BOOKS AND WRITERS .
IN a country villa a government clerk who lectures on the Apocalypse is entertaining visitors. They have come to see his guest, an epileptic Prince, who in face and character has a strange resemblance to Christ. His visitors include, among others, two generals, and four nihilists, of whom one is dying of consump- tion and coughs a good deal of blood, another is a retired officer turned boxer and the third claims to be the illegitimate son of the Prince's childhood benefactor. There are also the wife of one of the generals and his three_daughters, of whom one, the youngest and most beautiful, is in a state of hysterical Hassliebe for the Prince. Well past midnight, the party is completed by the arrival of a lovely and notorious lady who drives up in a carriage and pair drawn by two beautiful white horses and makes a startling and shameful announcement.
" I declare this is a lunatic asylum," cries Madame Epanchin, but she finds no one to agree with her except her daughter ; the others are far too interested in- what is going on. Neither can we share Madame Epanchin's indignation. We also are too interested to wish the scene to end ; besides we feel that, given the cast which has been assembled, the events of the party are no more extra- ordinary than we have a right to expect. Moreover we feel that such scenes as this are perfectly normal within the context of the strange world described or invented by Dostoevsky.
So intense and so vivid is the illusion cast upon us by Dostoevsky that for long periods he can leave us in doubt whether the real world is the normal world -of commonsense experience or his fantastic world of Napoleonic murderers, Rothschild adolescents, holy idiots, great sinners, sadistic virgins and atheistic believers. Yet we never lose the sense of the distinction between them ; and both the doubt and the distinction make us feel uneasy. With Dostoevsky we feel indeed that it is our own lives we are reading about, but seen with one or perhaps several more than the normal number of senses, so that everything, however familiar, seems strange, and everything, however strange, seems familiar. And this applies as much to the mere material circumstances of his novels as to his characters. Every stick and stone belongs recognisably to Petersburg and Moscow ; of nothing are we more convinced than that every incident and event is firmly rooted in a particular historical time and place ; the axe which Raskolnikov took to murder the old woman is nothing but an axe and the earth which Alyosha embraces is only common earth. No one less than Dostoevsky ever needed that conscious and deliberate machinery of symbolism, that elaborate distortion of fact, which lkir writers have used to convince us that they have penetrated, to `deeper depths of profundity than the normal eye can reach. No _heed for theological castles or metaphysical Old Baileys, of rooms which, are, only too obviously wombs or .aerodromes where only the hosts of hell take off ; in the detail of his work Dostoevsky employs only the rather worn and shabby material of 'ordinary life. How is it, then, that he is able to give us so vividly the impression of worlds which, unrealised till now, are nevertheless our own ?
Here are two books* from which, each in its different way, we may hope for some clue to an answer. Professor Simmons' Dostoevsky is subtitled The Making of a Novelist, and remembering the same authOr's excellent biography of Tolstoy we have every reason to expect that we shall find here some account of how Dostoevsky's characters came to birth. We are not wholly disappointed. Professor Simmons makes excellent use of Dostoevsky's note-books and correspondence to explain the genesis of his novels, and he ably expounds the thesis that, through the whole of Dostoevsky's work, from Poor Folk to The Brothers karamazov, a single and continuous line of development can be traced. For in essence Professor Simmons would have us believe that Dostoevsky had only one theme, which is the conflict in the self between self-denial and self-will, between meekness and the • Dostoevsky: The Making of .a Novelist. By Ernest J. Simmons
(Lehmann, 18s.)
Characters of Dostoevsky. By Richard Curie. (Heinemann, 12s. 6c1.1 will to power, and that. this conflict served him equally in the creation of such ambivalent characters as the hero of his early story The Double. or of such opposite characters as Prince Myshkin or Stavrogin, where in each case one element in the. conflict triumphs completely over-the other. Now it is true to say that this conflict does reappear in all Dostoevsky's novels, and indeed in almost all his characters ; that it lies at the root of his psychology ; and that the ambivalence: of feeling founded on it accounts for those savage and violent reversals of mood and motive so typical of life in Dostoevsky's world. But it is equally true, and perhaps more important, that in Dostoevsky this original insight into the ambiguity of human motives underwent a significant modification and with this acquired an incredible subtlety and complexity, more especially after his sojourn in the house of the dead.
Mr. Curie has a different interest from Professor Simmons. He is concerned not with the growth of Dostoevsky's characters but with their mature and final appearance on the stage. By the light of nature alone, and without any of the assistance which history or scholarship might provide, he sets out simply to describe for us the principal characters in Dostoevsky's four great novels ; in the course of his description he adds a few comments to show which of them meet with his approval. Raskolnikov does not ; he is con- ceited-and lacks a-real sense of humanity and comradeship. As for Nastasya Philippovna, she does not really make the best of things. The effect of such comments is rather like having the behaviour of the Crazy Gapg described in terms of the rules of conduct of an acadeiny for young, ladies ; and yet one would hasten to add that Mr. Curie's descriptions show so much love and understanding that his Characters may well attract to Dostoevsky many who have not yet read the novels for themselves.
If one is disappointed in these two books, it is because one feels that they do not face the central problem of Dostoevsky's men and women. Their lives and loves and hatreds, their virtues and vices, their passions and ambitions ; all these are fully, perhaps too fully, analysed. Yet these alone do not suffice to explain their behaviour. For it will not escape the attentive reader of Dostoevsky that his characters are never wholly absorbed in and by their relations with each other. In all their relationships there enters a third term, which is sometimes made explicit, but for the most part is suppressed, and it is only through the medium of this third term that they make contact with one another. Otherwise, very often, however much they talk, they might as well be talking to themselves, and this, indeed, is the impression they sometimes make. We may, for purposes of convenience, call this third term X. His men and women are all, each in their own way, searchers after this mysterious, unknown, yet knowable X, and it is in this continuous search that they are most unlike all other characters in fiction. Unless the reality of the search is accepted, their behaviour becomes meaningless, as indeed it does to them- selves sometimes, so that they complacently produce para- doxes like Shigalov's " Starting with unlimited freedom I end with unlimited despotism," while in the case of Shatov, faced with essentially the same problem, the solution is made explicit in his stammered affirmation to Stavrogin: " I . . . I will believe in God." The, tremendous assumption which Dostoevsky demands that we make is all the more difficult because for him X was a specifically Russian X, with a face that is figured in a thousand ikons. It is perhaps the -greatest sign of his genius that in reading him we make the -assumplion voluntarily, yet with a sense at once of uneasiness and exhilaration ; uneasiness because we are aware of what is demanded, exhilaration because of what is promised. Yet at times also, as in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky can turn this sense into one of sheer terror. Yet here again the feeling is curiously ambiguous. For the terror inspired by the Grand Inquisitor is a double one, terror of a world in which X has been eliminated, but perhaps even more, terror that if X is eliminated the victory of the Grand Inquisitor is
Previous page
