DOSTOEVSKI AND PARRICIDE
541
significant scene. The Elder in his conversation with Dmitri has
discovered that' Dmitri bears in himself a readiness to murder his
father, and throws himself at his feet. It is impossible that this is
meant as an expression of admiration; it must signify that the holy
man is rejecting the temptation to despise or shrink from the mur–
derer, and, therefore, humiliates himself before him. Dostoevski
1
s
sympathy for the criminal is in fact boundless: it goes far beyond the
pity which the unhappy wretch can claim, and reminds us of the
"sacred awe" with which epileptics and lunatics were treated in olden
days. The criminal is to him almost a Redeemer, who has taken on
himself the guilt which others would otherwise have had to bear.
One need not now commit murder, after he has committed murder,
but one must be grateful to him, because, without him, one would
oneself have to have been a murderer. That is not pure kindliness and
sympathy; it is identification on the basis of a similar murderous im–
pulse, in reality a slightly displaced narcissism. This is not to dispute
the ethical value of this kindliness. Perhaps the mechanism of kindly
sympathy in other men is the same, only it is particularly easy to
discern in the extreme case of the novelist, who was ridden by the
sense of guilt. There is no doubt that this identifying sympathy was
a decisive factor in determining Dostoevski's choice of material. He
dealt first with the common criminal-the criminal from egoism–
the political and the religious criminal, and not until the end of his
life did he come back to the primal criminal, the parricide, and in
him made his poetical confession.
The publication of Dostoevski's posthumous papers and of the
diaries of his wife has thrown a bright light on one episode in his life,
namely the period in Germany when he was obsessed with the
gambling mania (
Dostojewski am Roulette),
which it is impossible to
regard otherwise than as an unmistakable fit of pathological passion.
There was no lack of ways of rationalising this remarkable and un–
worthy behaviour.
As
often happens with neurotics, the sense of guilt
had taken tangible shape in the form of a burden of debt, and Dos–
toevski was able to take refuge behind the pretext that he was trying
by his winnings at the tables to make it possible for him to return to
Russia without being arrested by his creditors. But that was only a
pretext; Dostoevski was acute enough to recognise this and honest
enough to confess it. He knew that the chief thing was the gambling
in itself,
le jeu pour le jeu.
1
All the details of his impulsively irrational
1 "The main thing is the gambling itself," he wrote in one of his letters.
"I swear that greed for money has nothing to do with it, although Heaven
knows I am sorely in need of money."
