Great Russia/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII
DOSTOEVSKY AND THE RELIGION OF HUMAN SUFFERING
I
IT is one of the favourite methods of modern criticism which explains a writer's work and personality by his circumstances and surroundings. But there are some literary miracles which refuse to be explained. There are some writers who rise superior to circumstances, and who challenge their surroundings. The subject of the present chapter was preeminently such a writer. Dostoevsky seems to have been sent into the world by a special decree of Providence to assert the supremacy of the indomitable human spirit over adverse fate. Small and frail and haggard and miserably poor, he yet accomplished prodigies of labour. Diseased in mind and body, a bundle of twitching nerves, suffering from epilepsy, he yet preserved balance of judgment and sanity of doctrine. Sentenced to death, and the victim of a monstrous miscarriage of justice, he yet bore no ill-will against his judges, and he consistently vindicated the cause of law and order against revolution. Ill-used by his own country, he yet repaid that ill-usage with the most passionate tenderness. A martyr who endured every extremity of human suffering, he yet remained a cheerful and confirmed optimist. Take him all in all, Feodor Michaelovitch Dostoevsky, the gambler, the epileptic, the convict, stands out as the most pathetic and most Christ-like figure in Russian letters.
II
He was born in a Moscow hospital in 1821—the year of Napoleon's death—the son of a retired army doctor. Belonging to the impoverished nobility from whose ranks the Russian aristocracy are recruited, he was from his childhood inured to privation. He fought his way through the University, and he knew from personal experience the dire straits which he describes in "Crime and Punishment." At twenty-one years of age he emerged as a lieutenant of engineers, but only to resign his commission: he had already discovered his literary vocation. At twenty-three he wrote his first novel, "Poor Folk," which remains one of his best. In 1849, on the morrow of the Social Revolution which shook every throne of Europe, when Russia was in the clutches of the iron despotism of Nicholas I, he joined a debating club of political reformers. His adherence was purely platonic. He never took part in any plot, for there never was a less revolutionary temperament. Yet, through a grim irony of fate, he was implicated with thirty-six of his companions in a charge of conspiracy and sentenced to death. He was taken to the place of execution on a chill December morning. Standing on a raised platform with twenty-one fellow-prisoners, stripped to his shirt, with twenty-one degrees of frost, he had to listen for twenty minutes to the reading of the death sentence, with the soldiers lined in front of him and ready to shoot. At the last moment he was reprieved; but that cruel scene on that chill December morning remained a haunting obsession and coloured his imagination ever after.
The death sentence had been commuted into four years of hard labour in a Siberian convict station (described in "The House of the Dead"). He spent three more years in exile and three years as a private soldier, having married, in the meantime, the widow of one of his fellow-prisoners.
When he returned, in 1859, after ten years, his deliverance was but the beginning of a new life of ceaseless privation and suffering. Unpractical, improvident, generous, ruined by journalistic ventures, in the grip of epilepsy and of the moneylender, not a single day was he free from harassing cares, and twice he had to fly abroad to escape imprisonment for debt. When national recognition came at last, when his later books had made him the cynosure of the younger generation, it was too late. His constitution was irretrievably shattered. He died in 1881, one month before the assassination of the Tsar—a turning-point in Russian history. The funeral of Dostoevsky was the occasion of a demonstration unique perhaps in the history of literature. A procession of a hundred thousand mourners and spectators, princes of the Imperial Court, Cabinet Ministers, students, tradesmen, and artisans conducted to his last resting-place the former Siberian convict, the bankrupt journalist, the idol of the Russian people.
III
It is under such circumstances that Dostoevsky's novels were composed. An existence such as his would have broken the spirit of a Berserker, but Dostoevsky (to use his own expression) had the "vitality of a cat." We admire Charles Lamb, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Walter Scott for their gallant struggle with destiny; but what are the tragic episodes in their life's drama as compared with the lifelong tragedy of the Russian writer?
Yet, through twenty-five years of distress and disease, his literary activity continued unrelaxed. One novel succeeded another, all of them overloaded with human documents, some of them a thousand pages long, a thousand pages to be slowly pondered over during the interminable Russian winter evenings. And all those novels strike the same keynote of human misery. A martyr himself, he is the voice of Russian martyrs. The mere titles of his books—"Poor Folk," "The Insulted and Injured," "The Idiot," "The Possessed"—reveal the dreary monotony of the subject matter!
Yet Dostoevsky had not abandoned hope, for the depths of misery and degradation are illumined by faith in Christ and faith in humanity.
Even as his physical vitality resisted the onslaught of poverty and imprisonment, so did his moral vitality resist the onslaught of scepticism and rebellion. Again and again he repeated that his death sentence was the greatest blessing of his life; that it made him what he was, both as a man and as a writer. Dostoevsky, in the book in which he records his prison experiences, "The House of the Dead," has no word of bitterness against those who condemned him. It is difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to understand such meekness in the face of such oppression; but Dostoevsky was not an Anglo-Saxon—he was a Russian of the Russians. He did not believe in the West. Whereas Turgenev and the Liberals held that the only salvation for Russia was by imitation of European ideas, Dostoevsky believed that Russia had a future of her own, and that this future could only be reached by following her own traditions. He was convinced that it was the shipwrecked and the oppressed, it was the convict and the tramp, who alone possessed the secret of Divine wisdom. It was the meek and the humble who were to inherit the earth.