JOSEPH FRANK
269
I remember, when I got off the plank bed and gazed around, that I
suddenly felt I could look on these unfortunates with quite differ–
ent eyes.. . . That despised peasant with shaven head and brand
marks on his face, reeling with drink, bawling out his hoarse,
drunken song-why, he may have been that very Marey; after all,
I am not able
to
look into his heart.
This is no longer the "sentimental Naturalism" of Dostoevsky's early
period, the appeal not to judge the pathetic "crime" of the hopeless
drunkard too harshly because he died of grief. The crimes of those in
House of the Dead
are instances of evil far surpassing anything Dosto–
evsky could personally have met with earlier, but he still refuses to
believe that such evil is immitigable and irreparable. Concealed in the
human heart is also the kindness and compassion of Marey, and this
contains the possibility of remorse and redemption .
It
is these responses
that Dostoevsky now searches for (and finds) beneath the repellent exte–
rior and even the horrendous crimes.
Although Dostoevsky's novel and stories are filled with Christian sen–
timents, imagery, and allusions, explicit firsthand statements about his
religious convictions are quite rare. One of the very few is contained in
a notebook entry from April
I864,
written during an all-night vigil at
the bier of his first wife. "To love man like
oneself,
according to the
commandment of Christ," he scribbled then, "is impossible. The law of
personality on earth binds. The Ego stands in the way." Evil is thus an
inherent attribute of the human condition; only "Christ alone could
love man as himself, but Christ is a perpetual eternal ideal to which man
strives and, according to the law of nature, should strive."
It
is thus a
law of (human) nature to strive to realize the ideal of Christ, and since
human nature also contains another law, that of personality, it is thus
locked into an eternal battle with itself. These words condense and
express what Dostoevsky had learned in the prison camp, which had
immeasurably broadened and deepened what may be called the honest–
thief paradigm of his early years.
In
his
Diary of a Writer
(I873),
Dostoevsky vividly exemplifies the
same vision by citing a poem of Nekrasov entitled "Vias." He is a reli–
gious pilgrim who in the past had been a godless reprobate, flogging his
wife to death and consorting with thieves and highwaymen. But after
falling sick and experiencing a vision of the tortures of Hell, he takes an
oath and becomes a pilgrim wandering through the land and collecting
"offerings for God's church":
