ON OPENING THE BOOK we find that it at once commences in such a heartrending strain that one wonders how the writer will manage the climax. How will he apply his habitual method of gradually accumulating his dark touches to obtain the culminating point of harrowing terror?
He has succeeded, however, as those will learn who have the courage to read further to the chapter on corporal punishment, and the description of what takes place in the hospital ward where the convicts are laid out after their scourging. I doubt if it is possible to describe any sufferings more horrifying, or in surroundings more revolting. It is enough to discourage our vivisectors, for I defy them to do better in their descriptions of surgical operations.
And yet Dostoyevsky is not of that school. The difference is difficult to define, but it is felt. The man who visits a hospital to see special diseases out of mere curiosity is severely commented upon, but he who goes there to study the diseases deserves respect. It all rests with the motive actuating the writer, and the reader is not to be deceived, however cleverly the intentions may be disguised. When his realism is merely fantastical he may awake some morbid curiosity, but in our hearts we condemn him, as I do myself, and we do not like the author any the better for it. If, on the contrary, it is manifest that these æsthetic details serve to illustrate an idea, that they may contain an object lesson which we wish to propagate, we may disagree about the æstheticism, but our sympathies will be with the author. The disgusting will become ennobled, as does the ulcer under the fingers of the Sisters of Mercy.
This is Dostoyevsky’s case. He writes to cure. He raises with careful hand, but mercilessly, the sheet which hung before the eyes of the Russian people and veiled their own infernal Siberia, that “Dante’s girdle of ice” lost in the distant shadows. The Memories of the House of the Dead became for transportation what the Hunter’s Tales had been for serfdom – the tocsin of reform. To-day, let me hasten to add, these repulsive scenes are only ancient history. Flogging is abolished and the prison system in Siberia is on as humane lines as in our own country. By reason of these results let us forgive this torturer the secret voluptuous delight he finds in unnerving us when holding up this middle-age nightmare to our view, with its thousand, aye, two thousand, strokes on the bleeding back, the facetiousness of the floggers, the nauseous sights in hospital, the men gone made from fright, the diseases caused by this martyrdom!
It is well to overcome one’s squeamishness and to continue the perusal; for it tells us better than any long philosophical discussions of the existing customs, and of the actual character of a country where such things could happen only yesterday, and could be told, as it is in this book – as a mere commonplace occurrence, without the author finding it necessary to intrude with a single remark of astonishment or resentment. I well know that this impartiality is merely a part of styles, a literary method, partly due to the susceptibilities of the censor. But the mere fact that such a method is accepted by the reader, that such horrors can be placed before him as the common events in the social life of the day, shows us that we have been taken out of our own ordinary world and must expect to read only of the extremes of goods and evil, barbarity, courage, and abnegation. Nothing can astonish us about the men who go to the convict cell, Bible in hand! From the quotations I have made we can realize how these fanatics have been impregnated with the ancient spirit of the New Testament which spread over the Near East, but has since changed into a spirit of asceticism and martyrdom. Their errors as well as their virtues spring from the same source.
In truth, I am in despair when I think of trying to explain these people to our own; that is to say, to attempt to bring into a common bond the brains haunted by such different ideas petrified by such diverse hands. Those people come straight from the Acts of the Apostles – whether “raskol” peasants in pursuit of penitential suffering, or an author writing of his own experiences with mild resignation. And this gentleness is not all mere attitude. Dostoyevsky has told us a thousand times, since, that his experiences were good for him, that he had learnt to love his brethren, the people, to discern their innate greatness even down to the worst of criminals: — “Destiny, bringing me up as a stepmother, was in reality my own mother.”
