The hero of The Life is unsociable, “uncommunicative,” keeps a great many things to himself, is reserved and avoids people. Michael Dostoevsky in 1838 calls his brother “reserved,” not without reason. Fedor Dostoevsky, writing to him about the “strange and wonderful things” in his life, says “that he will never tell any one this long story.” In the College of Engineering, Dostoevsky, according to the recollection of his fellow-students, usually sat or walked alone, and kept himself apart from all. In 1854 he wrote from Semipalatinsk: “I live a lonely life here; I hide myself from people as usual.” That avoidance of human beings in the hero of The Life was fed by his contempt for them, by a feeling of repulsion, and sprang from “a proud, passionate, and domineering nature.” Let us call to mind a fragment from Dostoevsky’s letter to his brother Michael in 1847: “But, Lord, what a multitude of disgusting, narrow-minded, grey-bearded wiseacres, connoisseurs, Pharisees there are, who pride themselves on their experience, i.e. on their insignificance (for they are all made to the same measure), who eternally preach contentment with one’s lot, belief in something, sobriety in life, and satisfaction with one’s place, without having realized the meaning of those words,—a satisfaction which is like monastic flagellation and denial,—and with inexhaustible petty spite they condemn a strong, fiery soul who cannot endure their banal daily time-table and calendar of existence. They are scoundrels with their farcical earthly happiness. They are scoundrels!”
The hero of The Life had by nature a sharply defined sense of personality, a consciousness of his superiority, of inner strength, of his own uniqueness. Does not the very same tone sound in the proud and “hyperbolical” admissions of Dostoevsky himself, when intoxicated by the success of Poor Folk, his first literary venture?[110] “A crowd of new writers has appeared. Some are my rivals. Herzen (Iskander) and Goncharov are especially remarkable among them. They are highly praised. But the first place is mine for the time being and, I hope, for ever.”
Much later, when he had served hard labour, he writes (Oct. 1, 1859) to his brother from Tver: “Towards the middle of December I will send (or bring myself) the corrected Double. Believe me, brother, that the correction, provided with a preface, will be worth a new novel. They will at last see what The Double is like. I hope I shall make them even too deeply interested. In a word, I challenge them all. And, finally, if I do not correct The Double now, when shall I do it? Why should I lose a superb idea, the greatest type, in its social importance, which I was the first to discover, and of which I was the prophet?” The gigantic individualism of the hero of The Life, stressed more than once by the author, is to be heard in Dostoevsky’s characteristic admission to Apollon Maikov: “Everywhere and in everything I reach the furthest limit; I have passed beyond the boundaries of all life” (Aug. 16, 1867).
Certain eccentricities in the character of the hero of The Life are worth attention. He loved to “surprise everybody by unexpectedly rude pranks”; “behaved like a monster”; “offended an old woman.” Something of the kind, certain collapses in his spiritual life and in his relation to people, were to be found in Dostoevsky. Thus on his own admission he was rude to the officer who taught algebra in the College of Engineering (1838). In his letter to his brother (1847) he gives himself the following characteristics: “I have such a bad repulsive character…. For you and yours I am ready to give my life, but at times, when my heart is melting with love, you can’t get a kind word from me. My nerves do not obey me at such times…. How often I have been rude to Emily Fedorovna,[111] the noblest of women, a thousand times better than myself; I remembered how I used sometimes to be deliberately cross with Fedya whom at the same time I loved even better than yourself….”
There flared up at times in the hero of The Life “a feeling of destructiveness,” and the same feeling showed itself in Dostoevsky’s view of the world when he was a boy. “Up till now I did not know what wounded vanity meant,” he wrote on Oct. 31, 1838. “I should blush if that feeling possessed me … but—do you know?—I should like to crush the whole world at one go.” Those plunges into “abysses” and the voluptuousness of the hero of The Life have their counterpart in certain details which Dostoevsky himself relates of his youth. “Good-bye,” he ended his letter to his brother of Nov. 16, 1845; “the little Minnies, Claras, Mariannes, etc., are enchanting, but they cost a terrible amount of money. The other day Turgenev and Belinsky scolded me terrifically for my disorderly life.”
“The idea of amassing money,” one of the hidden thoughts of The Great Sinner, had early engrossed the attention of the greatest martyr in the ranks of poverty-stricken writers, who all his life long was in need of money and passionately awaited the chance of living and working in conditions of security like Tolstoi and Turgenev. “Money and security are good things. When shall I get rid of my debts?” “Money—I have not one brass farthing.” “It is very painful.” “If you can save me, do.” “I am again in such straits as to be ready to hang myself.” “I am really in an awful state now…. I have not got a farthing.” “All my life I have worked for money, and all my life I have been constantly in need.” “How can I write when I am hungry?… Damn myself and my hunger. But my wife is nursing, and she herself has to go and pawn her last woollen skirt. And it has been snowing now for two days. And then they ask me for artistry, for purity of poetry, without strain, without violence, and they point to Turgenev and Goncharov! Let them only see in what conditions I work … ”—that is the cry, echoing like a groan through Dostoevsky’s letters at various periods of his life, particularly when he was abroad, and during the years when The Life of a Great Sinner was being shaped. We have to suppose that the religious problem was being solved by Dostoevsky much in the same way as it was in the life of the hero of the novel—by “stretches” of belief and unbelief.
An analysis of The Life which reveals the autobiographic substratum lets us see with greater certainty the personal traits in those other novels of Dostoevsky’s into which The Life of a Great Sinner split off. Versilov’s son, born Dolgorukov (The Raw Youth), with his “idea of discipline,” approaches the character in Dostoevsky’s unwritten novel who in this respect, by the way, is akin to Stavrogin. The hero of The Possessed, with his falls, “abysses,” and depravity, is also akin to the Great Sinner. The pages about “Tushar’s” boarding-school, the exposed child, the figure of Lambert in The Raw Youth, are taken from The Life. In certain particulars the Great Sinner approaches Ivan Karamazov and Dmitri Karamazov. Tikhon of The Life passed into The Possessed and Brothers Karamazov in the characters of the Bishop and of the old monk Zosima.[112]
Thus the novel connects the most important works of Dostoevsky’s later period, and is allied in certain details with the early experiments, for instance with Notes from the Underworld. But much of what he had planned remained unexecuted and faded in the working out of the chosen themes. Where is the broad picture of the people’s religious life, with their world of sectarians and believers of the Old Faith, into which the Great Sinner plunged? The pale figure of Makar Ivanovich Dolgorukov, the pilgrim, is very far from corresponding with a great “poem.” The principal character became much diminished and spiritually toned down in the “raw youth,” Versilov.
The sketch of the unwritten novel is generally valuable for the light it throws upon Dostoevsky’s habits of creation. The novel was not written. The huge canvas would not have been covered by the mass of characters that hovered in the writer’s imagination. The novels Atheism and The Life of a Great Sinner clearly prove that Dostoevsky could not cope with the swarm of his creative imagination. He could not tame and conquer the rush of his elemental visions. His soul burnt too fiercely to be satisfied with an inferior light. All in flames, his soul set on fire and destroyed the flashing visions. And it seems as if iron necessity alone chained the writer to the desk and made it possible for us to read his works. There is something accidental in the published works of Dostoevsky. They do not represent the whole creator;
