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He preferred solitude, he asserts more than once, to the company of common folk or mediocre persons. He gives Tolstoy at his true rating, but is cruel to Turgenieff who never wished him harm. The Dostoïevsky caricature portrait of Turgenieff infinitely the superior artist of the two in The Possessed is absurd. Turgenieff forgave, but Dostoïevsky never forgave Turgenieff for this forgiveness.
In reviewing the final impression left upon one by the reading of Dostoievsky one must confess to many curious reactions. He certainly has the power of making all other novelists seem dull in comparison; dull or artistic and rhetorical.
Chekhov is destined to exert greater and greater influence on the American short story as the translations of his work increase, and these five volumes prove him to be fully equal to Dostoievsky in sustained and varied spiritual observation. These stories range through the entire gamut of human emotion from sublime tragedy to the richest and most golden comedy.
Henry B. Fuller, the author of the Chevalier di Pensieri-Vani, once spoke of the "cosy sublimity" in Raphael's Vision of Ezekiel; one might paraphrase the epigram by describing the pictures of Velasquez as boxed-in eternities. Dostoïevsky knew such a sensation when he wrote of "a species of eternity within the space of a square foot."
So was it also with the lofty thoughts of the philosopher Soloviev, the macâbre tales of Dostoïevsky, the realistic narratives of Gogol, or the popular epics of Gorky and Ouspensky. The doctrines of Marx took some strange shapes in the Russian milieu. Eminently materialistic, they were there reclothed in an abstract and dogmatic idealism in fact, Marxism in Russia was transformed into a religion.
Dostoievsky does it incidentally, by innumerable little side-touches and passing allusions, but the general effect remains in one's mind with extraordinary intimacy.
It is in their knowledge of the aberrations of these, of the mad contortions that these lead to, that the other writers seem so especially simple-minded. Over and over again, in reading Dostoievsky, one is positively seized by the throat with astonishment at the man's insight into the labyrinthian retreats of our secret pride and of our secret fear.
"I'll never travel first class, never!" "Why not?" "Because, considering the misery in which the majority of human beings are languishing, it is a mean low thing to do to travel first class. Read Dostoievsky, read Tolstoy, read Kropotkin! We are being chased like animals. We are being persecuted. It doesn't matter where we die."
It has the colour and shape and gait of the marvellous stories of Dostoïevsky and Turgenieff with an absolutely original motive, and more modern. A magical canvas! Its type of narrative is in the later style of the writer. The events are related by an English teacher of languages in Geneva, based on the diary of Razumov.
Dostoievsky was never more the Russian prophet than when he wrote "The Idiot," and uttered in it his humble thanksgiving that through the curse of nature, through the utter uselessness of his physical machine, through sickness and foolishness and poverty, he had been saved from doing the world's evil and adding to its death. And Moussorgsky is the counterpart of the great romancer.
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