PREFACE know the answer.
It was easy for me to render intimate and rapturous
DOSTOEVSKYin Moderation
BY
THOMAS MANN
T HERE was something very attractive to me about the invitation on
the part of Dial Press to write a preface to an edition of Dostoevskys
shorter novels, the six narratives included in this volume. The publishers
moderation which determined the character of this edition tended to put
the commentators mind at ease and to encourage him in a task from which
he might otherwise have shrunk, not to say recoiledthe task of making
the entire, tremendous cosmos of Dostoevskys works the object of his
consideration and discussion. Moreover this commentator would scarcely
have had another chance in this life to render his critical tribute to the
great Russian if it had not been for this opportunity to do it lightly, so to
speak, in a limited space, for a specific purpose, and with the degree of self-
restriction which the purpose charitably prescribes.
Strangely enough, my life as an author led me to write detailed studies
on Tolstoy as well as on Goetheseveral on each of them. But I have
never formally written on two other cultural experiences of similar weight
that moved me as deeply in my youth and that I never tired of renewing
and intensifying in my mature years: I have never written on Nietzsche
nor on Dostoevsky. I omitted writing the Nietzsche essay for which my
friends often asked me, although it seemed to lie on my path. And the
profound, criminal, saintly face of Dostoevsky (that was my
characterization at one time) appears only fleetingly in my writings to
vanish again quickly. Why this evasion, this shunning, this silencein
contrast with the inadequate, to be sure, but enthusiastic eloquence to
which the greatness of the other two masters and stars inspired me? I
homage, tempered with tender irony, to the images of the divine and the
fortunate, the children of nature in their exalted simplicity and their
exuberant healthfulness: to the autobiographic aristocratism of the molder
of a majestic personal culture, Goethe, and to the primitive epic force, the
unrivaled naturalness, of the great author of all the Russias, Tolstoy,
with his clumsy, ever failing attempts at moralistic spiritualization of his
pagan corporeality. But I am filled with awe, 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 the saint and the
criminal are one
It is my feeling that the Daemonic is the poets theme and not the
writers. It should speak from the depths of a work, if possible, in the garb
of humor; to devote critical essays to it seems to me, mildly, an
indiscretion. Possibly, even probably, this is only an extenuation of my
indolence and cowardice. 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, the sufferers of
holy disease. 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
Tolstoys moralism. It follows that my reverence for the intimates of Hell,
the devout and the diseased, is fundamentally much deeperand only
therefore less vocalthan my reverence for the sons of light. It is a good
thing that this reverence of mine has now received an outward incentive to
eloquence, though of a practically limited and restrained nature.
The Pale Criminalwhenever I read this chapter heading in
Zarathustra, a morbidly inspired work of genius if ever there was one, the
eerily grief-ridden features of Dostoevsky, as we know them from a
number of good pictures, stand before me. Moreover, I suspect that they
were in the mind of the drunken migrainist of Sils Maria when he wrote it.
For Dostoevskys work played a remarkable role in his life; he frequently
mentions him in his letters as well as in his books (while I am not aware
that he ever said a word about Tolstoy); he calls him the most profound
psychologist in world literature and refers to him in a kind of unassuming
enthusiasm as his great teacheralthough in fact there is scarcely an
indication of discipleship in his relation to his great Eastern brother-in-
spirit. They were more nearly brothers in spirit, tragically grotesque
companions in misfortune, in spite of fundamental differences in heredity
and traditionon the one hand the German professor, whose Luciferian
genius, stimulated by disease, developed from the soil of classical learning,
philological erudition, idealistic philosophy, and musical Romanticism; on
the other, the Byzantine Christian, who was free from the humanistic
inhibitions that limited the other, and who could occasionally be regarded
as the great teacher simply because he was not German (for it was
Nietzsches most passionate desire to free himself of his Germanism),
because he appeared as the liberator from bourgeois morality, and because
he affirmed the will to psychological affront, to the crime of frank
acknowledgement.
It seems impossible to speak of Dostoevskys genius without being
forced to think of the word criminal. The eminent Russian critic
Merezhkovsky uses it in various studies on the author of The Karamazovs,
repeatedly and with a double meaning: referring, in the first place, to
Dostoevsky himself and to the criminal curiosity of his insight, and, in
the second place, referring to the object of his insight, the human heart,
whose most recondite and most criminal impulses he laid bare. The
reader, says this critic, is aghast at his omniscience, his penetration into
the conscience of a stranger. We are confronted by our own secret
thoughts, which we would not reveal to a friend, not even to ourselves.
Yet we are only apparently dealing with objective and quasi-medical
scrutiny and diagnosisit is in reality psychological lyricism in the widest
sense of the word, admission and horrible confession, pitiless revelation of
the criminal depths of the authors own conscienceand this accounts for
the terrific moral force, the religious frightfulness of Dostoevskys
knowledge of the soul. A comparison with Proust, and with the
psychological novelties, surprises, and knick-knacks that abound in his
works, at once exposes the difference in accent, in moral tone The
psychological curios and pertnesses of the Frenchman are simply amusing
compared with the ghastly revelations of Dostoevsky, a man who had been
in Hell. Could Proust have written Crime and Punishment, the greatest
detective novel of all times? It was not the science that he lacked, but the
conscienceAs far as Goethe is concerned, a psychologist of the first
water from Wertherto the Elective Affinities, Goethe declares frankly that he
has never heard of a crime of which he did not feel capable himself. This is
the word of a disciple of pietistic self-scrutiny but the element of Greek
innocence predominates in it. It is a self-possessed worda challenge to
bourgeois morality, to be sure, but cool and haughty rather than filled with
Christian contrition, bold rather than profound in a religious sense.
Tolstoy was essentially his peer, in spite of all Christian velleity. I have
nothing to conceal from men, he used to say; let them all know what I am
doing! Compare this with the confessions of the hero of Notes from
Underground where he speaks of his secret dissipations. Even at that time,
he says, I had a love for secrecy. I was terribly afraid that someone might
see me, meet me, recognize me. His life, which could not bear ultimate
frankness, ultimate exposure before the eyes of the world, was ruled by the
secret of Hell.
Undoubtedly the subconsciousness and even the consciousness of this
titanic creator was permanently burdened with a heavy sense of guilt, a
sense of the criminal, and this feeling was by no means of purely
hypochondriac nature. It was connected with his infirmity, the sacred
disease, the pre-eminently mystic disease, epilepsy. He suffered from it
from childhood, but the disease was fatally intensified by his trial when he
was unjustly accused in the year 1849, at the age of twenty-eight, on a
charge of political conspiracy and actually sentenced to death (he was
already standing at the stake facing death when, at the last moment, his
sentence was commuted to four years at hard labor in Siberia). It was his
opinion that the disease would culminate in the exhaustion of his physical
and intellectual powers, in death or insanity. The attacks occurred on the
average of once a month, sometimes more frequently, at times even twice a
week. He often described them: both in direct communication and by
transferring the malady to psychologically favored characters in his
novels: to the terrible Smerdyakov, to the hero of The Idiot, Prince
Myshkin, to the nihilist and fatalistic Kirilov in The Possessed. Two
symptoms, according to his description, are characteristic of the falling
sickness: the incomparable sense of rapture, of inner enlightenment, of
harmony, of highest ecstasy, preceding by a few moments the spasm that
begins with an inarticulate, no longer human screamand the state of
horrible depression and deep grief, of spiritual ruin and desolation, that
follows it. This reaction seems to me even more symbolic of the nature of
the disease than the exaltation that precedes the attack. Dostoevsky
describes it as a rapture so strong and sweet that one is ready to exchange
ten years of life or even life itself for the bliss of these few seconds. The
subsequent, terrific hangover, however, according to the confession of the
great invalid, was marked by a feeling of being a criminal, by the weight
of unknown guilt, by the burden of an awful crime.
I dont know what neurologists think of the sacred disease, but in my
opinion it is definitely rooted in the realm of the sexual, it is a wild and
explosive manifestation of sex dynamics, a transferred and transfigured
act, a mystic dissipation. I repeat that I regard the subsequent state of
contrition and misery, the mysterious feeling of guilt, as even more
revealing than the preceding seconds of bliss for which one is ready to
exchange his life. No matter to what extent the malady menaced
Dostoevskys mental powers, it is certain that his genius is most intimately
connected with it and colored by it, that his psychological insight, his
understanding of crime and of what the Apocalypse calls satanic depths,
and most of all his ability to suggest secret guilt and to weave it into the
background of his frequently horrible creaturesall these qualities are
inseparably related to the disease. In the past of Svidrigailov (Crime and
Punishment), for example, there is a criminal affair of bestial, not to say
fantastic, brutality, for which he would most certainly have been sent to
Siberia. It is left to the more or less willing imagination of the reader to
guess what this affair may be: in all probability it is a sex crime, possibly
child rapefor this is also the secret of a part of the secret in the life of
Stavrogin in The Possessed, that icy and contemptible masterful person
before whom weaker creatures groveled in the dust, possibly one of the
most weirdly attractive creatures in world literature. There is an
unpublished portion of this novel, Stavrogins Confession, in which he
relates, among other things, the rape of a little girl. According to
Merezhkovsky it is a powerful fragment, full of terrible realism
transcending the bounds of art. Apparently this infamous crime constantly
occupied the authors moral imagination. It is said that one day he
confessed the commission of a sin of this sort to his famous colleague
Turgenev, whom he hated and despised on account of his West European
sympathiesundoubtedly a mendacious confession with which he merely
wished to frighten and confuse the serene, humane, and quite unsatanic
Turgenev. In St. Petersburg, when he was forty years old and had attained
fame as the author of The House of Death, which had moved even the Czar
to tears, in a family circle that included a number of very young girls, he
once narrated the plot of a story he had planned in his youth, a novel in
which a landed proprietor, a sedate and substantial man, suddenly
remembers that two decades ago, after an all-night drinking bout with
dissolute companions, he had raped a ten-year-old girl.
Fyodor Mikhailovich! the mother of the household exclaimed,
raising her hands in horror. Have pity on us! The children are listening!
Yes, he must have been a very remarkable citizen, this Fyodor
Mikhailovich.
Nietzsches infirmity was not the falling sickness, although it is not
difficult to picture the author of Zarathustra and The Antichrist as an
epileptic. He shared the fate of many artists and particularly of a notable
number of musicians (among whom he belongs after a fashion): he perished
from progressive paralysis, a malady of unmistakably sexual origin, since
medical science has long recognized it as the result of luetic infection.
Viewed from the naturalistic-medical anglea limited perspective, to be
sureNietzsches intellectual development is nothing but the case history
of paralytic deterioration and degenerationthat is, he was propelled from
a state of highly gifted normality upward into icy and grotesque spheres of
fatal insight and moral isolation, a terrible and criminal degree of
knowledge for which a delicate and kindhearted man, such as he was, in
need of forbearance and indulgence, had never been born but for which,
like Hamlet, he had only been called.
CriminalI repeat the word in order to stress the psychological
relationship of the cases of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. It is no mere chance
that the former was so strongly attracted to the latter that he called him
his great teacher. Excess is common to them both, the drunken
unleashing of insight, coupled with a religious, i.e., satanistic moralism
which in Nietzsches case was called antimoralism. Nietzsche probably did
not know the epileptics sense of guilt of which I spoke. But the fact that
his personal conception of life made him familiar with that of the criminal
is attested by one of his aphorisms, which I cant find at the moment but
which I distinctly remember. In it he says that all intellectual isolation and
alienation from the civil norm, all mental autonomy and ruthlessness, are
related to the criminals mode of life and afford an experiential insight into
it. It seems to me that we can go even farther and say that all creative
originality, all artistry in the widest sense of the word, does just that. The
French painter and sculptor Degas once made the remark that the artist
must put himself into the same frame of mind in which the criminal
commits his deed.
Exceptional conditions make the artist, Nietzsche himself said: all the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to the physical
conditions that are profoundly related and interlaced with morbid
phenomena; it seems impossible to be an artist and not to be sick. The
German thinker probably did not know the nature of his disease, but he
was well aware of his debt to it, and his letters and published works are full
of heroic eulogies of disease as a means to knowledge. A typical symptom
of paralysis, presumably due to hyperemia of the affected cerebral parts, is
the surge of an intoxicating sense of bliss and power and an actual
though medically, of course, pathologicalintensification of productive
capacity. Before it clouds its victims mind and kills him, the disease grants
him illusory (in the sense of sane normality) experiences of power and
sovereign facility, of enlightenment and blissful inspiration, so that he
stands in awe of himself and is filled with the conviction that there has
been no one like him in a thousand years; he regards himself as a divine
mouthpiece, a vessel of grace, a god in his own right. We have descriptions
of such euphoric affliction and of overwhelming inspiration in the letters of
Hugo Woolf, in whose case they were invariably followed by periods of
intellectual void and artistic impotence. But the most grandiose account of
paralytic enlightenment, a stylistic masterpiece, is found in Nietzsches
Ecce Homo, in the third section of the chapter on Zarathustra. Does
anyone, he asks, at the end of the nineteenth century have an idea of what
poets of powerful eras called inspiration? If not, I shall describe it. It is
clear that he regards his experience as something atavistic, something
daemonically retrovertive, something belonging to another, more
powerful, more Godlike state of mankind, something foreign to the
psychic capabilities of our faintly rationalistic epoch. And to think that
what he is in truth describingbut what is truth: experience or
medicine?is a morbid state of irritation that mockingly precedes the
paralytic collapse.
Possibly his concept of the Eternal Return, to which he attaches
great weight, is a product of euphoria, uncontrolled by reason, and a
reminiscence rather than intellectual property. Merezhkovsky pointed out
long ago that the idea of the Superman occurs in Dostoevsky, in the
speeches of the aforementioned epileptic, Kirilov, in The Possessed.
Dostoevskys nihilistic seer says: There will be a new man and everything
will be new. History will be divided into two sections: from the gorilla to
transformation of the earth and of manin other words, to the
appearance of the God-man, the superman. But no one seems to have noted
that the idea of the Eternal Return is also to be found in The Karamazovs,
in Ivans dialogue with the Devil. But our present earth has repeated
itself, possibly billions of times; it would become senile, turned to ice, broke
in two, fell apart, resolved itself into its elements, once more there was
water over the firmament, then the comet, next the sun, and finally, out of
the sun, came the earththis process has perhaps repeated itself times
without number and each time in the identical manner down to the last tiny
detailisnt that the most unspeakably indecent boredom!
Through the mouth of the Devil Dostoevsky designates as indecent
boredom what Nietzsche hails with Dionysiac affirmation, adding For I
love you, Eternity! But the idea is the same, and while I believe that the
Superman is a case of coincidence based on intellectual fraternity, I am
inclined to regard the Eternal Return as a result of reading, a
subconscious, euphorically tinged memory of Dostoevsky.
I am aware that I may be making a mistake in chronology; it is a
matter for the literary historians to examine. The important thing for me
is a certain parallelism in the thinking of these two great invalids and then,
moreover, the phenomenon of disease in the form of greatness or greatness
in the form of diseaseit is purely a matter of perspective in the
evaluation of disease: as a diminution of an intensification of life.
Considering disease as greatness and greatness as disease, the mere
medical point of view proves pedantic and inadequate, at the very least
one-sidedly naturalistic: the thing has an intellectual and cultural side,
connected with life itself and with its enhancement and growth, a side
which the biologist and physician never fully understand. Let us put it into
words: a type of humanity matures, or is reconstructed from the forgotten
past, which takes the concepts of life and health out of the hands of
biology, in which the exclusive right to these concepts has been vested,
and presumes to administer them in a freer, more pious, and certainly more
truthful manner. For man is not a mere creature of biology.
DiseaseFirst of all it is a question of who is sick, who is insane, who
is epileptic or paralytic: an average dolt, whose disease, of course, lacks all
intellectual and cultural aspectsor a Nietzsche, a Dostoevsky. In their
cases the disease bears fruits that are more important and more beneficial
to life and its development than any medically approved normality. The
truth is that life has never been able to do without the morbid, and
probably no adage is more inane than the one that says that only disease
can come from the diseased. 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; prefers disease, surmounting obstacles proudly on
horseback, boldly leaping from peak to peak, to lounging, pedestrian
healthfulness. Life is not finical and never thinks of making a moral
distinction between health and infirmity. It seizes the bold product of
disease, consumes and digests it, and as soon as it is assimilated, it is
health. An entire horde, a generation of open-minded, healthy lads pounces
upon the work of diseased genius, genialized by disease, admires and
praises it, 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.
In other words, certain attainments of the soul and the intellect are
impossible without disease, without insanity, without spiritual crime, and
the great invalids are crucified victims, sacrificed to humanity and its
advancement, to the broadening of its feeling and knowledgein short, to
its more sublime health. This is the reason for the aura of devoutness that
clearly surrounds the lives of these men and deeply affects their self-
consciousness. It is also the reason for the anticipatory feelings which
these victims have of power and of accomplishment and of a vastly
intensified life despite all suffering; feelings of triumph that can be
regarded as illusory only in a prosaic, medical sense: a union of disease and
power in their natures which scoffs at the ordinary association of disease
and weakness and by its paradoxy contributes to the religious tinge of
their existence. They force us to re-evaluate the concepts of disease and
health, the relation of sickness and life; they teach us to be cautious in
our approach to the idea of disease, for we are too prone always to give it
a biological minus sign. Nietzsche mentions this very point in a
posthumous note to his Will to Power. Health and disease, he says, be
careful! The standard must always be the efflorescence of the body, the
resilience, courage, and cheerfulness of the spiritbut naturally also how
much morbidity it can absorb and conquerin other words, make healthy.
(The italics are Nietzsches.) That which would destroy more delicate men
is a stimulant for great healthfulness.
Nietzsche regarded himself as a sound person in the grand manner,
one who is stimulated by disease. But if in his case the relation of disease
and power is such that the greatest sense of power and its productive
confirmation appear to be a consequence of disease (which lies in the
nature of paralysis), we are almost compelled in the case of Dostoevsky the
epileptic to regard his disease as a product of super-abundant power, an
explosion, an excess of tremendous health, and we are confronted by the
convincing fact that the greatest vitality can at times wear the mask of pale
infirmity.
From the biological point of view the life of this man is most
confusing: a quivering bundle of nerves, subject to spasms at a moments
notice, so sensitive as if he had been flayed and the mere contact with the
air were painful (quoted from Notes from Underground), he nevertheless
managed to live a full sixty years (1821-1881), and in his four productive
decades he erected a stupendous lifework of an unheard-of novelty and
audacity, a surging wealth of passions and visionsa work which not only
broadens our knowledge of man by its furor of criminal insight and
confession, but also contains a surprising amount of mischievous humor,
fantastic comedy, and cheerfulness of the spirit. For, among other things,
as the reader of the present edition will soon discover, this crucified man
was also a really great humorist.
 If Dostoevsky had written nothing else but the six short novels
presented here, his name would no doubt still deserve a pre-eminent place
in the history of the worlds narrative literature. As a matter of fact they
do not constitute one-tenth of his actual published writings, and his
friends, who were familiar with the inside story of his work, assure us that
of all the novels that Fyodor Mikhailovich carried with him in finished
form, so to speak, and which he narrated enthusiastically and in detail, not
one-tenth was ever put on paper. They say that he required practically no
time at all for the elaboration of these countless outlines. And then we are
expected to believe that disease represents an impoverishment of life!
The epic monuments which he erectedCrime and Punishment, The
Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov (incidentally, they are not epics
at all but colossal dramas, composed almost scenically, in which the soul-
stirring action, often compressed into the period of a few days, unwinds in
super-realistic and feverish dialogue)were created not only under the
scourge of disease but also under the blows of debt and degrading financial
trouble that forced him to work at an unnatural rate of speed; he tells us
that, in order to meet a deadline, he once wrote three and a half
signaturesfifty-six pagesin two days and two nights. In foreign
countries, in Baden-Baden and Wiesbaden, where he had to flee from his
creditors, he tried to ameliorate his impoverishment by gambling, only in
most instances to complete his ruin. Then he would write begging letters
in which he speaks the language of misery of the most depraved characters
of his novels, of Marmeladov, for example. His passion for gambling was
his second disease, possibly related to his first, a truly abnormal craving.
To it we owe the wonderful novel The Gambler, who goes to a German
resort, improbably and perversely named Roulettenburt; in this novel the
psychology of morbid passion and of the demon Chance is exposed with
unrivaled veracity.
This masterwork was written in 1867, between Crime and Punishment
(1866) and The Idiot (1868-1869), and with all its greatness it represents a
mere recreation. It is the latest of the stories in this volume, for the others
were produced between 1846 and 1864. The earliest one is The Double, a
pathological grotesque, which had appeared in the same year with
Dostoevskys first great novel, Poor People (1846), and it was a
disappointment after the profound impression which the latter had made in
Russiaprobably with some justification; for in spite of brilliant details of
the narrative, the young author was probably in error to believe that he
had excelled Gogol, although The Double was strongly influenced by him.
And he certainly did not surpass Edgar Allan Poes William Wilson, where
the same arch-romantic motif is treated in a morally profounder manner,
resolving the clinical in the poetic.
Be that as it may, our edition includes a number of wonderful
recreations or perhaps preparations for masterworks to follow. The
Eternal Husband dates from 1848, before the time of Dostoevskys trial and
deportation to Omsk in Siberia; its central figure is the embarrassingly
ludicrous cuckold, from whose malicious anguish the eeriest effects are
created. Then follows the period of confinement at hard labor, the horrible
experience of the Katorga, which was to be movingly described later in St.
Petersburg in The House of Death, the tale that stirred all Russia to tears.
But the actual resumption of Dostoevskys literary activity took place in
Siberia with the writing (1859) of The Friend of the Family, also called The
Manor of Stepantchikovo, justly famous for the incomparable character of the
despotic hypocrite Foma Opiskin, a comic creation of the first rank,
irresistible, rivaling Shakespeare and Molire. After this peak performance
Uncles Dream, which followed immediately, must frankly be regarded as a
retrograde step. It is, if I may judge, too long-drawn-out for its content, a
farce, whose tragic conclusion, the story of the tubercular young
schoolmaster, is filled with unbearable sentimentalism derived from the
early influence of Charles Dickens upon Dostoevskys work. To make up
for it, however, we find in Uncles Dream the lovely Zinaida Afanasyevna,
the type of the proud Russian girl, who enjoys the obvious and very
suggestive love of an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily
devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather
than to nobility of body and soul.
The chief item in our anthology, Notes from Underground, written in
1864, is an awe- and terror-inspiring example of this sympathy and this
frightful insight. In its content it comes closest to Dostoevskys great and
completely characteristic products. In general it is regarded as a turning
point in the poets activity, as an awakening to a consciousness of himself.
Today, when the painful and scornful conclusions, the radical frankness of
this novel, ruthlessly transcending all novelistic and literary bounds, have
long become part of our moral culture, today we can scarcely conceive the
lurid sensation which this novel must have created at the time of its
appearanceprotest on the side of idealistic aestheticism and passionate
agreement on the side of fanatical love for truth. I spoke of ruthlessness
Dostoevsky or the first-person hero or un-hero or anti-hero avoids that
charge by the fiction that he is not writing for the public, not for
publication, not even for a reader, but exclusively and secretly for himself
alone. His train of thought is as follows: In every mans memory there are
things which he does not reveal to everyone, but only to his friends. There
are also things which he does not reveal to his friends, but at best to
himself and only under a pledge of secrecy. And finally there are things
which man hesitates to reveal even to himself, and every decent person
accumulates a considerable quantity of such things. In fact, you might say,
the more decent a person is, the greater the number of such things that he
carries around with him. I myself, at any rate have only recently decided to
recall a few of my earlier experiences; until now I have always avoided
them, even with a certain uneasiness.
And so this novel consists of the unspeakably compromising record
of these earlier experiences, mingling the repulsive with the attractive in
a hitherto unheard-of manner. The author, or the person whom he makes
the author, is trying an experiment. Is it possible, he inquires, to be
completely frank at least to oneself, and to tell the whole truth without
reserve? He is thinking of Heine, who made the statement that strictly
truthful autobiographies were next to impossible; that everyone always
told untruths about himself, like Rousseau, who slandered himself from
pure vanity. The author concurs; but, he says, the difference between
Rousseau and himself is that the former made his confession to the public,
while he was writing for himself alone. And, he declares emphatically, if it
appeared as if he were addressing a reader, this was a mere pretense, as he
found it easier to write in that fashion. It is purely a matter of form, he
says.
Of course, all that isnt true at all, for Dostoevsky was certainly
writing for the public and for publication and for as many readers as
possible, if only because he needed money badly. The artistic and almost
facetious fiction of solitude and remoteness from literature is useful as an
excuse for the radical cynicism of the frank confession. But the fiction
within the fiction, the appearance of addressing himself to a reader, the
constant haranguing of certain gentlemen with whom the speaker is
arguing, that too is advantageous; for it brings an element of the
discursive, the dialectic, the dramatic into the recital, an element in which
Dostoevsky is very much at home and which makes even the most serious,
the most wicked, the most debased things amusing in the highest sense.
I confess that I like the first part of Notes from Underground even better
than the second, the stirring and shameful story of the prostitute Liza. I
grant that the first part does not consist of action but talk, and talk
reminiscent in many respects of the depraved prating of certain religious
personages in Dostoevskys great novels. Granted also that it is hazardous
talk in the strongest sense of the word, dangerously likely to confuse nave
minds, because it stresses skepticism against faith, and because it
heretically attacks civilization and democracy and the humanitarians and
the meliorists who believe that man strives for happiness and advancement
while 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. All that sounds like reactionary wickedness and
may worry well-meaning minds who 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. It is the
most important thingand yet those 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. The tortured
paradoxes which Dostoevskys hero hurls at his positivistic adversaries,
antihuman as they sound, are spoken in the name of and out of love for
humanity: on behalf of a new, deeper, and unrhetorical humanity that has
passed through all the hells of suffering and understanding.
As this edition of Dostoevsky compares with his complete work, and
as his published work compares with that which he could and would have
created if the limitations of human life had not prevented himso the
things I have said here about the titanic Russian compare to what could be
said about him. Dostoevsky in moderation, Dostoevsky in reason, that was
the watchword. When I told a friend of my intention to provide a preface
for these volumes he said, laughing:
Be careful! You will write a book about him.
I was careful.

THOMAS MANN, Pacific Palisades, California, July, 1945