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Dostoyevsky: The Man and the Writer
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13226 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1987 |
2,596 Words |
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Edward Wasiolek
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Dostoyevsky the writer and Dostoyevsky the man are not the same. The distance between man and work in Hemingway is small. Hemingway boozed, fished, hunted, thumped his chest, and haunted the bull rings, and so did his characters. F. Scott Fitzgerald envied the rich, regretted the past, and dreamed of women who would never grow old and moments that would never go stale, and so did his characters. The universe for Joseph Conrad, and for his characters, was immense, inscrutable, and indifferent. Not so with Dostoyevsky. The man was one thing, the writer another, and we have always had a hard time putting them together. The man was not that likable: he was irritable, hot-headed, dogmatic, hypochondriacal, and prejudiced. He hated Germans and Poles with a passion and had very few good things to say about the French, the English, the Swiss, and, when he bothered to refer to them, the Americans.
He thought Russian Orthodoxy was the preserver of pure Christianity, and that Roman Catholicism was a corruption of it. He believed to the end of his days that the pope would someday make his peace, for cynical reasons and earthly power, with the socialists and march with them under the banner of world conquest. He adored the czar, carried on a warm correspondence with court official K.P. Pobedonostsev, the czar's hatchet man, exalted the purity of Russian arms and wrote an article entitled. "Constantinople Must be Ours." He was an imperialist and a jingoist, and in one of the letters in this volume, he wrote about the virtues of war. It could be argued that these are improbable traits and views for the making of a writer.
Yet he is one of the great writers of the Western world. Freud called The Brothers Karamazov, along with Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, one of the three greatest pieces of world literature and picked out "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" as the greatest work of prose literature of all time. George Steiner rightly observes that we can speak in one breath of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevsky.
The novels speak for themselves, but the man does not, at least not directly and easily. Writers guard their personal life more zealously than their fantasy life. We know something about Dostoyevsky, but we would like to know more. We have the reminiscences of friends, family, and fellow writers, his notebooks and the diaries of wife and mistress, and the trial record of his criminal indictment in the Petrashevsky conspiracy. Now we have his letters, at least 156 of the more than 1,000 he wrote, expertly translated and judiciously selected by editors Joseph Frank and the late David Goldstein. Of all the biographical materials, the letters of a writer are the most revealing because they are the most genuine. Dostoyevsky's letters were written with no eye toward posterity and no intention of building an image. When you are begging for money from a friend, enduring the lack of amenities in a filthy hotel, begging a woman to marry you, chastising a no-account stepson nearing thirty to get hold of himself, and having bad dreams about your children, you are not thinking of your reputation.
The Letters and His Life
The letters are our window on the man as he conducts his domestic and professional life, catching him in rage and tender moments. They tell us something about his love life, how he wrote, what he believed in, and how he ordered his affairs. They are also a chronological record of a life which saw little harmony
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