Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  As a spouse, Dostoevsky was not an attractive proposition: a widower with few social graces and a string of hungry relatives in tow, a convicted subversive with a ten-year spell in Siberia behind him, a writer who, in the popular eye, had never really lived up to the promise of his first novel, Poor Folk, published over twenty years ago. Anna, however, accepted his offer and proved herself an excellent helpmate, standing by him through ill health and poverty, and after his death guarding his memory jealously.

  The marriage does not seem to have been a passionate one, at least in the beginning. For one thing, Dostoevsky had a daily routine that ran entirely athwart that of a young wife and mother: he sat at his desk from ten p.m. to six a.m., slept all morning, and took a stroll in the afternoon, dropping by a coffee shop to read the newspapers. When literary friends came visiting, he would closet himself with them, leaving Anna to bear the burden of his family, who for their part resented her as an interloper.

  Mikhail’s creditors became more pressing. Dostoevsky proposed to Anna that they quit St Petersburg and live abroad. She agreed, if only to get away from his family. For four years (1867–71) the Dostoevskys lived in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and then Germany again, in hotels or rented apartments. It was a period of unrelieved gloom. They survived from hand to mouth, depending on advances from Dostoevsky’s ever-tolerant publisher M. N. Katkov. Time and again Anna had to pawn clothes and jewellery to pay their bills.

  Living abroad only confirmed a strain of what Frank, in an unusually judgemental moment, calls Dostoevsky’s ‘rabid xenophobia’. (The Miraculous Years, p. 191) Dostoevsky had a particular prejudice against Germans: ‘There is no limit at all to how much I hate them!’ (p. 298) He objected to Florence because the Florentines sang in the streets when he wanted to sleep; in Geneva he grumbled because Swiss houses did not have double glazing. Even Russian émigré society gave him no pleasure. He had nothing in common with reactionary aristocrats who had left Russia in disgust after the abolition of serfdom; toward the most famous of literary émigrés, Ivan Turgenev, he cherished an undying grudge after Turgenev told him that, having settled in Germany, he considered himself a German, not a Russian.

  At the risk of exaggeration, Frank calls Dostoevsky ‘a literary proletarian forced to write for wages’. (p. 343) About the circumstances that kept him on the literary treadmill Dostoevsky felt considerable bitterness. Even with Crime and Punishment – an enormous popular success – and The Idiot behind him, he felt a painful sense of inferiority to Turgenev and Tolstoy, both held in higher critical esteem (and paid more per page) than he. He envied these rivals their time and leisure and inherited fortunes; he looked forward to a day when he would be able to tackle a truly major theme and prove himself their equal. He sketched in some detail an ambitious work, called first Atheism, then The Life of a Great Sinner, intended to bring him recognition as a serious writer. But these sketches had to be cannibalised for The Devils, and the major opus was again postponed.

  Dostoevsky had recognised the pivotal importance of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons when it appeared in 1861, but his judgements on Turgenev’s later writings were coloured by personal and political antagonism (Turgenev is satirised in The Devils as the vain and affected littérateur Karmazinov). As for Tolstoy, he and Dostoevsky kept a respectful distance from each other all their lives, never meeting. Privately, Dostoevsky lumped Tolstoy’s writings with Turgenev’s as ‘gentry-landowner literature’ belonging to an era now past. (p. 424)

  Anna bore two children during their years abroad. The first died at three months. The parents were shattered; out of shared grief came greater closeness. Anna’s unflinching support also began to make an impression on Dostoevsky. His first wife had reacted to his epilepsy with shock and dismay; Anna, despite her youth, nursed him through his attacks and bore their aftermath – days of irritability and quarrelsomeness – with good cheer. Gradually he developed respect for her judgement and began to take her into his confidence about his writing.

  Her heaviest burden was not his epilepsy, however, but his gambling. Dostoevsky was an obsessive gambler. His gambling brought down on Anna not only poverty but varieties of moral degradation: having to mistrust someone she loved; being lied to and deceived, and then having to listen afterwards to remorseful breast-beating and self-recriminations which were, finally, not sincerely meant, or not sincerely enough.

  Anna used to set aside a proportion of the housekeeping money for her husband’s gambling. When he had lost that, he would come back saying (she records in her diary) that ‘he was not worthy of me, he was a swine and I an angel’, but that he must have more. Usually she would give in, fearing that if she objected he would get excited and fall into one of his fits. Her mildness got her nowhere, Dostoevsky complaining that he would be better off with a scold for a wife: ‘It was positively painful to him the way I was so sweet.’ (Frank notes that the inhuman sweetness of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, which Dostoevsky was writing at this time, produces the same exasperating effect on the people around him.) (pp. 205, 206)

  Though Dostoevsky did not excuse his gambling, he was prepared to condemn it only on his own terms: as a manifestation of his tendency to go ‘everywhere and in everything . . . to the last limit’. (p. 225) In the man who had already created Marmeladov and would shortly create Stavrogin, one need barely point out that this is as much boasting as it is self-castigation. Anna, however, refused to judge her husband. Just as she preferred to read his mistreatment of her as the voice of epilepsy speaking through him (‘When he screams at me it is from illness, not from bad temper’), she seems to have succeeded – like Dostoevsky himself, as Frank observes – ‘in divorcing his gambling mania from his moral personality, in regarding it as something extraneous to his true character’. (pp. 207, 206) Frank refrains from asking the properly Dostoevskian question: if the devil in Dostoevsky was not his own, if he was not responsible for it, who was?

  II

  In his youth Dostoevsky had been attracted to utopian Socialism of the Fourierist variety. But four years in a prison camp in Siberia shook his faith in Socialism. There is no reason to doubt the account of his change of mind he himself gave: removed from the hothouse of the dissident urban intelligentsia and forced to live cheek by jowl with ordinary Russians, most of them peasants, he began to see that well-meant ideas imported from Europe simply did not apply to them. The people for whose sake he and his co-conspirators had striven regarded them with suspicion and even hostility: they would forever be ‘gentry’, and between gentry and peasantry there was a great gulf fixed. On the other hand, no matter how appalling the crimes might be that they had committed, these peasants were not doubters, rebels, nihilists: they might be sinners, but they were believing sinners, ‘Godbearing’, in the old Russian term. Thus Dostoevsky arrived, in Frank’s words, at ‘insight into the deeply rooted moral world of the peasantry, who lived inside their native Christianity as they did in their skins’. (p. 5) This insight made atheistic social creeds imported from the West seem irrelevant.

  Hence Dostoevsky’s enthusiasm, when he returned from Siberia, for the doctrine of pochvennichestvo, return to the soil, to native roots. To this doctrine he added, in the late 1860s, a tinge of Russian Messianism: ‘The Russian mission . . . consists in the revelation to the world of the Russian Christ.’ Under the sway of a false gospel, the gospel of Rome, the West was falling into decay; the time was approaching for Russia to offer the world ‘a new message’. ‘Russian thought is preparing a grandiose renovation for the entire world . . . and this will occur in about a century – that’s my passionate belief.’ (pp. 354, 359, 253)

  When to a belief in a special world-historical destiny for Russia are added calls for Russian hegemony to be extended over other Slavic nationalities, commitment to great-Russian imperialism, and even justification of war as a purifying fire, we have a picture of an extremist of the Right – a picture of Dostoevsky later to be confirmed in the widely read column ‘A Writer’s Diary’, which he co
ntributed to the newspaper The Citizen and afterwards continued independently. In this column – Frank says in a preview of the final volume of the biography – Dostoevsky would emerge as ‘the most important public voice in his country, whose every word was eagerly anticipated, commented on, and argued about’. (p. 499)

  But the picture of Dostoevsky as a rabid extremist is less than fair. His chauvinism stopped short of glorification of Russia’s past, while on social issues, Frank argues, he emerges as ‘somewhere in the middle’, a supporter of the liberal reforms with which Alexander II initiated his reign, including – crucially – the abolition of serfdom. (p. 250) His letters voice dismay at the reversal of these policies which followed on the attempt on Alexander’s life in 1866. Though he had no doubt that the doctrines of the radical intelligentsia spelled disaster for Russia, he accepted that they were animated by genuine ‘enthusiasm for the good . . . and purity of heart’. (p. 53) Even the shrill xenophobia of his years abroad belongs more to his letters than to his novels. The Idiot, the major novel of the late 1860s, is concerned to portray a man acting in imitation of Christ – a specifically Russian vision of Christ – not to assert the superiority of Eastern over Western theology. To Frank – who untangles the political from the religious/moral skeins of Dostoevsky’s thinking particularly lucidly – the novels advance the ‘ethical-universalistic’ side of Dostoevsky’s messianism, but not to a notable extent its ‘egoistic-imperialistic’ side. (p. 254)

  Dostoevsky’s contribution to the debate on Russia’s future is a huge one. In the major works of the years 1864–80 – Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov – he conducts a searching interrogation of Reason – the Reason of the Enlightenment – as the basis for a good society, and in particular of the good faith of Reason (does Reason not have its own covert agenda, as much to do with an itch for power as with a disinterested quest after truth and justice?). This interrogation is carried out at white heat not just because that is Dostoevsky’s manner but because the books emerge from, and speak to, an historical crisis, Russia’s crisis of modernisation. This crisis would culminate in the Bolshevik takeover of 1917, which promised to liberate the country into true modernity but in fact only petrified it.

  The symbolic beginning of the crisis can be set in 1862, with the publication of Fathers and Sons, in which Turgenev put his finger on a new and ominous social actor, Bazarov the Nihilist.

  ‘We act by virtue of what we recognize as useful,’ observed Bazarov. ‘At the present time, negation is the most useful of all – and we deny—’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Everything!’

  ‘What, not only art and poetry . . . but even . . . horrible to say . . .’

  ‘Everything,’ repeated Bazarov, with indescribable composure.2

  There was something puerile in Nihilism, as both Turgenev and Dostoevsky recognised. Cobbled together out of scraps of scientism and utilitarianism, it barely deserved the name of a philosophical doctrine. Its adherents may have been animated by the same pity and anger as had been Dostoevsky and his conspiratorial confrères in their day, but in its intellectual complacency (the ‘indescribable composure’ of Bazarov), its mindless destructiveness, its hubris, and, after the failure of the peasantry to rise in revolt in 1863, its ill-disguised contempt for those in whose name it claimed to speak, it seemed to Dostoevsky not just a heretical divergence from the utopian communitarianism of the 1840s but a malignant mutation of it – or, to use the master metaphor of The Devils, an evil spirit – taking over the minds of a rising generation of half-educated Russian youth.

  Dostoevsky admired Fathers and Sons, which he read as (in Frank’s words) a ‘poignantly lyrical indictment’ of nascent Nihilism. (p. 71) There is every reason to believe that Turgenev shared Dostoevsky’s reading of Bazarov. The Left, however, preferred not to recognise the critical dimension of the portrait; and Turgenev furthered this slanted reading by declaring mysteriously that Bazarov was himself. Dostoevsky was outraged by this move on Turgenev’s part, which he saw as sycophancy toward the youth of the Left.

  In his ongoing critique of Nihilism, we can imagine Dostoevsky as projecting the career of Turgenev’s hero into the 1860s. Frank traces the metamorphoses of Bazarov at Dostoevsky’s hands, from Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment to the younger Verkhovensky in The Devils (‘Bazarov . . . stiffened into a ruthless fanatic’). (p. 453) This critique is not conducted simply at a political level. In Dostoevsky’s eschatological imagination, Nihilism, with its amoral egoism and proto-Nietzschean self-deification, represented a growing spiritual illness: Russia in the hands of Nihilists would be neither more nor less than Russia under the Antichrist.

  III

  Dostoevsky was a great devourer of newspapers. Several of his novels had their genesis in reports of crimes, which he regarded as telltale symptoms of the maladies of the age. He was elated when, after Crime and Punishment, life imitated art and the newspapers reported Raskolnikov-type murders, for this proved to him that what he called the ‘fantastic realism’ of his novels brought him closer to the deep currents of Russian life than did the verisimilitude of programmatic realists. (pp. 45–6, 308)

  His method of composition, to the extent that his modus operandi can be called a method, was to assemble and develop a swarm of plots and narratives while waiting for the transformative flash of inspiration that would tell him which of them would be worth following up and which could be combined with which. He called the moment when a viable character emerged from the welter of possibilities, crystallising an action around himself, an ‘incarnation’. (p. 269) Once the major character and the story outline were settled on, he would swiftly and confidently create details of scene, character and action as he went along.

  Frank elucidates this process well, building upon the labours not only of the Russian editors of Dostoevsky’s notebooks but of such American scholars as Edward Wasiolek and Robin Feuer Miller.3 The early drafts of The Idiot and The Devils were unfortunately destroyed by Dostoevsky himself, over his wife’s protests, before their return to Russia. (As a one-time subversive he had felt he was bound to be searched at the border; he was reluctant to carry suitcases full of papers, fearing they would be held up for days while the frontier police read through them. In the event, the Dostoevskys’ baby cried so loudly at the railway station that the police hustled them through.) Frank’s analysis of the surviving notebooks and drafts is particularly illuminating. It allows him to explain the disjointedness of The Idiot – where Part One articulates weakly with Part Two – and to show how Dostoevsky’s narrative tactics in Crime and Punishment became more and more daring as composition of the book proceeded. His account of the complex genesis of The Devils is a model of clarity.

  The Devils presents particularly intransigent problems for the reader. From the time of Nicholas I until recently, censorship has been a constant factor in Russian intellectual life. Like most entrenched censorship systems, the Russian system succeeded in inducing writers, editors and publishers to do its work by policing themselves. In the manuscript presented by Dostoevsky to the Russian Messenger, the journal in which The Devils was being serialised, there is a chapter in which Stavrogin tells a priest how he seduced a young girl, then refrained from intervening while she killed herself. This chapter was rejected by Katkov, editor of the journal, on moral grounds. Despite numerous rewrites, in which Dostoevsky toned down the chapter as far as he conscientiously could, Katkov, in other respects a tolerant and sympathetic man, refused to relent.

  Dostoevsky was in an impossible position. Unless Stavrogin’s crime could be recounted, his character would remain too enigmatic, his spiritual despair excessive, and his suicide at the end of the book unmotivated. In the absence of the censored chapter, Dostoevsky did his hurried best to minimise the damage by reworking the rest of The Devils; later he revised the text a second time for book publication. Frank traces these revisions as closely as the fragmentary sourc
es allow, showing that the book we have – great though it may be – is not the one Dostoevsky wanted to write; furthermore, that although we possess the text of the suppressed chapter, it cannot simply be reinserted into the book because of the amount of secondary revision Dostoevsky had to perform on its context.

  IV

  The main trend in Dostoevsky studies today was set by Mikhail Bakhtin, author of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (published in 1929, republished in revised form in 1963). From Bakhtin the concept of dialogism has entered critical currency. A fully dialogical novel is one in which there is no dominating, central authorial consciousness, and therefore no claim to truth or authority, only competing voices and discourses. In Bakhtin’s account, Dostoevsky was the inventor (or re-inventor) and greatest practitioner of the dialogical novel, which he synthesised from other mixed and for the most part low-status genres: the detective story, the picaresque tale, the saint’s life, the eve-of-execution confession.

  In the orthodoxy of academic criticism, ‘dialogical’ has become a term of approval, ‘monological’ a term of censure. Bakhtin cannot be blamed for vulgarisations of his thought, and in particular for the treatment of monologism and dialogism (or its Bakhtinian near-synonym ‘polyphony’) as alternatives (alternatives with telling ideological implications) between which a writer is free to choose. Frank refers to Bakhtin only a few times, mainly to correct him on points of detail.4 In the process Frank loses an opportunity to supply what is missing in Bakhtin, namely, a clear statement that dialogism as exemplified in the novels of Dostoevsky is a matter not of ideological position, still less of novelistic technique, but of the most radical intellectual and even spiritual courage. Here is Frank on The Idiot:

  With an integrity that cannot be too highly praised, Dostoevsky fearlessly submits his own most hallowed convictions to the same test that he had used for those of the Nihilists – the test of what they would mean for human life if taken seriously and literally, and lived out to their full extent . . . With exemplary honesty, he portrays the moral extremism of his own eschatological ideal, incarnated by [Prince Myshkin], as being equally incompatible with the normal demands of ordinary social life, and constituting just as much of a disruptive scandal as the appearance of Christ himself among the complacently respectable Pharisees. (p. 341)