Dostoïevski

Dostoevsky

André Suarès

Born in Moscow, October 12, 1821. Died in Petersburg, January 28, 1881. He lost his mother in 1837, his father in 1839. He studied at Petersburg, from 1837 onward, with his brother Michael. He entered the School of Military Engineering in 1841; he resigned in 1844. He lived in misery until 1846, when he published, with success, Poor Folk. From 1847 to 1849, he produced, without success, several novellas and novels.

He was implicated in the Petrashevsky affair, arrested in March 1849, condemned to death on December 22, 1849; the sentence commuted to four years of hard labor and to deportation, he set out for Siberia on December 25, 1849.

He lived in the prison camp from 1850 to 1854; he came out of it on March 2, 1854. He was enrolled, as a common soldier, in a Siberian regiment; he served there two years; and freed in 1856, without any resources, he set to writing again.

He married the widow of a military doctor, a sick woman and older than himself; he adopted that woman’s son. A wretched life at Semipalatinsk,

1857–58. After many efforts, he obtained leave to return to Russia: first, to Tver, 1858–60; finally, to Petersburg, where he was restored to entire liberty, without conditions. His ordeal and his exile had lasted twelve years. From this period on, he has two or three devoted friends.

He founds a Review with his brother, 1861. It has success. It is resolutely Russian and nationalist. He publishes The Insulted and Injured, then The House of the Dead, 1861–62. These two years are the best he has yet known. He has some resources, and can make journeys abroad, 1862–63. But his health is worse and worse: stricken with epilepsy since 1849, the attacks multiply lamentably; and his wife never ceases to be ill. Finally, he gambles and loses at play everything he has.

In 1863, a triple disaster: his wife and his brother die; his review is suppressed, for political reasons. Two families remain in his charge, with fifteen thousand rubles of debts.

Three terrible years, from 1864 to 1867. He is alone at 45, more dejected each day by epilepsy, overwhelmed with cares, hunted by creditors. He publishes then Crime and Punishment, 1865–66.

On February 15, 1867, he marries a young woman of 22, Anna Grigorievna Snitkina. He had four children, two who died in infancy, two who survived.

From 1867 to 1871, he spends nearly five years abroad, driven out of Russia by the terror of debtors’ prison. Most often he is at Dresden, where he might have seen Ibsen and Wagner, whom he seems not to have known even by name. The rest of the time, he stays in Italy, in France, in Switzerland, and above all at Geneva, which he detests.

These painful and wretched years are nonetheless capital in his work. Katkov’s review, that of the famous Orthodox nationalist, publishes The Idiot in 1868; The Eternal Husband in 1870; The Possessed in 1871–72.

In 1871, Dostoevsky returns to Petersburg. He never leaves it again.

From 1875 to 1877, he edits a periodical pamphlet, of which he is the sole writer, and which suddenly founds his fame. The Diary of a Writer obtains an immense success. It does more for Dostoevsky, a hundred times over, than all his masterpieces together. At 56, he becomes the voice of Russia itself. He is the national writer of his country. On every occasion, he speaks henceforth for the nation: with respect to Pushkin or Nekrasov, on the subject of the war against the Turks, to the students, to the judges. He has on his side the people and the lettered.

In 1880, he gives The Brothers Karamazov.

He dies on January 28, 1881. He is given a funeral in the manner of Victor Hugo. Forty-two deputations follow the cortège, and represent all the classes of society. The procession stretches over the length of a league.

Fifteen years later, Tolstoy, condemning all books and even his own, makes exception in modern art only of the works of Dostoevsky.

Until now, I have not named Dostoevsky.

I have never let the face of Fyodor Mikhailovich be seen in my noondays of light, nor in my mists. I was reserving this name and this figure for some long night of meditation in which, settling my accounts with the grandeur of living, and all the suffering it implies, I should have to compare the sum to what I know of strongest and most ardent, if not of purest.

Here is the hour.

This night, I have seen the tree of my sorrow come forth out of my heart; and, lying on my back, my eyes in the winter stars, puny, bound to the mother, and such as I shall be in the eternal womb, knotted again to the navel of death, I measured, with the calm of supreme vertigo, the upward thrust of the sorrowful stalk; and I followed with my gaze my tree in all its growth, from the roots of the black breast up to the acorns of the planets and to those flower-heads of light, that one calls, just as naïvely, asters.

I was there, like a scale upon the bark of life and of the earth.

And yet, in that profound stupor, my soul full of love was the very sap of the tree. And I traveled the whole column of the living sapwood. And, ever rising, in my silence, I throbbed in the firmament between such and such a celestial flower, or thought, or sentiment.

Then I felt, in the proud cohort of those I love most, as it were the explosion of a salvation; or else, in the midst of a rending joy, like the encounter, smiling, of the most cherished of the dead, rising to give me his hand, and to kiss me on the brow, that admirable name and presence: Dostoevsky.

In him, I wish to discern myself. One must go down into this precipice, on the flank of the mountain; and one will have to climb back up the slope, from the lowest depth, to the summit that equals the highest peaks. All the blackness of crimes, the madness of heroes, the infamy of acts—the world wears these masks; and Dostoevsky does not conceal the horror of them. But it is with his uglinesses and his shadows as with the beggars, the poor, the little folk in Rembrandt: kings, saints, and high priests hidden beneath rags.

One must penetrate this terrible abundance of love: it is then that the pure face of life is uncovered, an ardor for beauty that nothing wearies, a loving heart, a surge toward the light, a will that strains without respite toward redemption.

I

ON HIS LIFE

He was born in autumn. He died in winter.

He saw the light of day in a sad room, in the depths of a hospital where his father was a doctor. On an evening of icy fog, he gave up the ghost in the black season. He breathed a great deal of polar air. From the sad dawn to the full darkness, he always had commerce with the shadow; and the smell of the poor always floated about him. The hospital of his birth was the hospice of beggars.

The second of three brothers and four sisters, he lost his mother when he was fifteen, and soon after, his father. He is one of those to whom the dark sides of life were revealed early.

As a child, he spent two or three summers in the country. His parents had a little estate, thirty leagues from Moscow near Tula, neighbors of Tolstoy, after all, in that immense land. All his life, he dreamed of the fields, and he lived only in the cities.

At the Marie hospital, there was already privation. A numerous family, and several domestic serfs, were crowded into a narrow space: ten or twelve of them, they had two rooms and a kitchen. They lived there poorly, but warmly. An ardent pity was the flame of the house. The father, a great reader of the Scriptures; the mother, humble and sickly, always ready for prayer: both of them, of a faith that no suspicion of doubt troubles. It is the ancient spirit of the plain, between Europe and Asia, the old ways, the familiar simplicity and the gentleness of the Orient, with the scrupulous rule of Christians. Austerity has nothing here of the stiffness proper to the puritans of England or to the pietists of the North. They are less hard, these old Russians, than they are resigned. Violent bursts cross their silence. They have that faculty of emotion which is so general in the Orient. They may never laugh; but they weep; they know how to weep, and do not blush at it.

Dostoevsky’s father was of that petty nobility which serves in the lowest ranks of the army and of the State. It played, over there, the role of the bourgeoisie in France. These nobles without fortune and of mediocre rank are artillerymen in the army, or doctors, or professors in the town, engineers, chemists. As they have nothing but the meager pay of a trade or of a rank without prestige, they marry the daughters of merchants. Such was Dostoevsky’s mother, docile, totally submissive to her husband, the Christian servant of the family, divided between the household, the lyings-in, prayer, and the care of the children.

The younger sisters, a little apart, the two elder sons, Fyodor and his brother Michael, always together, bound like the thumb and the index finger, devoted themselves to the same studies, and, until twenty-four or twenty-five years of age, do not part.

The young Dostoevsky is brought up in the profound intimacy of the family, where the religious bond makes so solid a knot of all the others. He is sensitive to excess. Somber and tender, pensive and violent, of a humor sometimes exalting, most often taciturn, in everything he is extreme. Like all those who feel with passion, he gives himself little and concentrates within himself, incapable of lending himself and able to give himself only wholly. Hungry for affection, he nonetheless does not form attachments. Moreover, he seems always to have been of a puny health. If not sick, they are all of an uneasy body, in the family.

He does not deny that he had a self-love without limits. His sickly character, his sorrowful complexion do not permit him to take pleasure in company. Nevertheless, he aspires to friendship, at all times and with all his strength.

He has never been at leisure. The lesser troubles left him only to make place for the greater sorrows. Sickness haunts him without respite; it is always at his heels. When he himself is not sick, sickness is still in the house: it holds for him his mother, or his brother, and later his wife. With the years, his cares have not ceased to grow.

Dostoevsky is unhappy in all his affections.

I am astonished to find in him less pride than self-love. All his pride is for his nation. As for self-love, there is in him no vanity, nor the sign that he prefers himself to others; but, as he does not know contentment with himself, he fears the judgment of others: he dreads in them the false note; he forebodes error with regard to himself; he anticipates the injustice that afflicts him. His mistrust is always in the order of sentiment: in the end, he wants to be loved! The risk of not being loved irritates him or makes him indignant. He is the only man who is not smaller, in proportion as one sees him more touchy.

Nothing suits him less than the usages of high society. It is not that he is of popular bearing or popular manners. Vulgarity is still more foreign to him than the distinction natural to the man of the world. He is well dressed and well bred only according to his own rule. Effacement is politeness, in society. An original soul, more than a genius, makes people cry scandal. If the people of the world are a gold coin, for it to be in circulation, the piece must no longer be new, the stamp must have ceased to be sharp, the effigy must not let itself be recognized. Of gold or of lead, a Dostoevsky does not suffer being effaced. He may have the elegance of his simplicity, in the simplest attire; but he does not know how to wear the formal coat; he is not at ease in the garments that custom imposes, or fashion: he is disguised in them. There are men who show through, whatever they do, across all the usages of the world: they offer the scandal of nakedness. Usages are made only to give a common envelope to the common animal. Such a hero of the drawing room is himself only in the dress of everyone. But Dostoevsky cannot put on the dress of everyone without appearing to wear a cast-off, and to have slipped into another’s garment.

§

The more he tries to live in society, the less sociable he is.

The more he aspires to love, the less he believes himself worthy of being loved. He cannot reconcile himself to the idea of being everything for others; and short of being everything for them, he nonetheless wishes to be nothing. There is the torment of passionate hearts. A need of love forever disappointed. He forebodes, he knows too well that he weighs cruelly on those he loves.

A young man still, he does not sleep, “because of the thoughts that torture him.” Despairing words are his habitual speech: he suffers from the city, he suffers from solitude, he suffers from himself and from others; “Petersburg and my life make me perish, frightful, deserted,” he says one day; and he concludes: “If my life had had to stop at this instant, I should have died with joy.” He almost never does what he wants, and such is the mortal sickness for any man who has a will, and a work he dreams of accomplishing. Is it ill fortune that makes him sick? Is it sickness that hampers his fortune? Dostoevsky is always hindered. From his twenties on, sickness and misery share this life between them, like two eternal bitches, loosed by the master of the infernal packs.

Before the time of his great moral revolution, the disgust at what surrounds him, privation, nervous fits, cares make him almost mad. The idea of suicide haunts him. He turns to hypochondria. He is gnawed by insomnia. Several then thought that he must lose his reason. He is avid for pleasure, but pleasure flays him alive; sensual delight unhinges him, enjoyment crushes him. If he deprives himself, he suffers; and he suffers still more when he comes out of privation. The city is worth nothing to him, and he is condemned to live there. “Petersburg is a hell for me.”

Privation and even misery have tormented him without respite. Misfortune overwhelms him, at every age. Between the two extremities of material sorrow and of moral sorrow, he struggles in a perpetual combat. At the beginning as at the end, he groans: “What does glory matter to me, when I am working for my bread?”

§

People sometimes say that misery is good for great souls. It seems that it strengthens them. That is the idea of those who have never passed through this damnation and this entombment. They do not know all that misery has killed in a man: the forces he has spent in scratching the earth to draw his bread from it are stolen from the fine works he would have done, had he been at leisure. The trouble he has given himself for any livelihood, the vigils, the anger, the anguish that exhaust—how many hours, how many years lost! Misery strengthens? Yes, doubtless, sometimes, and at what price? One remains standing only on the corpse of joy. And misery also kills. Such a man has always been sick, only to die before his time, who, in good health, would have multiplied masterpieces; and first of all, he would have lived. People too readily forget the finest and the surest advantage, which is, firstly, to live.

Dostoevsky’s correspondence is a monument to the misery of genius, a long cry of despair. Lamentable letters, in truth: for one hears in them the eternal lamentation of an eternal beggar. At twenty years of age or at forty, and at fifty as at thirty, it is the same groan. He cries famine. He calls for help. He has no more clothes, he does not know where to find the wherewithal to pay his rent. “It is a matter of paying all my debts with my next novel. If the affair does not succeed, it is possible that I shall hang myself.” (1) A quarter of a century afterward, having wife and child, he cries: “I have had to pawn my trousers to procure for myself two thalers. She, my wife, who is nursing her child, she is going herself to pawn her last winter skirt, of wool! And yet, here it has been snowing for two days.” (2)

Debt has been his Tartarus: he never came out of it. After Crime and Punishment, already famous, he had to flee Russia to escape prison. He wandered six years abroad, under the lash of debt. Exile, for a man like Dostoevsky, perhaps harder than his time in the prison camp in Siberia.

It is debts that wrest from him the pitiable confessions of which his letters are full. They press him; they terrify him; he does not make a movement without feeling the constraint at the armholes, not a gesture that does not envenom them. Debt is always there, to prevent him from satisfying the humblest needs that pull at him. In his correspondence, there is question of nothing but rubles, of loans, of advances, of pledges. “I shall return so much; I shall have so much; I need so much.” There is the knot of his convulsions. “I implore you! For the love of heaven! In the name of Christ! For the love of God!” There are letters in which this cry of the beggar recurs as many as nine times. (3) At every moment, he prostrates himself, crushed by trouble: “I am in despair. I am lost.” One trembles with one’s own impatience; one’s nerves are tense with waiting along with him. “In the name of heaven, answer me! An immediate reply, for the love of God!” that is the prayer he repeats ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times, on every page.

(1) Letter of March 14, 1845, Correspondence of Dostoevsky, translated by Bienstock. (2) Letter of October 1, 1869. (3) Letters of July 1856.

And the misery of miseries is not to fast, nor to eat one’s dry bread at the bedside of a sick woman. There can be worse: that one must earn this daily bread with one’s soul, when one is full of works that are not in circulation. The blackest misfortune is not to suffer, so long as one can suffice for the suffering; but to be in chains, when one must live as a Tantalus, separated from one’s art by sickness and all the vile cares of daily life: they make life all the more abject for its having been meant to be greater. “How can I write, while I am dying of hunger?” (1) asks the wretched man; “and on top of that, what do they demand of me? they demand art, poetic purity, without effort, without delirium; they give me Turgenev, Goncharov, and Tolstoy as models! Let them see, then, the condition, mine, in which I work!” And, to conclude: “All my life, I have had to work for money; and all my life I have continually been in need, at present more than ever.” (2)

There indeed is the cry of a whole life. There is Dostoevsky between sickness, misery, and mourning, for thirty years. He must come to touch the tomb to have at last some respite. The last five years, in which he meets glory and a sort of ease, are the place in the sun, that separates from the grave the man who comes to a halt. To come as far as that, a frightful road through the nettles and the torments. And, once on the terrace, how quickly it is crossed! The nocturnal hand, of which the infinite sky is the palm, holds the man by the shoulders and pushes him in the back. One more step, and the gilded place falls sheer into a margin of night, narrows, alas, like a man’s body brought back to the cocoon, but of an inundatable depth.

(1) Letter of October 1869. (2) Letter of February 26 / March 10, 1870.

Neither Tolstoy, nor Turgenev, nor the other famous Russians have known the lot of the poor man and the sick man. I do not speak of the humiliated man; for Dostoevsky, if he devoured the angers and the rage of the misunderstood artist, was never sensitive to the shame of the prison camp. A political prison camp, in the Russian manner, is a place full of honor. And besides, the criminals themselves, over there, accepting the penalty in conscience, are not at all ashamed of their crime, since they expiate it. Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, so many others, are rich lords, free of their time, in possession of fortune and of that priceless good: a robust health. They obey their creative function, and nothing combats it. The happiness of the poet is the same and not elsewhere.

Dostoevsky is not at leisure. Dostoevsky is no more free than Russia, his mother. He is in tears; he is in prisons; he is in chains. He is led, like her, to the gallows. He is granted grace only of his life. He escapes the gibbet; but he is reserved for the infinite sequence of torments. Now, he does not shrink from it. He preaches neither submission to evil, nor revolt. He dares to declare himself for the heroic use of suffering. He dares to make choice of the powerful exercise that evil proposes to our soul, that which is done to us and that which we are tempted to do. For himself and for all his race, he embraces the party of suffering love, which, according to me, is the only love, being the only one that accepts the trial of sacrifice. And, in the horror of all that surrounds him, for himself and for his people, Dostoevsky subscribes to the beauty of living.

Taken as a whole, it is a hideous life, this one. One can scarcely bear the idea of it; but let one consider the apparent life of Dostoevsky as the means of his inner life; all the harshnesses of fortune, the injuries of misfortune, so many coulters and ploughshares that serve, cutting, for the tillage of the hidden beauty, and which only the rending of the breast was to make visible.

There is how, in Dostoevsky, the revelation of a whole world is wrought. As he is, so is Russia. By every necessity, he had to be condemned to death and to go to the prison camp with her. Dostoevsky has created for us mystical Russia, cruel and Christian Russia, the people of the mission, between Europe and Asia, which carries to the tedium of the Western twilight the fire and the divine soul of the Orient. What king, what statesman, or what conqueror has acted more greatly for his race? It is in Dostoevsky, in the end, that Russia, ceasing to be Cossack, shows itself a reserve for the future, a resource for the human race.

II

IMAGE

Of medium height, he was small for a Russian. Nervous and jerky, there was uneasiness in all his gestures, a sort of feverish expectation. Or else, action wearied, the gait slow, he seemed dejected and as it were buried. A man agitated or undone, always in a shiver, or in a sweat, always in trouble. I smell his odor of feverish and moist skin. Discontented, he appeared old and sick. And, suddenly, contentment gave him back the air of youth.

One could remark nothing in him, when one had seen his head. Of all his body, Dostoevsky was only the man of a head. He had it large, vast, strong in all directions: each feature violent, powerful, rude even; and the total expression, nonetheless, full of gentleness and of fineness.

The hair sparse and pale, the color of ash; if not bald, stripped at the temples; and the brow very bare, early. This brow appeared the larger, high and broad, with two strong bumps above the fold that divides it, between the eyebrows. As a young man, he must have resembled Prince Myshkin, whom he has only washed of all flesh, and fleshed down until he made him bloodless. The beard is poor, irregular, long besides, reddish, with gray glints.

He has large ears, high and thick, longer than the nose. Bags under the eyes, and two pits of wrinkles, a double ravine from the nostrils to the lips. The whole face is broad and lean, with great folds. On the right cheek, a very common wart rounds out.

And here are the eyes, which are all the life. Light, pale, of old slate, rather sunk back in the bruised orbit, they are narrowly slanted at the top, and sewn by the upper lid to the eyebrow.

They are full of veiled sadness, in which there pierces a point of fire, the black grain of the pupil, which now goes out in reverie, now glints like a gimlet. Beneath the frowning eyebrows, what an admirable gaze! Present, and on the lookout, but not for what the world sees: it seeks the depth; it watches for the inner man; it plunges within; it goes beyond appearance. He does not care to hide anything of himself, neither his sentiments, nor his ideas. With a passionate attention, he gives himself; he offers to all troubles all the sorrow he has at his disposal. Suffering is always present. Dostoevsky is the great heart, which I find sound in spite of all, because grandeur, according to me, is the only health.

A gaze of a terrible seriousness, and almost hard, so much does it watch, somber, for the moment to spring upon its prey. But an immense sadness resides in it. A religious sadness, and quasi-popular: the sadness of misery, the sadness of the carpenter who tries the woods of life, who sends flying all the shavings of conscience, and who heaps up the sawdust to drink the blood spilled. There is the man of sorrow, if ever there was one. And he is good, even if he is unjust: his lips say it, excellent, thick, obstinate, and generous. Vexation twisted his mouth, with an evil smile; and the satisfaction of the heart brought back to it a gravity nourished with innocence.

Sorrow is behind all the features of this man. Striking as he may be, his aspect seduces me less by what it shows of the man than by what it hides of him. The face of Dostoevsky is a mask, if he laughs. But, at the repose of the muscles, when he meditates, the face of Dostoevsky is the reflection, surged up in the shadow, of another face turned within. A strange character, of a rare intensity: the visible man is the specter of the inner man.

Hence, that all is sorrow on this face: the great brow, as high as it is vast; the wrinkle between the two eyebrows; the small, sharp, and covered eyes, which sink beneath the mist of troubles, set in the circle of tears; and the mouth half-open, like children in their sobs: all is sorrowful depth in the phantom of the face. Each feature is a line that must be followed, in order to pass from the flesh as far as the soul, and to sink into the secret or into the lairs of the inner man.

The sensibility of such a man is sublime.

What Stendhal is to pure intelligence, and to the mechanics of the automaton, Dostoevsky is to the order and to the fatality of sentiments.

Stendhal reaches the bottom of the passions through the analysis of their effects, and of acts. Dostoevsky touches the most secret part of minds through the analysis of the sentiments and impressions that determine them. Dostoevsky is the prodigy of sentimental analysis; and he is the greatest inventor that is known in this order. With opposite means, they have the same power; but from Dostoevsky to Stendhal, there is the same difference as between the geometry of Pascal and the analysis of Lagrange. Pascal wished to solve every problem by the visible consideration of figures. So Stendhal: to understand everything. Modern mathematics wishes to approach the essence of number by the determination of the inner element, and by the fine discernment of the symbol. So Dostoevsky: to penetrate everything.

Stendhal and Dostoevsky are within the passions; and nothing interests them, nothing holds them but to be there. Stendhal shows them, like a sculptor who models his forms. Dostoevsky animates them, and lives in them like another Pygmalion. Stendhal holds all the threads of the drama, and amuses himself with it sometimes. Dostoevsky does not even play the drama of the passions: he is on the cross with them.

Among the most intense, a man insatiable to feel living man. Dostoevsky, sensitive to all life, and to the beasts, with a heart so just, in spite of all comes back always to man. It is the depth of man that occupies him with a constant care. Everything is a function of man for him, and even all of nature.

It is by virtue of this unfathomable sentiment—at least I feel it so—that Dostoevsky, having discovered the cross and Jesus Christ, was never able to see life except upon the cross and in Jesus Christ. Being in the prison camp, a pious woman, who visited the prisons, made him the gift of the Gospel. The true Dostoevsky dates from this moment. He had, at all times, read the Bible a great deal; but he had not let his soul interpret the letter. The heart is the interpreter that reveals a divine text.

The art of Dostoevsky is a direct painting of intuition. There is why everything, with him, being so true, seems like dream. One must consent to it, in order to understand him well; and this accord is not made at the first stroke, nor even at the second.

III

ON HIS ART

From the beginning, he knows where his strength lies. And even if he does not yet show it in his works, he forebodes what kind of genius he will later cause to appear there.

I am original, he says more or less, in that my means is analysis, not synthesis. I go within; and examining the atoms, I inquire into the whole.

§

He has always had a repugnance for the sciences, as vain.

His education, after all, was very literary. Early, he knew French and German. The little Dostoevskys had a French tutor, named Souchard. In the poor house of his father, Dostoevsky took the taste for reading. He had it as one ought to have it: to the point of passion. His harshest privation, in the prison camp, was not to read. As a student or a banished man, in his prison, in Siberia, from garret to garret, he always has books with him: the Bible, Shakespeare, Schiller, Racine, Dante, Pushkin. When he is not asking money of his friends, he implores that books be sent to him.

He is very much nourished on French works. They have stood for him in place of antiquity. French is his Greek and his Latin. He swallows everything, with an equal appetite, Voltaire and Balzac, Eugène Sue and Racine. As a young man, his reading is immense. As for the Russians, he is ignorant of nothing of them. All his life, he is curious about his rivals; he is avid for all that they publish: he ceaselessly calls for the novels of Turgenev, of Goncharov, and of Tolstoy; he follows the authors of every order, and even the critics. Alone, in his eyes, Pushkin and Gogol have genius; to Tolstoy, he refuses it. Besides, the example of Gogol, dead mad, haunts him.

People often make of Dostoevsky a kind of uncultivated barbarian, who owes nothing but to himself. Nothing is so false. An idea good for schoolmasters and the sergeants of letters: in it they flatter their own barbarism, in order to draw it out of the ranks. And, so that one may be sensitive to their originality, they find the barbarian in every original soul. The barbarian does not even know how to speak: he stammers. Dostoevsky is a man of long culture, as much by race as by education. He was never lying fallow. This son of the petty nobility received the noble nourishment. He did not set himself, late in life, to learning. Far from it, he was instructed from the cradle. Poor or not, that is what distinguishes the petty nobility from the Russian bourgeois and merchants. The elder Dostoevsky is not only an austere man, occupied solely with religious ideas: he too reads; he has served in the camps; he has made war against Napoleon. He sees beyond his quarter, beyond the town, and even beyond Russia.

One must seek Dostoevsky where he is: at the center of the pleiad that made the glory of the Russian mind. He is two years younger than Turgenev, and seven years older than Tolstoy. He is therefore halfway between Tolstoy and Gogol. All of them, they were born under the mystical reign of Alexander, and grew up in the darkness and the silence of Nicholas. Their fathers, all of them, are the men of 1812, who delivered the fatherland, and who imposed temporal Russia upon Europe. Russia will doubtless never again find fathers and sons like those. They are noble, in the sense of the elite: they are the choice of nature, and they respond to it generously. To be generous, that is all of nobility. In short, they are of good race. Ardent at the work, they believe in what they do; they give themselves, with a liberal soul; they have the illusion of being necessary to their time, to their country, to all men: to themselves. Moreover, Turgenev excepted, they are harsh, hard, and cruel toward one another. Dostoevsky cannot bind himself solidly with anyone. The kindness which Belinsky, Turgenev, and a few others had, at first, for him, soon serves them in nothing, nor him. As so often happens, it is a Dostoevsky in their own likeness that they loved in the author of Poor Folk; and the true Dostoevsky vexes them. The latter holds it against them that they do not do enough, after what they have done for the other. His heart is humble, at once, before love and despotic: it is profoundly avid. He falls out with all the men of letters whom he approaches. A rule: not one artist of genius will ever have peace with the men of letters, nor will wish to make it. Dostoevsky cannot keep a friend. He demands too much of friendship, doubtless. A melancholy humor! To love too much those one loves.

One forms too fine an idea of it. He would wish, this passionate heart, that people lived for him alone, I fear: for he would be capable of living for those he prefers.

§

He has the respect and the love of his art.

At the height of grief, given over alone to himself, provided he suffers only from himself, he goes far. Is he thus, or do I imagine it? In his love of art, too, he knows the extremities: sickness, which oppresses the soul; and the refusal to do anything for the public against his own genius. In the eyes of the artist, the public is a necessary evil: one must conquer it, and nothing more.

He adores the state of creation. But writing kills him. For he is in the pay of need; he may well hold firm, and protest that he will not write on commission, he lives by his pen; he is the serf of the engagements he must contract. Hence, he is the least equal of the great writers: he gives a masterpiece after a confused novel; and the masterpiece is followed by a mediocre book. (1)

§

He himself seems to yawn with boredom, in certain of his works. They are of an unbearable length, elaboration, subtlety. They smell of madness. The analysis in them makes one think of delirium, of scruple, and the inner detail of the mania for the infinitely small. The incoherence of Dostoevsky is piteous, when he does not find his order. It sneers, it grimaces. What a constrained smile! Then Dostoevsky goes at a terribly slow pace; he is obscure, diffuse, tedious as a cellar. His failed works, one would call them the fragments, the touches, the unchosen notes of a work that has not obtained the grace of unity. The more curious the analysis, the more necessary the unity. It is with all the details and all the inner elements as with a chemical body: all the atoms being there, there must be the spark that assembles them and groups them; the crystal must meet its form.

(1) After Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, 1866 and 1867; The Eternal Husband after The Idiot, 1868 and 1870.

§

Dostoevsky is of a prodigious disorder, when he does not succeed in finding his order.

But his order is a prodigy, when he attains it.

Nothing in it betrays symmetry, nor what is called composition, by a coarse word that depicts the coarse work. In the order of Dostoevsky, all is organs, and relations of organs. All is produced by inner necessity. Here, the life of facts is indeed the image, on the walls of the cavern, the image and the shadow of the inner life, in the great fire of the invisible hearth. Thus, the masterpieces of Dostoevsky are plunged into dream; and they alone have the character of dream, like those of Shakespeare, and sometimes of Ibsen.

The order of a work like Crime and Punishment is unheard-of. I shall make the analysis of it some day. I content myself with saying that this admirable drama takes place entirely, acts upon acts, in the conscience of Raskolnikov. The two long volumes contain only the sequence of sentiments, of visions, and of thoughts created by the imagination of the hero, and which his conscience unrolls. They enclose only a very small number of hours; but each instant of these hours is totally exhausted of its pensive essence and of its action, of its echoes and of its repercussions. Such a work, when one grasps it, seems the marvel long wished for by the mind: art is at last the dream of life, which itself is a dream.

§

Dostoevsky is rich in unforgettable words, which rise up from the abysses. They are words without pomp and without eloquence; but like a creek of deep water, between two rocks, they mirror, in the pure depth of the sea, the immense evening sky, with its clouds and the first stars.

To a wretched man, gangrened with consumption and with envy, who is going to die before having reached twenty years, Prince Myshkin, opening the door, says: “Pass first, and pardon us our happiness.” (1) — “Why have you destroyed everything in yourself?” cries the passionate young woman to the innocent prince; “why have you no pride?” (2) — And he, to say, insensible to all vanities and to his own perdition itself: “What is my trouble and my ill, if I am in a state to be happy?” (3)

Raskolnikov, the murderer, to the holy prostitute: “You too, you have set yourself above the rule: you have destroyed a life, your own: it comes to the same thing.” (4) — And again: “I wished to dare: I killed. And it is myself that I have killed.” (1) — Or these traits worthy of prayer: “Christ is with the beasts before being with us.” (2) — “If the judge were just, perhaps the criminal would not be guilty.” (3)

(1) The Idiot. (2, 3) The Idiot. (4) Crime and Punishment, IV, 4; V, 4. (1) Crime and Punishment, IV, 4; V, 4. (2, 3) The Brothers Karamazov, XI, 6.

§

Dostoevsky has the conscience of Petersburg.

He is the soul of those polar winters, where the day is an agony of the night; and of those summers, where the night is still the day, a dreaming twilight, pensive and adorable as the gaze of a mad lover.

I have lived with him in the ardent and dreary city, where the drunkards and the mystics give each other their arm, where funereal hypocrites kiss on the lips the candid rebels; where the worst corruption, which is sad, fattened with its dung the subtle innocence; where lust is a grape with seeds of remorse, and where the virgins have a smell that tempts sin.

§

A world apart.

In the work of Dostoevsky, there is a complete society, namely a religious society. For all the totem-bearers of the earth will avail nothing here, and their etymology still less: for man, religion, whatever it be, is the bond. Dostoevsky does not break the bundle. He tightens the knot of the city: everything enters it, from the humblest artisan to the haughty master of men. With him, not ranks and titles—the hierarchy is one of living virtue and of characters. He has his thieves and his scapegoats, his murderers like conquerors, his cowards, his vile rascals and his enormous buffoons, as he has his princes, his virgins, his heroic saintly women, and his saints. He is rich in every elite and in every plebs. Social condition counts there for almost nothing. How this genius is not intimate! How this sense of value touches me!

It is the world of profound conscience. The passions appear in it frenzied, because they resist being moved; convulsive, because they are about to strip themselves of all that clothes them. Dostoevsky knows well that simplicity is not in the objects; but only in the eye that examines them. The simplest life is in itself a prodigy of the complex. Simplicity is only the sleep of appearance.

A world, where the sentiments are carried to the last degree of acuteness and of ardor, seems the hell of suffering and the paradise of madmen. There, where all is intense, all is excess. The ordinary rule is abolished. The common order is the average order. And the average is the space of the mediocre.

Measure, such as it is, is an element of ordinary life. Measure, in art, would seem the truth, like the average of statistics. Measure varies with the magnitudes one compares. It is not the same for the guests of Olympus and for the captives of Erebus; nor above all for those and for the little souls of a trade, whose conscience lives in a shop. Souls of a trade, they make up numbers, like the ants. They nourish the averages. But, properly taken, the average is false like all moral statistics. For figures and measure reveal only the world of quantity. Quality is the supreme rule, as well as the bond of all the sentiments and of all the acts in relation with conscience.

§

The world of profound conscience takes on the appearance of dream; and even of madness, when it happens, with Dostoevsky, that living beings spread the echo of their own song, in order to give to it an echo more distant still; when they make the analysis of their passions, themselves, and when at last they have conscience of their conscience.

In Stendhal, this marvelous analysis being all intellectual, even if the hero lends himself an ear, one always sees, behind him, the most intelligent of men who is there, and who listens. All is clear; all is order; all is mind. With Dostoevsky, it is the passions that grow passionate and devour themselves in pursuing themselves, in contemplating themselves and in feeling themselves. Everything takes on, thenceforth, the character of dream, or of madness. But this world of madness is the sphere of a supreme reality. Madness is the dream of one alone. Reason is doubtless the madness of all. Here, the grandeur of Dostoevsky makes itself known: he is in the dream of conscience, like Shakespeare himself, and Shakespeare alone, with Rembrandt alone. Such are the summits of conscience and of analysis, like the highest mountains of the earth, in that they border, like them, the shore of the greatest depths. Summits that do not hide two or three other peaks, among which Dostoevsky.

§

No power closer to life. The great dreamers are the great living men. Where they seem to draw away most from life, they touch it still more closely than the others.

All is interior. It is not even thought that creates the world, by figuring it. It is emotion that arouses all life, by rendering it perceptible to the heart. The world is no longer even the image of a mind. The universe is the creation of intuition.

Creative emotion is the only and true knowledge. As it is born to itself, it gives birth to objects. And all is its dream, as it dreams itself. The heart is the means, and it is the place.

There is the new art. There, at least, is the art that I want, the one I seek and the one our effort prepares, if heaven consents to it. The inner art, which manifests all the splendors of nature and of action, by absorbing them all: from within to without. And all that is of the without itself, is within.

Such is that art whose prophets are so dear to me in the past, and who were always so rare. But by what they were in truth, they are.

I shall say more, to be understood by those who are already of the new era, and not to be understood by the others. What was the property of music, hitherto, without even wishing it, we cause it to pass, according to the means of thought and of language, into poetry. They will believe that it is a matter of imitative harmony, of timbres and of jingle-bells in the words, of alliterations and of other inanities; all dexterities of the trade, which must always efface themselves from art, when they enter it; and which cease to be vain only on condition of not being vain of them. It is another music, and less vulgar, that I have in mind, of which material harmony is only the envelope. To plunge all ideas into love, and to give the emotion of it, no longer the notion as such—there is the music I mean. In such an art, we want everything to be emotion, and proof to be reduced to nothing. Now, the more emotion is queen, the more art, its king, must make himself master of it.

The rhythm of love leads everything. Intelligence is the plough, not the grain nor the harvest. Neither eloquence, nor the evident idea is the bread that nourishes. It is no longer the search nor the painting of the object that solicits us: but the evocation of its form and of all the grace it holds, of the magic, in short, that is included in it, to make us believe in life. Art must seduce us to life.

One believes in life only in what one loves, and in the dream of what one loves.

IV

PASSIONS AND MOMENTS

His art does not come from his ill. But there is something of his ill in his art. And since this sacred ill has not killed art in the sick man, the artist helps himself by it to extend his art. Of a thousand epileptics, there is one alone who is not an imbecile; but that one has gleams that health does not know. It is the miracle of the mind, that it can make its good out of sickness itself. I shall not weary of speaking for the mind. Et spiritus adjuvat infirmitatem nostram, says the Apostle. It breathes where it will; and even in the patient, whom those curs of scientists would like to put in the asylum.

Sick, then, sometimes giving the idea of a madman, always bizarre, of an extreme humor, subject to sadness and to melancholy as to a passion; falling from strident laughter, and besides the rarest, to the blackest reverie; the least sound of men, if health is that state of happy equilibrium in which neither does the body complain to the soul, nor does the soul complain of all the ill that the body can do to the mind: Dostoevsky, all the same, was stricken with epilepsy only in prison and in the camp. He was thirty years old, then, and for thirty years that remained for him to live, he bent beneath the hard hand that crushes. Was it true epilepsy, or one of the nervous forms that imitate it? In any case, the attacks were not at all rare: he had as many as three and four of them in the month; sometimes even, every day.

Dostoevsky lived in the sacred ill. And this ill revealed to him the sacred terror, which he called mysterious terror. It is not only the aura of the crisis, that breath which sweeps the world of the vision and the object, to make of it a total whirlwind, gyrating around a fixed idea. I recognize in it the magical movement of contemplation, the gait of ecstasy, that revolution which carries the whole man into the dread of the vision that is promised to him, that he fears and desires, with all his being, in the same moment. Love at its height obeys the same incantation: love which, always, goes beyond its object, and, in man, always beyond the most beloved woman.

Sacred ill, ill of the earth, as one says in the village, loss of the senses. Loss of self, in a strange prescience, and even in a divine possession of another.

Aura quaedam frigida, a compound of sensations and of movement. A mysterious breath sets itself to weave a web, which separates the soul from all that surrounds it, without however depriving it of it: a complex tissue of passion and of possession, an abyss for the proper senses, an obscure revelation of universes.

If one wishes at all costs that it be an ill, I call it the sickness of the tripod. It is the state of seers, the very condition of the mystical presence. For, do not believe that this forgetting of extension is an absence, nor that the objects disappear because they no longer count one by one. But, on the contrary, everything takes its just place there, and the forms of the universe assemble around the sole fixed point. There is Saint Paul, when the awaited word swoops down upon him with the sun, on the road to Damascus; and he hears, he sees, he feels, he is begotten by what he begets; he opens himself entirely to the conception of his God, whom the fire darts upon his soul, and with whom it penetrates him as with the point of a sword heated white-hot. This whirlwind carries away the very sense of movement, because it blows upon time as a great wind upon the dandelion flower. The excess of speed flattens the totality of time: all is depth, beneath the dazzling film of an eternal and dreadful appeasement.

There, all explains itself; and there, all is conceived as explained. Man is no longer anything but his perfect passion, that knowledge which surpasses by very far the perfection of desire. He is no longer anything of himself, because he is the conscience of his world. He is his own end, he is penetrated by it, and he penetrates it. He is no longer the wretched shuttlecock of the energy that animates him; he melts into that very energy, he is the nucleus of it, the stable center and the universal explosion.

The witnesses of ecstasy count by minutes and by seconds, what the sacred subject could not count, without annihilating it along with himself. Mohammed said that in one of these instants, he displaced the mountains and filled the centuries, to make of them the single cup from which he drank. Dostoevsky practiced these excesses. He had the anguish of them. A fear that doubles itself with a mystical terror, in the ordinary course of life: not only because one awaits the return of ecstasy; but because the soul that has visited the depth can no longer live except in the great depths: it plunges into them all the objects of life, all the thoughts and all the acts. The depth is without repentance as it is without pardon. Whoever has felt an eternal presence wishes to know nothing except in function of eternity. And, such as he aspires to it, such he persists in dreaming, if one tells him that he is dreaming.

§

I compare the march of the epileptic toward the crisis, to the movement of Dostoevsky toward the depth.

Never does his thought stammer, although it seems to: it enumerates, it palpates the infinitely small; atom after atom, it attempts the analysis, as the antennae of the insect explore the pollen grain by grain. One would think he hesitates, because he comes and goes, and because he fumbles in the labyrinth; but he never loses sight of the character: he is drunk with it, rather; he seizes, he tastes, he pumps all the aspects of it, and disgorges them.

He must disentangle the knot of the obscure sensations and movements that make the body of the sentiment in the darkness. He seeks all the threads, one by one; he holds them, in the end; but always, he goes from one to the other, directing himself toward the bulb of the root. An infallible instinct serves him as a guide.

His line appears uncertain and slow: it is the living curve, made of small straight lines in infinite number. That is why Dostoevsky does not narrate: to recount, that is all the same to describe. Dialogue alone, or the colloquy, can render all the moments, the incidents, and the inflections of the inner curve. The great works of Dostoevsky make themselves in our mind, in proportion as we incarnate them into our dream. They are born of all the touches and of all the nuances they paint in us. One understands Dostoevsky, each one, only by reason of his own inner life. Never did a poet give less to the understanding alone and to the simple notion. His masterpieces are moments, which the dialogue exhausts, by exhausting totally the characters: chosen moments, moreover, in which a whole life forms a mass, scarcely linked one to another by a thread of narrative.

The descent of Dostoevsky into the unknown emotions partakes of calculation and of discovery. It is all in forebodings, in attempts, in allusions, in prodromes, some near at hand, others which lose themselves in an immense distance, but whose approach is certain, as soon as they have appeared to dawn on the horizon of conscience. And the sky of uneasiness reigns above the forest. Insomnia wanders there with those wearied bounds that throw it, sometimes, into the holes of an overwhelming sleep. The dream has its form, where one [obscured], more and more acute, draws back more and more into the shadow, to tend it. Then, this suffering self is like the point of the sacrificed arch, the summit that projects the whole cone of the vision; and the whole universe of emotion enters into the sectors of the light. To read Dostoevsky well, one would have to remember what one does not yet know: passion does thus, which, from the first sight, forebodes in the beloved object all that it is ignorant of in it; and a thousand traits, which escape at first, nonetheless enter into the soul that gathers and mirrors the object of its passion. Of all the poets, Dostoevsky is the one I can most, and always better, reread.

It may be that sickness prepared Dostoevsky for those rarest states of intuition, where the thinking element and the sensible element are born one of the other, where one touches in sentiment the thought in its nascent state, where sentiment rises, like the sorrowful dawn, in the nocturnal chaos of sensations.

First, the absence of self.

Then, the descent in convulsions into the abyss. Now, each sentiment is an abyss for the soul. But, among all, love.

What shall one call the soul, if not the organ of knowledge? I keep this discredited name for the only object that never wearies me.

In this way, the heart is reestablished in its prerogative. It has the privilege of the prince, which even its fall could not annul.

True knowledge founds the world of charity, and it alone. One could know nothing without loving. And it is not knowing, to know and not love.

The whole of life is that veiled woman, whom man seeks, of whom he makes his bride, and cognovit eam, having loved her.

There is that pallor, that trembling which precedes the embrace of the bridegroom. And his fear, perhaps, and his disgust. There is the man vowed to knowledge: he is at first a corpse to himself. His flesh bursts into rebellion, and dissociates itself from him: it makes itself discord. It slavers, it empties itself, it vomits; it strangles itself, it befouls itself; it wishes to flee the slavery it forebodes. It does not wish to lose itself in the journey of the ardent darkness. And, because it resists, it is abandoned.

O terror! It is left there, like a vile rag, by the soul on the threshold of knowledge. It is there, like the skin of a rat, dead of the plague, in a street of China; and the crowd is around, the people of men or the people of worms.

And when the flesh finds the spirit again, when it deigns to reenter into it, and to fill it with its presence—O God, I recover thee!—the servile conscience hesitates: it goes slowly, through the maze; it wavers, as if exhausted; it gropes the walls of the prison; it counts the stones, and the mosses, and the spiders, and the hideous insects, and the larvae in the cracks. It recognizes its road, neglecting not a sign, renewing the humblest steps by the ingenuousness of the paces it attempts: it discovers, as if it had just been born, what it knew and practiced not long ago, but of which it has lost the memory.

And such, too, is the gait of Dostoevsky, when he explores a sentiment or the reasons of an act. Like the invisible and sovereign hand, whose touch kindles life, he arouses what he finds again; in proportion as he enumerates the elements of it, he animates them and organizes them. The great creation of characters is an enumeration of the soul by a creator in passion.

They are dreadful, these moments that have the taste and the sense of the eternal. And it is fatal that a sort of death should follow an instant of divine life. One must at least pay with a temporary death for this flight beyond time. One must lose consciousness, to redeem the terrible favor of having had, a moment, the whole of knowledge.

At bottom, it is true that one cannot hold the balance between the flesh and the spirit. Always one of the two prevails. In all the great poets, matter is conquered. The more they love the flesh, the more they fear it. Or else, they mistrust it. In truth, what then is an art that is not idealist? But what indeed is even a thought?

§

How he is in love, there is the great secret of the man, and the one the artist hides most. This secret known makes the rest of the character known. I think not only of the love of the artist for his God and for his art; but of his love of woman, of all those thoughts of the flesh, which conscience is ignorant of and which the heart nourishes, without always naming them, in a space of mystery. And often, the secret of the man is not in what he yields of himself to the object of his love, but much more in all that he reserves, in what he conceals, that he never lets be seen and confides to no one.

From book to book, Dostoevsky keeps a bizarre household with women. What sad and ardent nuptials are his! I seek in him the key to his masterpieces. His life did not dare all that his works accomplish. His works no longer have any obscurity, when one lights them with his life.

He had made a strange marriage, in Siberia, with the widow of a doctor, an unhappy woman and already a little old: a marriage such as one sees in his novels, nuptials of compassion and of delirium, a mixture of weeping, of hysteria, of sufferings, and of remorse. Dostoevsky and his heroes marry as one chooses the longest torture among all the kinds of torment. It is a matter of taking up the cross, and often without hope.

Desire there is only one more attraction to the sacrifice. The flesh, even weak, does not seek its pleasure, but its trial and its sadness.

The soul gives itself without joy, not as to a promise of happiness, but to a sort of rending misery, to a fatality of its choice. It would be little if, not hoping for happiness for oneself, one kept the illusion of giving it to another than oneself. But it is not so. The marriages of Dostoevsky bring to completion a misfortune that would not have been complete, had the lovers not married, but which would have led them to madness, had they not resolved to accomplish their unhappiness. For such is the end of it: the marriages of Dostoevsky are accomplished misfortunes. At bottom, he is against the flesh to such a point that nothing must succeed for it, neither what it obtains, nor that for which it suffers so much in not obtaining it. It attains only its misery. And that is all it deserves.

He has, for women, a tenderness burning and sorrowful. One would say that he needs to suffer through them, and that, having a horror of making them suffer, he nonetheless is not ignorant that he will always be for them an occasion of suffering.

A desire of them as if infinite, and a fear of touching them, a terror of satisfying it. A fear of them all is in him, and it is by that above all that they attract him. He could doubtless not do without the feminine presence; and without being able to make, in anything, the happiness of a woman, he had to dream that a woman should make his.

His first marriage is frightful: it reeks of ugliness and of the hovel. It is a bedridden love. There, Dostoevsky willed his own sacrifice. He sought a chastisement; he expiated a sin that I sense, that I see, and that I do not wish to tell.

Later, scarcely widowed of this widow, he takes for wife a young girl. He has the passion for young girls, and none has known how far. He is one of those for whom innocence and earliest youth are the flower within the flower, the mandarin within the orange, and the love of love.

Prince Myshkin is, in love, Dostoevsky himself. He aspires to the finest sensual delight of women, to that smile between flesh and heart, which is the charm of young girls; he dreams also, with them, of the sweetnesses of children, if children could be his lovers, if they could give delicious caresses, or if lovers could receive innocent ones from them.

I consider with terror the life of a woman with such a man, and the life of such a man with any woman, whoever she might be. He can yield to her only his carnal shadow, with all the miseries that are appended to it, like so many wounded limbs through the rags. For the rest, he keeps an eternal silence. He breaks it only to hurl himself into transports of trouble and of passion. Trouble or passion, they scarcely understand any but that which concerns them.

For such men, their joy is always mute, so little does it count. Sorrow alone is eloquent.

A woman must suffer with him. She must, I say; because he knows that such is her vocation, if she is truly a woman. She must suffer; and he must, himself, suffer at making her suffer. Thus the sexes recognize each other, and they love each other in the end. Love is innate in this practice. Without that, egoistic pleasure masks everything. What patience, in a woman, to bear the suffering that is born of such a man! The patience of a woman is her strength. Her goodness, her virtue. What courage, in her, to keep her faith in life! For him, if she loves him, she must have faith in it, or she is lost to herself. She cannot betray the will of such a man; she cannot forget the unique teaching of his work: that faith in life, cost what it may, is the inexhaustible mother of all beauty.

It is hard to be a woman. Better is it to be one, however, than to be one of those fat prostitutes who make books, between Paris and Nice, with their hatred of man, licking themselves in a mirror. And because they are the ignominy of self-love, they believe themselves artists. Not to Lais scratching her pimples, but to them, is due the chastisement of steeping, throughout eternity, in the mire of their ulcers and the cream of their excrements, the graces they have found in themselves, and the hideous pleasures they tasted there. (1)

(1) Di quella sozza scapigliata fante, / Che là si graffia con l’unghie merdose, / Ed or s’accoscia, ora è in piede stante. Inferno, XVIII, 130–132.

§

Because he has seen them suffer, and because he has made women suffer, all while wishing passionately to raise them up and to heal them, Dostoevsky knows them better than another.

He sees them now cruel as the reproach of the flesh, now sweeter than the nursing milk in the mouth, but always all mad: mad with egoism, or mad to give themselves, mad to kill man, or mad to immolate themselves to him.

He knows their unique passion, that eternal waiting in which they stir: they are there, always the same sleeping Eve, who waits for the finger of her God to communicate to her the spark, and to call her to life. And in this eternal waiting, he always divines their eternal disappointment, their eternal despair: one must live for them! They can give life, but not have it! One must blow the fire for them, which is all the life of the soul; one must never let fall that immortal and fragile flame. And since it is fatal that one cannot always nourish it for them, they must lament the dupery of the total gift they wished to make of themselves to man and to love.

He has therefore suspected their cruel ardor, those icy resentments that threaten the hearth of tenderness and of desire. He has left as it were a mildew of that sensual soul, of those perverse modesties, of that innocent and virginal lust, which tremble in the sentiment of young girls, and which the furies of the guilty woman fan like an inextinguishable regret. All is passive in them. Their sacrifice has sometimes the violence of an egoistic appeal to the violence they repel. They put, in being taken, a sort of burning complaisance, in order to make of it later a pitiless reproach. They are indeed, in their acid perfumes, the flower that demands the pollen, and that claims to be fertilized, while it has the illusion of merely resigning itself to it. They are also the fruit that hopes for the sun in order to ripen; and that wishes to curse the maturity for which its pulp is avid.

To wait, always to wait! to never be granted! Such is woman.

§

He is more than one man, this Dostoevsky: and all the more so, as he is more Dostoevsky. More than one man, and more than one woman.

All these men, in him, and all these women, are each totally himself; and for a time, without bond to the others. The self multiplies itself in this way. The man, who has received this fatal gift, naturally carries in life and in his works the forms of dream.

Dostoevsky, so diverse and so one, conceives love with two or three women, or several: for there are in him two or three or several men for every woman he loves. Whether he desires her in her flesh, or whether he vows in her a cult to some rare idol or to the virgin. Profusion of love, a sharing that answers to a powerful and mysterious need. He must have the soul, with the flesh; with joy, he must have tears. And in the ardor of the woman in fruit, he must also have youth, the flower, or childhood itself.

He is not far from admitting two or three men for the same woman, because he finds them in himself; and all three, in him, have need of the woman he loves. It is from the obscure depth that the strange heroes of his books rise: all together, in the same love, they make but one, who is himself, Dostoevsky. Hence, that patient analysis, which considers one face of the character only in function of the other faces. Hence, in short, the accord in life, and above all in the extreme love, of what is unintelligible contrariety for the mind.

The desire of this man for the young girl trembles, like a carnation of fire in a flowerbed of ears of grain and of heavy corollas. The passion of innocence, the surge toward the virginal form, that essence of ardor, so powerful and so subtle that a single drop poured out perfumes every other love, and reveals itself even in the most infamous love—never does Dostoevsky resist it. Besides, the young girl is only in us.

According to me, he seeks the virgin in every woman; he can love none but her. This predilection carries him away; it rapts him to the third heaven, or it makes him descend even to that vernal fury, where the covetousness of man addresses itself to childhood. He goes to it, not from vice, but by virtue of a pilgrim passion. O how little shall I make this excess understood to the serfs of brutal appetite.

In the man insatiable of love, a pity-stricken passion, which dominates over all the desires: of having one love, in which all loves blend and entwine. He is woman and he is man; he is lover and he is father; he is of flesh for his soul in madness; he is all soul for the delirium of his flesh. And he wills innocence, because among all the essences of love, it is irreparable. I am reminded of Wagner, who inclines, with a zeal of the same order, to multiply the love of lovers by kinship, and who does not stop at the forbidden degrees. The lover is the brother of his beloved. Siegfried is almost the son of his beloved, and thinking of her, always he thinks of his mother. Kundry steals a filial kiss from the lips of the gasping Parsifal.

Were one to tell me of Dostoevsky that he had kept house with a little girl, I should have no surprise at it. And I am sure of it, if, leaving here the plane of visible facts, I half-open the annals of the secret man.

Do not believe that one is more sensual, in proportion as one is more passionate. It may happen that the fury of the senses crosses with passion. But the passionate imagination is subject also to a sort of ideal carnality. Nothing transpires of its intoxications; and sensual ardor exhausts itself in seeking difficulty. What often is the artist, above all in the art of characters, if not an imagination enamored of forms, to the point of forgetting all rule?

Dostoevsky is bigamous, at the least. I speak only of the intentions. Passion rarely meets its object; still less does one find the two or three women one desires in the same one.

Pity for the woman one loves less than one is loved is a terrible passion. It loves even, sometimes, unto death more surely than the other. Thus, the ardor of self-sacrifice infinitely surpasses the ardor one puts into sacrificing others to oneself.

He would wish them both: the one for himself, and himself for the other still. A taciturn secret that Dostoevsky confesses: to give oneself to the woman who loves us and who awaits from us her salvation; and to take the woman whom we love, from whom we await joy; the one whom passion makes live and the one who kills it. Is it not, in the shadowy evening of The Idiot, the two men, the husband and the lover, the victim and the executioner, that one sees watch over the same woman, who was double and who is dead, herself a victim too and an executioner? In the end, the joy one demands and the salvation one dispenses blend in the unfathomable trouble.

§

What then is this search for sorrow, in the sentiment that promises man the most felicity, according to nature? Is it not, rather, the fatality of it in the conscience? The more one thinks of it, the more it seems that man and woman are not made for the common life. Passion, more or less long, is not at all a state of duration. Passion, like the drama, lives by combat and is denounced by death.

Yet, man and woman, the more they love each other, the more it is fatal for them to live together and intermingled. To the genius of the species, which troubles itself only with the moment, is substituted the genius of tenderness, which claims to reconcile the contrary elements, and to make a durable state of a passing state. Such a violence to nature does not go without sorrow. And I say that it is necessary. Human love is distinguished, by that, from the love natural to the other creatures, and even to most men, if one judges by so many wretched couples.

For a man and a woman to be able to bear each other, they must suffer one from the other. It is the law. I speak of the man accomplished in conscience.

Accord comes only from sacrifice. He who loves most, suffers most. Ordinarily, the woman receives the sorrowful part; and often, she chooses to play the role of it. But the better man does not leave it to her.

In love, the heart is too debased, if it does not suffer. Suffering alone reestablishes us in our dignity as men. What deep lover is there whom love does not abase to the pardon of the worst offenses? One must suffer greatly from the woman, in order to remain worthy of oneself in the love one grants her, and even in the love she accords us.

And it is not enough, the natures that are opposed, in the man and in the woman. When the hearts are accomplices, it is destiny that is not. Misery, sickness, mourning, all that threatens every man beneath a fatal mask, in love unmasks itself, and, between lovers, for the one takes on the face of the other.

Love is what separates us most from the Ancients. Our passion is so ardent and so full only to make in us the union of the two worlds: the Christian heart inhabits the pagan flesh; and the pagan flesh haunts the Christian heart.

It is our love that demonstrates to us that we shall not divide off one world in us from the other, without reducing ourselves of the totality.

The mystery of love is that of sorrow itself. I believe in none but the suffering loves. Sorrow is not sickness; sorrow is an enrichment. Psyche would not have lost her God, had she awakened him in the sleeplessness of trouble, and not in the sleep of pleasure. Less sorrow, love is only the shadow of itself.

The Ancients were ignorant of sorrow, since they believed they conquered it. And we, we must save it.

Sorrow is not at all the place of our desire, but that of our certitude. The Ancients are too carnal. I do not claim that we ought to make election of sorrow. So far from it, that one ought to do everything to get out of it. But one must know it. The true man is not the master of his sorrow, nor the fugitive, nor the slave: he ought to be the savior of it.

Upon the Christian passion that has given so many echoes and so much depth to life, it is for us to raise a new life. Grandeur alone will make the joy of it. For, where life is, joy is also, even in tortures. To live is to have joy, at whatever price it be. Neither grandeur, nor beauty is valid without suffering. Thus man no longer goes without an inner sadness, which gives a price to all that he feels, like the dew of tears upon a marvelous face.

One could not boast, either of bringing man back to an age he no longer has, or of abolishing in him any of the powers that the past has put there, and which were necessary to him, since he gave them to himself. Sorrow is an august power.

Instead of destroying anything, one must accomplish everything in us, and complete everything there.

The Christian passion, if it had to be justified, I should say that it has created love, by the infinite price that sorrow attaches to it. Art is an excess of the same order, if one compares it to play. Love is only a young flame, which shines and consumes itself, with the Ancients. Our love is a fire that lasts, and that demands to last, a brazier that rekindles its flames in proportion as it devours them, an ardor that nourishes the whole of life. The love of the Ancients is only the envelope of ours: to the senses is added the heart.

V

THE RUSSIAN DEPTH

Passions of the hidden bottom, ground swells: most often, they sleep; but it happens, lifted up, that they carry away the banks of the common peace.

You do not know how far the love of life can go in the deep beings, born for suffering, and whom it attaches to it. It carries them to all the excesses, which you call crimes, according to your law. Neither the carnal Jews, nor the Yankees will ever be able to understand it: they are too enslaved to their idols: the Jews, in their slavery to earthly goods, and according to their inclination to enjoy them commodiously; the Yankees, in their brutal lie of automatons, with two mainsprings of vain agitation and of moral worth. To give one’s life, and even to take the life of others, without exactly weighing the worth of it on the scales of reason, of agreeableness, and of success—there is mystical honor. Dostoevsky, who has all the kinds of honor, save that of vanity, feels mystical honor to the same degree as a holy apostle. The love of love will make, of a man of Dostoevsky’s sort, the executioner of one woman and the plaything of another. But, for both of them, he will have only caresses in the soul, and all of his blood.

The passion of innocence will push him, perhaps, to live as a lover with a little girl. Not in order to corrupt her, may heaven be witness! in order to approach her fresh purity and to purify himself in it; in order to know her: one knows only in possession, and all possession borders on crime, alas; in order to increase it with his own tears, that adorable innocence. In short, in order to find his own again there.

Never enough happiness! Never enough joy! And always in tenderness. And the laughter in the tears. For where is happiness, if not in the madness of all that it costs us? The suffering soul alone is equal to this insatiable appetite. And it is not at all, if it does not first sigh.

Has he regrets and remorse, Dostoevsky, he who goes so far in the cruel art of knowing himself? He gives himself all the appearance of it. But remorse is a big word, which hides what it ought to define. Dostoevsky has the despair of never attaining that fullness of the passion he pursues. A suave despair, a terrible disappointment, a space of disavowal, a desert of the entire abandonment of self. The unique passion is, in sum, the passion of plenitude.

A creative artist would almost wish to participate, from moment to moment, in the universal creation. That is why he detests himself, in vain, infinitely: he does not scorn himself. He can, on the contrary, scorn others a great deal: and yet without ever detesting them. There is, in him, an eternal ardor for the kernel of the fruit. All crimes may haunt his soul: it could lose nothing of its pure will, which is to do no harm, nor of its primitive covetousness, which is innocence, after all. It aspires only to seize the living object, to adore it in itself, to possess it even to the point of destroying it. In the end, I shall say that it wishes to kill it, this object of love, in order to recreate it afterward at the expense of its own life.

Dostoevsky is not at all Rousseau displaying his miseries, and braving in proportion as he says: “You are more wretched than I; and I am worth more than you, at least in that I show you that I am worth nothing.”

For him, Dostoevsky, he is worth a great price; and all are worth their own. He touches the bottom, which is the very worth of life, as below the oceans, provided one casts the sounding-line far enough, it is always the immutable solidity of the earth; and all the seas are but a robe of dew upon the bark.

Dostoevsky reproves only wickedness without love. Desire is sacred to him, however little it carry flame: even impure desire. For him, there is nothing mediocre in itself: because in him, even the misdeeds of the flesh, all is heart and soul or, at least, holds some within. Nothing is vile, in his eyes, on the earth, but the peoples and the men without soul. To fall into all the sins, if need be, in order to be capable of expiating them all, had one even caressed them, in the brazier that the heart feeds. Where love is, there is life, once more. Where life is, there is the good. That is why it is so good to expiate the error included in crime: all chastisement is unjust, and the work of the demon in him who inflicts it. Just and salutary, in the guilty man who accepts it: for his heart demands it. Either to have the strength to punish oneself, or to be punished. Life, lost in the fault, is found again in expiation. Crime leads the heart astray, and has perhaps no other horror than this straying.

Dostoevsky has often appeared a wicked man, and he has passed for envious. A being too acute always seems wicked. Strength wounds. The gaze that penetrates hearts is a dagger for them: one holds it against him for the sting, were it of the finest point, and even when it should be blunted in the effusion of the tenderest tears. Men refuse to be divined. Still less do they accept being revealed to themselves. One does not strip them without doing them violence; and they groan at recognizing themselves. Dostoevsky spares nothing. The lie, which is at the bottom of human nature, irritates him to the point of rage. He is the one who measures himself with every conqueror according to the world, whoever he be; and he strikes him, he crushes him, he flays him alive. He condemns all those who dare to pass condemnation on the creature. He judges only the judges.

Made for solitude, or for a whole people, but not to bend to the taste of a few, whether he wish to please or wish to wound, he never contains himself. His tears are as prompt as his burst of laughter is brief and always astonished. It is he that I hear in the drawing room of the Epanchins, when the Innocent Prince, devoured with sympathy, frightens all his friends, exasperates his fiancée, and runs with such gladness to his social death.

He could be exquisite or cynical, by an equal desire to be himself, to please whoever pleased him, and to displease whoever should never have pleased him. And as he treated people face to face, the public is treated by his books.

Stung in his self-love, in the extreme intoxication of his sentiments, rather than in the pride of his thoughts, he carried himself to that excess which offends others most: which is, when they are present, to forget them. Or else, if he could believe in their sympathy, he associated them with his passion, he incorporated them into it, he bathed them in the torrent of his fervor. Losing all restraint, with a refined sense nonetheless of sentimental measure, he did not claim to convince, but to make loved the object of his love; and, doubtless, he put into it the more caress or violence, in that such a desire envelops the covetousness one has of all love. Then, he hurries the words, he lifts the sluice-gates, he loosens the locks of his passionate reason. He is haggard. He frightens. This man, with the heart desperate with love, has the bounds and the claws of the tiger-cat. He had also the soft mewings of it, the morbid tendernesses, and the velvet. Ha, what a gift of tears, of holy tears! What a clan of weeping! How he opens the inexhaustible spring, the fountain for the afflicted, who are, in the desert, all the pilgrims of the heart, tormented by thirst between the aridity of the sky and the dryness of the sands!

§

The strength of style carries everything away. But the depth of sentiment encloses everything, and style itself.

To have the same tears! would that not be the last word of art? The musician hearts will know how to understand me.

I shall say that the harshness of Dostoevsky toward foreigners and toward the Jews is a matter of style: they do not have the same tears. He detests all the peoples of the West; he mocks the Occident. Forced to live in Switzerland, in France, or in Germany, he stifles. Everything is empty to him, when he leaves Russia. He avenges himself on the foreigners for the disgust and the boredom that he breathes with them. But he is capable, at Petersburg or at Moscow, of doing them justice. He wishes to employ them for the good of Russia, on condition that they lend themselves to it. Now, they refuse to do so, and even they hate the Russian tears, far from mingling their weeping with the weeping of that great face.

There is how everything ends, with Dostoevsky, in the condemnation of the Jews. Instead of being Jews in Russia, why are they not Russians in Judea? But they would no longer be. Between Dostoevsky and the Jews, there is the same quarrel as between the Old and the New Testament. The second abrogates the other, since it accomplishes it. The dead grafted onto the living corrupts the living.

§

Finally, Dostoevsky is a gambler. And all the more so, in that he always loses.

Why does he gamble? In the unhappy man, who is twice passionate, gambling takes on all its strength. One gambles in order to gamble, and one gambles in order to win.

I have often said that the lottery, or the throw of the dice, seems to me the most honest means of making a fortune. For those, it goes without saying, who have not the genius for making a fortune. And it is true that they do not make it. Morality is therefore satisfied.

Those who do not believe in fate have never looked at life. Chance is the public name of fatality. Gambling is the popular consultation of destiny. Oedipus gambles on the road to Thebes. Orestes knows how to gamble. The Ancients, great connoisseurs of action, have no doubt about it. They go so far as to cheat with chance, in order to keep a trump against the black series: such is the wise Polycrates of Samos, who in vain makes an allowance to misfortune: as is just, his reserve does not protect him at all. Destiny does not mean to be flattered. It punishes the one for his humility, and the other for his insolence.

Dostoevsky, uneasy in everything, was bound to have his soul in gambling. He gambled his last six rubles, as one sows in the fields of Eldorado, in order to reap ten thousand from them, pay all his debts, and get out of need. Persuaded that gain is always possible, provided destiny consents to it: it takes only an instant of forgetfulness, after all; it suffices that the hand of fortune look elsewhere, the wink of an eye, and one wins. Well thought, and all the better in that the sweat of dread still makes its allowance to bad luck.

He who always loses has no reason not to always try the venture. Pride wills it thus, and the sense of the just. In the gambler of a certain order, there is a man passionate for justice. Always to lose irritates him. In principle, one ought not to lose more often than one wins. Faith mixes itself in, and one persists. This self-love is not ridiculous, because it is founded on an ingenuous cult of life. The unhappy man gambles to get out of unhappiness; but he gambles also to force the happiness that flees him. Gambling is an interrogation of fortune. And the more it refuses to answer, the more one interrogates it.

If I always won, I should wish to gamble in order to lose. As it is more ordinary always to lose, one gambles in order to win, this evening or tomorrow, or next week, or some day, in the end. I wager, in gambling, that Dostoevsky prayed.

§

How he lacks dignity with nobility! How well he rises above the usages! How he takes just account of them, by not taking account of them, by snapping his fingers at what is expected of him! What a deep honor dispenses him from satisfying honor according to the world, that infinite sequence of little basenesses, which a mask of banal impudence covers over, painted in the colors of a politeness fit for every use! (1)

Honor, in modern society, is only a façade of silver upon a palace where there is no longer anything, neither halls, nor furniture, nor bridal chamber: the fire has passed through there, and the house is empty even of the nuptial secret. Dostoevsky has no part in this honor of the drawing rooms and of the capitals.

(1) Triumph of this honor among the Anglo-Saxons. There, for a man, glory is to live in a mask. They make themselves masters of all their emotions, they say. But, most of them, they have none. And those they have, they master very well: the scorn of others, the hardness of hearts, the brutal surliness of the puritan spirit, the hatred of free morals; and this promised land of gentlemen is made up of groups of drunkards: because in fact it has them. They wash themselves carefully, every day, from head to foot, and Bible in hand, they ferociously scorn the poor. They all have the same soap; they are well dressed, in the same fashion. Not a stain on the clothes; not a grain of dust in the house. But hay in the head, and gravel under the great breast. They always tell the truth; but their whole being lies, from the womb of their mother, which it is forbidden to name.

Dostoevsky does not hide in order to weep. He does not blush to beg. He does not give such value to money. He has not so much respect for gold, neither for that which he does not have, nor for that of others. He yields nothing of his God; he never betrays what his God demands of him; and there is the true honor. Yankeehood has perhaps its own, after all: the dollar and the cold bath.

But rather, Dostoevsky undergoes the affront that fortune ceaselessly inflicts upon misery. His constancy is heroic: to serve his God, he is the humblest of men. He consents to pray, to solicit, to receive alms. As he shrinks from no burden, he recoils before no humiliation. He, who had so much pride, and much self-love, that inflamed skin of sick pride, gets down on his knees, in his shirt, as many times as it takes. He implores, he kisses the hand that gives. And yet, to give to such a man is always to give him the whip. He receives it with gentleness; he accepts every kind of bloody benefit.

One would have to be very low to reproach him for it. He has the love of perfection: such is the hand that fills him. Worked upon by so many ills, he sacrifices his dignity according to the world to his mission according to the spirit. He would not be the most Russian of Russians, if he did not believe in his mission. The more he accepts, the less he receives for himself. He worries at being always behind with his publishers; but he is not ashamed of being always in debt with his friends. And if he suffers from it, he finds in it an occasion to serve still.

It is that he never manages to satisfy himself. The one whom people take for a Barbarian loves perfection like an artist of France or of Athens. He lets himself be abased in the eyes of everyone; but he could not betray the work that he bears.

By that, he reminds me of Wagner, once more. And certainly, in arts so opposed, of a matter so diverse and of a form so contrary, Wagner and Dostoevsky touch each other more closely than any other two. The analysis of Wagner and that of Dostoevsky proceed from the same bottom. The same inner movements, which combine, entwine, knot and unknot themselves, the same will of the heart, here and there, envelop a unique sentiment. They live by emotion, and, in two different orders, they tend to produce a similar emotion.

§

The trees are not of the same essence. The foliages differ; and the branches direct themselves toward contrary horizons; but the roots are common.

I recognize Wagner even in the laughter of Dostoevsky. Wagner laughed only once; and his joy, not his gaiety, is steeped in emotion. There is not the shadow of gaiety in the great Russian. For me, the enormous and sorrowful comic of Dostoevsky touches me the most. Lebedev, Marmeladov, the elder Karamazov, so many others, astonishing figures, of an incomparable plenitude, in the manner of Falstaff. It comes from love, like the rest. They love themselves, these buffoons! They love themselves to the bottom, like monsters or like children. And they love life, like saints. One can therefore love them, even in the scorn they inspire. In truth, Dostoevsky is one of the magnificent believers in the beauty of this world, who would be capable of curing the fine minds of all scorn, if one could cure pettiness of being petty, and morality of being narrow. Criminals or ridiculous, Dostoevsky is for his heroes, as he is for all that he animates. Life—he has no other party. There is the source of a comic without a second, to my taste: it is not destructive; it is purged of all irony. It is clean of all blame, even in invective.

Marmeladov, Lebedev, and the whole band, tender rascals, and dear cynics, buffoons of life itself which contemplates itself, in tears as much as in laughter. Because Dostoevsky denies nothing, even when he destroys, his buffoons affirm a whole world that has not succeeded—but which, all the same, has continued its growth in shame, sin, rascality, debauchery, and remorse. They carry their excuse with them; and much more, their legitimate privilege. They are sure, at once, of their unworthiness and of the right that it has, too, to live: I shall say even of its prerogative in this world and in the other; for they suffer, these lustful men and these drunkards, whether they undergo the foulest miseries, or whether one scorns them and hates them. What a difference from Lebedev and Marmeladov to Bouvard and Pécuchet, those immortal caricatures! Those, one cannot even scorn them. They first make one laugh, then sneer; in the end, their comic is like the interminable tickling of thought: one bursts with boredom and irritation, at that laughter. They are abstract and dreary. They figure Science, and its labors in perpetuity. Marmeladov and Lebedev are so much men, that they are justified. Dostoevsky would say that there is a Lebedev and a Marmeladov in every father of a family, however little he had to live in the conditions in which those lived. They are not in death, nor pitilessly condemned, like the two perpetual secretaries of Flaubert, automatons of universal derision.

§

He is against the Occident, in the measure in which one arms oneself with the Occident against Russia.

Never could Dostoevsky give pledges to any party whatsoever, not even to his own: that of the earth and of the living. The will to deny is always foreign to him. He affirms by denying. Hatred is not in him. He is not even an anti-Semite. He is against the Jews on the same ground as he combats all those who deny Christ and Russia.

How he is free, in disdaining all political liberty! He knows that liberty is not in the vote. For is it not the slaves who vote? That he is free of every party, I sense it from the strength of his first fiber: art, politics, religion, in Dostoevsky, all comes out of the same cell: the humble pride of being the confidant of universal life, and of blending with it, indefinitely.

A man must indeed be worth the trouble, for him to give himself to the universe. Or what gift would he make? Whether he fall from the highest, or whether he kneel first, if he lie down at last upon the body of the earth, as he ought, it is in order to render to this mother all his kisses and all his tears, a great love and a great joy. To give all, in the end, is not enough, if one does not give a great deal.

Dostoevsky exalts the self in order to make of it for life a sacrifice worthy of it. All the same, he carries his race and his fatherland to the highest point in order to offer the miracle of them to the human race. He is not bitterly the man of Russia against Europe. But he does not wish that Europe should be called by Russia itself to corrupt Russia, to deform it and to destroy it. Whoever absorbs, destroys. One must nourish oneself on foreign thought, but not let oneself be digested by it.

The love of the soil and of the race does not invite Dostoevsky to isolation. It is a love that loves and lavishes itself, not a jealous possession that hoards. He rejects nothing, he repels only confusion. The more Russia is Russian, the more Europe will be Europe, and the more nobly will the life of the human race be increased by it.

Love of the soil without pettiness or rancor. The earth is all of a piece. A right to the earth, for whoever kisses and loves the earth. Doubtless, one is attached first to the corner of earth that holds us. But for Dostoevsky, the dead do not govern the living: never will Dostoevsky stir this mortal poison; never does he summon the dead, were it in their virtues. It is to the generosity of the living that he appeals, and to their great love that makes the dead live. Dostoevsky is far too strong to shut himself up in a cemetery. We do not live in a charnel house, but in a nursery in the sun, blessed by our tears. It is not a matter of burying life, but of renewing it. The work of man is not to cultivate the germs of a sepulchre, but to rejuvenate the earth, and the sepulchre itself, by sowing new cultures there, with piety.

No avarice, nor acid resentment. Dostoevsky does not fear that Europe will devour Russia for him; but he opposes the throwing of Russia like a bone to Europe. In every order, at every degree, Dostoevsky announces the duty of being oneself as much as possible, in order to be more a man. At this price only will humanity be better and more beautiful. The race, in the end, is, in his eyes, only a means of attaining a superior humanity.

What the Occident knows through measure, the Russian divines through sentiment. The Occident enumerates and calculates: it is number and geometry. The Russian evokes and forebodes: he is inner movement and music. The Occident opens its eyes upon the world; it sees and it compares. The Russian in the manner of Dostoevsky looks within. If the Russian closes his eyes, it is not in order to see more, doubtless: it is in order better to hear the deep murmurs of life, in the shadow where the images define themselves, the objects if one will. Rhythm is the first figure; and, in the bosom of the darkness, it is from melody that the forms are born, an obscure prodigy. Such is the reason why the Russian wishes nothing, if he does not love. He does not criticize: he denies. He does not doubt: he destroys. He is not an atheist: he is a priest of nothingness.

§

Before forty-two years of age, Dostoevsky produced nothing of worth. All his great works are of the full age, between forty and sixty years, when he died. The other Russians are more precocious: Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol lived little, but with an ardent life. Fyodor Mikhailovich was not one of those young men.

Russia recognized itself in Dostoevsky only a little while before losing him. He was the hero of his nation, the man who thinks, the heart that beats for the whole race; but he was it only five or six years before dying. He had to come to this extremity, again, in order to take the august rank that Tolstoy himself has not obtained. For nearly half a century, Tolstoy could pass for the greatest artist of his country. But for a few seasons, Dostoevsky was the man of Russia, the one who loves and who hates, who thinks, who wills, and who speaks for all, the venerable eldest of the house, the guide among all the brothers.

He is the man of sorrow: is that his sole title? One would be quite wrong to believe it. I have understood Russian sorrow in Dostoevsky: it is not only fruitful: it has the active strength that purifies. Russian joy has no virtue at all. Young peoples always have enough joy, since they wish to live. The joy you seek depresses you.

To come to this sorrowful reign, the life of Dostoevsky had to be all that it was in fact. He had to fall into political error, to be taken for a rebel, he who was so little of one, to be condemned to death, and to molder in the prison camp.

No one owes more to his sufferings than Dostoevsky. No one owes more to his errors. In no one was the fault more fruitful. There, he made for himself that incomparable view of the reverse side which he applies to the sentiments of men. He reads both sides of the page, and the visible face is to him only a means of better knowing the other.

The error of a great soul is never anything but in the action: neither the will nor the heart errs at all, being always faithful to the grandeur that animates them. One is mistaken only about the road to follow. When one retraces one’s steps, one possesses the whole horizon and all the perspectives, which one might perhaps never have seen well without that error. It is the common root of trouble and of power.

The work that made the fortune of Dostoevsky as a young man, (1) and those that came afterward until the catastrophe of the prison camp, seem to me of a mediocre invention and of a very feeble worth. They smell of the sentimental grime of garrets. They are whining and tearful. The little gaiety they have grimaces. They announced the Gogol of the garrets, if there can be a Gogol minus the strength and the style. The trait is forced, the drawing without beauty, the shadows thick. They resemble the pictures of a forgotten painter, Tassaert, who whimpered heavily in the hovels, from pallet to pallet. Subtle, in the end, but without depth. Now, the depth of sentiment alone corrects the subtlety it implies; the depth of analysis alone supposes the extreme complexity and justifies it. This double gift, which was to carry Dostoevsky to a height where no one surpasses him, makes itself felt in the first works only by the awkwardness of the action and the contortion of the characters.

(1) Poor Folk, 1846.

At the beginning as at the end, Dostoevsky paints only young people, and sometimes old men. There too, it is Russia itself, which is not ripe, always too green or too far advanced; it has its rotten adolescents and old people with a soul fresher than childhood. Often over there, the young women carry a corpse’s heart, full of vermin and of ashes, beneath a flesh in flower. Russia lives in excess: in everything, hitherto, it is ignorant of the in-between.

Dostoevsky himself and his books are at the center of this unknown world. He and his books are the great works of the ripe age. It is the man in all his strength, who possesses youth: young people do not know young people. Dostoevsky is that man, the one who does wrong neither to reality by dream, nor to dream by reality, who alone can understand all the depth of life.

Little matter his errors of fact, the first and the last, those that led him to the prison camp, and those that would have him taken for a councilor of the Hundred Black Men. Little matter that the Third Section be the hidden face and the visible arm of the Gospel in the horrible empire. Little matter His Excellency Bribe, the princes who steal the funds of the Red Cross from the sick and the wounded, or the reign of the Germans, frenzied policemen, who govern in the name of Christ and of the Slavic race. All the errors of fact do not prevent one from believing in the Russia that Dostoevsky incarnates for us. It is not only in him; but he reveals it to us, he completes all that one sees of it in Pushkin and in Gogol, in Turgenev and Tolstoy.

There must be a Russian people in swaddling-clothes. These political slaves must be admirable for moral liberty. These brutes, in the hell of drunkenness and of massacres, must all the same be rich with a conscience that has no longer its equal in Europe. This people, capable of everything at times, like cruel children, and which sleeps, the rest of the time, in a frightful impotence, it must nonetheless be the only people of Europe that still has a God.

Russia, even mad, even cowardly, even drowned in blood and in unscented brandy, Russia does not live for money, nor for hatred, nor for the balance of trade, nor for the ignominious triumphs of violence. Russia lives in order to give back a religious conscience to the human race: it has, in spite of all, the heart fraternal to all men, even in the midst of the butcheries and the vomitings into which its hysteria casts it.

Dostoevsky was born for sorrow, and to rise up in sorrow, above all the egoism and all the moral misery in which sorrow generally shuts up the mediocre natures.

He had to have sickness, the tortures of the heart, the anguish of the mind, the presence of death in order to conquer what I call the appetite and the health of a universal life. A little more, it was too much: one must be able to breathe, in order to live. But a little less, he would have remained, like so many others, halfway up the holy and terrible ascent. It is not at a lesser price that one takes upon oneself all suffering and all torture. One climbs the mountain surely only upon bloody rungs.

Above all, he had to have the prison camp and the hell of crimes, (1) in order to purge himself thoroughly of a self-love that was always ferocious, and of a natural jealousy. But much more still, this damnation was to reveal to him the great depths of the human soul, where no one has descended further, Shakespeare and Wagner excepted. There, he knew that crime has its virtues, and that it can be full of virtue itself; that the quality of man is never annulled; that the heart presents every grievance and every excuse; that the dryness of the soul is the only sin, if indeed there is one; that the fault is everywhere, that it always has a dispensation, that it obtains remission, provided it consent a little to expiation; and suffering is worth the consent, when the rebel refuses it; that love is the salvation of all and of each; that chastisement, horrible in those who dare to chastise, is necessary to every guilty man, in order to reassure in him the pride of his destiny and the dignity of man: for all life, before being at its term of beauty, all life is an expiation that love proposes to us, and that must be expiated.

(1) And I too, I have my hell, the prison camp of authors, of critics, and of false artists, where I purge, in a corner of shadow, the anger of my solitude and the old love of glory.

There is where Dostoevsky has grasped the soul of his people, and of all peoples, and even of those who have killed it. He weighed that the first according to rank are often the last according to life; and the last according to the world, the first according to the hidden soul of the world. There, he learned to set himself beneath every appearance. There, he accustomed himself to live in depth: for all the work of Dostoevsky is a life in the depth and in the secret truth, which is the only truth, doubtless. There, he established himself unshakably above all prejudices; and those of reason held no better before him than those of morality and of politics.

The great Dostoevsky showed, the first, that the end of life is life itself. But he went further: he knew, profoundly, that life itself is a formless void without the heart that animates it, and thus that love is the end of this unique end. What then is it, if not that man is made always to surpass himself? Man is not at all a finished figure, but a surge toward the perfect form, a continual essay at man. I find this heroic virtue in Dostoevsky, and this inner grandeur.

§

Intuition is a view of the heart in the darkness. The outer night is illuminated by the lightning sprung from within. It is there that nothing formulates itself, and all grows clear: there where life takes form, where the motives condense themselves, where the action is determined.

Intuition is indeed the luminary of the depth. It is the loving conscience of what is, at the bottom of what appears to be. It is what abides in what becomes, and which it carries. It is truly the instinct of knowledge, and the love of it.

In Dostoevsky, I end by referring everything to intuition. Dostoevsky has conscience of his intuition, and such is his miracle. One must read him as a musician.

Chastity is only the most visible sign of pure souls. The supreme purity is the innocence of goodness: the horror of doing evil. Dostoevsky does not hesitate to produce prostitutes more chaste and murderers more pure, by his account, than honest folk: it is that they love; and that crime, in them, is not the evil that lasts, but the error, the madness, and the misery of the moment. Never does he say with emphasis that the prostitute or the criminal are worth more than the honest woman and the judge. But the prostitute whom he defends is a victim: he shows in her, not the excellence of her infamy, but the excellence of the sorrow that the infamy costs her. And in the end, every creature who gives herself with passion is a victim, whatever be her executioner, her accomplice, or her idol.

No trace, in this admirable man, of virtuous hauteur. No one has perched himself less upon the stilts of duty and of morality. At the depth where he knows how to seek the origins, he finds, in himself, the seed and the excuse of all sins. And the crime of crimes, which is cruelty, he disentangles the roots of it, with a holy dread: he touches, he sees that cruelty and lust hold to each other like two monstrous sisters, united by the same bone of desire. The more he detests them, the more he espouses the knowledge of them. Dostoevsky has not, properly speaking, pity for evil: unless the chastisement be more pitiable than the fault, than the remission. But his compassion is marvelous for the trouble, whether public or hidden, that sin demands. A pity that is not at all vague nor smoky; it comports no weakness, it does not hold to lachrymosity: it is the human virtue par excellence, the virtue of virtues, the charity without which all remains dead and empty.

True love is there, where he who loves forgets himself and blends entirely into the beloved object. Tears of compassion, you make an eternal shame for the kisses without pity.

The highest point of virtue is always to conquer oneself, and to embrace perfectly the object: to be for it the heart and the soul that it has so little, or that it has not at all. This conquest is of another grandeur and of another fruitfulness, than domination such as it is. To seize another and the world, a misery beside the power one must have in order to give them life and to save them.

There is the magnificent courage of vision, which the Russians alone have had, with our French. They do not make a poor choice among the human passions: they consider them all. They do not feign to believe that lovers have no lips. The depth of Russian sentiment, and the power of the French mind: the two wings for the soaring of the new knowledge.

There is no depth without a fervent dream of the eternal. Depth is subjacent to sentiment, and not to intelligence. Depth is the privilege of the religious soul, and of that soul alone. There is no religious truth. But the religious sentiment has its knowledge. What strong intelligence does not seek a relation of itself to the universe? But it is nothing to have the idea of it: it is only a cipher. One must have the sentiment of it. And such is the religious soul. After many roads and cruel falls, the religious soul fixes itself in love: there is its place, and its conquest; there, its strength and the vocation of its power; there would be its repose, if there were one. Dostoevsky has not missed the crown promised to wandering love. He has entered into the port of the ideal search.

Reality! they say; reality! Eh, yes! We know, we too, that there is no tree without the soil that bears it, without dung or without earth. But if it never quit the soil, if it were not what escapes the dung and what comes out of the earth, the tree would not be the tree; and its root itself would rot.

The great Frenchmen have all the strength in the mind. Most of them, they have not the depth, which is so natural to religious souls. They have it no longer, at least. For they had it, those who raised the cathedrals beneath the sky. The great Flaubert does not make one think of it, that prince of nothingness. He is dry, and he sows ashes. Hence, the sands and the burning salt-marshes of his work: all the lines are beautiful, and one scarcely breathes there, in a wind of eternal boredom. Flaubert is a mortuary genius. If he has heart, as I believe, he has none for life. And all that he has of it, moreover, he stifles: he tries to be without love, like the world of his intelligence; and he succeeds in it.

The love of God, or the charity I mean, whatever name one give it, implies all the other loves. It is the love of God that Dostoevsky breathes. And the Russian people with him. One ought to have faith in the Russian people, on the faith of Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky, victim of the powers, speaks for the powers: tyranny, the police, the church, the rich. In his eyes, all the evil they can do is compensated, by very far, by the action they have upon the human soul: they provoke the excellence of it, by lavishing sorrow on it. If he ends by defending them, these mortal powers, I see in it a triumph of affirmation. Dostoevsky knows his people by himself. Every revolt of the race unleashes its instinct of blind destruction and of annihilation. The yoke, which bends its head down to the earth, keeps it narrowly from anarchy. The Russian head laughs. Its liberty turns at once into a frightful negation. The race of the Russians obeys and suffers with excellence. It rebels and does itself justice with infamy. This race can go to perfection only by the paths of sorrow. In a word, it wishes to choose only between mystical faith and nothingness, between the love of God and the hatred of life.

§

Dostoevsky, master in all passions, and holding all the keys of the abyss, closes the doors of nothingness. Tempted by all negations, he destroys nothing and he affirms. In Dostoevsky, I admire a redeemed Nietzsche. I do not believe in the Prometheuses who lose their heads on the rock. My Prometheus frightens Jupiter himself, who imagines he has nailed him fast. I shall give no credit to gods who end on all fours, in an asylum. And if the thunderbolt strikes me, even should I hold firm against it, may heaven be my witness that I shall not have wallowed.

All that is dead and negation in the philosophers, Dostoevsky has surpassed it; but such is his grandeur, that he rises one degree higher still. He carries to redemption the overwhelming weight of our fatalities. Whether I have painted him as he is, I do not know; but never, it seems to me, has one better measured the distance that separates the mortal theory from the living work, and the thinker without love from the true artist.

§

One more step.

I shall say of Nietzsche and of the Ancients that they can suffice for the world of intelligence. But they do not penetrate one inch into the world of the heart. They remain on the threshold. And the more they imagine that they lay down the law inside the house, the more they are ignorant of it. Hence, doubtless, the wretched boasting of Nietzsche, which exceeds all that one can permit to the pride of the mind; for it is the mind itself that there enters into decadence, and that marks the degrees of its fall by cries. The pride of the mind must not smell of general paralysis. The intelligence that boasts will find no excuse in the abasement of madness; but on the contrary, the end of this intelligence passes judgment on all the works of its growth; and, whatever one does, the more it has reduced everything to itself alone, the more it undergoes the condemnation of its own disdain.

What Schopenhauer and Spinoza are, the great witnesses of life will always be to Nietzsche. And these are the great artists: the confidants of love. I know more than one of them. But Dostoevsky is the first of all, in time: he has forestalled all the insolences of Nietzsche. Wagner too was there. There is not so far from The Idiot to the sublime Parsifal.

Every philosophy, moreover, that is not a simple play of logic, takes form in a work of art. One must come out of the squirrel cage. A living thought upon life has no other expression than a masterpiece. The books of Nietzsche are essays toward a masterpiece; but this Apollo is always in the cage: he plays the god, like a true University Phoebus, with gold-rimmed spectacles; all the same, his chariot is a lecture-chair, and his Pegasus a German nag harnessed with folio lexicons.

Nietzsche can serve as guide to the Prodigal Son in his roads as a young man. Nietzsche is a good method for rebellion. And, as in the manner of the doctors, he is drunk with his principles and quite blind to life, he tyrannizes. By that, he teaches discipline to those who have no inner rule. Likewise he satisfies the instinct of art in the half-artists.

Wagner as an old man, who had passed through every negation, could only shrug his shoulders, in the days of Parsifal, before that infatuated corybant who, impotent at all creation and incapable even of pleasure, made against the world of love his old idols of stone, his Bacchus, his Apollo, and his tripod. We need new gods to possess life. But the dead gods do not rise again. Wagner knew that Parsifal is living; and if, in order to offer him to the world, one had to turn one’s back on a professor of logical orgy, he turned his back on Nietzsche.

Dostoevsky does as much, with the same right.

Dostoevsky is the man of life, but not only in books. Because he is the man of life, his world is the world of strength, solely. The Ancients, again, are the masters of action, whereas Nietzsche is unbearably the man of the study and of books. By himself, he knows nothing of life, nothing of action, nothing of the passions; and he gives laws to the passions and to life. I am not astonished that he is the prophet and the god of the sonorous women who pronounce upon good or bad music. The most rebellious, and who flatter themselves on being so, are, most of them, minds born disciples.

Let Nietzsche, then, stand in place of the Ancients and of the heroic life for people who do not know how to read. And if they have not understood the Greeks, nor the Italians of the Middle Ages, nor Pascal, nor Stendhal, nor the Revolution, let them read Nietzsche, who makes for them, out of all that grandeur, a manual with all the coarse convenience that this format comports.

One ought to stop at Nietzsche. But one is only half a man, if one fixes oneself there. He is good only for women of letters and for young people.

Raskolnikov and all the young heroes of Dostoevsky know by themselves all that Nietzsche could teach them. But Dostoevsky does not defy them in this half-knowledge. He does not wish them to hold to this coarse story of energy. He carries them to the upper story, which is the properly human landing of charity. As for the superhuman, it is a good word for the amateurs of eloquence. To my ears, it has the cheering sound of bombast. There is nothing more human than to be a man. Man is rare on the market of Jupiter. And nothing superhuman has any sense except by the measure of man. Be fully a man, if you wish to surpass man. Such is the great, the only truth.

§

Intuition is the place of all the intelligences.

§

There is nothing in Nietzsche that is not in Dostoevsky. But while everything is negation, in Nietzsche, even what he affirms—and he, first of all, the unhappy man—all the negations that the sorrow of living wrests from Dostoevsky resolve themselves into an invincible affirmation: from sorrow, love concludes, in him, to the beauty of life. It is not the: Yes! of the will or of pride, that icy yes which is the polar sun of the stoics; but the love which, by carrying life, affirms it.

Such a tree gives the fruits of all sweetness. I have bent down the branches of it, and I wish to gather them in the dew that steeps them from the offering of the dawn to the sacrifice of the twilight, and even in the ardor of noon.

Dostoevsky weeps with delight, and his friends weep very often as he does. I shall tell, for myself too, the mystery of tears. Dostoevsky knows the marvelous humility of good tears. And certainly, there is in it a great secret.

§

Tears of tenderness, rain that hopes and that renews the human forest, you are the spring opened to those full of love. And everywhere that one strikes this tender rock, the shower pours forth; and it is never dried up, this loving water. What pride comes from higher? Now, it does not swoop down upon the leaves: it gives itself and penetrates them. And because it bends toward the meadow, one disdains it for stooping. But it has so much of pious complaisance, that no offense reaches it, and that it smiles at scorn itself.

To kiss the earth with transports, in joy or in sorrow, in the intoxication of good or in the avowal of crime, to kiss the earth weeping, to knot oneself again to it, to fill there at the spout of blood the heart that empties itself and grows altered—there is the cult to which Dostoevsky invites his children. And these tears are rich with an ineffable happiness: they have life, which is the only joy and all joy.

Adore life: thy kiss to the earth, whence thou comest and whither thou goest, and thy tears confess thy adoration.

Take patience of evil, by this rite, and take in it the conscience of all good.

Thy heart overflows. It quits thee. It goes to all this life that calls it. And where would one go but to life?

Thus thy tears have joy, all that thou awaitest, in that which thou givest. They have the excessive joy of thyself who quittest thee. It is not that thou regrettest it: it is that thou deliverest thyself. Until this weeping kiss, what an abyss thou wast to thyself, and what a desert with dunes of universal suffering, infinite, perpetually renewed, even as the void. And to suffer for nothing, there is no other damnation. Hell is suffering in the void. Lying against the earth, thou art the blessed dead man of the voluntary death, which is all life: in quitting thyself, thou risest again. This departure without return is the true love, dear soul.

§

It is not that love of the head, which cries: To live! To live! with the frightful mouth of a dead man. It is the melody of the heart which finds itself again, and which answers to all nature: here I am! here I am! It sings life, it is the eternal modulation of it even into death: because it has it, because it carries it, because it gives it. And what would one give, really, that one could not of oneself and upon oneself? What gift should I make, if I did not strip myself? There is the pride of love, and its sublime humility.

In truth, the pride that boasts and that esteems itself, the pride of the mind that compares itself, is a kind of humility a little base, to my sense. Whoever compares himself, abases himself. So the pride of the mind.

But the love that humbles itself in the innumerable gifts it knows how to make, in all the marvels that it suffices to create, by forgetting itself, by putting itself into them even to the point of effacing itself—this prodigy of humility is a celestial grandeur. And all the pride of the minds will never equal, by an infinity, this divine humility.

He who gives himself without measure, that one possesses. He who is all humble at the heart of all life, that one creates his object; and he does not care to know his glory. Superbness is dry. The pride of the mind discerns only itself: like a dead man who feels himself in the sepulchre.

Love adores in tears. Such is the sound of Dostoevsky. There is that hoarse and so gentle voice, the energy of that indefatigable soul, and its burning languors, its abandonments so tender. Indefatigable at suffering and at wishing to wash the gold of sufferings, in order to separate from it the treasure of joy: to the constancy of this gold-washer, to this one, what energy is equal?

O holy, good tears, roads of the effusion, deep paths of tenderness, it is you, very gentle tears, who alone speak of love, and of that love which makes one live by creating. And in the very embrace of lovers, it is the purest and the warmest tears of the blood that speak for life, that communicate it and transmit it, coming from so far! And often they do not understand the word they pronounce, and they are ennobled by it, even when they debase it.

The lover kisses his beloved and weeps his blood into her, as the man intoxicated with God kisses the earth with great tears. The earth receives these tears; and the beloved keeps with jealousy the sinful offering or the libation without sin.

If the spirit lowers itself, here, or if the flesh is exalted, who shall measure it? To serve with love is always a triumph. The humility of woman and of the earth ought to offer itself as an example to all service. And I am quite willing that life should find its reckoning in the humiliation of man. I never speak but for life; and I see fine pride only in all that augments it and exalts it.

Love of life, that is still ill said. Life is not so great nor so strong as love. It awaits from love the perfect beauty, of which our desire has made a promise to itself. More than the love of life, the life of love; such is the bottom of Dostoevsky. It is for love to give birth to and to save life. The best live only to serve this design. And the purest love is the most love.

O Fyodor Mikhailovich, so ardent, so acute, and so humble, you are deep and true among the great. You go beyond all others, doubtless. For in the end, where I have come, there is no truth but in the depth. To take all our height, it is necessary for us to be steeped in the abysses. All is lacking, in default of depth. And, on the whole, there is falseness where there is lack.

There then is the point where hatred is no longer anything but a twisted root among all the others; and if it has the form of the serpent or of the worm, it is not at all to make horror, it is not so that one should crush it, but to blend with the nourishing veins. Here is the point where all is ideal, by dint of being true; where the dream of the soul absorbs all matter, like a second matrix, but of resurrection. Here, thought is act; the fact is idea; here, the act and the idea are all love. Everything is steeped in the compassion of life for itself, and in the certitude of salvation, which the heart demands of a creative love.

Where all is love, all is life! Beyond the nothingness of all the ephemeral objects, it is upon this, in the end, that our faith or our hope is founded. Dostoevsky, if I am not mistaken, and I myself in my rank, we are the antidote of rational tyranny, of the philosophers, and of every inhuman poison: Dostoevsky, the deepest heart, the greatest conscience of the modern world.