Table Of ContentFYODOR 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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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