BOOKS;
DOSTOIEVSKY.•
Or the three great writers who dominated Russian literature' during the last half of the nineteenth century, certainly the least known in England is Dostoievsky. That he is, possibly, also the best worth knowing will surprise no one who realizes the strength and solidity of international barriers in questions of literary taste. It takes a long time, even for the most enlightened of critics, to appreciate in a foreign literature any- thing but those qualities which it shares in common with their own. But, in general, it is precisely in its peculiar and un- familiar qualities that the true greatness of a foreign literature is to be found. Thus for many years Tourg6nieff, a writer influenced far more than either of his great contemporaries by the literary traditions of Western Europe, was the one Russian author really appreciated by English-readers. Then the giant figure of Tolstoy loomed up, and it gradually came to be realized that in him lay a force Of far greater potency- and far greater significance. At the present moment Tolstoy undoubtedly stands with the English public for all that is most representative not only of Russian litera- ture, but of the Russian spirit. But the English public has yet to become acquainted with Dostoievsky. This extraordinary genius, known, if at all, in England simply as the author of ohe work, Crime wad Punishment, is in Russia universally recognized as at least the equal, and possibly the superior, of Tolstoy. Above-all, he is acclaimed as the most distinctively _Russian of writers ; and, no doubt, it is this very fact that has so far prevented his popularity in England. There is something so strange to English readers in Dostoiev- sky's genius—its essence seems so unfemiliar, so singular, so unexpected—that we are naturally repelled. But having swallowed Tolstoy, there he no reaeon why, in time, we should not also swallow Dostoievsky. Hitherto a material difflenity has stood in the way : the English translations of Dosioievsky's work have been few, incomplete, and unsatisfactory. Bat with the publication by Mrs. Garnett, the well-known translator of Tourgenieff and Tolstoy, of a complete and accurate translation of The Brothers Karamazos in a wonderfully cheap form, a great step has been- made in advance. Mrs. Garnett promises us the whole of the works of Dostoievsky, so that soon there should be no valid excuse for the most insular of English readers if he refrains at least from. teeing to become acquainted with a writer who, in the opinion Of his countrymen, has high claims to rank as the supreme spokesman of the Russian race.
No doubb the most obviously disconcerting of Dostoievsky's eharaderistics is his form. Most of his works are not only exceedingly long, but—at any 'ate on a first inspection— extremely disordered. Even in The Brothers Saran/awe the last and the most carefully composedof his novele,the construe- tion. seems often to collapse entirely ; there are the strangest digressions and the most curious, prolixities ; we have an end- less dissertation, introduced apparently a. proper de hotter, on the duties of a Russian monk ; we have a long, queer story, read aloud by one of the characters in a restaurant, about Christ and a Grand fnquisitor. lissome of the-most important of his other works—in The Idiot, The Adolescent, and The. Possessed—this characteristic appears in a, far more marked degree. The circumstances of Dostoievskeee life certainly account in part for the looseness- and- incoherence of his writing. Until his closing years be wa.s always in. dal:stales, always desperately in want of money, and always peering out * The Brothers $arantlazov. By ry,odor Disitoievekk, translated into English by Constatee Garnett:" totidon s nistitethastt. [8s; eitt riot] . •
a flood of fiction at the highest possible pressure. Thus it was only to be expected that his composition should not have been perfect ; but it seems probable that a necessity for hasty work was not the sole cause. His mind, by its very nature, did not move on the lines of judicious design and careful symmetry; it brought forth under the stress of an unbounded inspiration, and according to the laws of an imaginative vision in which the well-balanced arrangements of the ordinary creative artist held no place. Thus, the more one examines his writings and the more familiar one grows with them, the more distinctly one perceives, under the singular incoherence of their outward form, an underlying spirit dominating the most heterogeneous of their parts and giving a vital unexpected unity to the whole. The strange vast wandering conversations, the extraordinary characters rushing helter- skelter through the pages, the far-fetched immense digressions, the unexplained obscurities, the sudden, almost inconceivable incidents, the macabre humour with its extravagant exaggera- tions—all these things, which seem at first little more than a confused jumble of disconnected entities, gradually take shape, group themselves, and grow at last impressive and significant. The effect is like that of some gigantic Gothic cathedral, where, amid all the bewildering diversity of style and structure, a great mass of imaginative power and beauty makes itself mysteriously felt, and, with its uncertain proportions and indefinite intentions, yet seems to turn by comparison even the purest and most perfect of classical temples into something stiff and cold.
But, besides the looseness of his construction, there is another quality in Dostoievsky's work which is calculated to prove an even more serious stumbling-block to English readers. His books are strange not only in form, but in spirit. They seem to be written by a man who views life from a singular angle ; everything in them is agitated, feverish, intense ; they are screwed up above the normal pitch ; they appear to be always trembling on the verge of insanity, and sometimes, indeed, to plunge over into the very middle of it. Now this kind of atmosphere offers a peculiarly marked contrast to that of the ordinary English novel. The great tradition of English fiction has flowed steadily—from Defoe, through Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot, right down to the present day, to George Gissing and to Mr. Arnold Bennett—in a totally contrary direction. With a very few exceptions (Emily Brontë is the most outstanding of them) all our great novelists have been writers whose fundamental object has been to treat of life from the standpoint of common sense; to present it with sanity, with breadth, with humour ; to throw over their vision of it the plain clear light of day, and to stand on one side themselves, with the detachment of amused and benevolent spectators. The result has been a body of litera- ture remarkable for its sobriety, its humanity, and its quiet wisdom ; and it is only natural that a reader who has grown accustomed to these qualities should be perplexed and jarred when he comes upon the extravagance and the frenzy that seethe in Dostoievsky's pages. Yet here again the difficulty, to one who refuses to be rebuffed by first impressions, will turn out to be more apparent than real. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is yet certainly true that Dostoievsky, with all his fondness for the abnormal and the extraordinary, is a profoundly sane and human writer. In this respect, indeed, he is the exact opposite of Tolstoy, who conceals a neurotic temperament under the cloak of a strict and elaborate adherence to the commonplace. Dostoievsky, while refusing to turn away his eyes from what is horrible, grotesque, and disgraceful in life, does not, like the French writers of the Naturalistic School, take a pleasure in these things, and deal out pessimism with an acrimonious relish ; on the contrary, he only faces the worst in order to assert, with a fuller courage and a deeper confidence, the nobility and splen- dour of the human spirit. He can depict, side by side with the distorted and excessive creatures who fill his canvases, figures of the rarest beauty and the most exquisite purity- , Aliosha in The Brothers Karamazov, Muichkin in The Idiot, Sonia in Crime and Punishment. But his sympathy does not stop short with virtue and loveliness ; there is something infinite in it. He can show us characters where all that is base, absurd, and contemptible is mingled together, and then, in the sudden strange vision that he gives us of their poignant underlying humanity, he can make us lay aside our scorn and our disgust, endowing us with what seems a new understanding of the mysterious soul of man. No other writer ever brought forth with a more marvellous power the "soul of goodness in things evil."
This power is but one manifestation of the wonderful intensity and subtlety of Dostoievsky's psychological insight. Here, no doubt, lies the central essence of his genius, the motive force which controls and animates the whole of his work. It is his revelations of the workings of the human mind that give him his place among the great creative artists of the world. But in other directions his ability is hardly less remarkable : in the unforgettable vividness of his descriptions, in his singularly original sense of humour, in his amazing capacity for crowding his stage with a multi- tude of persons, all interacting and all distinct, as in the famous account of the Convict's Bath in the House of the Dead. One minor instance of his mastery over the resources of his art may be noticed—his extraordinary power of describing dreams. There can be no doubt that the night- mares of Dostoievsky (and there are many) throw all other attempts that have ever been made in that direction into insignificance. Perhaps an unsympathetic critic might declare that this was to be expected, since his books are all of them in reality little else than prolonged nightmares. But to how many of the highest works of man might not the same criticism be applied ? To Sing Lear, for instance. And indeed, if one seeks for comparisons, it is to the Elizabethan dramatists that one must turn to find kindred spirits with Dostoievsky. In his pages one finds again, as in an unexpected transmigration, the pathos, the terror, and the awful humour of Webster, the " inspissated gloom" of Tourneur, the tragic intensity of Middleton, the morbid agonies of Ford. The same vast and potent inspiration which filled so erratically and yet so gloriously those old poets of Renaissance England still seems to breathe and burn through the novels of the modern Russian. There is more than an echo in him of Shakespeare himself. The art which wove out of the ravings of three madmen in a thunderstorm the noblest and profoundest symphony that human hearts have ever listened to is, in its essence, the same art that went to the making of The Idiot and The Posseseed.
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