Part 32 (2/2)
And yet in spite of all this he takes a pride in his work, recasting cherished chapters again and again, burning what failed to satisfy him, starting afresh times without number. His attacks were in the meantime on the increase and he worked with ever greater difficulty. In spite of all he never lost heart. It is impossible to imagine circ.u.mstances which would have crushed him.
”I can bear everything, any suffering, if I can only keep on saying to myself, 'I live: I am in a thousand torments, but I live. I am on the pillar, but I exist. I see the sun, or I do not see the sun, but I know that it is. And to know that there is a sun, that is life enough.'”
And it is at this time (1865-1869), misunderstood by his readers, hara.s.sed by creditors, overwhelmed by the deaths of his nearest and dearest, in solitude, poverty and sickness, that he wrote _Crime and Punishment_, _The Idiot_ and _The Possessed_, and even planned _The Brothers Karamazov_.
He was not merely a man of letters, he is a true hero of literature, as heroic as any warrior or martyr. He fathomed the most dangerous and criminal depths of the human heart, especially the pa.s.sion of love in all its manifestations. At one end of his gamut he touches the highest, most spiritual pa.s.sion bordering on religious enthusiasm in Alyosha Karamazov, at the other that of the evil insect, ”the she-spider who devours her own mate,” in Smerdyakov, Ivan, Dmitri, Fedor.
At times he descends to depths which can only be accounted for as autobiographical fragments. As he himself confesses:
”At times I suddenly plunged into a sombre, subterranean, despicable debauchery. My squalid pa.s.sions were keen, glowing with morbid irritability. I felt an unwholesome thirst for violent moral contrasts, and so I demeaned myself to animality. I indulged in it by night, secretly, fearfully, foully, with a shame that never left me, even at the most degrading moments. I carried in my soul the love of secretiveness: I was terribly afraid that I should be seen, met, recognised.”
s.e.xual pa.s.sion appears with him at times a cruel, coa.r.s.e, even animal force, but never unnatural or perverted.
To Tolstoy the greatest of human sins is the infringement of conjugal fidelity. On the other hand, we hear self-condemnation on the lips of Dostoievsky in the words, ”Live decently I cannot.”
He gave way to the vice of gambling, and begs for loans with as much absence of self-respect as his own creation, Marmelador. Tolstoy, who also lost heavily at the tables, is able to pull himself up sharp, give up playing and live with the greatest frugality on sixteen s.h.i.+llings a month. He never lost his sense of proportion. Dostoievsky never had any.
”'Everywhere and in everything I go to extremes: all my life I have overshot the mark.'”
The life of Tolstoy was a pure and virgin water of a spring, that of Dostoievsky is the upgush of fire from elemental depths, mixed with lava, ashes, smoke and sulphur.
When his child dies, Dostoievsky, utterly self-forgetting, loves the child of his flesh, not according to the flesh, but the spirit, as a separate, eternal, irreplacable personality.
”But where is Sonia? I want Sonia.”
On 26th January 1881 he died, leaving it to future generations to understand and appreciate the greatness of his genius. And what is the message that he leaves for us to pick up?
”'Love all G.o.d's creation--every grain of sand,'” says Zossima, ”'every leaf, every ray of G.o.d, you should love. Love animals, love plants, love everything. Love everything, and you will arrive at G.o.d's secret in things.'”
Every one of his characters shows the conflict of heroic will: he concentrates all the artistic powers of his delineation into his dialogues, which are as fine as Tolstoy's are feeble. All Tolstoy's characters talk so alike that if we did not know who was speaking we should not be able to distinguish them at all by the language, whereas as soon as the first words are uttered in a novel of Dostoievsky we realise at once who it is that is talking. Hence Dostoievsky has no need to describe the appearance of his characters, for by their peculiar form of language and tones of voices they lay themselves bare before us. With Tolstoy we hear because we see; with Dostoievsky we see because we hear.
Then, too, we lose all sense of time in Dostoievsky: in the events of a single day he can make us feel that we have lived through aeons.
Added to this is the strange ethereal quality that marks out his characters from the normal. In Tolstoy we feel that the air is rare; we cannot breathe; it is the stage of calm before the storm: in Dostoievsky we feel the reviving freshness and the freedom of the storm itself.
Of one of Tolstoy's characters we read that ”she does not condescend to be clever.” Tolstoy seems himself to overlook the existence of the human mind altogether: Dostoievsky is pre-eminently a master of the mental rapier of feeling; he may lack many valuable qualities, but one never doubts his intelligence; all his characters are clever men first and foremost. Dostoievsky shows us how, contrary to popular opinion, abstract thought may be pa.s.sionate: all pa.s.sions and misdeeds in his work are the natural outcome of dialectic. Life is a tragedy to those who feel. And his characters feel deeply because they think deeply. They suffer endlessly because they deliberate endlessly: they dare to will because they dare to think. And the subject of their thought? In the main, G.o.d. They are all ”G.o.d-tortured.” This insatiable religious thirst is one of the most remarkable traits of the Russian spirit: when two or more Russians meet they immediately begin to discuss the immortality of the soul.
Most uncompromising of the realists, he yet ventures into depths. .h.i.therto undreamt of and unplumbed.
He seems to dwell with morbid intensity on hysterical women, sensualists, deformed creatures, idiots ... there is scarcely a healthy man or woman among his gallery of portraits. In Tolstoy there is scarcely one which does not emanate strength, physical perfection and complete self-control. Of a truth in Dostoievsky by his sickness we are healed. There is a sickness unto life, and this is the sickness that he depicts for us.
”What matter if it be a morbid state?” he writes. ”What difference can it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation, when remembered and examined in the healthy state, proves to be in the highest degree harmony and beauty; and gives an unheard of and undreamed of feeling of completion, of balance, of satisfaction, and exultant prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life?”
This is all of a piece with the theory that great pain alone is the final emanc.i.p.ator of the soul. In other words, where Tolstoy has to content himself with the fame of a mere artist, Dostoievsky can look forward to recognition as a prophet.
Another point of divergence presents itself when we try to glean a picture of Moscow or Petrograd from these two writers. In Tolstoy we have only the country, the land, the dark, primitive soul of Russia, whereas in Dostoievsky we actually realise the towns in which he lays his action. And yet of these he draws such a picture that they become strangely fantastic and bizarre.
”I am dreadfully fond of realism in Art,” he confessed, ”when, so to speak, it is carried to the fantastic. What can be more fantastic and unexpected than reality? What most people call fantastic is, in my eyes, often the very essence of the real.”
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