, criminals, epileptics, idiots, and neurotics of every type. He enters into their souls, and makes every moment of their lives, every mood of their unhappy beings real to us.
His greatest novel is “Crime and Punishment”; telling the story of a student who, ambitious and starving, has an impulse to murder an old woman money-lender and rob her. He commits the crime, but is too much terrified to get the money; then he is pursued by remorse, and we follow him through his inner torments. He meets a young girl who has become a prostitute in order to save her family from starvation; she persuades him to give himself up to the police, and she follows him to Siberia, and together their souls are redeemed by love.
I am conscientious in my attitude toward literature, and when I find the critics raving over a great master, I feel obliged to read him. Some years ago, I was in a hospital, recuperating from an operation, and that seemed a good time to tackle an eight hundred-page volume, so I began Dostoievski’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” There are several of these brothers, also an old father, and all of them are drunk most of the time, and tangled up with a stupid prostitute. The old father has money, and so has the advantage over the sons, and apparently one of the sons is on the way to murdering him. To cheer you up while the climax is preparing, there is a monastery full of monks who hate one another like poison, and one venerable and lovable saint, in whose spirituality you are expected to find hope for Russia and mankind. But this saint dies, and the youngest Karamazov brother, who loves him, has his faith in God and his hope for humanity shattered forever, because the expected miracle does not happen--Father Zossima stinks like any other corpse!--That is as far as I got in the novel, and if you want to know the outcome, you will have to do your own reading.
This is called “realism”; but get my point clear, it is romantic and subjective to the highest degree; it is impassioned, even frenzied, propaganda. Dostoievski is an orthodox Eastern or Byzantine Christian; also he is a Slavophile, or mystical Russian patriot, believing that the Russian soul is something wonderful and special, having secret relationship with God. This relationship is the old mediaeval orgy of suffering and submission, a wallowing in repentance and self-abasement, the glorification of sores, boils, rags, lice, beggary, and bad smells. All degradation, if patiently endured, is penitential and holy, whereby the character is lifted to exalted mystical states. When the young student in “Crime and Punishment” awakens to the horror of having killed a human being, he does not decide to redeem himself by devoting his educated brain to some useful labor; no, he decides he must go to a police station and deliver himself into the hands of officials who are worse criminals than he. A government, itself the distilled essence of a billion hideous crimes, will send him to Siberia, so that he and his pious prostitute may endure ecstacies of torment.
We see this still more clearly in another novel, whose purpose is to reduce Christianity to idiocy. Do not take this for hyperbole or epigram; it is merely the statement of Dostoievski’s thesis. The book is called “The Idiot,” and the hero is an incarnation of that mystical, psycho-neurotic Christianity which finds redemption through abasement deliberately sought. You see, it is so easy to suffer, and it is so hard to think! It is so easy to give yourself up to epileptic tremblings and terrors, and call it God! Also, it appears to be easy for literary critics to take mental disease at its own valuation.
In the whole field of art there is no spiritual tragedy greater than Dostoievski’s. This man made an attempt in the cause of liberty, and the Tsardom made him into a martyr; but he came back, not to be a soldier of enlightenment, but to crawl in the dust and lick the hand which had lashed him. He came back as a propagandist of reaction, proclaiming a Russia redeemed by monks. Well, he had his way, and the redeeming monk appeared--Gregori Rasputin by name!
Mind you, I do not quarrel with Dostoievski because he portrayed the lost and abandoned, the hopelessly sick and tortured souls he knew. I do not object because his characters are feverish and hysterical, because they stare and glare and moan and cry and leap and tremble, because their knees shake and their teeth chatter and they have nightmares filling whole chapters. I am willing to read these things; but I want to read them from the point of view of a scientist who can interpret them, or of an economist who can remedy them; I do not want to read them as an apotheosis of idiocy. I do not want them composed and idealized to prove the divine nature of epilepsy.
And when I hear perfectly sane and comfortable bourgeois critics in the United States exalting this pathologic mysticism, I want to throw a brick-bat at them. Here, for example, is Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale University, telling us that “of all the masters of fiction both in Russia and elsewhere, Dostoievski is the most truly spiritual.” At the beginning of his essay he says that this novelist “was brought up on the Bible and the Christian religion. The teachings of the New Testament were with him almost innate ideas. Thus, although his parents could not give him wealth, or ease, or comfort, or health, they gave him something better than all four put together.”
“I think,” says Mrs. Ogi, “that you had better take a chapter off and deal with that.”
Says her husband: “I have a title already chosen--”
##