Maurice Baring

“ When I left Russia, Littré’s thesis, which likens crime to madness, was the rage. I return, and crime is already no longer considered even as madness: it is considered as common sense itself, almost a duty, at least a noble protest. ‘Why should not an enlightened man kill if he has need of money?’ Such is the argument you hear. But that is nothing. The Russian God has ceded his place to drink. The people are drunk, the mothers are drunk, the children are drunk, the churches are empty. Oh, let this generation grow: it is a pity we cannot wait. ”

“ For Dostoievsky proves to us—so far from complaining of his lot—that life in the Dead House is not only worth living, but full of unsuspected and unexplored riches, rare pearls of goodness, shining gems of kindness, and secret springs of pity. He leaves prison with something like regret, and he regards his four years’ experience there as a special boon of Providence, the captain jewel of his life. He goes out saved for ever from despair, and full of that wisdom more precious than rubies which is to be found in the hearts of children. ”

“ There is enough of it, as it is, to last thousands of years, but we must organise obedience: it is the only thing which is wanting in the world. The desire for culture is an aristocratic desire. As soon as you admit the idea of the family or of love, you will have the desire for personal property. We will annihilate this desire: we will let loose drunkenness, slander, tale-telling, and unheard-of debauchery. We will strangle every genius in his cradle. We will reduce everything to the same denomination, complete equality. ”

“ But the difference between Tchekov and most English and French dramatists (save those of the quite modern school) is, that the moments which Tchekov selects appear at first sight to be trivial. His genius consists in the power of revealing the dramatic significance of the seemingly trivial. It stands to reason, as I shall try to point out later on, that the more realistic your play, the more it is true to life; the less obvious action there is in it, the greater must be the skill of the dramatist; the surer his art, the more certain his power of construction, the nicer his power of selection. ”

“ They dare not look into the midst of the Dnieper; no one save the sun and the blue sky looks into that. It is rare that a bird flies as far as the midmost waters. Glorious river, there is none other like it in the world!
“Wonderful is the Dnieper in the warm summer nights when all things are asleep: men and beasts and birds, and God alone in His majesty looks round on the heaven and the earth and royally spreads out His sacerdotal vestment and lets it tremble. And from this vestment the stars are scattered: the stars burn and shine over the world, and all are reflected in the Dnieper. ”

“ When the Germans have wished to express such things, they have done so in their music; they certainly have not done so in their poetry. What they have done in their poetry, and what they have done better than any one else, is to express in the simplest of all words the simplest of all thoughts and feelings. They have spoken of first love, of spring and the flowers, the smiles and tears of children, the dreams of youth and the musings of old age—with a simplicity, a homeliness no writers of any other country have ever excelled. ”

“ He has the simplicity of “The Idiot,” without his naïveté, and without the abnormality arising from epilepsy. He is a normal man, perfectly sane and sensible. He is the very incarnation of “sweet reasonableness.” He is Ivan Durak, Ivan the Fool, but without being a fool. Alosha, Dostoievsky says, was in no way a fanatic; he was not even what most people call a mystic, but simply a lover of human beings; he loved humanity; all his life he believed in men, and yet nobody would have taken him for a fool or for a simple creature. ”

“ Tourgeniev never wrote anything better than the book which brought him fame, the Sportsman’s Sketches. In this book nearly the whole of his talent finds expression. One does not know which to admire more—the delicacy of the art in choosing and recording his impressions, or the limpid and musical utterance with which they are recorded. To the reader who only knows his work through a translation, three-quarters of the beauty are lost; yet so great is the truth, and so moving is the poetry of these sketches, that even in translation they will strike a reader as unrivalled. ”

“ He could not look upon the whole world with the calm of Sophocles and of Shakespeare; he could not paint a large and luminous panorama of life unmarred by any trace of exaggeration, as Tolstoy did. On the other hand, he realised and perceived certain heights and depths of the human soul which were beyond the range of Tolstoy, and almost beyond that of Shakespeare. His position with regard to Tolstoy, Fielding, and other great novelists is like that of Marlowe with regard to Shakespeare. ”

“ For the Russian drama, like the Russian novel, has, without making any fuss about it, never done but one thing—to depict life as clearly as it saw it, and as simply as it could.
That is why there has never been a naturalist school in Russia. The Russians are born realists; they do not have to label themselves realists, because realism is the very air which they breathe, and the very blood in their veins. What was labelled realism and naturalism in other countries simply appeared to them to be a straining after effect. ”

“ Any reader familiar with German literature will, I think, agree that if one compares French or English poetry with German poetry, and French and English Romanticism with German Romanticism, one is conscious, when one approaches the work of the Germans, of entering into a more sober and more quiet dominion; one leaves behind one the exuberance of England: “the purple patches” of a Shakespeare, the glowing richness of a Keats, the soaring rainbow fancies of a Shelley, the wizard horizons of a Coleridge. ”

“ Instead of becoming stronger than mankind, he becomes weaker than mankind; instead of having conquered convention and morality, he is himself vanquished by them. He finds that as soon as the crime is committed the whole of his relation towards the world is changed, and his life becomes a long struggle with himself, a revolt against the moral consequences of his act. His instinct of self-preservation is in conflict with the horror of what he has done and the need for confession. Raskolnikov, as I have said, is the embodiment of pride; pride is the mainspring of his character. ”

“ It has been constantly said that Russia is the land of paradoxes, and there is perhaps no greater paradox than the mixture in the Russian character of obstinacy and weakness, and the fact that the Russian is sometimes inclined to throw up the sponge instantly, while at others he becomes himself a tough sponge, which, although pulled this way and that, is never pulled to pieces. He is undefeated and indefatigable in spite of enormous odds, and thus we are confronted in Russian history with men as energetic as Peter the Great, and as slack as Alexeieff the Viceroy. ”

“ Petersburg, there were men and women of every class, but mostly poor people, shabbily dressed, of the lower middle or the lower classes. The dream of Dostoievsky, that the whole of Russia should be united by a bond of fraternity and brotherly love, seemed to be realised when this crowd of men, composed of such various and widely differing elements, met together in common grief by his grave. Dostoievsky had lived the life of a pauper, and of a man who had to fight with all his strength in order to win his daily bread. ”

“ There is no better way of judging of this quality and of estimating its results, than to study the works of Russia’s greatest humorist, satirist, and realist. For if realism can be so vivid without being cruel, if satire can be so cruel without being bitter, and a sense of the ridiculous so broad and so strong without being ill-natured, the soil of goodness out of which these things all grow must indeed be rich and deep, and the streams of pity with which it is watered must indeed be plentiful. ”

“ Nearly every novelist, with the exception of Fielding, ends, in spite of himself, by placing his hero either above or beneath the standard of real life. There are many Vronskys to-day in St. Petersburg, and for the matter of that, mutatis mutandis, in London. But no novelist except Tolstoy has ever had the power to put this simple thing, an ordinary man, into a book. Put one of Meredith’s heroes next to Vronsky, and Meredith’s hero will appear like a figure dressed up for a fancy-dress ball. ”

“ Therefore, as I have more than once said in this study, although he sounds the lowest depths of human gloom, mortal despair, and suffering, his books are a cry of triumph, a clarion peal, a hosanna to the idea of goodness and to the glory of God. There is a great gulf between Dostoievsky and such novelists as make of their art a clinical laboratory, in which the vices and the sores, and only the vices and the sores, are dissected and observed, not under a microscope, but under a magnifying-glass, so that a totally distorted and exaggerated impression of life is the result. ”

“ We feel that Tolstoy is afraid of the dark; that to him there is something wrong in the whole of human life, a radical mistake. He is conscious that, with all his genius, he has only been able to record the fact that all that he has found in life is not what he is looking for, but something irrelevant and unessential; and, at the same time, that he has not been able to determine the thing in life which is not a mistake, nor where the true aim, the essential thing, is to be found, nor in what it consists. ”

“ And in the long-run I am convinced that we, that is to say, not we, but the future generations of the Russian people, shall every one of us, from the first to the last, understand that to be a real Russian must signify simply this: to strive towards bringing about a solution and an end to European conflicts; to show to Europe a way of escape from its anguish in the Russian soul, which is universal and all-embracing ”

“ And by so doing he would probably lose a great deal, since a man who is repelled by King Lear might very well be able to appreciate not only The Merchant of Venice, but Henry IV and the Winter’s Tale. If one were asked to sum up briefly what was Dostoievsky’s message to his generation and to the world in general, one could do so in two words: love and pity. The love which is in Dostoievsky’s work is so great, so bountiful, so overflowing, that it is impossible to find a parallel to it, either in ancient or in modern literature. It is human, but more than human, that is to say, divine. ”

“ I am clever, but my cleverness has as yet not been thoroughly tested on anything.... I am honest; that is to say, I love goodness.... There is a thing I love more than goodness, and that is fame. I am so ambitious, and so little has this feeling been gratified, that, should I have to choose between fame and goodness, I fear I may often choose the former. ”

“ The mocker will say, he adds, that the child will grow up and have time to sin; but he is not yet grown up. He understands, he says, what the universal vibration of joy must be, when everything in heaven and on earth joins in one shout of praise, and every living thing cries aloud, “Thou art just, O Lord, for Thou hast revealed Thy ways.” And when the mother shall embrace the man who tormented and tore her child to bits,—when mother, child, and tormentor shall all join in the cry, “Lord, Thou art just!” ”

“ Like a boundless azure sea, the dome of the sky, bending as though with passion over the world, seems to have fallen asleep, all drowned in softness, and clasps and caresses the beautiful earth with a celestial embrace. There is no cloud in the sky; and the stream is silent. Everything is as if it were dead; only aloft in the deeps of the sky a lark quivers, and its silvery song echoes down the vault of heaven, and reaches the lovesick earth. ”

“ A little later, Tolstoy goes to the Caucasus, to the war, where life is primitive and simple, where he is nearer to nature, and where man himself is more natural. And then we have The Cossacks, in which Tolstoy’s searchlights are thrown upon the primitive life of the old huntsman, the Cossack, Yeroshka, who lives as the grass lives, without care, without grief, and without reflection. Once more we feel that the soul of the writer is dissatisfied, still searching for something he has not found. ”

“ The secret of the merit of this extraordinary book is also the secret of the unique quality which we find in all Dostoievsky’s fiction. It is this: Dostoievsky faces the truth; he faces what is bad, what is worst, what is most revolting in human nature; he does not put on blinkers and deny the existence of evil, like many English writers, and he does not, like Zola, indulge in filthy analysis and erect out of his beastly investigations a pseudo-scientific theory based on the belief that all human nature is wholly bad. ”

“ As soon as Peter discovers Kirilov’s obsession, he extracts from him a promise that, as he has determined to commit suicide, and that as it is quite indifferent to him how and when he does it, he shall do it when it is useful to him, Peter. Kirilov consents to this, although he feels himself in no way bound to Peter, and although he sees through him entirely and completely, and would hate him were his contempt not too great for hatred. But Peter’s most ambitious plans do not consist merely in binding five men to him by an indissoluble bond of blood: that is only the means to an end. ”

“ On the other hand, he is astonished that they all love Sonia, who has followed him to the penal settlement where his prison is, and lives in the town. The convicts rarely see her, meeting her only from time to time at their work; and yet they adore her, because she has followed Raskolnikov. The hatred of the other convicts against him grows so strong that one day at Easter, when he goes to church with them, they turn on him and say: “You have no right to go to church: you do not believe in God, you are an atheist, you ought to be killed.” ”

“ To the true Russian, Europe and the affairs of the great Aryan race, are as dear as the affairs of Russia herself and of his native country, because our affairs are the affairs of the whole world, and they are not to be obtained by the sword, but by the strength of fraternity and by our brotherly effort towards the universal union of mankind.... ”

“ After his recovery he learns that Sonia has fallen ill herself, and has not been near the prison, and a great sadness comes over him. At last she recovers, and he meets her one day at his [Pg 200] work. Something melts in his heart, he knows not how or why; he falls at her feet and cries; and from that moment a new life begins for him. His despair has rolled away like a cloud: his heart has risen as though from the dead.
Crime and Punishment, the best known of all Dostoievsky’s works, is certainly the most powerful. The anguish of mind which Raskolnikov goes through tortures the reader. ”

“ Dostoievsky never nudges our elbow, never points out to us things which we know already, but he illuminates with a strong searchlight the deeps of the sombre and tortuous souls of his characters, by showing us what they are themselves thinking, but not what he thinks of them. His analysis resembles the Greek chorus, and his books resemble Greek tragedies in the making, rich ore mingled with dark dross, granite and marble, the stuff out of which Æschylus could have hewn another Agamemnon, or Shakespeare have written another King Lear. ”

“ For Dostoievsky says that Socialism is not only a social problem, but an atheistic problem. It is the problem of the incarnation of atheism, the problem of a Tower of Babel to be made without God, not in order to reach Heaven from earth, but to bring Heaven down to earth.
Alosha wishes to spend his whole life in the monastery, and to give himself up entirely to religion, but he is not allowed to do so. In the monastery, Alosha finds a spiritual father, Zosima. This character, which is drawn with power and vividness, strikes us as being a blend of saintliness, solid sense, and warm humanity. ”