The Warp and Woof of Genius
Dostoyevsky's Letters to his Wife. Translated by Elizabeth Hill and Doris Mudie, with an Introduction by Prince Miraky. (Constable. 21s.)
THE story of Dostoyevsky's artistic life is one of unbroken misery. It tells of a sullen fight against sickness, poverty, and that worst of all enemies, an unpractical personality. His wife's diary, published some years ago, showed us the woman's version of this tale of squalid grandeur. The diary, and her notes to these letters, reveal a quality, a relationship, which lifts up the whole situation, so that our disgust is changed to discomfort, our discomfort to awe, and our awe to reverence. We see how this self-effacing girl, married to a man twenty-five years older than herself, gradually insinuated her bourgeois standards of comfort, method, domestic order, and business sanity beneath the chaos and tumult of his inspired but diseased existence, until what was hectic became intermittent, a darkness broken by periods of light and calmness in which the poet was able to utilize the deep resources of his nature for the creation of work which might have been lost, had his later life remained in the desert of poverty and muddle.
The world knows the outlines of the story : how Dostoyevsky took his young wife from her quiet family circle, from home scenes and country, and left her, shrinking and pregnant, in lodgings in Dresden while he went on to Homburg to gamble away every kopeck they possessed, and even their clothes and wedding rings : how this mania continued for four years, fed by a fantastic resolution to discharge a debt for which the poet believed himself to be morally responsible. So the man was made ; his follies were often the outcome of exaggerated prudence or sensitiveness ; while his almost divine power of compassion would sometimes spring from bouts of marital sensuality to which he would refer in his letters with a disquieting lack of taste.
We are all compounded of material in which the black, grey, and white threads are closely interwoven : but Dostoyev- sky managed so to tangle and knot the threads, that the pattern wandered into confusion, the nice balance of vice and virtue, which makes a human personality, becoming so mingled that faults changed to energies even while their poison was working. It was, therefore, impossible to condemn the man according to any moral code fixed by adult standards. Nor will this collection of Dostoyevsky's letters to his wife help the reader to form a determined conception of his character. A person of prompt judgments, who demands certain automatic social and moral conformities from everybody, irrespective of the stress of circumstance and temperament—there are still such people—will glance through these wild effusions with bewilderment, and will conclude that the man was a selfish, morbid, insincere egoist, with no sense of dignity or manly restraint. According to such a judge's standards, this condemnation is justified. True criticism, however, goes deeper than justice, and one must look further, and with more than utilitarian mission, to discover in these letters a very impressive sincerity such as can be found only in people whose various selves and activities are unified by a compelling and inspired purpose.
Children have this inconsequential integrity ; and so has a man of genius, whose instincts and intuitions move on the lightning's back, carrying messages from the outlandish frontiers of conduct and experience to the central authority within the mind ; a system so swift that the ordinary shanks'- mare intelligence is confused by these far-fetched coherencies.
Dostoyevsky had this integrity. His sombre eyes saw everything, and what interested him or even momentarily arrested his attention, was stored up and integrated. But he had to speak about these things, the panorama of events, moods, and ideas ; and he poured out this material violently, and with a passion that seemed needlessly aggravated, like a prospector feverishly searching the sands for a grain of gold which his faith tells him he will one day find. Such was Dostoyevsky's frankness. J. R. Lowell said that the poet's greatest charm is the power of being franker than other men. In Dostoyevsky it is a charm whose flavour is appre- ciated only after long tasting. At first one is repelled by the profuse protestations of passion. " I kiss you all over. I kiss the soles of your feet," or, " Kiss the baby's open mouth for me." It is rather repulsive, especially when it follows a passage of grovelling self-abasement in which he has con- fessed further gambling losses, or has been describing the most intimate details of his last epileptic fit, lingering over the little nastinesses with all the morbid concentration of a senile hypochondriac.
And yet we read on. Something holds us ; some feeling that, after all, this is not morbid, not quite the mere egotism of a bore whom it would be impossible to live with. His wife treasured these letters, annotating them with care. She lived through the torturing anxiety of the mad years portrayed in them, and her love and reverent devotion suffered no hurt. Gradually we begin to share her feelings, discovering in these wild dithyrambs a profound sincerity and effort to tear down those barriers of spirit, mind, and flesh which keep one human being from another, and make life a pilgrimage through devastating solitude.
As we read we find more and more proofs of honesty, some of them being established by the evidence of the master's eccentricities. On one of the occasions when he was left at home with the children, his wife wrote instructing him to look in a certain trunk for some clean clothes. He searched the trunk for an hour and a half, and then discovered that it was the wrong one. The significant fact is that he spent an hour and a half turning the contents over and over. That is not the action of a shallow poseur, nor of a self-indulgent egotist. It betrays a childlike power of intense but ineffectual concentration. It is the action of an imbecile or a man of abnormal power of mind able to express itself by a magnifi- cent simplicity. The same thing happened when King Alfred burned the cakes.
This incident of the trunk is only one small sign of the true man. A passage could be found in every letter to show the wide range of his emotions, the opc.1 doors of the house of his spirit, through which trafficked the huge concourse of his daily. experiences. Suffering from incessant overwork ; tortured by fear of starvation and by the humiliation of his dreadful illness, he never failed to write to his wife at least two thousand words a day. A selfish man could not do that ; nor could a sensualist invoke the soul of his woman in these words :-
" Oh, Anya, I need you, I have felt this acutely. When I remember your bright smile, that happy warmth which floods my heart when I am with you, then I long to return to you. You usually see me, Anya, moody, gloomy and capricious, but that is only the outside ; I have always been like that, broken and spoilt by fate, but within I am different, believe me, believe me I"
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