But he survived, despite frequent epileptic attacks, despite the terrible solitude of his existence, despite extensions of his sentence. He even managed to fall in love with and marry a woman who, as it turned out, was dying of tuberculosis. He returned to St. Petersburg ten years after departing for Siberia, a free man and a changed one as well.
The change was extraordinary. The young rebel had become a middle-aged conservative, although he was not yet the violent reactionary that he later became. The tsar, he had concluded, had been right. He had deserved punishment and had achieved happiness in the only way possible for him and perhaps, he thought, for anyone: through suffering. He began to incorporate this doctrine, which is shared, of course, by many of the world’s great artists, in novels that place him in the first rank of Russian authors.
Crime and Punishment was one of the first of these works of Dostoevsky’s mature years. It was produced quickly, since at the time he was under severe pressure to repay large debts incurred in gambling binges, but the book is carefully shaped and plotted for all of the haste with which it was written. And its idea is both profound and shocking. Raskolnikov, the young hero of the novel, is torn between the two sides of his character: on one side, a meek, humble student, afraid to lift his voice in the world; on the other, a strong, self-willed man, insistent upon playing a leading role in the human comedy. To prove to himself that his real character is the latter and not the former, Raskolnikov decides to murder an old woman, a pawnbroker who preys upon the poor of St. Petersburg. He will murder her, he decides, thus confirming his strength of will, and also rob her, and use her money to do good for the poor. And indeed he does murder her, although with great difficulty; it is not as easy, he finds, to kill a human being as to kill a rat, say, or a fly.
The murder proves nothing and satisfies nothing. Raskolnikov is consumed by guilt and his bad dreams—those dreams that are one of the wonders of this book—become ever more nightmarish. His waking life, too, takes on the character of a nightmare. Finally he meets Svidrigailov, with whom he has a long conversation that shows him the depths of despair. Svidrigailov shares his vision of eternity with Raskolnikov:
“We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”
“Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that?” Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.
“Juster? And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you know it’s what I would certainly have made it,” answered Svidrigailov, with a vague smile.
It is to escape such visions, perhaps, that Raskolnikov begins to yearn for punishment, yearns to pay his debt to society and to God, so that he can once again dream of happiness. In the meantime the remarkable detective, Porfiry, is closing in. Finally, Raskolnikov is trapped, confesses, is condemned, and goes off to Siberia accompanied by his beloved Sonya, the meek and devoted heroine of the novel.
Probably The Brothers Karamazov is an even greater novel than Crime and Punishment; perhaps The Idiot and The Possessed are nearly its equal. But Crime and Punishment is, I think, the work of Dostoevsky with which a reader should begin to try to deal with the overwhelming power of this nearly mad Russian author. It takes a lot out of a reader; the pain that Raskolnikov suffers is all there, on the surface, and you may suffer it too.
LEO TOLSTOY
1828–1910
War and Peace
The Death of Ivan Ilych
Twenty-Three Tales
Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, a hundred miles south of Moscow. His parents died when he was young, and he was brought up by relatives who arranged for his education at the University of Kazan. Headstrong and uncontrollable, as well as rich, he returned home when he was nineteen to live on his estate, manage his affairs, and try to educate himself. None of this worked out well. He joined the army, serving bravely in several campaigns. He also began to write.
In 1862 he married, settled down, learned how to manage his estates efficiently, and began to write War and Peace. He worked on the book for six years, writing and rewriting; his young wife dutifully copied the entire enormous manuscript several times by hand. The book was finally published in 1869, when he was forty-one.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace is very large and vastly complex. Its scope is as wide as Russia or as life itself. It is also filled with thousands of small, carefully observed details.
Painters and moviemakers have tried to recreate the vastness of the book in other media, with their depiction of the shock of hundreds of thousands of soldiers battling at Austerlitz and Borodino, and their vision of the great emptiness of the Russian plain. These attempts have not been very successful. The scale of War and Peace is best expressed in words and best apprehended through the reader’s imagination. No film can do this book justice.
That is partly because vastness is not the book’s only characteristic, or even its leading one. Instead, it is the small details that are most vivid. Rock-hard, concrete details of experience that are exactly like the details of our own lives, they become part of our lives when we read the book.
One can wonder how anyone who has the slightest interest in books, or the barest curiosity about what the greatest of all novels may be like, could consider not reading War and Peace. At the same time it is easy to understand why many do not try it. It is too big, too “great,” too famous. There is a kind of backlash from all the effusive praise.
Let us concentrate, therefore, on how to read War and Peace. Perhaps the why will then take care of itself.
War and Peace is nearly fourteen hundred pages long. Few readers can read attentively at a steady rate of more than fifty pages an hour. This means that the book requires twenty-eight hours to read, at a minimum.
Many readers cannot read at a steady pace of fifty pages an hour. They may need a total of forty or fifty hours, or even more.
To read the book well, therefore, you will need a large chunk of free time, when you will not be too often interrupted and your mind drawn from what you are reading. Setting aside a week of your life to read War and Peace is a reasonable idea. The book is worth it.
Ideally, you should have nothing else to do during that week, besides reading, eating, and sleeping. Most readers will not be able to enjoy those ideal conditions, but try to get as close as you can.
Next, throw away any reader’s guides that list all the characters of the book and their relationships to one another. These are crutches that in the long run only impede the reader.