Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/317

Rh. This religious teaching is at the bottom of every single work of Dostoyevsky, and none of his novels can be fully understood unless the mystic foundation of his art is taken into consideration. Dostoyevsky questions in all his novels the problem of suffering humanity, and insists with what could even seem a pathological inquisitiveness on the subtlest shades of moral pain. And in every single case his arguments point to the religious truth. He justifies and sanctifies all suffering, raising it to what would be a Slav climax of ecstatic agony. The national and religious ideals of Dostoyevsky have evolved from Pushkin, but in his literary methods and as a novelist he is closely connected with another of his predecessors—with Gogol, the author of the famous novel, "Dead Souls," of the comedy, "The Inspector General," and, in fact, the father of the Russian realistic novel. Gogol has satirized the Russian bureaucracy of his time with its contrasts of arrogancy based on excessive arbitrary power, and of abject servility. He has created immortal types of Russian land- and serf-owners before the abolition of serfdom, some of them appallingly cruel and self-indulgent, and the majority petty, ignorant, ridiculously narrow-minded, and leading a sort of animal life, overeating, and punishing their serfs just to idle away the lazy hours.

Dostoyevsky took up the realistic vein of Gogol, but changed its spirit. He transformed Gogol's satirical vision of the "dead souls" into a mystic tale of humiliated and suffering souls redeemed by what they have endured. They both, Gogol and Dostoyevsky, have looked at the same realities of Russian life, and with the same sharp, uncompromising instinct of truth which detects all human failings. But Gogol laughed at what he discovered; he believed in the beneficial effect of sane, unprejudiced laughter. And Dostoyevsky loved erring humanity, and did better than to judge it; he pitied it. This did not stand in the way of his realism, as there certainly has never been a more true and outspoken painter of Russian life and psychology than Dostoyevsky, the "cruel genius," as he was called by the Russian critics. But his realism was strangely blended with a visionary mysticism. "They call me a psychologist," wrote Dostoyevsky himself, "but I think I am a realist in the higher sense of the word. I describe the depth of the human soul." And on another occasion, writing about himself in his "Diary of a Man of Letters" he said, "I am devoted to realism in art—to realism which reaches the borders of the fantastic. To my eyes there is nothing more fantastic than reality itself. What the majority of people call fantastic and exceptional is to me the very essence of actual reality."

The vast scope of Dostoyevsky's creations is due to his genius, but his amazing psychological knowledge of life and pain is also founded on the experiences of his own life. Not many writers have paid such a high price as Dostoyevsky in mental and physical agony for the revelations of their genius. His life is, in this respect, a striking contrast to the life of Tolstoy, and this again is highly characteristic of the mystic spirit of Russia.