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Alfred de Vigny was an early nineteenth century forerunner of Barbusse and Duhamel, and this record of the Napoleonic wars is curiously analogous to the books of these later men. I call attention to it here because it includes "Laurette," which is one of the great French short stories. This is the eleventh volume in the first collected English edition of Dostoevsky's works.
His passions are such as come before the criminal rather than the civil courts. His people are possessed with devils as the people in all but religious fiction have long ceased to be. "This is a madhouse," cries some one in The Idiot. The cry is, I fancy, repeated in others of Dostoevsky's novels. His world is an inferno. One result of this is a multiplicity of action.
And those voices take shape in certain unforgettable fragments of dialogue that have been spoken by one spirit to another in some ugly, mean tavern, set in surrounding darkness. Dostoevsky's people, it is suggested, "are not so much men and women as disembodied spirits who have for the moment put on mortality." They have no physical being.
This habit of packing into a few hours actions enough to fill a lifetime seems to me in Dostoevsky to be a novelist's device rather than the result of a spiritual escape into timelessness. To say this is not to deny the spiritual content of Dostoevsky's work the anguish of the imprisoned soul as it battles with doubt and denial and despair.
There was never so much talk in any other novels, and there was never so much action. Even the talk is of actions more than of ideas. Dostoevsky's characters describe the execution of a criminal, the whipping of an ass, the torture of a child. He sows violent deeds, not with the hand, but with the sack.
Similarly, he discovered something almost Sadistic in the manner in which Dostoevsky let his imagination dwell on scenes of cruelty and horror. And he was as strongly repelled by Dostoevsky's shrieking Pan-Slavism as by his sensationalism among horrors.
Mr. George Moore once summed up Crime and Punishment as "Gaboriau with psychological sauce." He afterwards apologized for the epigram, but he insisted that all the same there is a certain amount of truth in it. And so there is. Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism.
Think of the young man, for instance, in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment there is a young man whose experience surrounds and presses upon the reader, is felt and tasted and endured by the reader; and any one who has been through the book has truly become Raskolnikov, and knows exactly what it was to be that young man.
"As Dostoevsky's character, Razumikhin says 'You can talk the most mistaken rubbish to me and if it is your own, I will embrace it. It is better to tell your own lies than somebody else's truth." She laughed, put the back of her hand thoughtfully under her chin, and compressed her lips into a smile.
In some novel of Dostoevsky's an old man tramples underfoot the portrait of his dearly loved daughter because he had been unjust to her, and you vent your foul and vulgar jeers upon the ideas of goodness and truth because you have not the strength to follow them.
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