Engineer of Souls

DOSTOEVSKI--Ernest J. Simmons--Oxford ($3).

Behind the black-bearded, wild-eyed, dome-browed face of Fedor Dostoevski brooded one of the great analytical minds of literature. This "engineer of human souls," as Biographer Ernest Simmons calls him, graduated from a military engineering college in 1843, tunneled such depths into man's mind, spanned such cataracts of feeling, built such a monumental Cloaca Maxima of passionate drama that a contemporary critic said of Crime and Punishment that people with strong nerves became almost ill over the novel, and people with weak nerves were obliged to cease reading it.

Dostoevski's life was as subterranean as the human nature he wrote of. As a young writer he haunted the windy corners and foul alleys of hated St. Petersburg, was sentenced to death for revolutionary conspiracy, instead spent four years in prison, six years' exile in Siberia. Jailed with murderers & thieves, he exclaimed: "What a wonderful people! On the whole I did not lose my time." While his consumptive wife died slowly, he pursued a wretched affair with Polina Suslova, a wild, rebellious hussy who bobbed her hair, wore dark glasses, never went to church. He lusted for roulette, thought he had a "system," was systematically cleaned out. He sifted the newspapers for tales of murder, scandal, disaster, folly. The wary police eyed him till death exiled him for good in 1881.

This sinning, suffering, repenting novelist has impressed two generations chiefly as a religious philosopher. Predicted cranky, omniscient Oswald Spengler: "To Dostoevski's Christianity the next thousand years will belong."

With this view Ernest Simmons, onetime Harvard professor and biographer (1937) of Byronic Poet Alexander Pushkin, has little patience. Simmons denies the widespread notion that Siberian exile altered the thought and method of "one of the most original novelists in world literature." Dostoevski's originality combined 1) his distrust for Western European culture; 2) his belief in feeling against reason; 3) his expert, unprecedented child psychology; 4) his caustic satire, especially of radicals in The Possessed; 5) his great character types--the Meek, the Double, the Self-Willed.

The Double, or split personality, such as Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment, "thirsts for power and is powerless, he desires to torture and to be tortured, to debase himself and to debase others, to be proud and to humble himself." Dominance of one trait characterizes the Meek (quixotic Prince Myshkin of The Idiot}, as also the Self-Willed (the murderer Verkhovenski in The Possessed).

"They call me a psychologist," pro tested Dostoevski. "It is not true. I am merely a realist 'in the higher sense of the word, that is, I depict all the depths of the human soul."

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