Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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he has " white hands," that is to say, he cannot do heavy work. Seeing him toiling all day, but achieving little on account of his weakness, they jeer at him and call him " the Mole." They amuse themselves by hustling him, and laugh when they see him turn pale and bite his lips at the brutal orders of the warders. One evening in prison the convicts are playing cards and getting drunk. A prisoner who has been ill a long time, is dying; the convicts deride him and sing blasphemous requiems to him. " Wretches! Do you not fear God ? " cries a terrible voice. The convicts look round in amazement. It is " the Mole" who spoke, and who now looks like an eagle. He orders them to be silent, to respect the last moments of the dying man, speaks to them of God, and shows them the abyss into which they are slipping. From this day forth he becomes the master of those whose conscience is not quite dead. They surround him in a respectful crowd, drinking in his words eagerly. This prisoner is a man of learning; he talks to the convicts of poetry, of science, of God, and, above all, of Russia. He is a patriot who admires his country, and foresees a great future for her. His speeches are not eloquent and are not distinguished by beauty of style; but he has the secret of speaking to the soul and touching the hearts of his pupils. In the poem the prisoner dies, surrounded by the respect and admiration of the convicts. They nurse him devotedly during his illness; they make a sort of litter, and carry him out daily into the prison yard that he may breathe the fresh air and see the sun he loves. After his death his grave becomes a place of pilgrimage for all the inhabitants of the district.

      39 In the description of Prince Mishkin, Dostoyevsky says he was very thin and looked ill, and that his hair was so fair that it was almost white.

      When my father came back from Siberia Nekrassov showed the poem to him and said : " You are the hero of it." Dostoyevsky was greatly touched by these words; he admired the poem very much, but when his literary friends asked him if Nekrassov had described him faithfully he answered smilingly : " Oh, no! he exaggerated my importance. It weis I, on the contrary^ who was the disciple of the convicts."

      It is difficult to say which was right, Nekrassov or Dostoyevsky. The poem may have been only a poetic dream, but it shows what Nekrassov's opinion of my father was. When he spoke of Dostoyevsky as he did in The Wretched, Nekrassov avenged him for all the base caliunnies of his literary rivals. It is strange that none of Dostoyevsky's Russian biographers, save Nicolai Strahoff, have mentioned Nekrassov's poem, although they have faithfully reported all the ignoble slanders invented by young writers after the success of Poor Folks. Yet they cannot have been unaware that he was the hero of the poem, for Dostoyevsky himself recorded his conversation with Nekrassov on the subject in his Journal of the Writer. It is almost as if they had wished to conceal the Russian poet's conception of the novelist from the public.

       VII

      WHAT THE CONVICTS TAUGHT DOSTOYEVSKY

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       DOSTOYEVSKY had some reason to declare that the convicts had been his teachers. As a fact, they taught him what it was above all things important for him to learn; they taught him to know and to love our beautiful and generous Russia. When he foimd himself for the first time in his life in a truly national centre, he felt his mother's blood speaking more and more loudly in his heart. My father began to recognise that Russian charm which is indeed the strength of om* country. It is not by fire and sword that Russia has conquered her enemies; it is the heart of Russia that has formed the vast Russian Empire. Our army is weak, our poor soldiers are often beaten, but wherever they pass they leave imperishable memories. They fraternise with the vanquished instead of oppressing them; open their hearts to them; treat them as comrades; and the vanquished, touched by this generosity, never forget them. " Where the Russian flag has once flown, it will always fly," we say in Russia. My compatriots are conscious of their charm.

      The Russian peasant, dirty, wild and ragged, is in fact, a great charmer. His heart is gentle, tender, gay and childlike. He has no education, but his mind is broad, clear and penetrating. He observes a great deal and meditates on subjects that would never come into the head of a European bourgeois. He works all his life, but cares nothing for profit. His material wants are few, his moral needs much more extensive. He is a dreamer, his soul seeks for poetry. Very often he will leave his fields and his family to visit monasteries, to pray at the tomb of saints, or to travel to Jerusalem. He belongs to the Oriental race that gave the world a Krishna, a Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Mahommed, The Kussian peasant is always ready to leave the world and go to seek God in the desert. He lives more in the beyond than in this world. He has a strong sense of justice: " Why quarrel and dispute? We should live according to the truth of God." Such phrases may often be heard from Russian peasants. This " truth of God " is much in their minds; they try to live according to the Gospel. They love to caress little children, to comfort weeping women, to help the aged. It is not often one meets a " gentleman " in Russian cities, but there are plenty in our villages.

      Studying his convict companions, Dostoyevsky did justice to the generosity of their hearts and the nobility of their souls, and learned to love his country as she deserves to be loved. Russia conquered Dostoyevsky's Lithuanian soul through the poor convicts of Siberia, and conquered it for ever. My father could do nothing by halves. He gave himself heart and soul to Russia, and served the Russian flag as faithfully as his ancestors had served the flag of the Radwan. Those who wish to understand the change in Dostoyevsky's ideas should read his letter to the poet Maikov, written from Siberia shortly after his release. It is a fervid hymn to Russia. " I am Russian, my heart is Russian, my ideas are Russian," he repeats in every line. When we read this letter it is easy to understand what was taking place in his heart. Every serious and idealistic young man tries to become a patriot, for only patriotism can give him strength to serve his country well. A young Russian is instinctively patriotic, but a Slav, whose paternal family comes from another country and who has been brought up in a different atmosphere, cannot possess this instinctiv patriotism. Before offering his services to Russia, the young Lithuanian wished to know what her aims were. On leaving the School of Engineers, Dostoyevsky sought this explanation in the society of Petersburg, and failed to find it. In the drawing-rooms of Petersburg he found only people who were seeking their material advantage, or intellectuals who hated their fatherland and blushed to acknowledge that they were Russians. These languid and listless people could give my father no idea of the greatness of Russia. In the novel, The Adolescent, Dostoyevsky has drawn a cm-ious type, the student Kraft, a Russian of German origin, who commits suicide because he is persuaded that Russia can play but a secondary part in human civilisation. It is very possible that in his youth Dostoyevsky had himself suffered from Kraft's disease, a disease to which all Russians of foreign extraction are more or less subject. My father often told his friends that he was on the verge of suicide, and that his arrest saved him. But if Petersburg could not teach Dostoyevsky patriotism, the Russian people he met in prison soon taught him the great Russian lesson of Christian fraternity, that magnificent ideal which has gathered so many races under our banners. Dazzled by its beauty, my father wished to follow their example. Was he the first Slavo-Norman who gave himself heart and soul to Russia? No. All the Moscovite Grand Dukes who founded Great Russia, who defended the Orthodox Church and fought valiantly against the Tartars, were also Slavo-Normans, the descendants of Prince Rurik. Thanks to their Norman perspicacity, these first Russian patriots understood our great Idea better even than the Russians themselves in their national infancy. It often happens that young nations serve their national idea instinctively, without understanding it very well, and thus their patriotism is never very profound. It is only when they mature that nations fully reaUse the idea they have been building up, and, understanding at last the services their ancestors have rendered to humanity, become proud of their country. Among races which are growing old, patriotism reaches its apogee, and often dazzles them. It is at this stage that Napoleons and Williams make their appearance; inordinately proud of their national culture, they desire to impose it on others.

      Having at last understood the Russian Idea, Dos-toyevsky eagerly followed the example of the illustrious Slavo-Normans whose history he knew so well, having studied it in his childhood in the works of Karamzin. Like the Moscovite Grand Dukes of old, Dostoyevsky explained the Russian Idea to his compatriots; like them, he cherished all that was original in Russia

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