Extract from Rebecca West on Dostoevsky, 1915

There is nothing very mystical in the idea that the mind, even as the body, grows stronger in the country of its race. That has been proved again and again by such various manifestations as the characterlessness of colonial art, the literary tatting performed by the refined English spinsters who are to be found in the shadow of almost every Italian campanile, or the transformation of the Hindu into something tortuous and impotent by the English education. If one removes a man from his country, one deprives him of that heritage of tradition which Dostoevsky upholds as the enemy of science, but which is really the unwritten preface to science, and much more in its spirit than the jabber of misapprehended phrases he was denouncing. When, for instance, he distrusts Jews because it is the tradition of his country that they do not bear poverty so beautifully as Christians, he is plainly arriving at the conclusion by more scientific methods than are used by Houston Stewart Chamberlain when he produces “evidence” that Teutonic infants in arms have been known to burst into tears when approached by Jews. And the man removed from his country has torn from his shoulders the net of human relationship wherein he might have learnt love, which so greatly fortifies the will to live. Never will he be knit to many people by laughter over local jokes, never will he join with strangers in the shamelessly untuneful singing of old songs about past national glories. For never can one become completely assimilated to another nation; always an excess of passion here, a lack of interest there, will betray that one is a different kind of animal, with a different history and other ends. Only in one’s own country is the rose of life planted where one would have it, shaped as far as could be by the will of one’s own people, nourished by one’s own blood.

That was the nationalism of Dostoevsky. If he stated it angrily, with curses at things that are very fair, and in such loose terms that it has been used to support the attack of the bureaucracy upon the people’s will, it mused be remembered than an artist who conceives this hunger for salvation cannot work calmly. It is like standing in the darkness outside a lighted house to which one has no key. If Dostoevsky sometimes lost himself in rage as he beat on the doors, it was because he had in his heart such a wonderful dream of the light.