418
JOSEPH FRANK
illusory image of man's own unrealized perfections. But while
this
may have shaken Dostoevsky temporarily, it is possible to show how the
spiritual education that Dostoevsky had already acquired prepared the
way for the conclusions to which he finally came.
One of the strongest impressions made on Dostoevsky's imagina–
tion in childhood was that of the Book of Job. "I am reading the
Book of Job," he writes his second wife in June, 1875, "and it
filk
me with a morbid excitement. I throw the book away and walk up
and down in my room for hours on end, almost in tears, and without
the stupid notes of the translator perhaps I'd be happy. This book,
Annette, is a strange thing; it's one of the first that really struck me,
I was then almost a child." The mystery of God's manifestations, which
transcend human understanding, had thus long left its imprint on
Dostoevsky's spirit. And the effect of the Book of Job was certainly
strengthened by Dostoevsky's intimate friendship, during his early
years in St. Petersburg between 1837 and 1840, with Ivan Shidlovsky.
This young poet was not only a Romantic "dreamer," but also-and
the two went very well together- a deeply religious personality plagued
by doubt and tormented by the problem of evil and suffering. Haunted
by thoughts of suicide, Shidlovsky nonetheless struggled to maintain a
faith that was his only salvation from catastrophe. "We must believe
that God is good," he wrote Mikhail Dostoevsky in January, 1839,
"for otherwise he is not God; that the Universe is the visible and
tangible beauty of this goodness.... Only then does our soul recognize
all in itself, winds a spider web of sympathy around the borders
of
life, and, in the center of the web, embraces God Himself."
Nor should we forget that, in one of his most important early
letters, the youthful Dostoevky sets himself up--somewhat confusedly,
but all the same significantly- as a defender of
feeling
against an ex–
clusive emphasis on reason as a source of knowledge. His brother
Mikhail had written that "to
know
more one must
fe el
less"; and
Fyodor, obviously drawing sustenance from the pervasive Schellingian
atmosphere of the Russian thirties, replies in October, 1838: "What
do you mean by the expression 'to know'? To know nature, the soul,
God, love ... It's by the heart one knows them, not the mind....
The intelligence, instrument, machine, is driven by the fire of the
soul . . . Besides (second point) human intelligence, expert in the
domain of the various knowledges, works independently of feeling,
