DOSTOEVSKI AND PARRICIDE
531
reached with less effort. This
iS
the weak point of the great person–
ality. Dostoevski threw away the chance of becoming a teacher and
liberator of humanity; instead, he appointed himself its gaoler. The
future of civilisation will have little to thank him for.
It
is probable
that he was condemned to such frustration by his neurosis. The
greatness of his intellect and the strength of his love for humanity
should have opened to him another, apostolic, way of life.
To treat D,ostoevski as a sinner and a criminal rouses violent
resistance which need not be based on the philistine assessment of the
criminal. The real motive soon becomes apparent: two traits are
im~
portant in the criminal, boundless egoism and a str-ong destructive
tendency, both in conjunction; and the conditions for their expres–
sion is the absence of love, the lack of an affective valuation of
(human) objects. One immediately recalls the contrast presented by
Dostoevski, his great need of love and his enormous capacity for love,
which expressed itself in manifestations of superhuman goodness, and
enabled him to love and help where he was justified in hatred and
revenge-for example, in his relations with his first wife and her
lover. That being so, we have to ask whence comes the temptation to
reckon Dostoevski among the criminals. The answer is that it comes
from his choice of material, which singles out from all others violent,j
murderous, and egoistic characters, which points to the existence of
similar tendencies in his own soul, and also from certain facts in his
life, like his passion for gambling, and perhaps the sexual abuse of a
young
girl
(A Confession
1
).
The contradiction is resolved by the per–
ception that Dostoevski's very strong destructive impulse, which might
easily have made him a criminal, was in his life directed mainly
against his own person (inward instead of outward), and thus found
expression in masochism and the sense of guilt. His personality, more–
over, contains sadistic characteristics in plenty, which are expressed
in his irritability, his love of tormenting, and his intolerance even to–
wards persons he loved, and which appear also in the way in which,
as an author, he treats his readers. That is, in little things he was a
sadist to others, in bigger things a
s~dist
to himself, that is, a masochist,
who is the mildest, kindliest, most helpful human being possible.
See the discussion of this point in
Der unbekannte Dostojewski,
1926.
Stefan Zweig says: "He does not stop before the chambers of bourgeois morality,
and no one can say exactly how far he transgressed the bounds of law in his
own life, or how much of the criminal instincts of his heroes was realised in him"
(Drei Meister,
1920) . For the intimate relations between Dostoevski's characters
and his own experiences, see the arguments in the introductory section of Rene
Fiilop-Miller's
Dostojewski am Roulette,
1925, which relate to Nikolai Strakhov.
