For a normal, human-like existence is what the majority of the human race aspires to. A writer who regards six thousand rubles as a vast amount of money operates, therefore, on the same physical and psychological plane as the majority of people; i.e., he deals with life on its own general terms, since, like every natural process, human life gravitates toward moderation. Conversely, a writer who belongs to the upper echelon of society or to its lower depths will invariably produce a somewhat distorted picture of existence, for, in either case, he would regard it at too sharp an angle. Criticism of society (which is a nickname for life) from either above or below may produce a great read; but it's only an inside job that can supply you with moral imperatives.
Furthermore, a middle-class writer's own position is precarious enough to make him view what goes on below with considerable keenness. Alternatively, the situation above, due to its physical proximity, lacks in celestial appeal. Numerically, to say the least, a middle-class writer deals with a greater variety of plights, increasing, by the same token, the size of his audience. In any case, this is one way to account for the wide readership enjoyed by Dostoevsky, as well as by Melville, Balzac, Hardy, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner. It looks as if the equivalent of six thousand rubles ensures great literature.
The point is, however, that it is far harder to come into this money than to come into millions or to stay penniless, for there are simply more contenders for the norm than for extremes. Acquisition of the said amount, as well as of a half or a tenth of it, involves far greater convolutions of the human psyche than any get-rich scheme or any form of asceticism. In fact, the smaUer the amount involved, the more one spends emotionally to acquire it. It's obvious then why Dostoevsky, for whose operation the intricacies of the human psyche were lock and stock, viewed six thousand rubles as a vast amount of money. To him, it meant a vast amount of human investment, a vast amount of nuance, a vast amount of literature. In short, it was not so much real as metaphysical money.
Almost without exception, aU his novels are about people in narrow circumstances. This kind of material itself guarantees absorbing reading. However, what t^ed Dostoevsky into a great writer was neither the inevitable intricacy of his subject matter nor even the unique profundity of his mind and his capacity for compassion; it was the tool or, rather, the texture of the material he was using, i.e., the Russian language.
As intricacies go, this language, where nouns frequently find themselves sitting smugly at the very end of the sentence, whose main power lies not in the statement but in its subordinate clause, is extremely accommodating. This is not your analytical language of "either/or"—this is the language of "although." Like a banknote into change, every stated idea instantly mushrooms in this language into its opposite, and there is nothing its syntax loves to couch more than doubt and self-deprecation. Its polysyllabic nature (the average length of a Russian word is three to four syllables) reveals the elemental, primeval force of the phenomena covered by a word a lot better than any rationalization possibly could, and a writer sometimes, instead of developing his thought, stumbles and simply revels in the word's euphonic contents, thereby sidetracking his issue in an unforeseen direction. And in Dostoevsky's writing we witness an extraordinary friction, nearly sadistic in its intensity, between the metaphysics of the subject matter and that of the language.
He made the most of Russian's irregular grammar. His sentences have a feverish, hysterical, idiosyncratic pace and their lexical content is an all but maddening fusion of belles- lettres, colloquialisms, and bureaucratese. True, he never wrote at leisure. Much like his characters, he worked to make ends meet: there were always either creditors or a deadline. Still, for a man beset with deadlines, he was extraordinarily digressive, and those digressions, I venture to say, were prompted more by the language than by the requirements of a plot. Reading him simply makes one realize that stream of consciousness springs not from consciousness but from a word which alters or redirects one's consciousness.
No, he was not a victim of the language; but his treatment of the human psyche was by far too inquisitive for the Russian Orthodox he claimed to be, and it is syntax rather than the creed that is responsible for the quality of that treatment. Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul. This discovery very often creates an unbearable schism within an individual and is, in part, responsible for the demonic reputation literature enjoys in certain witless quarters. Basically, it's just as well, for the seraphim's loss nearly always is the mortal's gain. Besides, either extreme, in itself, is quite boring, and in a work of a good writer we always hear a dialogue of the spheres with the gutter. If it doesn't destroy the man or his manuscript (as in the case of Gogol's Part II of Dead Souls), this schism is precisely what creates a writer, whose job therefore becomes making his pen catch up with his soul.
This is what Dostoevsky was all about, except that his pen was pushing his soul beyond the confines of his creed, Russian Orthodoxy. For to be a writer means invariably to be a Protestant or, to say the least, to employ the Protestant conception of man. WhWhile either in Russian Orthodoxy or in Roman Catholicism man is judged by the Almighty or
His Church, in Protestantism it is the man who subjects himself to a personal equivalent of the Last Judgment. In doing so, he is far more merciless toward himself than the Deity, or even than the Church, if only because he knows himself better (so he thinks) than does either, and is unwilling or, to be precise, unable to forgive. Since no writer writes for his parish alone, a literary character and his deeds should be given a fair trial. The more thorough the investigation, the greater the verisimilitude, and verisimilitude is what a writer is, in the first place, after. In literature, Grace doesn't count for much; that's why Dostoevsky's holy man stinks.
Of course, he was a great defender of the "good cause," the cause of Christianity. But come to think of it, there hardly ever was a better devil's advocate. From classicism, he took the principle that before you come forth with your argument, however right or righteous you may feel, you have to list all the arguments of the opposite side. And it is not that in the process of listing them one is being swayed by the opposite side; it is simply that the listing itself is a mightily absorbing process. One may not in the end drift away from one's original stance, but after having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor. This, in its own way, also fosters the case of verisimilitude.
But it is not for the sake of verisimilitude only that this writer's heroes bare their souls with an almost Calvinistic tenacity before the reader. There is something else that forces Dostoevsky to tum their lives inside out and undo every fold and wrinkle of their mental dirty linen; and it is not the quest for truth either. For the results of his inquisition show more than truth; they reveal the very fabric of life, and that this fabric is shabby. The force that drives him to do it is the omnivorousness of his language which eventually comes to a point where it cannot be satisfied with God, man, reality, guilt, death, infinity, salvation, air, earth, water, fire, money; and then it takes on itself.