Truth's Dark Side

THE SHORT NOVELS OF DOSTOEVSKY--With an Introduction by Thomas Mann --Dial Press ($4).

Some of the most provocative recent writing is contained in a 14-page preface by Novelist Thomas Mann to the reprint of six short novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Few 19th-Century novelists said as much in a whole lifework as did Fyodor Dostoevsky in his short novels. Few 20th-century critics could say, at book length, as much about Dostoevsky as Mann says in the introductory essay in which the great German brilliantly examines the great Russian, and, for the first time, movingly acknowledges his debt to him.

Most of Dostoevsky's short novels have been out of print for decades. This collection includes: The Gambler and The Double (two remarkable studies of pathological personalities) ; The Friend of the Family ("justly famous," says Mann, "for . . . a comic creation . . . rivaling Shakespeare and Moliere"); The Eternal Husband (which creates the "eeriest effects" out of a "ludicrous cuckold['s] . . . malicious anguish"); Uncle's Dream (a Dickensian farce); the famed Notes from Underground ("an awe-and terror-inspiring example of ... sympathy and . . . frightful insight").

Why This Silence? Mann admits a lifelong debt to four great writers: Goethe, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. Of Goethe ("the molder of a majestic personal culture") and of Tolstoy ("the primitive epic force"), Mann has often written with "enthusiastic eloquence." But he could never bring himself to write a line about Nietzsche (who suffered from creeping paralysis) or Dostoevsky (an epileptic). "Why," asks Mann, "this evasion . . . this silence?"

His answer: "I am filled with ... a profound, mystic, silence-enjoining awe, in the presence of the religious greatness of the damned, in the presence of genius of disease and "the disease of genius, of the type of the afflicted and the possessed, in whom saint and criminal are one. . . . It is incomparably easier and more wholesome to write about divinely pagan healthfulness than about holy disease. We may amuse ourselves at the expense of the former, the fortunate children of nature and their artlessness; we cannot amuse ourselves at the expense of the children of the spirit, the great sinners and the damned. ... I would find it utterly impossible to jest about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as I have occasionally done in a novel about the egotistic child of a lucky star, Goethe, and in an essay about the colossal loutishness of Tolstoy's moralism. It follows that my reverence for the intimates of Hell, the devout and the diseased, is fundamentally much deeper--and only therefore less vocal--than my reverence for the sons of light."

Secret of Hell. Dostoevsky's life "was ruled by a secret of Hell," a condition which Mann believes was part & parcel of Dostoevsky's epilepsy--"the pre-eminently mystic disease." In the instant preceding an epileptic seizure (Dostoevsky suffered them at least once a month), the Russian experienced a rapture so ecstatic that, he wrote, "one is ready to exchange . . . life itself for the bliss of these few seconds." Later he invariably suffered a horrifying "feeling of being a criminal" and was oppressed "by the weight of unknown guilt, by the burden of an awful crime."

Like Freud, Mann believes that Dostoevsky's seizures were "a wild and explosive manifestation of sex dynamics, a transferred and transfigured sexual act, a mystic dissipation." Dostoevsky was obsessed by the awfulness of sexual crime, and once hinted that he had committed rape. But out of his "terrific hangover ... of spiritual desolation" came what Mann calls "the terrible and criminal degree of knowledge . . . the drunken unleashing of insight" that helped to create The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, The Possessed, Crime and Punishment ("the greatest detective novel of all time"). Then Dostoevsky's overburdened conscience overflowed in a "psychological lyricism . . . and pitiless revelation [that] transcends the bounds of art."

Medical science tends to write off natures like Dostoevsky's as pathological. But, asks Mann, "What is truth: experience or medicine? [It seems that] certain attainments of the soul and the intellect are impossible without disease, without insanity, without spiritual crime. . . . Life is not prudish, and it is probably safe to say that life prefers creative, genius-bestowing disease a thousand times over to prosaic health. . . . An entire horde, a generation of open-minded, healthy lads pounces upon the work of diseased genius . . . raises it to the skies., perpetuates it, transmutes it, and bequeathes it to civilization, which does not live on the home-baked bread of health alone. They all swear by the name of the great invalid, thanks to whose madness they no longer need to be mad. Their healthfulness feeds upon his madness and in them he will become healthy."

Truth about Man. Mann has a word of caution for those "humanitarians [and] well-meaning minds" who see nothing but "reactionary wickedness" in Dostoevsky's sinful, demoniacal characters. It is all right "to believe that the most important thing today is the bridging of the chasm that yawns between intellectual realization and scandalously retarded social and economic reality." But it is also well to heed Dostoevsky's warning that though "man strives for happiness and advancement ... he is actually thirsting just as much for suffering, the only source of knowledge, that he really does not want the crystal palace and the anthill of social consummation, and that he will never renounce his predilection for destruction and chaos. . . . [These] heresies are the truth: the dark side of truth, away from the sun, which no one dares to neglect who is interested in the truth, the whole truth, truth about man."

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