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psychic life, and for that we know too little. The descriptions of the
seizures themselves teach us nothing, our information about the rela–
tions between the seizures and Dostoevski's experiences are defective
and often inconsistent. The most probable assumption is that the at–
tacks go back to his childhood, that the symptoms were mild to start
with, and did not assume epileptic form until after the terrible experi–
ence of his eighteenth year, the murder of his father.
1
It would be
very convenient if it could be established that the attacks ceased
entirely during his exile in Siberia, but other accounts are opposed
to this.
2
"'
The unmistakable connection between the murder of the father
in
The Brothers Karamazov
and the fate of Dostoevski's father has
struck more than one of his biographers, and has caused them to refer
to a "certain modern psychological school." A psychoanalytical con–
sideration-for it is psychoanalysis that is meant-is tempted to see
in this event the most serious
trauma,
and in Dostoevski's reaction
to it, the crucial point of his neurosis.
But if I undertake to substantiate this idea by means of psycho–
analysis, I expose myself to the danger of being unintelligible to all
those readers who are unfamiliar with the language and teaching of
psychoanalasis.
VVe
have one certain starting-point. We know the meaning of
the first attacks from which Dostoevski suffered in his early
youth~
long before the incidence of the "epilepsy." These attacks had a death
See Rene Fiilop-Miller's article,
Dostojewski's Heilige Krankheit,
in
Wissen und L eben,
Nos. 19-20, 1924. Of special interest is the information that
in the novelist's childhood, "something terrible, agonising and unforgettable"
happened, to which the first signs of his disease may be traced (Suvorin in an
article in the
Novoe Vremia
for 1881, quoted in the introduction to
Dostojewski
am Roulette,
page xlv). Further, Orest Miller in
Dostojewski's autobiographische
Schriften
says: "There is, however, another special piece of evidence about Fedor
Mikhailovich's illness, which relates to his earliest youth, and brings the illness
into relation with a tragic event in the family life of his parents. But, although
this piece of evidence was given to me orally by one who was a close friend of
Dostoevski, because I can nowhere find confirmation of it, I am unable to make
up my mind to give an exact and detailed account of it" (page 140). Biographers
and scientific researchers cannot be grateful for this discretion.
2 Most of the accounts, including Dostoevski's own, maintain rather that
the illness first assumed a definite epileptic character during the exile in Siberia.
Unfortunately there is reason to distrust the autobiographical accounts of neu–
rotics. Experience shows that their memories introduce falsifications designed to
break down an unpleasant causal connection. Nevertheless, it appears certain that
his time in a Siberian prison markedly altered Dostoevski's morbid state. Cf.
Dostojewski's Heilige Krankheit,
page 1186.
