BOOKS AND WRITERS
TWO massive volumes contain the Diary* which Dostoievsky contributed, first weekly and later monthly, to the review, The Citizen, between 1873 and 1881. The Diary is not con- tinuous, and there is a long break between 1877 and 1880 when Dostoievsky was at work on The Brothers Karamazov ; there is only one instalment for each of the years 1880 and 1881, the one for 1880 consisting of Dostoievsky's famous address on the occasion of the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow. The address created immense enthusiasm ; but there was an even deeper significance in the occasion than was then apparent. A year later Dostoievsky hiniself was dead, and from Pushkin to Dostoievsky covers the whole period of that astonishing creative out- burst which makes the nineteenth century in Russia one of the most brilliant ages in history, brilliant not only because of the variety and richness of its literary achievements but because of the revolutionary change they made in the powers of the human under- standing. It is one of the unsolved tasks of historical criticism to reveal the precise relationship between the two parallel develop- ments that took place, under such different material conditions, in Russia and in Western Europe ; and we must admit that, so far at least, this task has been undertaken with far greater seriousness from the Russian than from the European side, so much so that one is tempted to agree with the claim so often repeated by Dostoievsky in these essays: " We Russians necessarily know Europe as well as ourselves, but Europe does not know us." Indeed, for a European it is a sad confession that only recently, under the direct or indirect influence of political fanaticism or hatred of one kind or another, has any serious attempt been made to solve the problem which Russia presents for Europe. Unfortunately, the very motives which direct men's minds to the problem of Russia are those which prevent any dispassionate consideration of it.
Certainly anyone who wishes to wrestle with the angel, or devil, of Russia should prepare himself by reading these essays of Dostoievsky's. At the same time they present considerable diffi- culties to a Western reader. For here Dostoievsky tries to establish some direct and personal method of communication between himself and the Russian educated public (it is obvious that he has no hope of reaching a wider audience). He tries to throw off the veils of artistic creation, to discard the voice of Raskolnikov, or Stavrogin, or the Karamazovs, and to think aloud for the benefit of his readers. The result is a long, repetitive, often incoherent monologue, which covers an immense variety of disconnected subjects, some merely ephemeral but some, and it is to these that Dostoievsky returns again and again, of profound and lasting interest. Incoherence here is the result of obsession, and, what is more, of obsessions which the Western European does not and cannot share, so that often in these essays it is difficult to distin- guish between what is due to Dostoievsky's profound and subtle understanding of life and what are merely the outpourings of that " Russian soul " which Conrad, for instance, found so repellent. Yet, in spite of this, it is perhaps possible to distinguish three themes which permanently occupy Dostoievsky's mind, whether he is talking about a sensational murder-trial, or Nekrasov, or the Bulgarian massacres ; those themes are Russia, Europe and some- thing to which for lack of anything better we have to give the name of God. And if we make a further effort of simplification, we can say that these three are only different aspects of one single theme which for Dostoievsky was the deepest underlying reality, the dark substratum into which, at moments, he had so miraculously clear a vision.
It would, of course, be presumptuous to try to summarise Dostoievsky's ideas in any brief space, especially because their ambivalence and ambiguity are of their very essence, and also because many of them, while familiar and even trite to a Russian, may strike a Western European as strange to the point of lunacy ; and if, for instance, we were to apply to some of Dostoievsky's 'The Diary of a Writer. By F. M. Dostoievsky. Translated and Annotated by Boris Brasol. Two Volumes. (Cassell. 50s. the set.) political writings the fashionable techniques of logical-positivism we might be forced to regard him as one of the most accomplished writers of nonsense that have ever existed.
Yet it might not be unfair, however crude and summary, to say that Dostoievsky's fundamental ideas ran somewhat as follows. Russia owed to Europe, in the period between Peter the Great and the liberation of the serfs, whatever she knew of modern civilisation, and, indeed, Russia adopted this knowledge so whole- heartedly that she became better equipped to understand it than Europe herself. For Europe, owing to the domination, ficst of Catholicism and then of its child, revolutionary radicalism (so that the Grand Inquisitor is the truest symbol of European political thought), became so corrupted by rationalism that it reached the stage where " everything is permitted " and there were no longer any barriers to the vilest excesses of which men are capable in thought or in action. Indeed, just because the Russian educated classes adopted civilisation from Europe, they took with it its inherent corruption, with which they became fatally infected. But because the Revolution carried out by Peter did not touch the ruled, but only the rulers, the Russian peasant, though sunk in barbarism, bestiality and ignorance, still preserved, precisely because of his suffering, a pure, undefiled and primitive faith. The Russian peasant " carries in his heart the image of Christ," and indeed a specifically Russian Christ, whose essence is above all his love for suffering humanity. Nothing can take away from the peasant his centuries-old knowledge and experience of a Christ whom he has fashioned in his own image, and for this reason it is necessary for the Russian ruling class to humble themselves before the peasant, who will bring to Europe the redemption she needs ; just because the Russian people's political and religious ideas are speci- fically and exclusively Russian, that is, founded upon their unique experience of suffering, the faith and the salvation Russia offers is a universal one. Every great nation, says Dostoievsky, must believe that she is meant to dominate the world, and so must Russia ; but hers will be the domination of universal love.
At first sight, when compared with the actual course of history, this prophetic analysis seems signally misconceived, and one might be tempted to dismiss it as the ravings of a not very inspired idiot. But may it not be rather a prophecy to which history has given a malicious and sinister twist which did not figure in Dostoievsky's calculations ? For it is precisely in Russia that the Grand Inquisi- tor has most completely triumphed and there that his opponent has been most totally defeated ; their conversation in Seville is repeated every day in the cellars of the Lubianka. Yet in his triumph the Grand Inquisitor has not disdained to assume some of the postures of the peasant's suffering Christ. The screams of rage and hate that come from Moscow play a curious counterpoint with doctrines of universal love. The gospel of humanity united by suffering may be read every week in the Cominform Journal ; and never was the legend of a Third Rome, founded on universal love, more stridently and continuously preached.
Curiously enough, one cannot feel that such a development would have been wholly unexpected to Dostoievsky, fervently though he preached a rival faith. For just as his own religious experience was a matter of struggle rather than achievement, a miracle by which faith precariously triumphed over reason, so his political ideas are only just rescued from blackest pessimism by an irrational intuition of the supreme value of the Russian people, an intuition which first came to him during his days of suffering in the house of the dead. Yet Dostoievsky's genius was such that it never allowed the evidence of things unseen to obscure what was seen by his extraordinarily penetrating eye ; the two enter into such a strangely intimate union that they seem to be one. The moral and physical detail of what Dostoievsky saw in the house of the dead was entirely calculated to make him believe that the trimph of the Grand Inquisitor was and is inevitable ; but he also believed he saw, and his genius is precisely in making us accept this belief, a perpetually repeated miracle by which, out of such squalor, a great beauty
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