DOSTOEVSKY

[iii]

DOSTOEVSKY

By André Gide

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH

With an Introduction by

ARNOLD BENNETT

“Dostoevsky

was the only psychologist

from whom I had anything to learn:

he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life,

happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.”

Nietzsche

ALFRED A. KNOPF

1926

[iv]

DOSTOEVSKY

By André Gide, was first published in Paris by Plon-Nourrit et Cie. in 1923

Made and Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London

[v]

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

André Gide is now one of the leaders of French literature. The first book of his to attract wide attention among the lettered was L’Immoraliste. Since then, in some twenty years of productiveness, he has gradually consolidated his position until at the present day his admirers are entitled to say that no other living French author stands so firm and so passionately acknowledged as an influence. His authority over the schools of young writers who contribute to or are published by La Nouvelle Revue Française (with which he has been intimately connected from its foundation) is quite unrivalled. And it must be stated, as a final proof of mastership, that he has powerful and not despicable opponents.

To my mind his outstanding characteristic is that he is equally interested in the æsthetic and in the moral aspect of literature. Few imaginative writers have his broad and vivacious curiosity about moral problems, and scarcely any moralists exhibit [vi] even half his preoccupation with the æsthetic. He is a distinguished, if somewhat fragmentary, literary critic—not merely of French but of Russian, English and classical literatures. I shall not forget his excitement when he first read Tom Jones. “Ce livre m’attendait,” said he, with grave delight. His practical interest in the technique of fiction never fades; indeed it grows. So much so that his latest novel, now appearing serially in La Nouvelle Revue Française, really amounts to an essay in a new form; and with startling modesty he has labelled it, in the dedication, “my first novel.”

Of course no novelist can achieve anything permanent without a moral basis or background. Balzac had it. De Maupassant had it to the point of savagery. Zola had it, in his degree. Paul Bourget—a writer whom highbrows French and English have still to reckon with—has it. But André Gide writes in the very midst of morals. They are not only his background, but frequently his foreground. Scarcely one of his books (the exception may be Les Caves du Vatican) but poses and attempts to resolve a moral problem.

It was natural and even necessary that such a writer as Gide should deal with such a writer as Dostoevsky. They were made for each other—or rather Dostoevsky was made for Gide. I first met [vii] Gide in the immense field of Dostoevsky. He said, and I agreed, that The Brothers Karamazov was the greatest novel ever written. This was ages ago, and years have only confirmed us in the opinion.

“But,” said Gide, “everything that Dostoevsky ever wrote is worth reading and must be read. Nothing can safely be omitted.”

At that period there was none but a mutilated French translation of The Brothers Karamazov, and Gide had to read Dostoevsky in German. A complete translation, I fear, still lacks in French, but André Gide can now read him in full in English: which is to our credit and his. Let us, however, not be too much uplifted. Dostoevsky’s important Journal d’un Ecrivain exists in French but not in English.

Those who read Gide’s Dostoevsky will receive light, some of it dazzling, on both Dostoevsky and Gide. I can recall no other critical work which more cogently justifies and more securely establishes its subject. If anyone wants to appreciate the progress made by Western Europe in the appreciation of Russian psychology, let him compare the late Count Melchior de Voguë’s Le Roman Russe with the present work. It is impossible to read this Dostoevsky without enlarging one’s idea of Dostoevsky and of the functions of the novel. All the conventional [viii] charges against the greatest of the Russians—morbidity, etc., etc., fall to pieces during perusal. They are not killed; they merely expire. And Dostoevsky in the end stands out not simply as a supreme psychologist and narrator, but also as a publicist of genius endowed with a prophetic view over the future of the nations as astounding as his insight into the individual. “There never was,” says Gide, “an author more Russian in the strictest sense of the word and withal so universally European.”

Dostoevsky had various and distressing personal defects, but his humanity and his wisdom, doubtless derived from the man Jesus who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, are unique; and André Gide’s demonstration of their worth is his invaluable contribution to Dostoevsky literature.

ARNOLD BENNETT.

[ix]

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

In the early months of 1922, M. André Gide delivered before M. Jacques Copeau’s School of Dramatic Art at the Vieux-Colombier a series of six addresses on Dostoevsky, first published from shorthand notes—with but slender emendation, lest the style should lose in spontaneity—in the Revue Hebdomâdaire, Nos. 2–8, 1923, then later in the same year in book form, together with selected essays. These addresses form the basis of the present translation from which two short chapters, Les Frères Karamazov and an Allocution lue au Vieux-Colombier pour la Célébration du Centenaire de Dostoïevsky, have been omitted by desire of the Author, who adapted his original preface specially for this English edition.

By courtesy of Messrs. William Heinemann, we are permitted to quote extensively from Mrs. Constance Garnett’s translations of Dostoevsky’s Novels (12 vols., 1912–1920). We have utilized as far as possible Miss Ethel Colburn Mayne’s Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends (Messrs. Chatto and Windus, 1917): elsewhere we have cited J. W. Bienstock’s Correspondance [x] et Voyage à l’Étranger (Paris, 1908). Quotations are further made from Bienstock and Nau’s version of the Journal (Paris, 1904), and from Th. M. Dostoevsky: eine biographische Studie, by N. Hoffmann (Berlin, 1899).

[xi]

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

Tolstoy in his immensity still overshadows our horizon; but as a traveller in a land of mountains sees, with each receding step, appear above the nearest peak one loftier yet, screened hitherto by the surrounding heights, some eager spirits herald perchance the rise of Dostoevsky behind Tolstoy’s giant figure. This cloud-capped summit is the secret heart of the chain and source of many a generous stream in whose waters the Europe of to-day may slake her strange new thirsts. Dostoevsky, not Tolstoy, merits rank beside Ibsen and Nietzsche: great as they, mayhap the mightiest of the three.

In Germany translations of Dostoevsky are multiplying, each an advance on its predecessor as regards vigour and scrupulous accuracy. England, stubborn and slow to move, yet makes it her concern not to be outstripped. When he introduced Mrs. Constance Garnett’s translation in the New Age, Arnold Bennett wished all English novelists and short story writers could come under the influence of these “most powerful works of the imagination ever produced.” Speaking more particularly of [2] The Brothers Karamazov, he declared this book, in which human passion reaches its maximum intensity, contains about a dozen figures that are simply colossal. Who can tell if these colossal figures have ever made, even in Russia, so direct appeal as to us, whether their call sounded ever before so pressing?

Dostoevsky’s admirers were recently rare enough, but as invariably happens when the earliest enthusiasts are recruited from the élite, their number goes on increasing steadily. First of all, I should like to inquire how it is that certain minds are still obdurately prejudiced against his work, admirable though it be. Because the best way to overcome a lack of comprehension is to accept it as sincere and try to understand it.

The principal charge brought against Dostoevsky in the name of our Western-European logic has been, I think, the irrational, irresolute, and often irresponsible nature of his characters, everything in their appearance that could seem grotesque and wild. It is not, so people aver, real life that he unfolds, but nightmares. In my belief this is utterly mistaken; but let us grant the truth of it for argument’s sake, and refrain from answering after the manner of Freud that there is more sincerity in our dream-life than in the actions of our real existence. Hear rather what Dostoevsky has to say for himself on the subject of dreams: “These obvious absurdities and impossibilities with which your dream was overflowing ... you accepted all at once, almost without the slightest surprise, at [3] the very time when, on another side, your reason was at its highest tension and showed extraordinary power, cunning, sagacity, and logic. And why, too, on waking and fully returning to reality, do you feel almost every time, and sometimes with extraordinary intensity, that you have left something

unexplained behind with the dream, and at the same time you feel that interwoven with these absurdities some thought lies hidden, and a thought that is real, something belonging to your actual life, something that exists and always has existed in your heart. It’s as though something new, prophetic, that you were awaiting, has been told you in your dream.”⁠[1]

What Dostoevsky says here about dreams we shall apply to his own books, not for a moment that I would consider assimilating these stories to the absurdities of certain dreams, because we feel when we leave one of his books, even should our reason refuse complete agreement with it, that he has laid his finger on some obscure spot “which is part of our actual life.” In this, I think, we shall find explained the refusal of certain minds, in the name of Western-European civilization, to admit Dostoevsky’s genius, because I readily observe that in all our Western literature (and I do not limit myself to French alone) the novel, with but rare exceptions, concerns itself solely with relations between man and man, passion and intellect, with family, social, and class relations, but never, [4] practically never with the relations between the individual and his self or his God, which are to Dostoevsky all important. I fancy nothing could better illustrate my idea than the reflection made by a Russian and quoted in Mme. Hoffmann’s biography,

the best by far I know, but which unfortunately has not yet been translated. His reflection, she holds, will enable us to discern one of the peculiarities of the Russian soul. Once reproached with his unpunctuality this Russian gravely retorted: “Yes, life is difficult! There are moments that must be lived well, and this is more important than the keeping of any engagement.”⁠[2] The inner life is thus more highly prized than relations with one’s fellow-man. Here lies Dostoevsky’s secret, the thing which makes him for some so great, for many others so insufferable!

Not for a moment do I suggest that in Western Europe, in France, for example, man is wholly a social being, ever dressed for a part. We have Pascal’s Thoughts and the Fleurs du Mal, strangely solitary and profound, yet as French as any other works in our literature. But a certain category of problems, heart-searchings, passions, and associations seem to be the province of the moralist and the theologian, and a novelist has no call to burden himself with them. The miracle Dostoevsky accomplished consists in this: each of his characters—and he created a world of them—lives [5] by virtue of his own personality, and these intimately personal beings, each with his peculiar secret, are introduced to us in all their puzzling complexity. The wonder of it is that the problems are lived over by each of his characters, or rather let us say the problems exist at the expense of his characters: problems which conflict, struggle, and assume human guise to perish or triumph before our eyes.

No question too transcendent for Dostoevsky to handle in one of his novels; but, having said this, I am bound at once to add that he never approaches a question from the abstract, ideas never exist for him but as functions of his characters, wherein lies their perpetual relativity and source of power. One individual evolves a certain theory concerning God, providence, and life eternal because he knows he must die in a few days’ time, in a few hours maybe (Ippolit in The Idiot): another (in The Possessed) builds up an entire system of metaphysics, containing Nietzsche in embryo, on the premise of self-destruction, for in a quarter of an hour he is going to take his own life, and hearing him speak, it is impossible to distinguish whether his philosophy postulates his suicide or his suicide his philosophy. Prince Myshkin owes his most wonderful, most heavenly raptures to the imminence of an epileptic fit. In conclusion I have only one comment to offer: though pregnant with thought, Dostoevsky’s novels are never abstract, indeed, of all the books I

know, they are the most palpitating with life.

[6]

Representative as Dostoevsky’s characters are, they never seem to forsake their humanity to become mere symbols or the types familiar in our classical drama. They keep their individuality which is as specific as in Dickens’s most peculiar creations, and as powerfully drawn and painted as any portrait in any literature.

Listen to this: “There are people whom it is difficult to describe correctly in their typical and characteristic aspect. These are the people who are usually called ‘the mass,’ ‘the majority,’ and who do actually make up the vast majority of mankind. To this class of ‘commonplace’ or ‘ordinary’ people belong certain persons of my tale, such as Gavril Ardalionovitch.”⁠[3]

Now, this is a character particularly difficult to delineate. What will he succeed in telling us about him?

“A profound and continual consciousness of his own lack of talent, and at the same time the overwhelming desire to prove to himself that he was a man of great independence, had rankled in his heart from boyhood up. He was a young man of violent and envious cravings, who seemed to have been positively born with his nerves overwrought. The violence of his desires he took for strength. This passionate craving to distinguish himself sometimes led him to the brink of most ill-considered actions, but our hero was always at the last moment too sensible to take the final plunge. That drove him [7] to despair.”⁠[4] And this for one of the least important characters in the book! I must add that the others, the chief protagonists, he does not portray, leaving them to limn in their own portrait, never finished, ever changing, in the course of the narrative. His principal characters are always in course of formation, never quite emerging from the shadows. In passing, note how profoundly different he is from Balzac, whose chief care seems ever to be the

perfect consistency of his characters. Balzac paints like David; Dostoevsky like Rembrandt, and his portraits are artistically so powerful and often so perfect that even if they lacked the depths of thought that lie behind them, and around them, I believe that Dostoevsky would still be the greatest of all novelists.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The Idiot, p. 455.

[2] Hoffmann, p. 7, “Es gibt Augenblicke, die richtig gelebt sein wollen.” (Translator’s note.)

[3] The Idiot, pp. 461–462.

[4] The Idiot, p. 464.

[8]

DOSTOEVSKY IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE

(1908)

I

You are prepared to find a super-man: you lay hold on a fellow mortal, sick, poor, toiling without respite, and strangely lacking in that pseudo-quality he himself criticized so strongly in the French—eloquence. In dealing with a book so bare of all pretension, I shall hold remote every consideration save one, straightforwardness. If some there be who seek in these pages fine writing or intellectual entertainment, I warn them now, it were well to read no further.

The text of the letters is often confused, inaccurate, unskilfully put together, and we are grateful to Dostoevsky’s translator for having renounced all idea of introducing a certain artificial elegance or attempting to remedy their characteristic awkwardness.⁠[5]

The first contact is indeed discouraging. Mme. [9] Hoffmann, Dostoevsky’s German biographer, leads us to understand that the selection of letters issued by the Russian editors might have been better made; but she entirely fails to convince me that its keynote could have been different. As it stands, the volume is bulky, and the reader gasps in astonishment less at the number of the letters than at the vast formlessness of each one of them. Perhaps we have never yet had an example of a literary man’s letters so badly written, by that I mean written with so little regard for style. Ideas seem to come from his pen not in ordered sequence, but in a rich confusion, which, once it is brought under control, contributes powerfully to the complexity of his novels. The same man who is so uncompromising and so tenacious where his own work is concerned, correcting, destroying, modifying his stories, page by page, until each becomes “the expression of his very being,” writes his correspondence anyhow: never crossing a phrase out, but constantly catching himself up, hurrying on as

fast as he can, and never able to bring his letter to a satisfactory close; and nothing helps us better to estimate the distance between a work and its creator. Inspiration? romantic and flattering convenience! The muse is not so readily wooed. And if ever Buffon’s modest saying—“A patience that knows no weariness”—were applicable, ’tis here.

“What theory is this you’ve got hold of?” he writes to his brother, on the very threshold of his [10] career.⁠[6] “A picture ought to be painted at one sitting, you say? When did you acquire this conviction? Believe me, in all things, labour, yes, prolonged labour, is indispensable. A few lines of Pushkin’s verse, light and polished, truly seem the fruit of one effort, thanks to the hours Pushkin spent arranging and revising them. It needs more than a happy knack to produce mature work. We are told that Shakespeare’s work bears no trace of correction: that is exactly why we find in it so many imperfections and so much that is contrary to good taste. If he had spent more time over it, the result would have been better.” Such is the keynote of the whole correspondence. The best of his life and spirit Dostoevsky devotes to his work. None of his letters was written from pleasure. He constantly reverts to his “terrible, unmasterable, incredible distaste for letter-writing.”—“Letters,” he declares, “have neither rhyme nor reason: it is

impossible to unburden oneself in them.” He goes even further: “I write to you at great length, and I see that of the very essence of my moral or spiritual life I have given you not a notion, and so it will remain as long as we continue to correspond; I cannot write letters: I cannot write about myself and be just.”⁠[7] Elsewhere he says that “in a letter it’s impossible to write anything. There’s the secret of my dislike to Madame de Sévigné: the [11] woman wrote her letters too well!” Or with a touch of humour: “If ever I go to the lower regions, I shall beyond a doubt be sentenced to write for my sins some ten letters a day”—and I think this is the one flicker of humour you can discern throughout the whole gloomy book.