First published in 1923, at a time when Dostoevsky had yet to be rediscovered by the West, French author André Gide’s observations about the great writer are fascinating (and revealing about Gide as well). It’s far from a complete account, but there are plenty of gems to be found, such as Gide’s observation that Dostoevsky’s characters “group and arrange themselves always on one plane only, that of humility and pride.” Of special interest also were a sampling from Dostoevsky’s letters, including the one he wrote on December 22, 1849, the day his death sentence was stayed by the Tsar at the last minute, and another he wrote five years later which described in detail the journey he and his fellow prisoners took to Siberia, as well as the brutal conditions he found there.

Gide helps reveal the many bitter ironies about Dostoevsky’s life – the fact that despite his delicacy in childhood, he was drafted into the military, whereas his more robust brother Michael was rejected. That after his first four years in exile, when he wasn’t allowed to correspond with anyone, he spent six years pleading with his brother to write him, and to send him books – but never heard a word. “He wept when he bade me good-bye. Has his feeling towards me grown cold? Has his character changed? That would be a grief. Has he forgotten all the past?” he wrote a friend in 1856. That in the last year of his life, despite winning over public opinion, he was still struggling with attacks in the press, writing “For what I said in Moscow [his speech on ‘Pushkin,’ now revered], just look how I’ve been treated by almost the whole of the press: it is as if I were a thief or had embezzled from some bank or other. Ukhantsev [a notororious swindler of the time] is less foully abused than I.” It was during these final years, shortly before he died at just 59, that he would lament “the weakening of his memory and his imagination,” and yet it was at this time that he still produced his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, which is as inspiring as it is humbling.

All of these aspects of his life seem to have fueled his self-doubt as a writer, his humility as a person, his awkwardness around others, and his submissiveness that seemed to channel Christ (e.g. still believing in the Emperor’s kindness after 10 years of exile). They were all facets of a genuinely vulnerable person. He was a man who knew pain, poverty, physical affliction (his epilepsy), and mental obsession (his gambling), and yet through it all he was generous to those around him and remained an optimist, both in Russia and in humanity. He resisted the Westernization of Russa, famously feuding with Turgenev, instead believing that Russia could help heal the party passions that were dividing Europe. And remarkably, during his exile, after having lived in frigid conditions with meager provisions for four years, he wrote, “Brother, there are very many noble natures in the world.”

There is such depth of feeling and authenticity in his work not because it is perfect precise and tidied up, but because it reflects the contradictions in people and remains gloriously messy. As Gide expresses it, he himself was a man of contradictions: “Conservative, but not hide-bound by traditions: monarchist, but of democratic opinions: Christian, but not a Roman Catholic: liberal, but not a progressive … he is of the stuff which displeases every party.” And yet Dostoevsky never tried to fit a mold, and said “The hardest thing on earth is to remain yourself.” He was raw, pure, natural. And thus, “with him there is no attempt to straighten or simplify lines; he is at his happiest in the complex; he fosters it.”

I liked how Gide rather poetically expressed the craft in Dostoevsky’s writing. “Balzac paints like David; Dostoevsky like Rembrandt,” he writes in the preface. In one of the lectures that were transcribed for the book, he says “In one of Stendhal’s novels, the light is constant, steady, and well-diffused. Every object is lit up in the same way, and is visible equally well from all angles; there are no shadow effects. But in Dostoevsky’s books, as in Rembrandt’s portrait, the shadows are the essential. Dostoevsky groups his characters and happenings, plays a brilliant light upon them, illuminating one aspect only.”

In a thought-provoking way, Gide also compares Nietzsche’s reaction to the Gospels as one of jealousy leading to the Superman, with Dostoevsky’s which is one of submission. In Dostoevsky, he writes, “the will to power leads inevitably to ruin,” whereas in Nietzsche it’s the opposite. In Dostoevsky, rationality and the mind are “demonic,” he says, and that “Dostoevsky’s heroes inherit the Kingdom of God only by the denial of mind and will and the surrender of personality.” That may sound antithetical to progress or what an atheist intellectual like me may buy into, but if I think of the “mind” in this context as ego, which in turns leads to competitiveness and internal suffering, I see the wisdom that I’ve always found in Dostoevsky.

There were many bits here and there that didn’t ring true e.g. Gide saying the influence of WWI upon literature was “nil,” or that jealousy might not be felt if people hadn’t read of it and expected themselves to feel that way, or subscribing to Mme. Hoffmann’s view that Russian mistrustfulness stemmed from “consciousness of his own insufficiency and proneness to sin,” or stating that “with physical well-being, mental activity is in abeyance.”

However, there is also wisdom in Gide’s anecdotes, such as this one from Walter Rathenau, who had been asking about Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. “His answer was that naturally he had suffered at the horrible abominations practiced by the revolutionaries. ‘But believe me,’ he added, ‘a nation learns to know itself, as a man his own soul, only by passing through the depths of his suffering and the abyss of his sin…And America has not yet gained a soul because she refuses to accept sin and suffering.” I thought that was incredibly prescient, given America’s refusal to truly atone for its two original sins, slavery and genocide.

This is certainly not the final word on Dostoevsky, but it was a pleasure to read the insights from an aficionada in the literati nearly a century ago. ( )

A critical classic. ( )