By Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé
Part Three.
Navigate our series by starting here
Dostoevsky, 1872, by W.G. Perow.
FREEDOM INDEED, BUT ONLY relative. Dostoyevsky was placed in the ranks of a Siberian regiment. Two years later, in 1856, the change of reign brought him his pardon. Promoted to his former rank as an officer, and reappointed to all civil rights, he was shortly after authorized to send in his papers, but that was as yet far from receiving permission to return to Europe, and above all from obtaining leave to publish his writings, without which life to an author was as nought. At last, in 1859, after ten years of exile, he recrossed the Ural Mountains and entered a New Russia, in which everything seemed changed, everything, so to speak, “aired,” trembling with impatience and hope on the eve of the Great Emancipation.
He brought a wife with him, the widow of a late comrade in the Petrachevsky conspiracy, whom he met in Siberia, loved, and married. As with everything that concerned his life, this bit of romance during his exile brought him unhappiness, to be ennobled by self-abnegation. The young woman loved somebody else better, and it did not take long before she went over to the other man. For a whole year, so his letters show us, Dotoyevsky did all he could to further the happiness of the woman he loved, and of the man his rival, even to writing to St. Petersburg that all obstacles in the way of their union might be removed. “As for myself,” he writes at the end of one of those letters, “by God! I shall drown myself or take to drink.” This incident of his private life is reproduced in his Humbled and Outraged [published in English as The Insulted and Injured
The position of confidante to both sides, and of furthering a love affair which puts him in a state of despair, is no doubt possible, since the author has experienced it. I cannot tell whether she had been misrepresented, or whether we are more egotistical, but it is difficult to realize, and it certainly cannot be prolonged without becoming ridiculous. The slow development, the double dramatic action, shocks all our ordinary conceptions of good composition. As soon as we are interested in an intrigue, a second appears unexpectedly, quite distinct, but seemingly a copy of the first. I am quite willing to believe that the writer had in this separation of the two parts made rather a subtle artistic attempt borrowed from a process well known to the musical world. The principle drama awakes a far-away echo. It is the melody arrangement for the orchestra transposing the chorus heard on stage. Or, if preferred, it is as if the two novels together imitate the play of two mirrors when on opposite walls, bother reflecting the same object onto each other simultaneously. But all this is too subtle for the general public.
MOREOVER, SOME OF THE actors are unreal. Dostoyevsky had drunk deep of Eugene Sue, and from reading certain passages in his Correspondence I imagine he was at that time still under the influence of that dramatist.
His Prince Valkovsky is the traitor in a melodrama, and is taken straight out of the Ambigu. On the rare occasions when taking his types from among the upper classes, he invariably went wrong. He knew nothing of the complex and discreet methods of hearts deadened by the social customs of the higher circles. Natasha’s lover, that giddy youth for whom she sacrifices everything, is not worth much. I am quite aware that Cupid must never be asked for his reasons, and that it is more philosophical to admire him independently of his victims, but the novel reader is not bound to be so philosophical; he expects to be made interested in the personality of the hero who is to be loved. He accepts him even if a scoundrel, but if stupid he cannot be abided. In France, at least, we would never allow the representation – though true, quite natural, and comforting – of an exquisite creature kneeling before an idiot. Being gallant, however, we might, if called upon, agree to it the other way – a genius adoring a fool of a woman! But that is as far as we can go.
Dostoyevsky had judged himself very severely. When referring to Humbled and Outraged in a press article, he wrote: “I acknowledge that my novel contains many dolls instead of people: that they are not characters artistically arranged, but mere perambulating talking machines.”
With these reservations, let us say that the master’s hand is to be recognized in both the female characters. Natasha is passionate love incarnate – but jealous. She speaks and acts like one of the victims in a Greek tragedy entirely at the beck and call of fatal Venus. Nelly, the delicious and fascinating little girl, is a sister to one Dickens’ delightful children. She ably personates the deep feelings of living religious ideas always present in the hearts of the Russian people when she says, “I shall go and beg in the street. There is nothing to be ashamed of in begging. I do not ask of any man in particular, but from everybody, and everybody is nobody. That is what an old beggar woman told me once. I am little, I have nothing, and I am going to ask everybody for something.”
On his return to St. Petersburg, and up to the year 1865, Dosotyevsky became absorbed in journalism. The poor metaphysician had an unfortunate liking for this enticing work; but it used up the best part of his talent, and of his life. During this time he started two papers in which to defend the ideas he thought he had. I defy any one to formulate his ideas in practical language. He had taken a standpoint about half-way between that of the Liberals and the Slavophiles, nearer the latter. Like them he had as a rallying cry the two famous verses of the poet Tucheff –
“One cannot understand Russia with one’s reason.
One can but have faith in Russia.”
It is no doubt a very worthy patriotic faith, but such a faith, replete with mystery, devoid of precise dogma, essentially escapes all explanation and argument. One believes or one does not, and that is the end of the matter. The great error of the Slavophiles is that for the last twenty-five years they had blackened mountains of pulp to find a reasonable justification for a sentiment. A stranger cannot enter into such debates, which presuppose a preliminary initiation and an acceptance of a definite faith. And he knows that he has to expect, whatever he may say or do. If he wishes to enter into the discussion he is informed that he is incapable of comprehension, and that holy linen can only be washed by the Levites in their own houses. If he keep aloof he is accused of being ignorant and contemptuous.
AT THIS TIME ESPECIALLY, during the memorable years of the emancipation, their ideas, affected by the long years of restraint, had become foolish. The metel had arisen – that furious wind which at times whips up the snow-fields, darkens the air with their frozen flakes, effaces the tracks and hides the view. In this semi-darkness a train comes along with its engine smothered in its own dense vapour, propelled by imprisoned forces which make it tremble with impatience, and dashes at full speed into the unknown. Such was Russia in those days.
The Memoirs of M. Strakhoff, a fellow worker of Dostoyevsky at this time, contains a passage which deserves notice, for nothing can be more instructive as regards the state of affairs and the men at that period:
“These are the circumstances in which one of our editors, Ivan Dolgomostyeff, a most worthy and sensible young man, went suddenly mad under my very eyes. He died shortly after. He lived by himself in a furnished apartment. In the beginning of December, when the extreme cold began, he one day appeared before me, and begged me, with tears in his eyes, to save him from the persecutions and annoyances to which, he said, he was subjected in his rooms. I suggested his remaining with me at my house. A few days later, on returning home after midnight, I found him still awake. From the room where he slept he began to talk in what struck me as an incoherent manner……. I begged him to stop talking and to go to sleep. I then slumbered an hour or two later I was awakened by the sound of a voice. I listened in the dark. It was my guest, who was talking to himself. His voice became louder and louder, and he sat up in his bed. I soon realized that he was raving mad. What was to be done? It was too late to fetch a doctor or to go to a hospital. I awaited the dawn. For five or six hours I listened to his ravings. As I happened to know all his ideas, and the phrases in which my friend always expressed them, I was able to disentangle, if I may say so, the ‘secret foolishness’ of this madness. It was a chain of ideas and phrases I was long familiar with. It was ass if this unfortunate Dolgomostyeff’s whole soul and all his thoughts and sentiments had been pulverized into minute atoms, and that these had reunited anyhow. To most people the same thing happens on suddenly awakening, when thoughts and words which fill our brain condense into quaint, often insensate, imaginings…. There was one underlying thought which in a measure connected his ramblings. It was the ever-recurring wish to find a new line of action for our political party to adopt. It was with sorrow and fear that in my friend’s delirious wanderings I recognized the discussions and themes which occupied our columns as well as our literary debating clubs night and day the last few years.”
In this same way some of these brains actually burst from too inflated hopes; others became void through disappointed hope. Into these empty spaces Nihilism flowed freely and took possession. It was a fatal, logical sequence of shattered enthusiasms. This was the time of Dostoyevsky’s advent, and from this moment he absorbed romance and politics. Abandoning the purely artistic idea, he separated from Gogol’s influence, and consecrated himself entirely to the “new spirit.”
In 1865 began a series of miserable years for our author. His second journal, like a literary charger, was killed under him and he lay crushed under its heavy weight of debt. He first lost his wife, then his brother Michael, who associated with him in his work. To escape his creditors he flew abroad, first to Germany, then to Italy, to lead a wretched existence. Unwell, and continually interrupted in his work by his epileptic fits, he returned to Russia, only to raise money in advance, from his publishers. His letters were full of expressions of despair with regard to the unfavourableness of his contracts, which almost strangled him. Europe made very little impression on him. What struck him most was an execution he witnessed in Lyons, which, recalling to mind the scenes of Semenovsky, made it a stock subject for his characters to relate in all his future novels. “And for all that,” he wrote at this time, “I have only begun to live. Funny, is it not? A real cat’s life!” But, as a matter of fact, during that anxious time between 1865 and 1871, he composed three great novels: Crime and Punishment
THE FIRST MARKS THE zenith of Dostoyevsky’s talent, judging even from translations alone. To men of science devoting themselves to the study of the human soul, it is of interest as containing the most perfect description of criminal psychology since that of Macbeth; those of an inquisitive nature, to whom, like Perrin Dandin, torture is always a pleasurable pastime, will find it excellent and quite to their taste. I fancy, however, that to most readers it will seem disgusting, and will not be read to the end.
Dostoevsky's signature.
One generally looks to a novel to give one pleasure and not to make one sick, otherwise to peruse Crime and Punishment would be taking an intentional risk, for it leaves an immoral taint behind. It is, moreover, highly dangerous for the female reader or for any impressionable nature. Every book is a duel between the writer, who aims at forcing on us a truth, a fiction, or a terror, and the reader, who defends himself with indifference of with his reason. As a fact the author’s power of frightening the reader is far superior to the power of resistance in the average nervous system. The latter is often overcome, and suffers inexpressible agony. If I permit myself to be so dogmatic, it is because of the many cases I have seen in Russia to this effect, as a result of reading that novel. Perhaps I shall be reminded of the special sensitiveness of the Slav temperament, but I can assure my reader that I have observed the same in France, where many have suffered in the same way. Hoffmann, Edgar Poe, Baudelaire, all the well-known writers in the “alarming” style whom we know of, are but a joke to Dostoyevsky. In their fiction the author’s cunning if appreciated; in Crime and Punishment one realizes that the author is quite as much terrified as we are by the character which he has drawn of himself.
The plot is a very simple one. A man conceives the idea of committing a crime. He matures it, carries it out, for some time escapes the clutches of the law, but is moved to give himself up, and expiates his crime. For once the Russian author has kept to the European custom of observing continuity of action. The drama, purely psychologic, deals throughout with the struggle between the man and his ideas. The characters and the scenic accessories are of no interest beyond their actual influence on the criminal’s settled purpose.
The first part, showing the conception and growth of the idea, is carried out with a truthfulness and exactness above all praise. The student, Raskolnikoff, a Nihilist in the true sense of the word, intelligent, without principles, broken down by misery and want, dreams of a better state of things. On his way back from having pawned a piece of jewellery at a miserly old woman’s, the following vague thought passes through his brain, without his considering it of much importance: “An intelligent man possessed of the money this woman has, would be successful in anything. All that is required is to suppress this useless and noxious old thing.”
It is but one of those small beginnings or larvæ of an idea, which have at least come once into every mind, or, during a feverish nightmare, through the words of a popular song, such as “Let us kill the Mandarin.” But they can only gather thought or come into action with the assent of the will. This is to be seen to become stronger page by page, and eventually becomes an obsession. All the sad circumstances of that life by which Raskolnikoff is surrounded are brought in to further his object, and, in a mysterious way, are made to justify the “criminal intent.” The plasticity of the force behind the man is placed before us in such a striking manner that we see it as one of the moving actions in the drama, like one of the “Fates” in one of the ancient tragedies. She takes the criminal by the hand to the moment when the axe falls on both the victims.
The horrible crime has been committed. Then the miserable creature is seen to struggle with the memories of the deed, as he did before when conceiving it. A new leading thought dominates the second part. The murderer’s attitude towards the world is now completely changed by the mere fact of having taken a life. Henceforth, seen through the crime, the world is given a new aspect and a new meaning, which deprives the culprit of the power of feeling and reasoning like other men, and excludes the possibility of his taking up a recognized position amongst them. The soul is entirely changed, and is completely out of harmony with life.
DOSTOYEVSKI TAKES GOOD CARE to show us that this is not remorse as it is usually understood. His character will feel only remorse, with all its beneficent and restorative virtues, on the day of expiation. No – his is a complex and perverted sentiment, best described as a mixture of contempt for not having obtained greater advantages from such carefully made preparations, and indignation at the unexpected consequences to his conscience engendered by the act itself, as also for the feelings of shame at the discovery of his own weakness – for Raskolnikoff’s leading characteristic is pride. The only interest he has left is to dodge the police. He seeks their acquaintance and their friendship. Possessed of the same spirit which drives a man to the brink of a precipice to experience the joys of dizziness, the murderer amuses himself by constantly entertaining his friendly police officials, and carries on the play to the extreme point where a single word would ruin him. At every moment we think he is going to pronounce that word – but he disengages and gleefully continues the awful game. The magistrate, Porfir, has guessed the student’s secret; he plays with him like a tiger on the prowl, certain that his prey will be irresistibly attracted to him, and eventually Raskolnikoff knows himself found out. Several chapters are devoted to a fanciful and lengthy dialogue between these two adversaries; a double dialogue – one of the smiling lip which intentionally ignores, the other of the steady eye which sees and tells everything.
Finally, when the author has tormented us sufficiently by witnessing this acute situation, he brings forward the salutary influence which is to break the criminal’s pride and which is to reconcile him to himself through expiation. Raskolnikoff is in love with one of the unfortunate street girls. Do not for a moment suppose from the above brief sketch that Dostoyevsky has botched his work with the stupid theme which drags through our novels of the last fifty years – of a convict and such a woman acting together because they love each other. Notwithstanding the similitude of the circumstances, we are here, as will readily be seen when reading the further developments of the story, thousands of miles away from such a commonplace conception. With characteristic perspicacity he divines that in the psychologic state of mind caused by a criminal deed, the normal sentiment of love, as well as any other sentiment, undergoes a change becomes tinged with the dark colours of despair.
Sonya, a humble creature, a victim of necessity, is almost unconscious of her disgrace, to which she has succumbed as she would to any other inevitable malady. Shall I reveal the author’s innermost thought at the risk of making it impossible to believe in the existence of such mystic exaggeration? Well then, it is to Sonya an “appointed cross,” which she carries with religious resignation! She loves the one man who has not treated her with contempt, and seeing him scared by a secret of his own, she tries hard to share it with him. After many and long struggles the confession escapes him. I am wrong – he does not utter a single word that might betray him. In a dumb scene, the acme of tragic action, Sonya sees the monstrous act passing before her in the depths of her lover’s eyes. The wretched girl, for a moment overcome, quickly recovers herself. She knows the remedy. From her heart she cries: “We must suffer, and together… pray… expiate…. Let us to the convict prison!”
HERE WE ARE ONCE more on the same ground to which Dostoyevsky inevitably returns, as being the fundamental idea of Christianity as conceived by the Russian masses, namely, a belief in the innate efficacy of penitential suffering, especially when endured together, and as possessing the unique virtue for solving every difficulty.
To explain fully the singular relations, pious and sad, between these two beings, and so foreign to all the usual ideas evoked by the word “love,” and further to translate the expression preferred by the author, it is necessary to restore the etymological sense of our word “compassion” as understood by Bossuet, viz. “to suffer with and through another.” When Raskolnikoff throws himself at the feet of this girl who maintains her parents by her shame, and when she, despised of all, becomes frightened and tries to raise him up again, he makes use of a phrase which holds the synthesis of all the books we are studying: – “It is not before thee I kneel – I prostrate myself before the sufferings of all humanity.”
We may mention here in passing, that our author has never once succeeded in representing love unaccompanied by such subtleties – the simple and natural mutual attraction of two human hearts. He only knows it in the exaggerated forms: either when in connection with this mystic feeling of compassion towards an unfortunate being – of devotion without desire; or else the passions of the brute, if even contrary to nature.
The lovers he shows us are not made of flesh and blood, but of nerves and tears. Hence, an almost inexplicable aspect of his art. This realist who is prodigal with doubtful situations, and is crude in his way of telling them, never assails or disturbs the soul, but invariably confines himself to rending the heart. I defy anyone to find a single instance where sensual passions are evoked, even when woman is passed before us as a temptress. He only shows the nude under the surgeon’s knife on a bed of suffering.
On the other hand, and quite outside the incidents of absolutely chaste love, the attentive reader will find in each novel one or two pages pricked by what Sainte-Beauve styles a “point of Sadism.”
To be loyal, it is necessary to note these contrasts of this extravagant nature incapable of keeping to the “happy mean” between an angel and a beast.
The final issue can be easily surmised. The Nihilist, half conquered, hangs about the police office for some time longer, as a once savage animal, now tamed, comes crouching to the crack of the trainer’s whip. At last he confesses and is condemned. Sonya teaches him how to pray, and the fallen creatures are then raised up again after expiating together. Dostoyevsky makes us follow them into Siberia, and in the form of an epilogue exultingly seizes the opportunity for recapitulating a chapter out of the House of the Dead.
Even after removing from the book its principal characters, there would still be left among the minor ones sufficient food for the mind for many years to come. Take, for instance, the three characters, the underling Marmeladoff, the magistrate Porfir, the enigmatic Svidrigayeloff, the man who ought to have killed his wife, whose lover approaches Raskolnikoff to discuss crimes in general. I shall not make any extracts, for this book has been translated by M. Derély, whose version is one of the few translations which are not obscure; but if there are any of our novelists who wish to improve the methods of realism without sacrificing any of their own style, I have much pleasure in referring them to the speeches by Marmeladoff with their funeral wakes, and especially the scene of the murder. It is impossible to forget them after having once read them. There are worse things yet, such as the scene where the murderer, always haunting the fatal spot, reconstructs the whole affair for his own entertainment, where he rings the cracked bell of the apartment, to make the horrible moment more realistic when listening to its discordant sound.
A modern etching by Jack Coughlin.
I MUST REPEAT THAT, owing to Dostoyevsky’s method of gradually increasing the agony, it would materially detract from their force if any passages were taken singly. What is most remarkable is the way the dialogues are woven together as if by the thinnest of electric wires through which we may have left unnoticed, or the slightest fact, mentioned in one line, has its significance fifty pages further on. One had to go back to them to understand the transformations of a soul in which these germs, fallen there as if by chance, have developed in the dark. This is so true that is one skips a few pages the rest become quite unintelligible. One feels angry with the author for being so prolix, one runs on ahead of him, and, all of a sudden, he is no longer understood – the electric current has been interrupted. That, at least, is what everybody tells me who has tried it. How about our excellent novels which may indifferently be begun at either end? This one never bores, but it tires one, as does a thoroughbred always on the prance; add to this the necessity of finding one’s way among the crowd of cunning people who, like shadows, glide about in the background. All this compels the reader’s closest attention, and to have as good a memory as is required for the study of a philosophic work. It is a pleasure or an inconvenience, according to the quality of the reader. Moreover, a translation, however good it may be, seldom succeeds in giving the continuous vibrations underlying the text of the original.
The man who could write such a book, evidently based on his own experiences, can but be pitied. To understand how he came to write it, one has to remember what he said to a friend – holding the same opinions – after one of these fits of madness: “The depths into which I am plunged on those occasions may be described thus: I feel myself a great criminal, as if a great unknown sin, the deed of a scoundrel, weighed heavily on my conscience.”
The periodical which published Dostoyevsky’s serial stories, frequently stopped short after a few pages, ending abruptly in the middle, followed by a few brief words of excuse. It was common knowledge that he was passing through one of his “attacks.”
Crime and Punishment assured the writer of his popularity. In 1866 this literary event was on every lip. All Russia was affected by it. As soon as the book appeared a Moscow student attacked and murdered a pawnbroker, in every detail exactly as imagined by the novelist. Statistics would show that since then many similar murders had taken place suggested by the reading of that book. Of course there is no doubt about the fact that Dostoyevsky’s intention was to prevent such crimes by the forbidding consequences that would follow, but he failed to perceive that the extreme exaggeration of his description would also have the opposite effect in tempting the demon of imitation who lurks in the cells of a demented brain.
I, also, find myself very much embarrassed when passing judgment on the moral value of such a work. Sour writers will tell me that I give myself needless anxiety. I know they do not admit that this element should be dragged in when considering a work of art. As it anything can exist in this world without considering its moral value! The Russian authors are not so high and mighty; they, at least, profess to be “feeding souls,” and the greatest injustice that can be done to them is to accuse them of scraping words together without furthering a cause. Dostoyevsky’s novel will be considered useful or useless in accordance with one’s belief in the efficacy, or not, of public trials and punishments. The question is the same. As for myself, my answer is in the negative.
Note: This is part three of a five-part series. The remaining parts will be published this year in the New Series. This text was first published as an extended chapter in an English-language translation by Col. Herbert Anthony Sawyer in The Russian Novel (Chapman & Hall, 1913). It has been manually transcribed exclusively for the New Series, with very minor edits to track usage.
Eugène-Melchior, vicomte de Vogüé.
THE FIRST FRENCH EDITION of Le roman russe appeared in 1886 and was perhaps one of the most influential books of literary comment of the 19th century, bringing Russian fiction to the attention of French, then English, readers, most of whom were previously unaware of it. Le roman russe, wrote historian Owen Chadwick, “was so critical, and yet so constructive, so personal and yet so objective, so penetrating without being astringent, so prosaic and yet so haunting, that even after so many decades you cannot read it without wanting to go back to read the Russian novelists for themselves. If we say that Vogüé ‘popularized’ Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, that would be true. But the description is very inadequate both to explain what the book achieved and the way it achieved that effect.” Vogüé was an acquaintance of Maupassant’s and other contemporary literary celebrities, a contributor to the Revue des deux Mondes and a friend of Ferdinand Brunetiere’s.
To obtain the unedited text, please see the copyright page for instructions. Please note The Fortnightly Review and fortnightlyreview.co.uk in citations based on this transcription.
