BOOKS OF THE DAY
Dostoievsky
Dostoievsky. By J. C. Powys. (John Lane. 7s. 6d.)
IN a time of upheaval it would not be surprising if many should turn afresh to the novelist of upheaval. It is unfortunate, then, that the revival of Dostoievsky which is clearly on the way should be heralded, and the approach to him obscured, by writers whose matter betrays that they haven't more than a minimal fitness for the job. While no other novelist has aroused so much both of championship and detraction, it happens that Dostoievsky's work at the same time has the strange power of attracting people who are drawn by a kind of morbid fascination with his sheer creative energy and the startling idiosyncrasies of his vision, and who, with only a glimmering notion of what it is all about, submit them- selves to delicious, forbidden thrills, returning to their office chairs to write about the " criminality " or the " abnormality " of this greatest of dramatists and bravest of all explorers of what it means to be a man. For example, Mr. William Phillips, the editor of the recent American edition of Dostoievsky's collected tales, writes a preface which begins like this: "It is no secret that ' the greatest of all novelists,' as Andre Gide called him, was both a creature and a prophet of the pathological. He lived in the shadow of insanity; his creative world was an abyss of criminality and derangements; his ideas, which were largely ramifications of his political views [!] .were certainly perverse (I almost said perverted), and by the prevailing norms of progressivism they would have to be characterized as reactionary.' Only his morality seems to have been untainted. Yet even in this sphere, even in his most exalted moments, we can see the desperate lunges of the underground man into the human daylight."
Mr. Powys is far from such insufferable patronage ; indeed, he is an unqualified enthusiast. His enthusiasm is warming, and it is painful for me to have to say tha: for the most part it is misplaced. He sees about a tenth part of Dostoievsky, and though it is a real enough part, in making it the whole he would convert his idol quite cheerfully into something monstrous and demoniacal : "For myself I regard him not as a reactionary pietist or mystic, but simply and solely as a formidable, unscrupulous, titanic life-lover. Yes, I am convinced, with every psychological tendril I possess, that what he really is is a Dionysian life-worshipper, all of whose novels may be unrolled before us, like garments soaked in blood, and treated en masse as one single ecstatic celebration in melodramatic prose of that mad ' joy of it' that heaves and winds and twists and coils, like a fiery serpent, in and out of the whole cosmic kaleido- scope ! "
From this level, which is that of a Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov (Mr. Phillips' being that of a Gania Ivolgin) it is evident that no discriminations within the total world of Dostoievsky are ,possible: for where are Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha? As a result this book is formless, a hotchpotch of opinionated generalisations, some acute, some banal and some merely ridiculous. But the Dostoievsky world is not the sort of animistic chaos depicted by the author of The
Art of Happiness, who, looking in this glass, sees only his own features darkly reflected. It is a cosmos, and, rightly approached, it makes sense : the transcendent sort of sense, however, which must be forever incomprehensible both to the omnivorous sensualist and to the arid disciple of rationalist enlightenment—hence the ludicrous- ness of the attempts to measure Dostoievsky in terms of the timorous " normality " of the bourgeois mind and the consequent irate and petty stigmatisation of his presumed criminal, morbid and neurotic temperament. Dostoievsky no more than presented the irrational perversity which is present in every human soul: what did St. Paul write about it? And, it may be appropriate to ask, in what novelist may we find more delicious humour or so much genuine goodness and warmth of heart? Fortunately, in Mr. Lloyd Dostoievsky has found an eminently judicious and fair-minded biographer, who is able to present the salient facts of his subject's life and work with a skilful economy it would be difficult to improve upon. "Convoluted and tortuous in his mentality," avouches Mr. Lloyd, ".he yet always preserved something at least of that childlike openness which he claimed to have in common with his small son," and not the least of the merits of this book is the perspicacity with which it examines and refutes " that ' dark legend ' which was attached so persistently, and without any real evidence, to the reputation of this already sufficiently perse- cuted man of genius." One can't have everything, however, and in his interpretative asides Mr. Lloyd is not, perhaps, altogether adequate. Dostoievsky, he says, was " no philosopher " ; he sees the main preoccupation "in all the works alike " to be the idea of sin ; and towards the end he becomes so uncertain of his ground as to suggest weakly that perhaps only through Freud is a real approach to Dostoievsky possible. Yet it seems to me beyond doubt that Dostoievsky was, no less than Kierkegaard, in the truest sense a living thinker, in whose mind existence and idea were so inter- fused that it was natural for him to express them, not abstractly, but concretely in character and action. Certainly he was preoccupied with the fact and meaning of sin, but the idea which chiefly haunted him, and whose strange double dialectic he pursued with matchless subtlety and penetration, was surely that, so inalienably involved with it, of freedom.
• To begin with, of course, one must understand that the issues debated in Dostoievsky are not those of the bourgeois novel with its closed, finite world, but the ultimate questions of human destiny, when the stakes, recognised or not, are salvation and perdition ; and it is the relation of his characters, not to .some human or social norm, but to the infinite, which affects their be- haviour and exlains their seemingly fantastic contortions. In the impassioned critique of rationalistic humanism which is one of the principle threads of his work, DostOlevsky's method was precisely to remove his subject from its finite, social context and to take it to an extreme—i.e., to view it in the perspectives of infinity, when man without God appears as the superman, the man-god, claiming to pass beyond all human and moral bounds, with consequences which may be seen in that portrait gallery which includes the figures of Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov and Stavrogin. Dostoievsky's unspoken conclusions on the matter seem to 'come to something like this : Power is weakness and weakness power ; it is only when man's nature is supposed to be grounded in necessity that there arises the urge towards the proud, isolated assertion of freedom : when it is known to be actually grounded in freedom the need is for humility i.nd obedience.
But there is no end to discussion of Dostoievsky's life-giving genius: to understand him fully would be to understand our human life itself. No one has explored it at deeper levels and expressed his findings with more moving power. D. S. SAVAGE.
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