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FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY A CRITICAL STUDY BY J. MIDDLETON MURRY NEW YORK / RUSSELL & RUSSELL 1966 FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1924 REISSUED, 1966, BY RUSSELL & RUSSELL A DIVISION OF ATHENEUM HOUSE, INC. L.C. CATALOG CARD NO: 66----24737 TO GORDON CAMPBBLL REPRINTED FROM A COPY IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE “ I do not speak,” said Dostoevsky in the famous speech on Pushkin which was the end of the work of his life, “ as a literary critic ; I am only thinking of what may be for us pro phetic in his work.” It would be foolish for an English writer to attempt a purely literary criticism of Dosto evsky’s work ; this book also professes only to think of what may be for us prophetic in it. Dostoevsky is a phenomenon which has lately burst upon our astonished minds, one towards which an attitude must be determined quickly, almost at the peril of our souls. Our English literature has lately emerged from a period during which French influence upon it has been palpable. But the influence of the French has been slight and mainly confined to externals ; there has not been sufficient force in the French literature of the nineteenth century to make its influence more deeply felt. Dostoevsky is a different matter. He is a power where v FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY influence may well be incalculable, not upon the form—he never achieved his own form — but upon the thought and spirit of our literature. An English critic who is ignorant of the Russian language can derive very little help towards a comprehension of Dostoevsky from any other books than Dostoevsky’s own. There is in English only one book that is illuminating —the translation of Dmitri Merejhkovsky’s Tolstoi as Man and Artist, which contains some profound chapters upon Dostoevsky’s work. Apparently when it was published, fifteen years ago, it met with no success, so that the second part, The Religion of Dostoevsky, was never translated. It would have been invaluable. One cannot say the same of another Russian criticism which has lately been translated : Dostoevsky : His Life and Literary Activity, by Evgeny Soloviev, which is spiteful, shallow and misleading. Perhaps this lack of author ities has done no harm. Dostoevsky, like all great writers, affords his own best commen tary, and in any case this book does not profess to expound Dostoevsky from any other than a purely English, even insular, point of view. In a sense it has been pioneer work, and if the vi PREFACE trail has at times for want of company seemed a lonely one, the writer has taken heart from a letter which Dostoevsky wrote in the last year of his life : — I swear to you that though I have received much recognition, possibly more than I deserve, still the critics, the literary critics, who certainly have often —no, rather, very seldom—praised me, nevertheless have always spoken of me so lightly and superficially that I am obliged to assume that all those things which my heart brought forth in pain and tribulation, and which came directly from my soul, have simply passed unperceived. . . . There it stands on Dostoevsky’s authority that his own works are the only road to an understanding of his thought. There is no single aspect of his thought which is not re flected faithfully and imaginatively expressed in his novels. It could only have been expressed in imaginative terms, not because it is more mystical than any living thought must be, but because the strange characteristic which dis tinguishes it is the intimacy of its relation to human life. Abstract thought and conduct have always been divorced in the West, since the day when the Father of Philosophy pro- vii FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY nounced that the theoretic life was the best of all. Fundamental to Dostoevsky is a new and passionate synthesis of thought and life. Never has the ideal world been brought so close to the real as in his works ; they do not merely march with each other, they are confounded and they are one. Other writers have created their figures against a metaphysical back ground, it is true ; but in Dostoevsky’s work the figures themselves are the metaphysical background. Cogito ergo sum is the principle of their being ; and the more they think, the more they are. Yet they do not fold their hands in contemplation, rather they fling themselves into life, and their tragedy, if tragedy it can be called, consists in this, that they who by their thought contain life can by no means become a part of that which is but a part of them. It will be evident that there was no place in this criticism for a detailed account of Dosto evsky’s life, though it would be easy, by multi plying quotations from the letters, to elaborate a most pitiful picture of Dostoevsky the man. But the picture would contain only a fragment of the truth. Dostoevsky cannot be under stood from his letters ; to understand them viii PREFACE demands first an understanding of his work. Without that, they are obscure ; with it, almost superfluous. So is it with his life. There is not a single fact in it that cannot be deduced from his books, and one can with certainty deduce from them infinitely more than the most keen-eyed biographer could dis cover, or the least reticent dare to tell. All his real life is in his books ; he lived in them and for them ; they alone contain the anatomy of his tormented soul. Many of Dostoevsky’s minor works have been omitted. To have considered them would have made the work of exposition almost im possible from the point of view which has been deliberately adopted. Many of them were written by Dostoevsky in the intervals between the great novels of his maturity, while he was pondering and shaping the tremendous figures of his imagination. Their composition was at once a distraction and a means of livelihood, for he was always poor. Thus while he was working Crime and Punishment in his mind in the years of liberty and poverty which im mediately followed his imprisonment, he wrote, besides The House of the Dead, The Insulted and Injured and the Letters from the Under ix