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Updated: May 23, 2025
Dostoevski was enormously interested in his disease, studied its symptoms carefully, one might say eagerly, and gave to his friends minute accounts of exactly how he felt before and after the convulsions, which tally precisely with the vivid descriptions written out in his novels.
Dostoevski told the secrets of his prison-house in his great book "Memoirs of a House of the Dead" translated into English with the title "Buried Alive." Of the many works that have come from prison-walls to enrich literature, and their number is legion, this is one of the most powerful, because one of the most truthful and sincere.
Probably no man ever lived who had a bigger or warmer heart than Dostoevski, and out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. All the great qualities of the mature man are in this slender volume: the wideness of his mercy, the great deeps of his pity, the boundlessness of his sympathy, and his amazing spiritual force.
From one point of view the novel is a huge, commonplace book, into which Dostoevski put all sorts of whimsies, queries, and vagaries. Smerdakov, the epileptic, is a thorn in the side of those who endeavour to instruct him, for he asks questions and raises unforeseen difficulties that perplex those who regard themselves as his superiors.
No one can read a book like this without being better for it, and without loving its author. It is unfortunate that Dostoevski did not learn from his first little masterpiece the great virtue of compression. This story is short, but it is long enough; the whole history of two lives, so far as their spiritual aspect is concerned, is fully given in these few pages.
Thus the works of the man who is perhaps the greatest novelist in history are in harmony with what we recognise as the deepest and most eternal truth, both in life and in our own hearts. The silver tones and subtle music of Turgenev's clavichord were followed by the crashing force of Tolstoi's organ harmonies, and by the thrilling, heart-piercing discords struck by Dostoevski.
But it is clear that no new writer has appeared in Russia since the death of Dostoevski in 1881 who can compare for an instant with the author of "Anna Karenina," and that the great names in Russian fiction are now, as they were forty years ago, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoi, and Dostoevski.
This last sentence shows the real animus against Turgenev that obsesses Mr. Baring's mind; once more the reader queries, Suppose Dostoevski be all that Mr. Baring claims for him, why is it necessary to attack Turgenev? Is there not room in Russian literature for both men? But as Mr. Baring has appealed to Russian criticism, it is only fair to quote one Russian critic of good standing, Kropotkin.
The cruel pathos of the story is not in the fact that such men are in prison, but that a Dostoevski should be among them. Here is a delicate, sensitive man of genius, in bad health, with a highly organised nervous system, with a wonderful imagination, condemned to live for years in slimy misery, with creatures far worse than the beasts of the field.
"Even making allowance for the enthusiasm of his admirers, it is true to say that almost any Russian judge of literature at the present day would place Dostoevski as being equal to Tolstoi and immeasurably above Turgenev; in fact, the ordinary Russian critic at the present day no more dreams of comparing Turgenev with Dostoevski, than it would occur to an Englishman to compare Charlotte Yonge with Charlotte Bronte."
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