Chapter V: Goncharóff--Dostoyévskiy--Nekrasoff (1)

Goncharóff--_Oblómoff_--The Russian Malady of Oblómoffdom--Is it exclusively Russian?--_The Precipice_--Dostoyévskiy--His first Novel--General Character of his Work--_Memoirs from a Dead House_--_Down-trodden and Offended_--_Crime and Punishment_--_The Brothers Karamázoff_--Nekrasoff--Discussions about his Talent--His Love of the People--Apotheosis of Woman--Other Prose-writers of the same Epoch--Serghéi Aksákoff--Dahl--Ivan Panaeff--Hvoschinskaya (V. Krestovskiy-pseudonyme). Poets of the same Epoch--Koltsoff--Nikitin Pleschéeff. The Admirers of Pure Art: Tutcheff--A. Maykoff--Scherbina--Polonskiy--A. Fet--A. K. Tolstóy--The Translators.

GONCHARÓFF.

Goncharóff occupies in Russian literature the next place after Turguéneff and Tolstóy, but this extremely interesting writer is almost entirely unknown to English readers. He was not a prolific writer and, apart from small sketches, and a book of travel (_The Frigate Pallas_), he has left only three novels: _A Common Story_ (translated into English by Constance Garnett), _Oblómoff_, and _The Precipice_, of which the second, _Oblómoff_, has conquered for him a position by the side of the two great writers just named.

In Russia Goncharóff is always described as a writer of an eminently objective talent, but this qualification must evidently be taken with a certain restriction. A writer is never entirely objective--he has his sympathies and antipathies, and do what he may, they will appear even through his most objective descriptions. On the other hand, a good writer seldom introduces his own individual emotions to speak for his heroes: there is none of this in either Turguéneff or Tolstóy. However, with Turguéneff and Tolstóy you feel that they live with their heroes, that they suffer and feel happy with them--that they are in love when the hero is in love, and that they feel miserable when misfortunes befall him; but you do not feel that to the same extent with Goncharóff. Surely he has lived through every feeling of his heroes, but the attitude he tries to preserve towards them is an attitude of strict impartiality--an attitude, I hardly need say, which, properly speaking, a writer can never maintain. An epic repose and an epic profusion of details certainly characterise Goncharóff’s novels; but these details are not obtrusive, they do not diminish the impression, and the reader’s interest in the hero is not distracted by all these minutiæ, because, under Goncharóff’s pen, they never appear insignificant. One feels, however, that the author is a person who takes human life quietly, and will never give way to a burst of passion, whatsoever may happen to his heroes.

The most popular of the novels of Goncharóff is _Oblómoff_, which, like Turguéneff’s _Fathers and Sons_, and Tolstóy’s _War and Peace_ and _Resurrection_, is, I venture to say, one of the profoundest productions of the last half century. It is thoroughly Russian, so Russian indeed that only a Russian can fully appreciate it; but it is at the same time universally human, as it introduces a type which is almost as universal as that of Hamlet or Don Quixote.

Oblómoff is a Russian nobleman, of moderate means--the owner of six or seven hundred serfs--and the time of action is, let us say, in the fifties of the nineteenth century. All the early childhood of Oblómoff was such as to destroy in him any capacity of initiative. Imagine a spacious, well-kept nobleman’s estate in the middle of Russia, somewhere on the picturesque banks of the Vólga, at a time when there were no railways to disturb a peaceful patriarchal life, and no “questions” that could worry the minds of its inhabitants. A “reign of plenty,” both for the owners of the estate and the scores of their servants and retainers, characterises their life. Nurses, servants, serving boys and maids surround the child from its earliest days, their only thoughts being how to feed it, make it grow, render it strong, and never worry it with either much learning or, in fact, with any sort of work. “From my earliest childhood, have I myself ever put on my socks?” Oblómoff asks later on. In the morning, the coming mid-day meal is the main question for all the household; and when the dinner is over, at an early hour of the day, sleep--a reign of sleep, sleep rising to an epical degree which implies full loss of consciousness for all the inhabitants of the mansion and its dependencies--spreads its wings for several hours from the bedchamber of the landlord even as far as the remotest corner of the retainers’ dwellings.

In these surroundings Oblómoff’s childhood and youth were passed. Later on, he enters the University; but his trustworthy servants follow him to the capital, and the lazy, sleepy atmosphere of his native ‘Oblómovka’ (the estate) holds him even there in its enchanted arms. A few lectures at the university, some elevating talk with a young friend in the evening, some vague aspiration towards the ideal, occasionally stir the young man’s heart; and a beautiful vision begins to rise before his eyes--these things are certainly a necessary accompaniment of the years spent at the university; but the soothing, soporific influence of Oblómovka, its quietness and laziness, its feeling of a fully guaranteed, undisturbed existence, deaden even these impressions of youth. Other students grow hot in their discussions, and join “circles.” Oblómoff looks quietly at all that and asks himself: “What is it for?” And then, the moment that the young student has returned home after his university years, the same atmosphere again envelops him. “Why should you think and worry yourself with this or that?” Leave that to “others.” Have you not there your old nurse, thinking whether there is anything else she might do for your comfort?

“My people did not let me have even a wish,” Goncharóff wrote in his short autobiography, from which we discovered the close connection between the author and his hero: “all had been foreseen and attended to long since. The old servants, with my nurse at their head, looked into my eyes to guess my wishes, trying to remember what I liked best when I was with them, where my writing table ought to be put, which chair I preferred to the others, how to make my bed. The cook tried to remember which dishes I had liked in my childhood--and all could not admire me enough.”

Such was Oblómoff’s youth, and such was to a very great extent Goncharóff’s youth and character as well.

The novel begins with Oblómoff’s morning in his lodgings at St. Petersburg. It is late, but he is still in bed; several times already he has tried to get up, several times his foot was in the slipper; but, after a moment’s reflection, he has returned under his blankets. His trusty Zakhár--his old faithful servant who formerly had carried him as a baby in his arms--is by his side, and brings him his glass of tea. Visitors come in; they try to induce Oblómoff to go out, to take a drive to the yearly First of May promenade; but--“What for?” he asks. “For what should I take all this trouble, and do all this moving about?” And he remains in bed.

His only trouble is that the landlord wants him to leave the lodgings which he occupies. The rooms are dull, dusty--Zakhár is no great admirer of cleanliness; but to change lodgings is such a calamity for Oblómoff that he tries to avoid it by all possible means, or at least to postpone it.

Oblómoff is very well educated, well-bred, he has a refined taste, and in matters of art he is a fine judge. Everything that is vulgar is repulsive to him. He never will commit any dishonest act; he cannot. He also shares the highest and noblest aspirations of his contemporaries. Like many others, he is ashamed of being a serf-owner, and he has in his head a certain scheme which he is going to put some day into writing--a scheme which, if it is only carried out, will surely improve the condition of his peasants and eventually free them.

“The joy of higher inspirations was accessible to him”--Goncharóff writes; “the miseries of mankind were not strange to him. Sometimes he cried bitterly in the depths of his heart about human sorrows. He felt unnamed, unknown sufferings and sadness, and a desire of going somewhere far away,--probably into that world towards which his friend Stoltz had tried to take him in his younger days. Sweet tears would then flow upon his cheeks. It would also happen that he would himself feel hatred towards human vices, towards deceit, towards the evil which is spread all over the world; and he would then feel the desire to show mankind its diseases. Thoughts would then burn within him, rolling in his head like waves in the sea; they would grow into decisions which would make all his blood boil; his muscles would be ready to move, his sinews would be strained, intentions would be on the point of transforming themselves into decisions.... Moved by a moral force he would rapidly change over and over again his position in his bed; with a fixed stare he would half lift himself from it, move his hand, look about with inspired eyes ... the inspiration would seem ready to realise itself, to transform itself into an act of heroism, and then, what miracles, what admirable results might one not expect from so great an effort! But--the morning would pass away, the shades of evening would take the place of the broad daylight, and with them the strained forces of Oblómoff would incline towards rest--the storms in his soul would subside--his head would shake off the worrying thoughts--his blood would circulate more slowly in his veins--and Oblómoff would slowly turn over, and recline on his back; looking sadly through his window upon the sky, following sadly with his eyes the sun which was setting gloriously behind the neighbouring house--and how many times had he thus followed with his eyes that sunset!”

In such lines as these Goncharóff depicts the state of inactivity into which Oblómoff had fallen at the age of about thirty-five. It is the supreme poetry of laziness--a laziness created by a whole life of old-time landlordism.

Oblómoff, as I just said, is very uncomfortable in his lodgings; moreover, the landlord, who intends to make some repairs in the house, wants him to leave; but for Oblómoff to change his lodgings is something so terrific, so extraordinary, that he tries by all sorts of artifices to postpone the undesirable moment. His old Zakhár tries to convince him that they cannot remain any longer in that house, and ventures the unfortunate word, that, after all, “others” move when they have to.

“I thought,” he said, “that others are not worse than we are, and that they move sometimes; so we could move, too.”

“What, what?” exclaimed Oblómoff, rising from his easy chair, “what is it that you say?”

Zakhár felt very ashamed. He could not understand what had provoked the reproachful exclamation of his master, and did not reply.

“Others are not worse than we are!” repeated Iliyá Iliych (Oblómoff) with a sense of horror. “That is what you have come to. Now I shall know henceforth that I am for you the same as ‘the others’.”

After a time Oblómoff calls Zakhár back and has with him an explanation which is worth reproducing.

“Have you ever thought what it meant--‘the others,’” Oblómoff began. “Must I tell you what this means?”

Poor Zakhár shifted about uneasily, like a bear in his den, and sighed aloud.

“‘Another’--that means a wild, uneducated man; he lives poorly, dirtily, in an attic; he can sleep on a piece of felt stretched somewhere on the floor--what does that matter to him?--Nothing! He will feed on potatoes and herrings; misery compels him continuously to shift from one place to another. He runs about all day long--_he_, he may, of course, go to new lodgings. There is Lagáeff; he takes under his arm his ruler and his two shirts wrapped in a handkerchief, and he is off. ‘Where are you going?’ you ask him.--‘I am moving’, he says. That is what ‘the others’ means.--Am I one of those others, do you mean?”

Zakhár threw a glance upon his master, shifted from one foot to the other, but said nothing.

“Do you understand now what ‘another’ means?” continued Oblómoff. “‘Another,’ that is the man who cleans his own boots, who himself puts on his clothes--without any help! Of course, he may sometimes look like a gentleman, but that is mere deceit: he does not know what it means to have a servant--he has nobody to send to the shop to make his purchases; he makes them himself--he will even poke his own fire, and occasionally use a duster.”

“Yes,” replied Zakhár sternly, “there are many such people among the Germans.”

“That’s it, that’s it! And I? do you think that I am one of them?”

“No, you are different,” Zakhár said, still unable to understand what his master was driving at.... “But God knows what is coming upon you....”

“Ah! I am different! Most certainly, I am. Do I run about? do I work? don’t I eat whenever I am hungry? Look at me--am I thin? am I sickly to look at? Is there anything I lack? Thank God, I have people to do things for me. I have never put on my own socks since I was born, thank God! Must I also be restless like the others?--What for?--And to whom am I saying all this? Have you not been with me from childhood?... You have seen it all. You know that I have received a delicate education; that I have never suffered from cold or from hunger,--never knew want--never worked for my own bread--have never done any sort of dirty work.... Well, how dare you put me on the same level as the ‘others’?”

Later on, when Zakhár brought him a glass of water, “No, wait a moment,” Oblómoff said. “I ask you, How did you dare to so deeply offend your master, whom you carried in your arms while he was a baby, whom you have served all your life, and who has always been a benefactor to you?” Zakhár could not stand it any longer--the word benefactor broke him down--he began to blink. The less he understood the speech of Iliyá Iliych, the more sad he felt. Finally, the reproachful words of his master made him break into tears, while Iliyá Iliych seizing this pretext for postponing his letter-writing till to-morrow, tells Zakhár, “you had better pull the blinds down and cover me nicely, and see that nobody disturbs me. Perhaps I may sleep for an hour or so, and at half past five wake me for dinner.”

About this time Oblómoff meets a young girl, Olga, who is perhaps one of the finest representatives of Russian women in our novels. A mutual friend, Stoltz, has said much to her about Oblómoff--about his talents and possibilities, and also about the laziness of his life, which would surely ruin him if it continued. Women are always ready to undertake rescue work, and Olga tries to draw Oblómoff out of his sleepy, vegetative existence. She sings beautifully, and Oblómoff, who is a great lover of music, is deeply moved by her songs.

Gradually Olga and Oblómoff fall in love with each other, and she tries to shake off his laziness, to arouse him to higher interests in life. She insists that he shall finish the great scheme for the improvement of his peasant serfs upon which he is supposed to have been working for years. She tries to awaken in him an interest for art and literature, to create for him a life in which his gifted nature shall find a field of activity. It seems at first as if the vigour and charm of Olga are going to renovate Oblómoff by insensible steps. He wakes up, he returns to life. The love of Olga for Oblómoff, which is depicted in its development with a mastery almost equalling that of Turguéneff, grows deeper and deeper, and the inevitable next step--marriage--is approaching.... But this is enough to frighten away Oblómoff. To take this step he would have to bestir himself, to go to his estate, to break the lazy monotony of his life, and this is too much for him. He lingers and hesitates to make the first necessary steps. He postpones them from day to day, and finally he falls back into his Oblómoffdom, and returns to his sofa, his dressing gown, and his slippers. Olga is ready to do the impossible; she tries to carry him away by her love and her energy; but she is forced to realise that all her endeavours are useless, and that she has trusted too much to her own strength: the disease of Oblómoff is incurable. She has to abandon him, and Goncharóff describes their parting in a most beautiful scene, from which I will give here a few of the concluding passages:

“Then we must part?” she said.... “If we married, what would come next?” He replied nothing. “You would fall asleep, deeper and deeper every day--is it not so? And I--you see what I am--I shall not grow old, I shall never be tired of life. We should live from day to day and year to year, looking forward to Christmas, and then to the Carnival; we should go to parties, dance, and think about nothing at all. We should lie down at night thanking God that one day has passed, and next morning we should wake up with the desire that to-day may be like yesterday; that would be our future, is it not so? But is that life? I should wither under it--I should die. And for what, Iliyá? Could I make you happy?”

He cast his eyes around and tried to move, to run away, but his feet would not obey him. He wanted to say something, but his mouth was dry, his tongue motionless, his voice would not come out of his throat. He moved his hand towards her, then he began something, with lowered voice, but could not finish it, and with his look he said to her, “Good-bye--farewell.”

She also wanted to say something, but could not--moved her hand in his direction, but before it had reached his it dropped. She wanted to say “Farewell,” but her voice broke in the middle of the word and took a false accent. Then her face quivered, she put her hand and her head on his shoulder and cried. It seemed now as if all her weapons had been taken out of her hand--reasoning had gone--there remained only the woman, helpless against her sorrow. “Farewell, Farewell” came out of her sobbings....

“No,” said Olga, trying to look upon him through her tears, “it is only now that I see that I loved in you what I wanted you to be, I loved the future Oblómoff. You are good, honest, Iliyá, you are tender as a dove, you put your head under your wing and want nothing more, you are ready all your life to coo under a roof ... but I am not so, that would be too little for me. I want something more--what, I do not know; can you tell me what it is that I want? give me it, that I should.... As to sweetness, there is plenty of it everywhere.”

They part, Olga passes through a severe illness, and a few months later we see Oblómoff married to the landlady of his rooms, a very respectable person with beautiful elbows, and a great master in kitchen affairs and household work generally. As to Olga, she marries Stoltz later on. But this Stoltz is rather a symbol of intelligent industrial activity than a living man. He is invented, and I pass him by.

The impression which this novel produced in Russia, on its appearance in 1859, was indescribable. It was a far greater event than the appearance of a new work by Turguéneff. All educated Russia read _Oblómoff_ and discussed “Oblómoffdom.” Everyone recognised something of himself in Oblómoff, felt the disease of Oblómoff in his own veins. As to Olga, thousands of young people fell in love with her: her favourite song, the “Casta Diva,” became their favourite melody. And now, forty years afterwards, one can read and re-read “Oblómoff” with the same pleasure as nearly half a century ago, and it has lost nothing of its meaning, while it has acquired many new ones: there are always living Oblómoffs.

At the time of the appearance of this novel “Oblómoffdom” became a current word to designate the state of Russia. All Russian life, all Russian history, bears traces of the malady--that laziness of mind and heart, that right to laziness proclaimed as a virtue, that conservatism and inertia, that contempt of feverish activity, which characterise Oblómoff and were so much cultivated in serfdom times, even amongst the best men in Russia--and even among the malcontents. “A sad result of serfdom”--it was said then. But, as we live further away from serfdom times, we begin to realise that Oblómoff is not dead amongst us: that serfdom is not the only thing which creates this type of men, but that the very conditions of wealthy life, the routine of civilised life, contribute to maintain it.

“A racial feature, distinctive of the Russian race,” others said; and they were right, too, to a great extent. The absence of a love for struggle; the “let me alone” attitude, the want of “aggressive” virtue; non-resistance and passive submission--these are to a great extent distinctive features of the Russian race. And this is probably why a Russian writer has so well pictured the type. But with all that, the Oblómoff type is not limited to Russia: It is a universal type--a type which is nurtured by our present civilisation, amidst its opulent, self-satisfied life. It is the conservative type. Not in the political sense, but in the sense of the conservatism of well-being. A man who has reached a certain welfare or has got it by inheritance is not willingly moved to undertake anything new, because it might mean introducing something unpleasant and full of worries into his quiet and smooth existence. Therefore he lingers in a life devoid of the true impulses of real life, from fear that these might disturb the quietness of his vegetative existence.

Oblómoff knows the value of Art and its impulses; he knows the higher enthusiasms of poetical love: he has felt both. But--“What is the use?” he asks again. “Why all this trouble of going about and seeing people? What is it for?” He is not a Diogenes who has no needs. Far from that. If his meat be served too dry and his fowl be burned, he resents it. It is the higher interests which he thinks not worth the trouble they occasion. When he was young he thought of setting his serfs free--in such a way that the step should not much diminish his income. But gradually he has forgotten all about that, and now his main thought is, how to shake off all the worries of the management of his estate. “I don’t know”--he says--“what obligatory work is, what is farmer’s work, what ownership means, what a poor farmer is and what a rich one; what makes a quarter of wheat, when wheat has to be sown and reaped, or when it has to be sold.” And when he dreams of country life on his estate he thinks of pretty greenhouses, of picnics in the woods, of idyllic walks in company with a goodly, submissive and plump wife, who looks into his eyes and worships him. The question of why and how all this wealth comes to him, and why all these people must work for him, never worries his mind. But--how many of those all over the world, who own factories, wheat fields and coal mines, or hold shares in them, ever think of mines, wheat fields and factories otherwise than in the way Oblómoff thought of his country seat--that is, in an idyllic contemplation of how others work, without the slightest intention of sharing their burdens?

The city-bred Oblómoffs may take the place of the country-bred, but the type remains. And then comes the long succession of Oblómoffs in intellectual, social, nay even in personal, life. Everything new in the domain of the intellect makes them restless, and they are only satisfied when all men have accepted the same ideas. They are suspicious of social reform, because the very suggestion of a change frightens them. Love itself frightens them. Oblómoff is loved by Olga; he, too, loves her; but to take that step--marriage--frightens him. She is too restless. She wants him to go about and to see pictures; to read and to discuss this and that; to throw him into the whirl of life. She loves him so much that she is ready to follow him without asking any questions. But this very power of love, this very intensity of life, frightens an Oblómoff.

He tries to find pretexts for avoiding this irruption of life into his vegetative existence; he prizes so much his little material comfort that he dares not love--dares not take love with all its consequences--“its tears, its impulses, its life,” and soon falls back into his cosy Oblómoffdom.

Decidedly, Oblómoffdom is not a racial disease. It exists on both continents and in all latitudes. And besides the Oblómoffdom which Goncharóff has so well depicted, and which even Olga was powerless to break through, there is the squire’s Oblómoffdom, the red-tape Oblómoffdom of the Government offices, the scientist’s Oblómoffdom and, above all, the family-life Oblómoffdom, to which all of us readily pay so large a tribute.

THE PRECIPICE

The last and longest novel of Goncharóff, _The Precipice_, has not the unity of conception and workmanship which characterise _Oblómoff_. It contains wonderful pages, worthy of a writer of genius; but, all said, it is a failure. It took Goncharóff full ten years to write it, and having begun to depict in it types of one generation, he remodelled later on these types into types from the next generation--at a time when the sons differed totally from their fathers: he has told this himself in a very interesting critical sketch of his own work. As a result there is no wholeness, so to speak, in the main personages of the novel. The woman upon whom he has bestowed all his admiration, Vyéra, and whom he tries to represent as most sympathetic, is certainly interesting, but not sympathetic at all. One would say that Goncharóff’s mind was haunted by two women of two totally different types when he pictured his Vyéra--the one whom he tried--and failed--to picture in Sophie Byelovódova, and the other--the coming woman of the sixties, of whom he saw some features, and whom he admired, without fully understanding her. Vyéra’s cruelty towards her grandmother, and towards Ráisky, the hero, render her most unsympathetic, although you feel that the author quite adores her. As to the Nihilist, Vólokhoff, he is simply a caricature--taken perhaps from real life,--even seemingly from among the author’s personal acquaintances,--but obviously drawn with the desire of ventilating personal feelings of dislike. One feels a personal drama concealed behind the pages of the novel. Goncharóff’s first sketch of Vólokhoff was, as he wrote himself, some sort of Bohemian Radical of the forties who had retained in full the Don Juanesque features of the “Byronists” of the preceding generation. Gradually, however, Goncharóff, who had not yet finished his novel by the end of the fifties, transformed the figure into a Nihilist of the sixties--a revolutionist--and the result is that one has the sensation of the double origin of Vólokhoff, as one feels the double origin of Vyéra.

The only figure of the novel really true to life is the grandmother of Vyéra. This is an admirably painted figure of the simple, commonsense, independent woman of old Russia, while Martha, the sister of Vyéra, is an excellent picture of the commonplace girl, full of life, respectful of old traditions--to be one day the honest and reliable mother of a family. These two figures are the work of a great artist; but all the other figures are made-up, and consequently are failures; and yet there is much exaggeration in the tragical way in which Vyéra’s fall is taken by her grandmother. As to the background of the novel--the estate on a precipice leading to the Vólga--it is one of the most beautiful landscapes in Russian literature.

DOSTOYÉVSKIY

Few authors have been so well received, from their very first appearance in literature, as Dostoyévskiy was. In 1845 he arrived in St. Petersburg, a quite unknown young man who only two years before had finished his education in a school of military engineers, and after having spent two years in the engineering service had then abandoned it with the intention of devoting himself to literature. He was only twenty-four when he wrote his first novel, _Poor People_, which his school-comrade, Grigoróvitch, gave to the poet Nekrásoff, offering it for a literary almanack. Dostoyévskiy had inwardly doubted whether the novel would even be read by the editor. He was living then in a poor, miserable room, and was fast asleep when at four o’clock in the morning Nekrásoff and Grigoróvitch knocked at his door. They threw themselves on Dostoyévskiy’s neck, congratulating him with tears in their eyes. Nekrásoff and his friend had begun to read the novel late in the evening; they could not stop reading till they came to the end, and they were both so deeply impressed by it that they could not help going on this nocturnal expedition, to see the author and tell him what they felt. A few days later Dostoyévskiy was introduced to the great critic of the time, Byelínskiy, and from him he received the same warm reception. As to the reading public, the novel produced quite a sensation. The same must be said about all subsequent novels of Dostoyévskiy. They had an immense sale all over Russia.

The life of Dostoyévskiy was extremely sad. In the year 1849, four years after he had won his first success with _Poor People_, he became mixed up in the affairs of some Fourierists (members of the circles of Petrashévskiy), who used to meet together to read the works of Fourier, commenting on them, and talking about the necessity of a Socialistic movement in Russia. At one of these gatherings Dostoyévskiy read, and copied later on, a certain letter from Byelínskiy to Gógol, in which the great critic spoke in rather sharp language about the Russian Church and the State; he also took part in a meeting at which the starting of a secret printing office was discussed. He was arrested, tried (of course with closed doors), and, with several others, was condemned to death. In December, 1849, he was taken to a public square, placed on the scaffold, under a gibbet, to listen there to a profusedly-worded death-sentence, and only at the last moment came a messenger from Nicholas I., bringing a pardon. Three days later he was transported to Siberia and locked up in a hard-labour prison at Omsk. There he remained for four years, when owing to some influence at St. Petersburg he was liberated, only to be made a soldier. During his detention in the hard-labour prison he was submitted, for some minor offence, to the terrible punishment of the cat-o’-nine-tails, and from that time dates his disease--epilepsy--which he never quite got rid of during all his life. The coronation amnesty of Alexander II. did not improve Dostoyévskiy’s fate. Not until 1859--four years after the advent of Alexander II. to the throne--was the great writer pardoned and allowed to return to Russia. He died in 1883.

Dostoyévskiy was a rapid writer, and even before his arrest he had published ten novels, of which _The Double_ was already a forerunner of his later psycho-pathological novels, and _Nétochka Nezvánova_ showed a rapidly maturing literary talent of the highest quality. On his return from Siberia he began publishing a series of novels which produced a deep impression on the reading public. He opened the series by a great novel, _The Downtrodden and Offended_, which was soon followed by _Memoirs from a Dead-House_, in which he described his hard-labour experience. Then came an extremely sensational novel, _Crime and Punishment_, which lately was widely read all over Europe and America. _The Brothers Karamázoff_, which is considered his most elaborate work, is even more sensational, while _The Youth_, _The Idiot_, _The Devils_ are a series of shorter novels devoted to the same psycho-pathological problems.

If Dostoyévskiy’s work had been judged from the purely æsthetic point of view, the verdict of critics concerning its literary value would have been anything but flattering. Dostoyévskiy wrote with such rapidity and he so little cared about the working out of his novels, that, as Dobrolúboff has shown, the literary form is in many places almost below criticism. His heroes speak in a slipshod way, continually repeating themselves, and whatever hero appears in the novel (especially is this so in _The Downtrodden_), you feel it is the author who speaks. Besides, to these serious defects one must add the extremely romantic and obsolete forms of the plots of his novels, the disorder of their construction, and the unnatural succession of their events--to say nothing of the atmosphere of the lunatic asylum with which the later ones are permeated. And yet, with all this, the works of Dostoyévskiy are penetrated with such a deep feeling of reality, and by the side of the most unreal characters one finds characters so well known to every one of us, and so real, that all these defects are redeemed. Even when you think that Dostoyévskiy’s record of the conversations of his heroes is not correct, you feel that the men whom he describes--at least some of them--were exactly such as he wanted to describe them.

The _Memoirs from a Dead-House_ is the only production of Dostoyévskiy which can be recognised as truly artistic: its leading idea is beautiful, and the form is worked out in conformity with the idea; but in his later productions the author is so much oppressed by his ideas, all very vague, and grows so nervously excited over them that he cannot find the proper form. The favourite themes of Dostoyévskiy are the men who have been brought so low by the circumstances of their lives, that they have not even a conception of there being a possibility of rising above these conditions. You feel moreover that Dostoyévskiy finds a real pleasure in describing the sufferings, moral and physical, of the down-trodden--that he revels in representing that misery of mind, that absolute hopelessness of redress, and that completely broken-down condition of human nature which is characteristic of neuro-pathological cases. By the side of such sufferers you find a few others who are so deeply human that all your sympathies go with them; but the favourite heroes of Dostoyévskiy are the man and the woman who consider themselves as not having either the force to compel respect, or even the right of being treated as human beings. They once have made some timid attempt at defending their personalities, but they have succumbed, and never will try it again. They will sink deeper and deeper in their wretchedness, and die, either from consumption or from exposure, or they will become the victims of some mental affection--a sort of half-lucid lunacy, during which man occasionally rises to the highest conceptions of human philosophy--while some will conceive an embitterment which will bring them to commit some crime, followed by repentance the very next instant after it has been done.

In _Downtrodden and Offended_ we see a young man madly in love with a girl from a moderately poor family. This girl falls in love with a very aristocratic prince--a man without principles, but charming in his childish egotism--extremely attractive by his sincerity, and with a full capacity for quite unconsciously committing the worst crimes towards those with whom life brings him into contact. The psychology of both the girl and the young aristocrat is very good, but where Dostoyévskiy appears at his best is in representing how the other young man, rejected by the girl, devotes the whole of his existence to being the humble servant of that girl, and against his own will becomes instrumental in throwing her into the hands of the young aristocrat. All this is quite possible, all this exists in life, and it is all told by Dostoyévskiy so as to make one feel the deepest commiseration with the poor and the down-trodden; but even in this novel the pleasure which the author finds in representing the unfathomable submission and servitude of his heroes, and the pleasure they find in the very sufferings and the ill-treatment that has been inflicted upon them--is repulsive to a sound mind.

The next great novel of Dostoyévskiy, _Crime and Punishment_, produced quite a sensation. Its hero is a young student, Raskólnikoff, who deeply loves his mother and his sister--both extremely poor, like himself--and who, haunted by the desire of finding some money in order to finish his studies and to become a support to his dear ones, comes to the idea of killing an old woman--a private money-lender whom he knows and who is said to possess a few thousand roubles. A series of more or less fortuitous circumstances confirms him in this idea and pushes him this way. Thus, his sister, who sees no escape from their poverty, is going at last to sacrifice herself for her family, and to marry a certain despicable, elderly man with much money, and Raskólnikoff is firmly decided to prevent this marriage. At the same time he meets with an old man--a small civil service clerk and a drunkard who has a most sympathetic daughter from the first marriage, Sónya. The family are at the lowest imaginable depths of destitution--such as can only be found in a large city like St. Petersburg, and Raskólnikoff is brought to take interest in them. Owing to all these circumstances, while he himself sinks deeper and deeper into the darkest misery, and realises the depths of hopeless poverty and misery which surround him, the idea of killing the old money-lending woman takes a firm hold of him. He accomplishes the crime and, of course, as might have been foreseen, does not take advantage of the money: he even does not find it in his excitement; and, after having lived for a few days haunted by remorse and shame--again under the pressure of a series of various circumstances which add to the feeling of remorse--he goes to surrender himself, denouncing himself as the murderer of the old woman and her sister.

This is, of course, only the framework of the novel; in reality it is full of the most thrilling scenes of poverty on the one hand and of moral degradation on the other, while a number of secondary characters--an elderly gentleman in whose family Raskólnikoff’s sister has been a governess, the examining magistrate, and so on--are introduced. Besides, Dostoyévskiy, after having accumulated so many reasons which might have brought a Raskólnikoff to commit such a murder, found it necessary to introduce another theoretical motive. One learns in the midst of the novel that Raskólnikoff, captivated by the modern, current ideas of materialist philosophy, has written and published a newspaper article to prove that men are divided into superior and inferior beings, and that for the former--Napoleon being a sample of them--the current rules of morality are not obligatory.

Most of the readers of this novel and most of the literary critics speak very highly of the psychological analysis of Raskólnikoff’s soul and of the motives which brought him to his desperate step. However, I will permit myself to remark that the very profusion of accidental causes accumulated by Dostoyévskiy shows how difficult he felt it himself to prove that the propaganda of materialistic ideas could in reality bring an honest young man to act as Raskólnikoff did. Raskólnikoffs do not become murderers under the influence of such theoretical considerations, while those who murder and invoke such motives, like Lebiès at Paris, are not in the least of the Raskólnikoff type. Behind Raskólnikoff I feel Dostoyévskiy trying to decide whether he himself, or a man like him, might have been brought to act as Raskólnikoff did, and what would be the psychological explanation if he had been driven to do so. But such men do _not_ murder. Besides, men like the examining magistrate and M. Swidrigailoff are purely romantic inventions.

However, with all its faults, the novel produces a most powerful effect by its real pictures of slum-life, and inspires every honest reader with the deepest commiseration towards even the lowest sunken inhabitants of the slums. When Dostoyévskiy comes to them, he becomes a realist in the very best sense of the word, like Turguéneff or Tolstóy. Marmeládoff--the old drunken official--his drunken talk and his death, his family, and the incidents which happen after his burial, his wife and his daughter Sónya--all these are living beings and real incidents of the life of the poorest ones, and the pages that Dostoyévskiy gave to them belong to the most impressive and the most moving pages in any literature. They have the touch of genius.

_The Brothers Karamázoff_ is the most artistically worked out of Dostoyévskiy’s novels, but it is also the novel in which all the inner defects of the author’s mind and imagination have found their fullest expression. The philosophy of this novel--incredulous Western Europe; wildly passionate, drunken, unreformed Russia; and Russia reformed by creed and monks--the three represented by the three brothers Karamázoff--only faintly appears in the background. But there is certainly not in any literature such a collection of the most repulsive types of mankind--lunatics, half-lunatics, criminals in germ and in reality, in all possible gradations--as one finds in this novel. A Russian specialist in brain and nervous diseases finds representatives of all sorts of such diseases in Dostoyévskiy’s novels, and especially in _The Brothers Karamázoff_--the whole being set in a frame which represents the strangest mixture of realism and romanticism run wild. Whatsoever a certain portion of contemporary critics, fond of all sorts of morbid literature, may have written about this novel, the present writer can only say that he finds it, all through, so unnatural, so much fabricated for the purpose of introducing--here, a bit of morals, there, some abominable character taken from a psycho-pathological hospital; or again, in order to analyse the feelings of some purely imaginary criminal, that a few good pages scattered here and there do not compensate the reader for the hard task of reading these two volumes.

Dostoyévskiy is still very much read in Russia; and when, some twenty years ago, his novels were first translated into French, German and English, they were received as a revelation. He was praised as one of the greatest writers of our own time, and as undoubtedly the one who “had best expressed the mystic Slavonic soul”--whatever that expression may mean! Turguéneff was eclipsed by Dostoyévskiy, and Tolstóy was forgotten for a time. There was, of course, a great deal of hysterical exaggeration in all this, and at the present time sound literary critics do not venture to indulge in such praises. The fact is, that there is certainly a great deal of power in whatever Dostoyévskiy wrote: his powers of creation suggest those of Hoffman; and his sympathy with the most down-trodden and down-cast products of the civilisation of our large towns is so deep that it carries away the most indifferent reader and exercises a most powerful impression in the right direction upon young readers. His analysis of the most varied specimens of incipient psychical disease is said to be thoroughly correct. But with all that, the artistic qualities of his novels are incomparably below those of any one of the great Russian masters: Tolstóy, Turguéneff, or Gontcharóff. Pages of consummate realism are interwoven with the most fantastical incidents worthy only of the most incorrigible romantics. Scenes of a thrilling interest are interrupted in order to introduce a score of pages of the most unnatural theoretical discussions. Besides, the author is in such a hurry that he seems never to have had the time himself to read over his novels before sending them to the printer. And, worst of all, every one of the heroes of Dostoyévskiy, especially in his novels of the later period, is a person suffering from some psychical disease or from moral perversion. As a result, while one may read some of the novels of Dostoyévskiy with the greatest interest, one is never tempted to re-read them, as one re-reads the novels of Tolstóy and Turguéneff, and even those of many secondary novel writers; and the present writer must confess that he had the greatest pain lately in reading through, for instance, _The Brothers Karamázoff_, and never could pull himself through such a novel as _The Idiot_. However, one pardons Dostoyévskiy everything, because when he speaks of the ill-treated and forgotten children of our town civilisation he becomes truly great through his wide, infinite love of mankind--of man, even in his worst manifestations. Through his love of those drunkards, beggars, petty thieves and so on, whom we usually pass by without even bestowing upon them a pitying glance; through his power of discovering what is human and often great in the lowest sunken being; through the love which he inspires in us, even for the least interesting types of mankind, even for those who never will make an effort to get out of the low and miserable position into which life has thrown them--through this faculty Dostoyévskiy has certainly won a unique position among the writers of modern times, and he will be read--not for the artistic finish of his writings but for the good thoughts which are scattered through them, for their real reproduction of slum life in the great cities--and for the infinite sympathy which a being like Sónya can inspire in the reader.

NEKRÁSOFF

With Nekrásoff we come to a poet whose work has been the subject of a lively controversy in Russian Literature. He was born in 1821--his father being a poor army officer who married a Polish lady for love. This lady must have been most remarkable, because in his poems Nekrásoff continually refers to his mother in accents of love and respect, such as perhaps have no parallel in any other poet. His mother, however, died very early, and their large family, which consisted of thirteen brothers and sisters, must have been in great straits. No sooner had Nicholas Nekrásoff, the future poet, attained his sixteenth year, than he left the provincial town where the family were staying and went to St. Petersburg, to enter the University, where he joined the philological department. Most Russian students live very poorly--mostly by lessons, or entering as tutors in families where they are paid very little, but have at least lodgings and food. But Nekrásoff experienced simply black misery: “For full three years,” he said at a later period, “I felt continually hungry every day.” “It often happened that I entered one of the great restaurants where people may go to read newspapers, even without ordering anything to eat, and while I read my paper I would draw the bread plate towards myself and eat the bread, and that was my only food.” At last he fell ill, and during his convalescence the old soldier from whom he rented a tiny room, and to whom he had already run into debt, one cold November night refused to admit his lodger to his room. Nekrásoff would have had to spend the night out of doors, but a passing beggar took pity on him and took him to some slums on the outskirts of the town, to a “doss-house,” where the young poet found also the possibility of earning fifteen farthings for some petition that he wrote for one of the inmates. Such was the youth of Nekrásoff; but during it he had the opportunity of making acquaintance with the poorest and lowest classes of St. Petersburg, and the love towards them which he acquired during these peregrinations he retained all his life. Later on, by means of relentless work, and by editing all sorts of almanacks, he improved his material conditions. He became a regular contributor to the chief review of the time, for which Turguéneff, Dostoyévskiy, Hérzen, and all our best writers wrote, and in 1846 he even became the owner of this review, _The Contemporary_, which for the next fifteen years played so important a part in Russian literature. In _The Contemporary_ he came, in the sixties, into close contact and friendship with two remarkable men, Tchernyshévskiy and Dobrolúboff, and about this time he wrote his best verses. In 1875 he fell seriously ill, and the next two years his life was simply agony. He died in December, 1877, and thousands of people, especially the University students, followed his body to the grave.

Here, over his grave, began the passionate discussion which has never ended, about the merits of Nekrásoff as a poet. While speaking over his grave, Dostoyévskiy put Nekrásoff by the side of Púshkin and Lérmontoff (“higher still than Púshkin and Lérmontoff,” exclaimed some young enthusiast in the crowd), and the question, “Is Nekrásoff a great poet, like Púshkin and Lérmontoff?” has been discussed ever since.

Nekrásoff’s poetry played such an important part in my own development, during my youth, that I did not dare trust my own high appreciation of it; and therefore to verify and support my impressions and appreciations I have compared them with those of the Russian critics, Arsénieff, Skabitchévskiy, and Venguéroff (the author of a great biographical dictionary of Russian authors).

When we enter the period of adolescence, from sixteen years to twenty, we need to find words to express the aspirations and the higher ideas which begin to wake up in our minds. It is not enough to have these aspirations: we want _words_ to express them. Some will find these words in those of the prayers which they hear in the church; others--and I belonged to their number--will not be satisfied with this expression of their feelings: it will strike them as too vague, and they will look for something else to express in more concrete terms their growing sympathies with mankind and the philosophical questions about the life of the universe which pre-occupy them. They will look for poetry. For me, Goethe on the one side, by his philosophical poetry, and Nekrásoff on the other, by the concrete images in which he expressed his love of the peasant masses, supplied the words which the heart wanted for the expression of its poetical feelings. But this is only a personal remark. The question is, whether Nekrásoff can really be put by the side of Púshkin and Lérmontoff as a great poet.

Some people repudiate such a comparison. He was not a poet, they say, because he always wrote with a purpose. However, this reasoning, which is often defended by the pure æsthetics, is evidently incorrect. Shelley also had a purpose, which did not prevent him from being a great poet; Browning has a purpose in a number of his poems, and this did not prevent him from being a great poet. Every great poet has a purpose in most of his poems, and the question is only whether he has found a beautiful form for expressing this purpose, or not. The poet who shall succeed in combining a really beautiful form, _i. e._, impressive images and sonorous verses, with a grand purpose, will be the greatest poet.

Now, one certainly feels, on reading Nekrásoff, that he had difficulty in writing his verses. There is nothing in his poetry similar to the easiness with which Púshkin used the forms of versification for expressing his thoughts, nor is there any approach to the musical harmony of Lérmontoff’s verse or A. K. Tolstóy’s. Even in his best poems there are lines which are not agreeable to the ear on account of their wooden and clumsy form; but you feel that these unhappy verses could be improved by the change of a few words, without the beauty of the images in which the feelings are expressed being altered by that. One certainly feels that Nekrásoff was not master enough of his words and his rhymes; but there is not one single poetical image which does not suit the whole idea of the poem, or which strikes the reader as a dissonance, or is not beautiful; while in some of his verses Nekrásoff has certainly succeeded in combining a very high degree of poetical inspiration with great beauty of form. It must not be forgotten that the _Yambs_ of Barbier, and the _Châtiments_ of Victor Hugo also leave, here and there, much to be desired as regards form.

Nekrásoff was a most unequal writer, but one of the above-named critics has pointed out that even amidst his most unpoetical “poem”--the one in which he describes in very poor verses the printing office of a newspaper--the moment that he touches upon the sufferings of the workingman there come in twelve lines which for the beauty of poetical images and musicalness, connected with their inner force, have few equals in the whole of Russian literature.