The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The Inflammable Slav
THE INFLAMMABLE SLAV
Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences. Translated from the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murry. 8vo. 286 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
THIS fresh collection of Dostoevsky's letters which, with the permission of the present Russian government, has now been released for translation adds no new facts to our knowledge of the life of this writer. Besides eight letters sent from Geneva and Dresden to A. N. Maikov, already the recipient of many of the most interesting of Dostoevsky’s letters in an earlier volume (1914) there are several to Pobiedonszev, one of unusual interest written on the eve of his banishment to Siberia to his brother, and a number to his wife from Moscow, where he had gone for the famous Pushkin celebration. The volume also includes a fragment of his wife's reminiscences taken from her memoirs, which, it is understood, are to be published in their entirety at a later date, thus making of somewhat dubious wisdom the appearance of the present chapter.
Once more we see him in these letters—the perturbed, inflammable, and extreme Slav, so simple, so easily disarmed, so generously credulous—driven mad by poverty—writing, destroying in despair, and again flinging off page after page at breakneck speed, goaded on by accumulating debts which no amount of industry seems ever to diminish. "All the money I have is 30 francs; everything to the very last rag, mine and my wife's, has been pawned. My debts are urgent, pressing, immediate . . ." he writes to his friend, and after his death his wife plaintively remarks "Indeed, until the very end of his life Fiodor Mihailovich had not written a single novel with which he was satisfied himself; and the cause of this was our debts."
Protruding nervously, distractedly even, is his familiar dislike of everything foreign, his apprehensive nostalgia for Russia. "A writer should not leave his country for a long time, he should live one life with her; otherwise he is lost," or "It is better for me to sit in the debtor's prison in Russia than to remain abroad."
The simplicity and mildness of his wife's portion of the book, her reiterated devotion, and pat little assurances of her obedience and loyalty might almost be termed prosaic. Yet now and then she describes with an engaging archness certain incidents of her and her husband's life together. In commenting on his well-known attacks of jealousy she shows him to us driven to a frenzy of resentment by a timorous admirer who devoted his attentions exclusively to her merely as a means of securing favour in the eyes of the famous author. Dostoevsky, like a character in one of his own novels, finally gives a crashing blow to a nearby table, breaking a glass and nearly upsetting a lighted lamp, seizes his coat, flings himself out of the door, and starts running distractedly up the road while after him follows his loyal and exasperated wife calling loudly "Fedya, Fedya, are you mad? Where are you running?" Indeed, one sees traces of this same riding suspicion in his anxious and touchingly delicate letters to her from Moscow. "My lovely, dearest, darling Anya," one of them begins, and ends "I keep on having very bad dreams, nightmares about your being unfaithful to me with others." Even his exhilaration over the spectacular part he is to play in the great celebration is overshadowed by his eagerness to return to his family in the cramped, shabby rooms, where every morning new creditors sit angrily on the rickety rented chairs, rooms where hours of anguish and joy so strangely intermingle.
Fresh proof of his resentment toward Turgenev is revealed, "Turgenev has only clacquers, but my people have true enthusiasm." That the temporary embrace which passed between the two on the crest of Dostoevsky’s overwhelming triumph was but a momentary lowering of hostilities is already well enough known.
One regrets in the translation of this material the use of certain verbal vulgarities usually associated with the insincerity and lack of taste of the English middle classes, and the presence of these seriously interferes with the strength and dignity of the original Text, as for instance "seedy," "smithereens," "awful lot," to mention only a few.
As with Dostoevsky's novels so in reading over the present collection one's critical faculties forgo their habitual vigilance, and one is lost in speculation over the mysterious qualities of a personality so strangely limited and yet so inexplicably without boundaries. His belief in orthodoxy, his ardent nationalism, his fidelity to the Tzar, here once more so clearly discernible, must have been deeply inimical to many of the atheistical and cynical youth who received his words as if they were the only words of truth in all Russia, who marched blindly behind his banner, and wept at the very mention of his name. The old rigid concepts of right and wrong withered at his lightest touch, and he could create from some magical depth in himself a whole singular thickly peopled universe where were violated at every turn the sacred and accepted canons of art; and still our sympathy and attention instead of flagging remain more and more penetrated, all the safe little partitions of our habitual judgements shattered, as in a trance we expose ourselves to this new and passionately extreme world. Is it then to be wondered at that the other great obliterator of modern false values, Friederich Nietzsche himself, could write "He (Dostoevsky) belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal"?