The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  (Translated by Constance Garnett)

  In these Notes he includes symbolically his dominant ideas. London’s Crystal Palace, the triumph of Western materialism (it burned down in 1936), suggests halcyon days that will never be. The undergroundling encounters a prostitute who tries to give him wholehearted love, which somehow he cannot accept. Instead he asserts himself and humiliates her by trying to pay for her affection.

  Notes from the Underground in 1864 opened the creative years of Dostoyevsky’s four great novels, along with new chapters of sufferings. From the gaming tables of Bad Hamburg where his gambling obsession kept him in futile pursuit of fortune, he was recalled to the deathbed of the wife to whom he had been unhappily married since his military service in Siberia. On the day after her death he reflected:

  April 16. [1864] Masha is lying before me on the table. Will I ever see Masha again?

  To love another as oneself according to Christ’s commandment is impossible. Man is bound on earth by the law of personality. The Ego holds him back. Only Christ was able to do this, but Christ is a perpetual and eternal ideal towards which man strives and according to the law of nature must strive against.…

  And therefore on earth man strives towards an ideal that is opposed to his nature. When man sees that he has not lived up to the commandment to strive for the ideal, that he has not sacrificed his Ego to other people or to another person (Marsha and I), he suffers and calls this state sin. Man must suffer unceasingly, but this suffering is compensated for by the heavenly joy of striving to fulfill the commandment through sacrifice. This is the “earthly equilibrium”; without it, life would be meaningless.

  (Translated by Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff)

  That year too his beloved brother Mikhail died.

  To ward off debtor’s prison, he tried to sell his idea for a novel to be called The Drunkard, but publishers were not interested. Instead he sold the rights to a new three-volume edition of his work to an unscrupulous speculator, Fyodor Stellovsky. To this agreement was added the outrageous condition that if Dostoyevsky did not submit a new novel by November 1 of the following year, Stellovsky would acquire the rights to publish all his work for the next nine years free of charge. In late July 1865 Dostoyevsky left to try his luck at the roulette tables. “But in the course of five days in Wiesbaden,” he wrote to Turgenev, “I have lost everything. I am completely broke—I even gambled away my watch, and I owe money at the hotel.” When a small loan from Turgenev was not enough to pay his way home, the city’s Russian priest advanced him enough to escape debtor’s prison in Wiesbaden and travel back to St. Petersburg in October 1865.

  The plan for The Drunkard was developing into the story for Crime and Punishment, but that writing would take time. Meanwhile the deadline for his bondage to Stellovsky was approaching. To meet it he decided to write a shorter piece, originally titled “Roulettenburg,” which became The Gambler. And to speed it along, fortunately he engaged a twenty-year-old stenographer recommended by a friend to take his dictation. This Anna Snitkina had wept over his House of the Dead. As a schoolgirl she had been so devoted to his books that she became known as Netochka, after one of his heroines. Although Dostoyevsky was irritable and difficult, she was submissive, and wonderfully efficient. With her help he managed to complete the whole novel in sixteen days. Meanwhile the unscrupulous Stellovsky had left town to prevent the manuscript from being delivered on time and so trap Dostoyevsky into bondage. Still Dostoyevsky managed to secure a receipt from a district police officer for its delivery on October 31.

  Only a week later, when the devoted Anna came to take dictation for the conclusion of Crime and Punishment, he was uncharacteristically cheerful. He surprised and delighted her when he proposed marriage by recounting his dream of finding a tiny sparkling diamond. He told the plot of a new novel in which a poor sick artist falls in love with a much younger girl who happened to have the name of Anya. The celebration of their marriage brought on a double attack of epilepsy, which made her fear “that my beloved husband was in the process of going insane.” But by accepting this novelized proposal Anna began fourteen years of a happy stenographic marriage. Her shorthand would record his life’s work. Despite the twenty-five years’ difference in their ages, they found a way, based on her patience with his epilepsy, her tolerance of his gambling obsession, her adoration and submission, to what she called “my life’s sun.”

  Crime and Punishment, which drew on his prison experience to create the story of a struggling soul, was the result of endless labor and revision. Dostoyevsky had first cast it as a confession, then as a diary, before its final form, which appeared serially for a year beginning in January 1866. Fortunately, since the magazine never came out on time, he could come up with the next installment at the last minute. The hero, Raskolnikov, a nihilist governed by “reason,” makes his own definition of good and evil and commits murder to serve a “better” end. Dostoyevsky summarized in his notebooks the “Idea of the Novel”: “There is. no happiness in comfort; happiness is brought by suffering. Man is not born for happiness.” Finally Raskolnikov too discovers that the soul is satisfied only by confession and accepting punishment. The public reception of the book was sensational, but somehow did not relieve Dostoyevsky’s personal agonies. The seven thousand rubles from it soon disappeared into the pockets of unsatisfied creditors.

  Fleeing abroad with the money secured by Anna’s sale of her dowry of furniture, piano, and silver, they departed in April 1867. The next four years brought excruciating poverty, frequent removals to avoid debtor’s prison, and humiliating pleas to friends and relatives for loans to keep them alive. Dostoyevsky’s epileptic seizures came as regularly as his disastrous plunges at the gaming tables, which unaccountably ceased in 1870. Nowhere did Dostoyevsky find ease or peace of mind—not in Berlin or Dresden, or Baden-Baden, nor in Geneva, Vevey, Milan, or Florence, or other way stations back to St. Petersburg in July 1871. He could hardly have survived without the bottomless sympathy, warmth, and encouragement of his “little diamond.”

  Despite or perhaps because of all this, in transit he wrote doggedly. To keep up with life at home he devoured the Russian newspapers, selecting sensational items as subjects for his own writing. Trial by jury, newly introduced in Russia, made the details of criminal cases more public. Dostoyevsky’s interest was captured by the story of a family in the provinces who treated their daughter Olga so cruelly that she tried to burn down their house, and finally was driven out of her mind. This became the nucleus of The Idiot (1868–69) and Olga was the model for the heroine Mignon. The story slowly developed around “my old favourite idea, but so difficult that for a long time I did not dare to cope with it.”

  The chief idea of the novel is to portray the positively good man. There is nothing in the world more difficult to do, and especially now. All writers, and not only ours, but even all Europeans who have tried to portray the positively good man have always failed.… There is only one positively good man in the world—Christ.… I recall that of the good figures in Christian literature, the most perfect is Don Quixote. But he is good only because at the same time he is ridiculous. Dickens’ Pickwick (an infinitely weaker conception than Don Quixote, but nevertheless immense) is also ridiculous and succeeds by virtue of this fact. One feels compassion for the ridiculous man who does not know his own worth as a good man, and consequently sympathy is invoked in the reader. This awakening of compassion is the secret of humour.… In my novel there is nothing of this sort, positively nothing, and hence I am terribly afraid that I shall be entirely unsuccessful.

  (Translated by Ernest J. Simmons)

  His hero, Prince Myshkin, unlike Don Quixote, is not a crusader but a gentle Russian Orthodox believer, set against his sensual antagonist Rogozhin.

  While writing this novel he was awaiting the birth of his first child, a girl who arrived to his exuberant delight in March 1868. And when the baby died three months later, Dostoyevsky was plunged into the deepest despond of hi
s whole unhappy life. He kept his sanity by working at The Idiot, which he completed the next January. It was hardly a subject of good cheer, for the heroine is murdered, the anti-hero becomes a murderer and goes mad, and the hero relapses into idiocy. Even before The Idiot was delivered, Dostoyevsky was deep in debt to his publisher Katkov for another novel still unwritten. And The Idiot was not a publishing success.

  More than ever Dostoyevsky now envied the prosperity of his popular contemporaries Turgenev, Goncharov, and Tolstoy. He continually begged friends and relatives for money, repeating his plea that “it is only once in a lifetime that money can possibly be so cruelly needed.” Still he kept insisting that he was the most unmercenary of men. “I have never invented a theme for money’s sake, to meet the obligation of writing up to a previously agreed time-limit. I always made an agreement … and sold myself into bondage beforehand … only when I already had my theme in mind prepared for writing, and when it was one that I felt it necessary to develop.” At the outset of his career he had promised himself, “Even if driven to the extreme limit of privation, I shall stand firm and never compose to order. Constraint is pernicious and soul-destroying. I want each of my works to be good in itself.”

  While reading Russian newspapers in the Dresden library in late 1869 Dostoyevsky noted the story of a young man found drowned on the grounds of the Moscow Agricultural Academy with stones tied to his head and feet. The trial revealed that he was the victim of fellow members of a secret revolutionary society, which aimed at a popular uprising and the public execution of the czar. With slogans hardly distinguishable from those of the revolutionists of 1917 they sought the emancipation of mankind. Dostoyevsky seized this story as the framework for The Possessed, which would dramatize the evils of Western nihilism and materialism. He returned to St. Petersburg in July 1871 with Anna and his daughter, born in Dresden. The first published installments of The Possessed attracted great interest and established him as the darling of the reactionary government.

  Dostoyevsky saw the book as “almost a historical study” of the consequences of the separation of Russian intellectuals from the Russian masses. In Shatov, he projected Russia’s world mission against the West. “To be with the soil, to be with your own people, signifies to believe that precisely through this people all humanity will be saved, and finally the idea will be born into the world and a heavenly kingdom with it.” After finishing The Possessed in 1872, he developed the theme “of our national spiritual independence” in his Diary of a Writer. This miscellany of trials and crimes and popular fads became the source for his last and greatest novel.

  The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoyevsky’s creation from the accumulated thoughts and impressions of his life—from the Siberian prison, countless news stories, voluminous notebooks, and his grandiose plan for the “Life of a Great Sinner.” Early in 1878 he received an advance from his publisher Katkov. Encouraged by Anna and with the companionship of a young philosopher who shared his faith in the Church, Dostoyevsky made a long-postponed arduous pilgrimage to the monastery Optina Pustyn. It was celebrated for the piety and wisdom of its elders, especially its charismatic Father Amvrosy. In only two days at Optina Pustyn he noted everything he saw and that Father Amvrosy told him, for chapters of the novel. The installments of The Brothers Karamazov began appearing in Katkov’s magazine, The Russian Messenger, in January 1879. The enthusiasm of readers grew with each installment. He finished the last chapter in November 1880. Then Dostoyevsky began a series of public readings from his own works and from Pushkin, Gogol, and others. Without Dickens’s histrionic flair, he still had his own solemn charm, always encouraged by the presence of Anna. Finally, when he was nearing sixty, he had paid off his creditors and was making money from the sale of his novels. Anna added to their income by selling books by mail.

  The longest of Dostoyevsky’s novels, The Brothers Karamazov was also the most explicit and elaborate in dealing with theology and the Russian soul. Of the varied characters and their separate doubts in search of God Dostoyevsky makes violent scenes. At the same time he explains why no theology is adequate to the needs of life. Alyosha, like the “entirely good man,” Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, insists to his brother Ivan, “I think every one should love life above everything in the world.” “Love life more than the meaning of it?” asks Ivan. “Certainly,” replies Alyosha, “love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it’s only then one will understand the meaning of it.”

  A passionate Eastern Orthodox Christian, Dostoyevsky still resists the temptations of dogma. “But the greatness of it,” says Father Zosima, “lies just in the fact that it is a mystery—that the passing earthly show and the eternal verity are brought together in it. In the face of the earthly truth, the eternal truth is accomplished.” When the Grand Inquisitor denies Christ for having left man freedom of choice between good and evil, the answer is not in reason but in the heart, and in suffering for the sins of others. In his notebook Dostoyevsky explained that this “whole novel” was an answer to those who accused him of a naive and retrograde “faith in God.” “I do not believe in God like a fool (a fanatic). And they wished to teach me, and laughed over my backwardness! But their stupid natures did not dream of such a powerful negation as I have lived through.”

  So Dostoyevsky transforms the bloodless abstractions of theology into human hopes and conflicts. The powerful “negations of God … in the Grand Inquisitor” showed that Dostoyevsky himself had faced the question. “Even in Europe there have never been atheistic expressions of such power. Consequently, I do not believe in Christ and His confession as a child, but my hosanna has come through a great furnace of doubt.”

  Dostoyevsky did not long outlive the spectacular success of his Brothers Karamazov. When it first appeared in book form in January 1881 it sold fifteen hundred copies in a few days. But by the end of that month he suffered fatal hemorrhages of the lungs complicated by an attack of epilepsy. The attacks had occurred from childhood but became acute only after Dostoyevsky was snatched from execution to his years in Siberian hard labor. Thereafter they had occurred about once a month, sometimes twice a week. The onset of an attack, Dostoyevsky himself recounted, was a sense of rapture and resurrection, of being born again. But the terrible aftermath brought a “feeling of being a criminal,” guilty of some horrible unknown crime. All this, says Thomas Mann, we can see in the “profound, criminal, saintly face of Dostoyevsky.” So Mann was “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 saint and criminal are one.”

  In a vast public funeral Dostoyevsky was praised as the irreplaceable champion of Holy Russia. Turgenev, with a wit Dostoyevsky lacked, noted that the Russian bishops there were really celebrating the Russian Marquis de Sade. It was said that students had to be prevented from marching behind the coffin with fetters like those Dostoyevsky had worn for four years in Siberia to commemorate the death of the man who had once loved freedom and been punished for it.

  The cult of Dostoyevsky, like that of Wagner, attests to the victory of art over ideas. Both had their own curious brands of chauvinism and expounded ideas unpopular in the free West, yet both attained there a cosmopolitan fame and influence. Thus Dostoyevsky proved the ineffectiveness of the “lackeys of thought” against the sagas of the soul. Although he aimed to reach everybody, he has remained, as his biographer Avrahm Yarmolinsky observes, largely “a writer’s writer,” finding his most enthusiastic response among fellow literati. His ever-widening audience can be explained, too, by what other writers were not saying. And by the vivid passion and suffering of his characters.

  Western readers, delighted by the commemorative involutions of Proust and the filigreed everyday trivia of Joyce, would be challenged by the mysteries of Dostoyevsky’s men and women in search of God. His characters discovered their uniqu
eness in their soul, in their own peculiar circumstances—lover, priest, parricide, reformer, revolutionary—and in the infinite variety of choices of good and evil.

  Dostoyevsky’s fanatic Slavomania reminded the West that there might be dimensions of life not seen in the clear stream of consciousness or in the murky depths of the unconscious. So he provided a foil for the Western self. As a chauvinist Russian he had declared war on the West, whose symbols were science, reason, and materialism. He opposed the perversion of Christianity into an authoritarian Catholic Church, the perversion of selflessness into the enforced sharing of socialism, and the multiplying of desires by industrial capitalism.

  While Marxist scriptures exhorted workingmen of the world to “lose their chains,” Dostoyevsky dramatized the virtue of unmerited suffering. When The Brothers Karamazov ends with Dmitri being found guilty of a crime he did not commit, he protests his innocence. But he adds, “I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame. I want to suffer and by suffering I shall purify myself.” Nurturing his punishment, Dmitri refuses escape to America. “I hate that America already! And though they may be wonderful at machinery, everyone of them, damn them, they are not of my soul. I love Russia, Alyosha, I love the Russian God, though I am a scoundrel myself. I shall choke there!” While Dostoyevsky never sold suffering to the West, he gave the experience of it in his novels an outlandish charm. So he lends an exotic cosmic dimension to our struggles within ourselves.

  At his last public appearance, at the Pushkin Festival in Moscow on June 8, 1880, he offered the future mission of Russia. If Russia would be backward and behind the West in wealth, this only saved her from materialist distraction, preparing for her world mission to unify mankind under Christ. To which his enthusiasts in the audience exclaimed “Saint!” “Prophet!” While some comrades after the Russian Revolution of 1917 also hailed him as a prophet, when Lenin was asked what he thought of Dostoyevsky he is reported to have said, “I have no time for such trash!”