Places and Persons

...There is nothing but peace in its pages, and this notwithstanding the horrors with which it is filled...

...It differs absolutely from his other stories, that often are as savage, as violent and as incoherent as Dostoievsky himself was at times...

...Dostoievsky was not the terrible creature one might think him by taking this work too literally...

...But it is typical of his badly balanced mind, in that it shakes us with dismay and dread, and some of its pages make us almost feel the flames of hell itself...

...This word is "stradatel" which means "endurer...

...Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Stavrogin in The Devils, the brothers Karamazov—none of these personages was conceived in the Siberian dungeon where Dostoievsky lingered four long years...

...There is hardly anything but bitterness, revolt and suppressed impatience in The Brothers Karamazov, in The Idiot, in The Devils...

...Curiously enough it was during the epileptic fits from which he suffered all through his life that Dostoievsky had the keenest vision of what awaited both him and Russia in the near future...

...But if I am God, I wish to be like the former God, I wish to judge the planet, to alter the revolting lie of its law, and if that is impossible, then to destroy it...

...What was said on the cross turned out a lie...

...During the years which he spent in prison, Dostoievsky assimilated the mentality of his country's lower classes, which other Russian writers, Tolstoy, for instance, never quite succeeded in doing...

...There was also nihilism endeavoring to counteract any good these reforms might have produced under different conditions...

...In our times, it was Bolshevism that appeared, to destroy all that still existed of good in the social condition of Russia, without the slightest idea of what it could put in its place...

...But he is infinitely greater in his understanding of the weaknesses of humanity...

...But this endurance, this absence of revolt which is so distinctively Russian, Dostoievsky possessed only in personal matters...

...The day passed, both died—and found neither paradise nor resurrection...

...When the hour struck for Dostoievsky to meet his Maker he prepared himself courageously for the ordeal, insisted on a priest being brought to hear his confession and administer to him the last sacraments...

...And now, if with Him a lie happened, if the laws of nature did not spare even Him, and caused even Him to tell a lie, to believe in a lie and to die for a lie—then the whole planet rests on a lie and a mockery...

...In the importance which he attributes to imaginary conflicts of the soul, Dostoievsky shows himself far more brutal than his contemporaries...

...But Dostoievsky's eastern origin and atavism made it easy, and resulted, moreover, in the incoherence which at times makes his books so misleading or incomprehensible to foreigners...

...they anticipate almost entirely the sinister aspects of the Russian revolution, and create the prototypes of many of its leaders...

...Take for instance the following lines, which I must hasten to say were suppressed finally from the volume when it went to print, Dostoievsky himself realizing the sinister effects they might have in some quarters: There was a day on earth, and in the middle of the earth stood three crosses...

...The whole planet with all that there is in it, with all that has been and will be, is not worth a single word of that Man...

...Later on, after he had returned to normal life, he lost his deep faith while remaining a profoundly religious man— an anomaly which is possible only in Russia...

...He may have acquired there the note of sadness which followed him everywhere after he had been released from prison, and the years he spent in confinement undoubtedly paralyzed to some extent his mental qualities, by driving them constantly toward one and the same point— undeserved human suffering...

...In his novels and other books, such as The Journal of a Writer, for instance, he often lets loose his bitterness at the spectacle of the many injustices one meets in this world of ours...

...Suppose I alone say that I am God...

...The moral which he preached survived him, although his personal influence quickly vanished after he had passed away...

...During the latter half of the last century there were reforms, admirably conceived, but badly put into execution, reforms which came not as a balm to the outraged portion of the public that had been clamoring for them...

...Dostoievsky was in many ways the most typical representative of the generation of dreamers who undoubtedly contributed to develop in Russia the atmosphere of negation, nihilism and doubt of everything out of which finally emerged Bolshevism with all its sinister accompaniments...

...It is doubtful whether he could ever have invented and created such characters when he was confined within the dark cells of the Omsk penitentiary...

...He is always at his best in his descriptions of human temptation or of crime, no matter in what form, but he loses himself in useless analyses, and becomes absolutely garrulous whenever he tries to explain the mental problems and preoccupations of people seeking or hungering for the truth...

...Dostoievsky was a sufferer, and a Slav sufferer at that, which means that he could apply to his sufferings all the sharp criticism and analysis a Slav mind alone can carry so far...

...And his last conscious gesture was to try to reach a New Testament which the wives of the exiled Decembrists had given to him in Siberia, and which had never left his bedside since...

...Like all persons afflicted with epilepsy, he was oversensitive in some things...

...In this respect his work and his teachings were eminently civilized, and they left an impression not only on his own generation, but also upon the succeeding ones...

...Turgeniev woke up the energy for good of his compatriots, and showed them the real aim humanity ought always to have in view...

...In this extraordinary book Dostoievsky appears almost diabolic and yet he was far from that...

...The previsions which the story contains are at times quite uncanny...

...There is hardly anything one could call natural, either in himself or in his books, with the exception of The Memories of a Dead House, his masterpiece...

...At the same time, none could analyze and describe crime, sin and iniquity better than this extraordinary writer...

...If Russia had been allowed to develop slowly, and nothing had happened to shake it out of the peace which ought to attend the growth and the healthy development of all human things, it might have outdone every other nation in the world by its vitality, its search after knowledge, its desperate hunting for truth...

...In many instances they have displayed brilliancy which diverts attention from the real superficiality of the books in which it appears, books that at first sight seem so marvellously profound, books that tell so much and teach so little...

...But they did not exercise any influence upon his creative genius...

...And if so, wherefore live...

...To no Russian does this definition apply more exactly than to Dostoievsky, one of Russia's greatest writers, and one of the strangest incarnations of the Russian genius of the last century, which was such a curious mixture of foreign influence and developed native knowledge, acquired and expressed with uncertainty as to the course it ought to pursue, and discouragement at a failure which seemed to it inevitable...

...Together with some of his other admirers, I will venture to say that this was not the case...

...He can touch all the cords of human hearts, and move them not only to indignation but also to tears...

...This is an essential fact to be remembered whenever an attempt is made to appreciate the forces which drove writers like Turgeniev, Tolstoy and Dostoievsky to express opinions of their native land...

...That Man was the highest product of the earth...

...His nervous sense of research made him insist on useless details which he liked to accumulate in his books, often to the detriment of their artistic value, and always to the loss of the particular impressions which he had been trying to produce upon his readers...

...He believed in an all-powerful and all-merciful Being whom one ought to worship and in whom one ought to hope...

...At the same time he was one of those beings to whom much ought to be forgiven, because they are unable to render, even to themselves, an account of what they are really thinking or believing...

...There is a Russian word which describes the type of which he was the most perfect example and incarnation...

...This is what the reader of The Possessed should never forget...

...This stands alone in the list of Dostoievsky's literary achievements, and reveals him as he really was in his good moments, those moments during which he accepted everything that was befalling him with submission, the Christian submission of a heart that believes in its Saviour's mercy...

...Never before, nor after, will there be anything like Him...

...The words, with their deep meaning, resume better than anything else which has been said on the subject, the intricacies of a nature that was perpetually longing for the unattainable, continually striving for high ideals, and that failed to understand how the thought of evil ever could enter a human soul...

...During the last five or six years of his troubled existence, Dostoievsky used to say that it was in Siberia that his literary talent had developed itself...

...This probably accounts for the fact that his books rarely contain the bitter analysis of the intelligence and moral principles of well-educated people which we find in Turgeniev's or Gogol's works...

...On the other hand he lost his contact with the social spheres in which he had moved previous to his imprisonment...

...Bolshevism, however, was still unknown in those distant days when these three giants of Russian literature, Turgeniev, Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, arose and brought to the world the knowledge of the great power their country could wield in thoughts and ideals...

...Unfortunately something was always happening to stop its progress, to throw it back for centuries, to erect a barrier between it and the rest of humanity...

...It was while he was undergoing one of the worst attacks of his burdensome sickness that he composed, in the intervals between the fits which prostrated him, the masterpiece, The Devils (called The Possessed in the English translation...

...Tolstoy was an iconoclast, a destroyer, a precursor of Lenin...

...Answer if you are a man, if you are an honest man...

...It is impossible to pass a general judgment on the tendencies of the school to which these writers belonged...

...One can only judge its individual members, and even there it is easy to be led astray...

...In an occidental character, this inner fight of a conscience that still retains faith but has discarded belief, would either be impossible or result in complete atheism...

...Dostoievsky was an abnormal apparition in an abnormal society, a society slowly waking out of a trance which had lasted ever since the political conspiracy of December 14, 1825...

...The only distinctly Siberian book the great novelist ever wrote was The Memories of a Dead House and, curious to say, it is the only one to which the word "serene" can be applied...

...He taught the whole of Russia how to weep, how to forgive, and how to forget the evil done to one...

...One on the cross believed so much that He said to the other for his belief: "Today thou shalt be with me in paradise...

...They are the product of the much later time, during which his genius expanded and ripened amid anxieties, worries without end, a sharp struggle for life and, most of the time, uncongenial surroundings...

...Of these three colossal figures, Dostoievsky is the most appealing, especially to foreigners, and this in spite of the peculiarities of his at times illiterate, but always powerful and too often inexorable, genius...

...The entire life of the gifted writer who had had the courage to describe the physical, moral and intellectual tortures to which he had been subjected, without any bitterness or animosity, was a long and noble endurance of a hard and undeserved fate...

...There is a good deal of it in Crime and Punishment, but there we also find traces of pity, the humble Russian pity which sees redemption in every tear, finds excuses for every crime, accepts humiliations, bows down before every suffering, and which is expressed so well in the exclamation of Raskolnikov falling at the feet of Sonia, the street girl: "It is not before thee that I am bending the knee, it is before the suffering of humanity...

...Dostoievsky's greatest and most intimate friend, Vladimir Soloviev, the Christian philosopher, who was undoubtedly one of the most luminous figures of his time, once described him as "a mind that just lacked the conception of wrongdoing, even while seeing it, and sometimes performing it...

...But since I do not know how to alter it, and cannot destroy it, then I, God, wish to destroy myself...

...His last years were tormented by the problem of the existence of God, a problem which, to those who knew him and heard him talk, can be detected in most of his later books...

...Judging him, one must recapitulate all the vicissitudes of his life, spent partly in prison, partly in exile from his native land, partly in poverty and penury...

...And this very fact helps one to realize the deficiencies of his so essentially Russian genius...

...It was in its pages that he had found consolation and strength during the dreadful years he had spent in the Omsk penitentiary, and it was in that same book that he discovered the faith and courage to die serenely, with "sure and certain hope in eternal resurrection...

...Therefore the very law of the planet is a lie, and the whole of life is the devil's farce, if there were a devil...