PREFACE
DOSTOEVSKY — i n Moderation —in BY
THOMAS MANN
T
HERE was something
very attractive to me about the invitation on the part of Dial Press to write a p reface to an edition of Dostoevsky‟s shorter novels, the six narratives included in this volume. The publisher‟s moderation which determined the character of this edition tended to put the commentator‟s mind at ease and to encourage him in a t ask from which he might otherwise have shrunk, not to say recoiled — recoiled — the the task of making the entire, tremendous cosmos of Dostoevsky‟s works the object of his consideration and discussion. Moreover this commentator would scarcely have had another chance in this life to render his critical tribute to the great Russian if it had not been for this opportunity to do it lightly, so to speak, in a limited space, for a specific purpose, and with the degree of selfrestriction which the purpose charitably prescribes. Strangely enough, my life as a n author led me to write detailed studies on Tolstoy as well as on Goethe — Goethe — several several on each of them. But I have never formally written on two other cultural experiences of similar weight that moved me as deeply in my youth and that I never tired of renewing and intensifying in my mature years: I have never written on Nietzsche nor on Dostoevsky. I omitted writing the Nietzsche essay for which my friends often asked me, although it seemed to lie on my path. And the “profound, criminal, saintly face of Dostoevsky” (that was my characterization at one time) appears only fleetingly in my writings to vanish again quickly. Why this evasion, this shunning, this silence — silence — in in contrast with the inadequate, to be sure, but enthusiastic eloquence to which the greatness of the other two masters and stars inspired me? I
know the answer. It was easy for me to render intimate and rapturous homage, tempered with tender irony, to the images of the divine and the fortunate, the children of nature in their exalted simplicity and their exuberant healthfulness: to the autobiographic aristocratism of the molder of a majestic personal culture, Goethe, and to the primitive epic force, the unrivaled naturalness, of the “great author of all the Russias,” Tolstoy, with his clumsy, ever failing attempts at moralistic spiritualization of his pagan corporeality. But I am filled with awe, with a profound, mystic, silence-enjoining awe, in the p resence of the religious greatness of the damned, in the presence of genius of disease and the disease of genius, of the type of the afflicted and the possessed, in whom the saint and the criminal are one… It is my feeling that the Daemonic is the poet‟s theme and not the writer‟s. It should speak from the depths of a work, if possible, in the garb of humor; to devote critical essays to it seems to me, mildly, an indiscretion. Possibly, even probably, this is only an extenuation of my indolence and cowardice. It is incomparably easier and more wholesome to write about divinely pagan healthfulness than about holy disease. We may amuse ourselves at the expense of the former, the fortunate children of nature and their artlessness; we cannot amuse ourselves at the expense of the children of the spirit, the great sinners and the damned, the sufferers of holy disease. I would find it utterly impossible to jest about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as I have occasionally done in a novel about the egotistic child of a lucky star, Goethe, and in an essay about the colossal loutishness of Tolstoy‟s moralism. It follows that my reverence for the intimates of Hell, the devout and the diseased, is fundamentally much deeper — and and only therefore less vocal — — than than my reverence for the sons of light. It is a good thing that this reverence of mine has now receiv ed an outward incentive to eloquence, though of a practically limited and restrained nature. “The Pale Criminal”— whenever whenever I read this chapter heading in Zarathustra , a morbidly inspired work of genius if ever there was one, the eerily grief-ridden features of Dostoevsky, as we know them from a number of good pictures, stand before me. Moreover, I suspect that they were in the mind of the drunken migrainist of Sils Maria when he wrote it. For Dostoevsky‟s work played a remarkable role in his life; he frequently mentions him in his letters as well as in his books (while I am not aware
that he ever said a word about Tolstoy); he calls him the most profound psychologist in world literature and refers to him in a kind of unassuming enthusiasm as his “great teacher”— although teacher”— although in fact there is scarcely an indication of discipleship in his relation to his great Eastern bro ther-inspirit. They were more nearly brothers in spirit, tragically grotesque companions in misfortune, in spite of fundamental differences in heredity and tradition — on on the one hand the German professor, whose Luciferian genius, stimulated by disease, developed from the soil of classical learning, philological erudition, idealistic philosophy, and musical Romanticism; on the other, the Byzantine Christian, who was free from the humanistic inhibitions that limited the other, and who could occasionally be re garded as the “great teacher simply because he was not German (for (for it was Nietzsche‟s most passionate desire to free himself of his Germanism), because he appeared as the lib erator from bourgeois morality, and because he affirmed the will to psychological affront, to the crime of frank acknowledgement. It seems impossible to speak of Dostoevsky ‟s genius without being forced to think of the word “criminal.” The eminent Russian critic Merezhkovsky uses it in various studies on the author of The Karamazovs , repeatedly and with a double meaning: referring, in the first place, to Dostoevsky himself and to “the criminal curiosity of his insight,” and, in the second place, referring to the object of his insight, the human heart, whose most recondite and most criminal impulses criminal impulses he laid bare. “The reader,” says this critic, “is aghast at his omniscience, his penetration into the conscience of a stranger. We are confronted by our own secret thoughts, which we would not reveal to a friend, not even to ourselves.” Yet we are only apparently dealing with objective and quasi-medical scrutiny and diagnosis — it it is in reality psychological lyricism in the widest sense of the word, admission and horrible confession, pitiless revel ation of the criminal depths of the author‟s own c onscience — and and this accounts for the terrific moral force, the religious frightfulness of Dostoevsky‟s knowledge of the soul. A comparison with Proust, and with the psychological novelties, surprises, and knick-knacks that abound in his works, at once exposes the difference in accent, in moral tone The psychological curios and pertnesses of the Frenchman are simply amusing compared with the ghastly revelations of Dostoevsky, a man who had been
in Hell. Could Proust have written Crime and Punishment , the greatest detective novel of all times? It was not the science that he lacked, b ut the conscience…As far as Goethe is concerned, a psy chologist of the first water from Werther to to the Elective Affinities , Goethe declares frankly that he has never heard of a crime of which he did not feel cap able himself. This is the word of a disciple of pietistic self-scrutiny but the element of Greek innocence predominates in it. It is a self-possessed word — word — a challenge to bourgeois morality, to be sure, but cool and haughty rather than filled with Christian contrition, bold rather than profound in a religious sense. Tolstoy was essentially his peer, in spite of all Christian velleity. “I have nothing to conceal from men,” he used to say; “let them all kn ow what I am doing!” Compare Compare this with the confessions of the hero of Notes from Underground where Underground where he speaks of his secret dissipations. “Even at that time,” he says, “I had a love for secrecy. I was terribly afraid that someone might see me, meet me, recognize me.” His life, which could which could not bear ultimate frankness, ultimate exposure before the eyes of the world, was ruled by the secret of Hell. Undoubtedly the subconsciousness and even the consciousness of this titanic creator was permanently burdened with a heavy sense of guilt, a sense of the criminal, and this feeling was by no means of purely hypochondriac nature. It was connected with his infirmity, the “sacred” disease, the pre-eminently mystic disease, epilepsy. He suffered from it from childhood, but the disease was fatally intensified by his trial when he was unjustly accused in the year 1849, at the age of twenty-eight, on a charge of political conspiracy and actually sentenced to death (he was already standing at the stake facing death when, at the last moment, his sentence was commuted to four years at hard labor in Siberia). It was his opinion that the disease would culminate in the exhaustion of his physical and intellectual powers, in death or insanity. The attacks occurred on the average of once a month, sometimes more frequently, at times even twice a week. He often described them: both in direct communication and by transferring the malady to psychologically favored characters in his novels: to the terrible Smerdyakov, to the hero of The Idiot , Prince Myshkin, to the nihilist and fatalistic Kirilov in The Possessed . Two symptoms, according to his description, are characteristic of the falling sickness: the incomparable sense of rapture, of inner enlightenment, of
harmony, of highest ecstasy, preceding by a few moments the spasm that begins with an inarticulate, no longer human scream — scream — and and the state of horrible depression and deep grief, of spiritual ruin and desolation, that follows it. This reaction seems to me even more symbolic of the nature of the disease than the exaltation that precedes the attack. Dostoevsky describes it as a rapture so strong and sweet “that one is ready to exchange ten years of life or even life itself for the bliss of these few seconds.” The subsequent, terrific hangover, however, according to the confession of the great invalid, was marked by a “feeling of being a criminal,” by the weight of unknown guilt unknown guilt , by the burden of an awful crime. I don‟t know what neurologists think of the “sacred” disease, but in my opinion it is definitely rooted in t he realm of the sexual, it is a wild and explosive manifestation of sex dynamics, a transferred and transfigured act, a mystic dissipation. I repeat that I regard the subsequent state of contrition and misery, the mysterious feeling of guilt, as ev en more revealing than the preceding seconds of bliss for which “one is ready to exchange his life.” No matter to what extent the malady menaced Dostoevsky‟s mental powers, it is certain that his genius is most intimately connected with it and colored by it, that his psychological insight, his understanding understanding of crime and of what the Ap ocalypse calls “satanic depths,” and most of all his ability to suggest secret guilt and and to weave it into the background of his frequently horrible creatures — creatures — all all these qualities are inseparably related to the disease. In the past of Svidrigailov (Crime and Punishment), Punishment), for example, there is “a criminal affair of bestial, not to say fantastic, brutality, for which he would most certainly have been sent to Siberia.” It is left to the more or less willing imagination of the reader to guess what this affair may be: in all p robability it is a sex crime, possibly child rape — for for this is also the secret of a part of the secret in the life of Stavrogin in The Possessed , that icy and contemptible masterful person before whom weaker creatures groveled in the dust, possibly one of the most weirdly attractive creatures in world literature. There is an unpublished portion of this novel, “Stavrogin‟s Confession,” in which he relates, among other things, the rape of a little girl. According to Merezhkovsky it is a powerful fragment, full of terrible realism transcending the bounds of art. Apparently this in famous crime constantly occupied the author‟s moral imagination. It is said that one day he
confessed the commission of a sin of this sort to his famous colleague Turgenev, whom he hated and despised on account of his West European sympathies — undoubtedly undoubtedly a mendacious confession with which he merely wished to frighten and confuse the serene, humane, and quite unsatanic Turgenev. In St. Petersburg, when he was forty years old and had attained fame as the author of The House of Death , which had moved even the Czar to tears, in a family circle that included a number of very young girls, he once narrated the plot of a story he had planned in his youth, a novel in which a landed proprietor, a sedate and substantial man, suddenly remembers that two decades ago, after an all-night drinking bout with dissolute companions, he had raped a ten-year-old girl. “Fyodor Mikhailovich!” the mother of the household exclaimed, raising her hands in horror. “Have pity on us! The children are listening!” Yes, he must have been a very remarkable citizen, this Fyodor Mikhailovich. Nietzsche‟s infirmity was not the falling sickness, although it is not difficult to picture the author of Zarathustra and and The Antichrist as as an epileptic. He shared the fate of many artists and particularly of a notable number of musicians (among whom he belongs after a fashion): he perished from progressive paralysis, a malady of unmistakably sexual origin, since medical science has long recognized it as the result of luetic infection. Viewed from the naturalistic-medical angle — angle — a limited perspective, to be sure —Nietzsche‟s intellectual development is nothing but the case history of paralytic deterioration and degeneration — degeneration — that that is, he was propelled from a state of highly gifted normality upward into icy and grotesque spheres of fatal insight and moral isolation, a terrible and criminal degree of knowledge for which a delicate and kindhearted man, such as he was, in need of forbearance and indulgence, had never been born but for which, like Hamlet, he had only been called. “Criminal”— I repeat the word in order to stress the psychological relationship of the cases of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. It is no mere chance that the former was so strongly attracted to the latter that he called him his “great teacher.” Excess is common to them both, the drunken unleashing of insight, coupled with a religious, i.e. , satanistic moralism which in Nietzsche‟s case was called antimoralism. Nietzsche probably did not know the epileptic‟s sense of guilt of which I spoke. But the fact that
his personal conception of life made him familiar with that of the criminal is attested by one of his aphorisms, which I can‟t find at the moment but which I distinctly remember. In it he says that all intellectual isolation and alienation from the civil norm, all mental autonomy and ruthlessness, are related to the criminal‟s mode of life and afford an experiential insight into it. It seems to me that we can go even farther and say that all creative originality, all artistry in the widest sense of the word, does just that. The French painter and sculptor Degas once made the remark that the artist must put himself into the same frame of mind in w hich the criminal commits his deed. “Exceptional conditions make the artist,” Nietzsche himself said: “all conditions that are profoundly related and interlaced with morbid phenomena; it seems impossible to be an artist and not to be sick.” The German thinker probably did not k now the nature of his disease, but he was well aware of his debt to it, and his letters and published works are full of heroic eulogies of disease as a means to knowledge. A typical symptom of paralysis, presumably due to hyp eremia of the affected cerebral parts, is the surge of an intoxicating sense of bliss and power and an actual — actual — though medically, of course, pathological — pathological — intensification intensification of productive capacity. Before it clouds its victim‟s mind and kills him, the disease grants him illusory (in the sense of sane normality) exp eriences of power and sovereign facility, of enlightenment and blissful inspiration, so that he stands in awe of himself and is filled with the conviction that there has been no one like him in a thousand years; he regards himself as a divine mouthpiece, a vessel of grace, a god in his own right. We have descriptions of such euphoric affliction and of overwhelming inspiration in the letters of Hugo Woolf, in whose case they were invariably followed by periods of intellectual void and artistic impotence. But the most grandiose account of paralytic enlightenment, a stylistic masterpiece, is found in Nietzsche‟s Ecce Homo , in the third section of the chapter on Zarathustra . “Does anyone,” he asks, “at the end of the nineteenth century have an idea of what poets of powerful of powerful eras eras called inspiration? If not, I shall describe it.” It is clear that he regards his experience as something atavistic, something daemonically retrovertive, something belonging to another, more “powerful,” more Godlike state of mankind, something foreign to the psychic capabilities of our faintly rationalistic epoch. And to think that
what he is in truth describing — describing — but but what is truth: experience or medicine? — is is a morbid state of irritation that mockingly precedes the paralytic collapse. Possibly Possibly his concept of the “Eternal Return,” to which he attaches great weight, is a product of euphoria, uncontrolled by reason, and a reminiscence rather than intellectual property. Merezhkovsky pointed out long ago that the idea of the “Superman” occurs in Dostoevsky, in the speeches of the aforementioned epileptic, Kirilov, in The Possessed . Dostoevsky‟s nihilistic seer says: “There will be a new man and everything will be new. History will be divided into two sections: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and f rom the annihilation of God to the physical transformation of the earth and of man”— in man”— in other words, to the appearance of the God-man, the superman. But no one seems to have noted that the idea of the Eternal Return is also to be found in The Karamazovs , in Ivan‟s dialogue with the De vil. “But our present earth has repeated itself, possibly billions of times ; it would become senile, turned to ice, broke in two, fell apart, resolved itself into its elements, once more there was water „over the firmament,‟ then the comet, next the sun, and finally, out of the sun, came the earth earth — — this this process has perhaps repeated itself times without number and each time in the identical manner down to the last tiny …isn‟t that the most unspeakably indecent boredom!” detail …isn‟t Through the mouth of the Devil Dostoevsky designates as “indecent boredom” what Nietzsche hails with Dionysiac affirmation, adding “For I love you, Eternity!” But the idea is the same, and while I believe that the Superman is a case of coincidence based on intellectual fraternity, I am inclined to regard the “Eternal Return” as a result of reading, a subconscious, euphorically tinged memory of Dostoevsky. I am aware that I may be making a mistake in chronology; it is a matter for the literary historians to examine. The important thing for me is a certain parallelism in the thinking of these two great invalids and then, moreover, the phenomenon of disease in the form of greatness or greatness in the form of disease — disease — it it is purely a matter of perspective in the evaluation of disease: as a diminution of an intensification of life. Considering disease as greatness and greatness as disease, the mere medical point of view proves pedantic and inadequate, at the very least one-sidedly naturalistic: the thing has an intellectual and c ultural side,
connected with life itself and with its enhancement and growth, a side which the biologist and physician never fully understand. Let us put it into words: a type of humanity matures, or is reconstructed from the forg otten past, which takes the concepts of life and health out of the hands of biology, in which the exclusive right to these concepts has been vested, and presumes to administer them in a freer, more pious, and certainly more truthful manner. For man is not a mere creature of b iology. Disease…First of all it is a question of who is sick, who is insane, who is epileptic or paralytic: an average dolt, whose disease, of course, lacks all intellectual and cultural aspects — aspects — or or a Nietzsche, a Dostoevsky. In their cases the disease bears fruits that are more important and more beneficial to life and its development than any medically approved normality. The truth is that life has never been ab le to do without the morbid, and probably no adage is more inane than the one one that says that “only disease can come from the diseased.” Life is not prudish, and it is probably safe to say that life prefers creative, genius-bestowing disease a thousand times over to prosaic health; prefers disease, surmounting obstacles proudly on horseback, boldly leaping from peak to peak, to lounging, pedestrian healthfulness. Life is not finical and never thinks of making a moral distinction between health and infirmity. It seizes the bold product of disease, consumes and digests it, and as soon as it is assimilated, it is health. An entire horde, a generation of open-minded, healthy lads pounces upon the work of diseased genius, genialized by disease, admires and praises it, raises it to the skies, perpetuates it, transmutes it, and bequeathes it to civilization, which does not live on the home-baked bread of health alone. They all swear by the name of the great inv alid, thanks to whose madness they no longer need to be mad. Their healthfulness feeds upon his madness and in them he will become healthy. In other words, certain attainments of the soul and the int ellect are impossible without disease, without insanity, without spiritual crime, and the great invalids are crucified victims, sacrificed to humanity and its advancement, to the broadening of its feeling and knowledge — in in short, to its more sublime health. This is the reason for the aura of devoutness that clearly surrounds the lives of these men and deeply affects their selfconsciousness. It is also the reason for the anticipatory feelings which these victims have of power and of accomplishment and o f a vastly
intensified life despite all suffering; fe elings of triumph that can be regarded as illusory only in a prosaic, medical sense: a union of disease and power in their natures which scoffs at the ordinary association of disease and weakness and by its paradoxy contributes to the religious tinge of their existence. They force us to re-evaluate re- evaluate the concepts of “disease” and “health,” the relation of sickness and life; they teach us to be cautious i n our approach to the idea of “disease,” for we are too prone always to give it a biological minus sign. Nietzsche mentions this very point in a posthumous note to his Will to Power . “Health and disease,” he says, “— be be careful! The standard must always be the efflorescence of the body, the resilience, courage, and cheerfulness of the spirit — spirit — but but naturally also how in other words, make healthy.” much morbidity it can absorb and conquer — in make healthy.” (The italics are Nietzsche‟s.) “That which would destroy more delicate men is a stimulant for great for great healthfulness.” healthfulness.” Nietzsche regarded himself as a sound person in the grand manner, one who is stimulated by disease. B ut if in his case the relation of disease and power is such that the greatest sense of p ower and its productive confirmation appear to be a consequence of disease (which lies in the nature of paralysis), we are almost compelled in the case of Dostoevsky the epileptic to regard his disease as a product of super-abundant power, an explosion, an excess of tremendous health, and we are confronted by the convincing fact that the greatest vitality can at times wear the mask of pale infirmity. From the biological point of view the life of this man is most confusing: a quivering bundle of nerves, subject to spasms at a moment‟s moment ‟s notice, “so sensitive as if he had been flayed and the mere contact with the air were painful” (quoted from Notes from Underground ), ), he nevertheless managed to live a full sixty years (1821-1881), and in his four productive decades he erected a stupendous lifework of an unheard-of novelty and audacity, a surging wealth of passions and visions — visions — a work which not only broadens our knowledge of man b y its furor of “criminal” insight and confession, but also contains a surprising amount of mischievous humor, f antastic antastic comedy, and “cheerfulness of the spirit.” For, among other things, as the reader of the present edition will soon discover, this crucified man was also a really great humorist.
If Dostoevsky had written nothing else but the six short novels presented here, his name would no doubt still deserve a pre-eminent place in the history of the world‟s narrative literature. As a matter of fact they do not constitute one-tenth of his actual published writings, and his friends, who were familiar with the inside story of his work, assure us that of all the novels that Fyodor Mikhailovich carried with him in finished form, so to speak, and which he n arrated enthusiastically and in detail, not one-tenth was ever put on paper. They say that he required practically no time at all for the elaboration of these countless outlines. And then we are expected to believe that disease represents an impoverishment of life! The epic monuments which he erected — erected — Crime Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov (incidentally, (incidentally, they are not epics at all but colossal dramas, composed almost scenically, in which the soul stirring action, often compressed into the period of a few days, unwinds in super-realistic and feverish dialogue) — dialogue) — were were created not only under the scourge of disease but also under the blows of debt and degrading financial trouble that forced him to work at an unnatural rate of speed; he tells us that, in order to meet a deadline, he once wrote three and a half signatures — fifty-six fifty-six pages — in in two days and two nights. In foreign countries, in Baden-Baden and Wiesbaden, where he had to flee from his creditors, he tried to ameliorate his impoverishment by gambling, only in most instances to complete his ruin. Then he would write b egging letters in which he speaks the language of misery of the most depraved characters of his novels, of Marmeladov, for example. His passion for gambling was his second disease, possibly related to his first, a truly abnormal craving. To it we owe the wonderful novel The Gambler , who goes to a German resort, improbably and perversely named Roulettenb urt; in this novel the psychology of morbid passion and of the demon Chance is exposed with unrivaled veracity. This masterwork was written in 1867, b etween Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Idiot (1868-1869), and with all its greatness it represents a mere recreation. It is the latest of the stories in this volume, for the others were produced between 1846 and 1864. The earliest one is The Double , a pathological grotesque, which had appeared in the same y ear with Dostoevsky‟s first great novel, Poor People (1846), (1846), and it was a disappointment after the profound impression which the latter had made in
Russia — probably probably with some justification; for in spite of brilliant details of the narrative, the young author was probably in error to believe that he had excelled Gogol, although The Double was was strongly influenced by him. And he certainly did not surpass Edgar A llan Poe‟s William Wilson , where the same arch-romantic motif is treated in a morally profounder manner, resolving the clinical in the poetic. Be that as it may, our edition includes a number of wonderful “recreations” or perhaps preparations for masterworks to follow. The dates from 1848, before the time of Dostoevsky‟s Dostoevsky‟s trial and Eternal Husband dates deportation to Omsk in Siberia; its central figure is the embarrassingly ludicrous cuckold, from whose malicious anguish the eeriest effects are created. Then follows the period of confinement at hard labor, the horrible experience of the Katorga, which was to be movingly described later in St. Petersburg in The House of Death , the tale that stirred all Russia to tears. But the actual resumption of Dostoevsky‟s literary activity took place in Siberia with the writing (1859) of The Friend of the Family , also called The Manor of Stepantchikovo , justly famous for the incomparable character of the despotic hypocrite Foma Opiskin, a comic creation of the first rank, irresistible, rivaling Shakespeare and Molière. After this pe ak performance cle’s Dream , which followed immediately, must frankly b e regarded as a Un cle’s retrograde step. It is, if I may judge, too long-drawn-out for its content, a farce, whose tragic conclusion, the story of the tubercular young schoolmaster, is filled with unbearable sentimentalism derived from the early influence of Charles Dickens upon Dostoevsky‟s work. To make up for it, however, we find in Uncle’s Dream the the lovely Zinaida Afanasyevna, the type of the proud Russian girl, who enjoys the obvious and very suggestive love of an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul. The chief item in our anthology, Notes from Underground , written in 1864, is an awe- and terror-inspiring example of this sympathy and this frightful insight. In its content it comes closest to Dostoevsky‟s great and completely characteristic products. In general it is regarded as a turning point in the poet‟s activity, as an awakening to a consci ousness of himself. Today, when the painful and scornful conclusions, the radical frankness of this novel, ruthlessly transcending all novelistic and literary bounds, have
long become part of our moral culture, today we can scarcely conceive the lurid sensation which this novel must have created at the time of its appearance —protest on the side of “idealistic” aestheticism and passionate passionate agreement on the side of fanatical love for truth. I spoke of ruthlessness — ruthlessness — Dostoevsky or the first-person hero or un-hero or anti-hero avoids that charge by the fiction that he is not writing for the public, not for publication, not even for a rea der, but exclusively and secretly for himself alone. His train of thought is as follows: “In every man‟s memory there are things which he does not reveal to everyone , but only to his friends. There are also things which he does not reveal to his friends, but at best to himself and only under a pledge of secrecy. And finally there are things which man hesitates to reveal even to himself, and every decent person accumulates a considerable quantity of such things. In fact, you might say, the more decent a person is, the greater the number of such things that he carries around with him. I myself, at any rate have only recently decided to recall a few of my earlier experiences; until now I have always avoided them, even with a certain uneasiness….” And so this “novel” consists of the unspeakab ly compromising record of these “earlier experiences,” mingling the rep ulsive with the attractive in in a hitherto unheard-of manner. The author, or the person whom he makes the author, is trying an experiment. “Is it possible,” he inquires, “to be completely frank at least to oneself, and to tell the whole truth without reserve?” He is thinking of Heine, who made the statement that strictly truthful autobiographies were next to impossible; that everyone always told untruths about himself, like Rousseau, who slandered himself from pure vanity. The author concurs; but, he says, the difference between Rousseau and himself is that the former made his confession to the pub lic, while he was writing for himself alone. And, he declares emphatically, if it appeared as if he were addressing a reader, this was a mere pretense, as he found it easier to write in that fashion. It is purely a matter of form, he says. Of course, all that isn‟t true at all, for Dostoevsky was certainly writing for the public and for publication and for as many readers as possible, if only because he needed money badly. The artistic and almost facetious fiction of solitude and remoteness from literature is useful as an excuse for the radical cynicism of the frank confession. But the fiction
within the fiction, the “appearance” of addressing himself to a reader, the constant haranguing of certain certa in “gentlemen” with whom the speaker is arguing, that too is advantageous; for it brings an element of the discursive, the dialectic, the dramatic into the recital, an ele ment in which Dostoevsky is very much at home and which makes even the most serious, the most wicked, the most debased things amusing in the highest sense. I confess that I like the first part of Notes from Underground even even better than the second, the stirring and shameful story of the prostitute Liza. I grant that the first part does not consist of action b ut talk, and talk reminiscent in many respects of the depraved prating of certain religious personages in Dostoevsky‟s great novels. Granted also that it is hazardous talk in the strongest sense of the word, dangerously likely to confuse naïve minds, because it stresses skepticism against faith, and because it heretically attacks civilization and democracy and the humanitarians and the meliorists who believe that man strives for happiness and advancement while he is actually thirsting just as much for suffering, the only source of knowledge, that he really does not want the crystal palace and the anthill of social consummation, and that he will never renounce his predilection for destruction and chaos. All that sounds like reactionary wickedness and may worry well-meaning minds who believe that the most important thing today is the bridging of the chasm that yawns between intellectual realization and scandalously retarded social and economic reality. It is the most important thing — thing — and and yet those heresies are the truth: the dark side of truth, away from the sun, which no one dares to neglect who is interested in the truth, the whole truth, truth about man. The tortured paradoxes which Dostoevsky‟s “hero” hurls at his positivistic adversaries, antihuman as they sound, are spoken in the name of and out of love for humanity: on behalf of a n ew, deeper, and unrhetorical humanity that has passed through all the hells of suffering and understanding. As this edition of Dostoevsky compares with his co mplete work, and as his published work compares with that which he could and would have created if the limitations of human life had not prev ented him — him — so so the things I have said here about the titanic Russian compare to what could be said about him. Dostoevsky in moderation, Dostoevsky in reason, that was the watchword. When I told a friend of my intention to provide a preface for these volumes he said, laughing:
“Be careful! You will write a book about him.” I was careful.
THOMAS MANN,
Pacific Palisades, California, July, 1945
