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Dostoyevsky's 'New Word'
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13240 |
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Book World
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10 / 1987 |
5,704 Words |
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Michael Scammell
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In May 1871, when Fyodor Dostoyevsky was at the height of his powers as a novelist, he wrote a letter to the critic Nikolai Strakhov in which he said of some of his rivals: "You know what? All that is landowners' literature. It has said all there was for it to say (beautifully in the case of Lev Tolstoy). But that, the apogee of the landowner's word, was the very last. The new word that is to replace that of the landowners' has not yet been heard, but then there hasn't been time."
Were it not for the admiring reference to Tolstoy (about whose work Dostoyevsky was unfailingly positive), this comment might have smacked of sour grapes, particularly since Dostoyevsky had just finished explaining to Strakhov that another landowner-writer, Ivan Turgenev, was second-rate. Or it might have indicated a false modesty, for by 1871 Dostoyevsky had already published two of his mature masterpieces: Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, and a third, The Devils, was even then being serialized in a leading literary magazine of the period, the Russian Messenger. Indeed, Strakhov had just written to Dostoyevsky that after he had read The Devils, "even Tolstoy is monotonous by comparison."
But Dostoyevsky was absolutely sincere. Ever since his sensational literary debut twenty-five years earlier with the short novel Poor Fold, he had been striving to express a "new word" in Russian literature. His whole life had been, and would continue to be, a search for that word. Reading through this latest volume of his letters, it is possible to see what a complex idea Dostoyevsky was voicing, how rich that "new word" was, and why he felt that it still had not been heard. Little did he then realize how influential that word was to prove not only for Russian, but for world literature.
In point of fact, the "new word" Dostoyevsky spoke of can be interpreted in various ways, for it is clear that it operated on a variety of levels. One might, to begin with, point to the novelty of his exalted concept of the role of the writer for the Russia of his day. Already at the age of seventeen, while under the influence of German romanticism, he had written to his brother Mikhail that "a poet in the moment of inspiration perceived God; hence, he accomplishes the mission of philosophy. Hence, the poet's ecstasy is a philosophical ecstasy." Eight years later, he again wrote to Mikhail of working for "Holy Art in all the purity of my heart, a heart that has never before vibrated and throbbed within me the way it does now before the new images and characters that are springing up in my mind. Brother, I feel I have been reborn."
The Novelist as Prophet and Teacher
The idea that poetic inspiration was "like a heavenly sacrament" stayed with Dostoyevsky throughout the rest of his life--though he was no stranger to the truth of the adage that a work of art consists of one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration--and was closely linked with two other ideas. The first of these was a rejection of rationalism. "An understanding of nature, the human soul, God, love that comes from the heart, not from the mind," he wrote to his brother in one of his early letters. "An idea is born in the soul. Reason is an instrument, the machine that is set in motion by the fire of the soul." And years later, in a letter to the critic Apollon Maikov, he spoke of artistic ideas "flashing and pulsating through my head and heart. But then they just flash, and what I have
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