Biography

"DOSTOEVSKY opens up new worlds: the regions he explores were previously unknown to literature. And he creates Upheaval." With these words Mr. Julius Meief-Graefe commences the latest biography of one of the great trilogy of Russian writers, perhaps even, if one may attempt to set foot upon the odious road of comparisons, the greatest of the group which put a new literature before the world: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev. Tolstoy and Turgenev painted upon what might be called a variation of the Western canvas, with new colors; Dostoevsky created a new easel and a new technique. It is the difference between a Raphael and a Rembrant.

Mr. Meier-Graefe's book, to be exact, is not a biography in the classic sense of the word. To put the matter generally, it is the attempt of an astute and typically German mind to understand and to some extent lay bare a notice and typically Russian mind. And the attempt is singularly successful. From the very nature of the works with which he has to deal, a mere investigation and discussion of what may be called the facts of the novels--their construction, their action, even their dramatic quality--however painstaking and exact it might be, would be of little value. One must go deeper to find the kernel; one must pierce the shell of the detective story and delve deep into the psychological development of the works, for in them is mirrored the development not only of Dostoevsky's idea, but of Dostoevsky himself. When one has done that, the man who wrote the "Notes from Underground" and "The Brothers Karamazov" is no longer merely the gloomy epileptic whose chief joy would appear--from a casual reading--to be vivid portrayal of dirt, squalor, sensuality and the psychology of the diseased and stunted mind. Instead he takes on something of the aspect of a religious teacher, not a theologian not a didacticism, but one who used as his text the Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus. He becomes rather the man who, having passed through a life of suffering and deprivation and a decade of hell in the Siberian katorga, returned without losing faith in humanity and with boundless pity for the insulted and injured. A man like that must look at life from more angles than one, and it is primarily the task of calling forth Dostoevsky's human philosophy that Mr. Meler-Graefe has set himself, a task in which he has succeeded admirably.

And it is only after one has finished the book and has gained something of a comprehension of Dostoevsky's mind and of his almost artless art, that one can wholly understand Mr. Meier-Graefe's opening lines, and why he consistently calls the great novelist a poet