Clods & Saints

THE DIARY OF A WRITER (1,097 pp.)--Feodor Dostoevsky--Scribner ($12.50).

One day in 1872, Feodor Dostoevsky, then 51 and already famous as the author of Crime and Punishment, decided to become a newspaperman again. He had tried it before, without much success. In fact, journalism was a bad choice for a man who needed all the elbow room of the Russian novel for self-expression. But Dostoevsky felt full of miscellaneous ideas and Messianic urges, and besides, he needed the money. When the aristocratic and crotchety Prince Meshchersky offered him a job as editor of The Citizen (salary: 250 rubles a month), Dostoevsky accepted.

He soon regretted the decision. He hated the work: getting out the sheet each week, rewriting the prince's pompous, half-literate articles, churning out copy for his own column, "The Diary of a Writer." And though The Citizen whooped it up for Czar and Russia, Dostoevsky found himself in several scrapes with the censors; once he was sent to jail for 48 hours for having violated a bureaucratic regulation.

In the summer his job was particularly hateful; without his family, which was in the country, Dostoevsky felt lost. He suffered from nightmares in which his little girl was flogged to death as she piteously cried, "Mamochka! Mamochka!" His only solace was a girl who read proof for The Citizen. They would sit up late, reading galleys over a kerosene lamp and arguing about God and Russia. Sometimes he would explode in fits of rage, pounding the table and shouting "The Antichrist is coming! . . . The end of the world is near at hand! . . ."

Somehow, Dostoevsky managed to edit The Citizen regularly all through 1873. Early the following year he quit his job, but in 1876 he decided to launch Diary, an all-Dostoevsky monthly of his own. It appeared irregularly until shortly before his death, in 1881. He wrote all the copy himself, from memorable criticisms of his contemporaries to ill-tempered notes to dissatisfied subscribers. His wife was business manager; when an issue came out she drafted the family nursemaid or stray visitors to help mail it.

Image of a Writer. Next week The Diary of a Writer appears in English for the first time. It is one of those books that is alternately fascinating and dreary, tinglingly exciting and unendurably boring. Journalist Dostoevsky observed none of the rules; he wrote about whatever he pleased at whatever length he pleased, and he wrote sloppily and badly, seldom troubling to whip his pieces into coherent shape. Diary is a vast jumble of rants, stories, articles, sketches, criticisms, polemics--some completely dated, some as fresh and troubling as The Brothers Karamazov.

Its chief value is in the self-portrait it presents of one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Almost nothing in Diary was written calmly or with composure; even the simplest bits of reportage were harried, tense, turbulent. Sometimes Dostoevsky drove himself clear over the precipice of hysteria; at other times he sank into the marshes of sentimentality. His obsession with the perverse, the criminal and the sadistically brutal corrupted his sermons on universal love; his vanity and quarrelsomeness mingled with a deep humility and a genuine reverence for people. The Dostoevsky paradox was that of the restless double men, the fatally split intellectuals, who yearn for love but know only pride, who hunt God and find doubts, who preach compassion and revel in violence.

Image of Christ. The paradox lies behind every line of Diary. A tireless chauvinist, Dostoevsky cried for a Russian crusade to free the Balkan Slavs from the heathen Turks--and, incidentally, take Constantinople. "Lasting peace," he wrote in one of his bullying moods, "always generates cruelty, cowardice and coarse, fat egoism . . ." He railed against the Jews, calling them interlopers and bloodsuckers on the backs of the peasants, in the same language the Nazis were to use later. He saw in the Russian people a special spiritual quality: "Their craving for suffering, perpetual and unquenchable suffering . . ." He believed that Russia's destiny was to save (and conquer) the world; its people alone, particularly its peasants, had retained immaculate "the Divine image of Christ."

He was severe with the Russian intellectual; the peasant was rooted in earth and God, the intellectual was homeless and sick with doubt. The "Westernized" Russian intellectual he found full of "heart-emptiness," puffed up with ill-digested European notions, detached from the people, ridiculously vain, and given to lying in order "to create ... an aesthetical impression." And he was tormented with the knowledge that he was himself an intellectual, driven and confused.

With horror and zest, he described how Turks stripped a father's skin in the presence of his child; how a father flogged his seven-year-old girl until he almost fainted from excitement; how a woman threw a little girl out of the window in a moment of pique. Then his other side burst through: "Have you ever seen a child hiding in a corner, so that he may not be seen, and weeping there, twisting his little hands (yes, twisting the hands--I have seen it myself) and striking his chest with his tiny fist, not comprehending what he was doing, not fully grasping his guilt and the reason why he was being tortured, but realizing only too clearly that he was not loved?"

"Alluvial Barbarism." Dostoevsky was at his best when he dropped abstract notions and described concrete scenes. He was a splendid crime reporter who could take a "simple but tricky case," investigate it with obsessive thoroughness and arrive at uncanny psychological explanations for the actions of the people involved. In the midst of a bad and sententious article on the Jews, Dostoevsky the novelist took over and made scenes come alive: "On a warped table a greasy guttered candle is burning out, while through the hoary tiny window, covered with ice, glimmers the dawn of another difficult day for poor folks . . ."

In one of the most powerful sections of Diary, Dostoevsky turned to his favorite theme, the peasant. "Did you ever see how a peasant whips his wife?--I did. He begins with a rope or a strap. Peasant life is devoid of aesthetic delights--music, theatres, magazines; naturally it has to be enlarged somehow. Tying up his wife, or thrusting her legs into the opening of a floor board, our good little peasant would probably begin--methodically, phlegmatically, even sleepily--with measured blows, not listening to the screams and entreaties --to be more correct--precisely listening to them, listening with delight, for otherwise what pleasure would he be deriving from the whipping? . . . Suddenly, he throws away the strap; like a madman, he seizes a stick, a bough, anything, and breaks it over her back with three last, terrific blows.--No more! He quits, plants himself by the table, sighs, and sets himself to his kvass."

Dostoevsky knew all there was to know about the Russian peasant's "alluvial barbarism," his ignorance, brutality and debauchery. But he insisted that "the Russian people [be judged] not by those villainies which they frequently perpetrate, but by those great and holy things for which they long amidst their villainy." Feodor Dostoevsky knew that the clod could also be a saint; the sinner could find his way to Christ.

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