Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  DOSTOEVSKY

  DOSTOEVSKY A Writer in His time

  JOSEPH FRANK

  edited by

  Mary Petrusewicz

  Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,

  Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

  press.princeton.edu

  All Rights Reserved

  Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2012

  Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-15599-9

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

  Frank, Joseph, 1918–

  Dostoevsky : a writer in his time / Joseph Frank.

  p. cm.

  Abridged ed. of author’s work in 5 v.: Dostoevsky. c1976–2002.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-691-12819-1 (acid-free paper) 1. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881. 2. Novelists, Russian—19th century—Biography. 3. Russia—Intellectual life—1801–1917. I. Title.

  PG3328.F75 2010

  891.73′3—dc22

  [B] 2009001418

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Frontispiece: The bust of Dostoevsky on his grave

  Parched with the spirit’s thirst, I crossed

  An endless desert sunk in gloom,

  And a six-winged seraph came

  Where the tracks met and I stood lost.

  Fingers light as dream he laid

  Upon my lids; I opened wide

  My eagle eyes, and gazed around.

  He laid his fingers on my ears

  And they were filled with roaring sound:

  I heard the music of the spheres,

  The flight of angels through the skies,

  The beasts that crept beneath the sea,

  The heady uprush of the vine;

  And, like a lover kissing me,

  He rooted out this tongue of mine

  Fluent in lies and vanity;

  He tore my fainting lips apart

  And, with his right hand steeped in blood,

  He armed me with a serpent’s dart;

  With his bright sword he split my breast;

  My heart leapt to him with a bound;

  A glowing livid coal he pressed

  Into the hollow of the wound.

  There in the desert I lay dead.

  And God called out to me and said:

  “Rise, prophet, rise, and hear, and see,

  And let my words be seen and heard

  By all who turn aside from me.

  And burn them with my fiery word.”

  —A. S. Pushkin, “The Prophet”

  trans. D. M. Thomas

  CONTENTS

  List of illustrations

  Preface: Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

  Acknowledgments

  Transliteration

  Abbreviations

  PART I

  The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849

  1 Prelude

  2 The Family

  3 The Religious and Cultural Background

  4 The Academy of Military Engineers

  5 The Two Romanticisms

  6 The Gogol Period

  7 Poor Folk

  8 Dostoevsky and the Pléiade

  9 Belinsky and Dostoevsky: I

  10 Feuilletons and Experiments

  11 Belinsky and Dostoevsky: II

  12 The Beketov and Petrashevsky Circles

  13 Dostoevsky and Speshnev

  PART II

  The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859

  14 The Peter-and-Paul Fortress

  15 Katorga

  16 “Monsters in Their Misery”

  17 Private Dostoevsky

  18 A Russian Heart

  19 The Siberian Novellas

  20 Homecoming

  PART III

  The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865

  21 Into the Fray

  22 An Aesthetics of Transcendence

  23 The Insulted and Injured

  24 The Era of Proclamations

  25 Portrait of a Nihilist

  26 Time: The Final Months

  27 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

  28 An Emancipated Woman, A Tormented Lover

  29 The Prison of Utopia

  30 Notes from Underground

  31 The End of Epoch

  PART IV

  The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871

  32 Khlestakov in Wiesbaden

  33 From Novella to Novel

  34 Crime and Punishment

  35 “A Little Diamond”

  36 The Gambler

  37 Escape and Exile

  38 In Search of a Novel

  39 An Inconsolable Father

  40 The Idiot

  41 The Pamphlet and the Poem

  42 Fathers, Sons, and Stavrogin

  43 Exile’s Return

  44 History and Myth in Demons

  45 The Book of the Impostors

  PART V

  The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881

  46 The Citizen

  47 Narodnichestvo: Russian Populism

  48 Bad Ems

  49 A Raw Youth

  50 A Public Figure

  51 The Diary of a Writer, 1876–1877

  52 A New Novel

  53 The Great Debate

  54 Rebellion and the Grand Inquisitor

  55 Terror and Martial Law

  56 The Pushkin Festival

  57 Controversies and Conclusions

  58 The Brothers Karamazov: Books 1–4

  59 The Brothers Karamazov: Books 5–6

  60 The Brothers Karamazov: Books 7–12

  61 Death and Transfiguration

  Editor’s Note

  Index

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations are from Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky v portretakh, illyustratsiyakh, dokumentakh, ed. V. S. Nechaeva (Moscow, 1972).

  Frontispiece The bust of Dostoevsky on his grave

  1. Dr. M. A. Dostoevsky

  2. Mme M. F. Dostoevsky

  3. A government courier on a mission

  4. The Academy of Military Engineers

  5. F. M. Dostoevsky in 1847

  6. Feodor’s older brother, M. M. Dostoevsky, in 1847

  7. V. G. Belinsky in 1843

  8. M. V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky in 1840

  9. N. A. Speshnev

  10. The Peter-and-Paul Fortress

  11. The mock execution of the Petrashevtsy

  12. Marya Dimitrievna Isaeva

  13. Dostoevsky in uniform, 1858

  14. Nikolay Strakhov in the 1850s

  15. Apollon Grigoryev in the 1850s

  16. Mikhail Dostoevsky’s home and the offices of Time

  17. F. M. Dostoevsky, 1861

  18. I. S. Turgenev, ca. 1865. From Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 9 (Moscow–Leningrad, 1965)

  19. Main hall of the Crystal Palace. From Scientific American, March 19, 1851.

  20. Apollinaria Suslova. From Dominique Arban et al., Dostoïevski (Paris, 1971)

  21. Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevsky, ca. 1863

  22. Hans Holbein the Younger, Dead Christ (1521–1522)

  23. Apollon Maikov, ca. 1861

  24. Dostoevsky in 1872, by V. G. Perov

  25. A page from Dostoevsky’s notebooks for Demons

  26. Vladimir Solovyev

  27. Tolstoy in 1877, by I. N. Kram
skoy

  28. Dostoevsky in 1876

  29. A page from the manuscript of The Brothers Karamazov

  30. Dostoevsky on his bier, by I. N. Kramskoy

  PREFACE

  Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

  Since the present volume is a condensation of the five that I have already published on the life and works of Dostoevsky, I should like to acquaint my new readers with the point of view from which they were written. My approach arose primarily from a troubling sense that important aspects of Dostoevsky’s work had been overlooked, or at least not accorded sufficient importance, in the considerable secondary literature devoted to his career. The major perspective of these studies derived from his personal history, and this had been so spectacular that it was almost irresistible for biographers to recount its peripeties at length. No other Russian writer of his stature could equal the range of his familiarity with both the depths and heights of Russian society—a range that included four years spent as a convict living side by side with peasant criminals, and then, at the end of his life, invitations to dine with younger members of the family of Tsar Alexander II, who, it was believed, might benefit from his conversation. It is quite understandable that such a life, in all its fascinating particularities, should have furnished the background against which Dostoevsky’s works were initially viewed and interpreted.

  The more I read Dostoevsky’s novels and stories, however, not to mention his journalism, both literary and political (his Diary of a Writer was the most widely circulated monthly publication ever published in Russia), the more it seemed to me that a conventional biographical point of view could not do justice to the complexities of his creations. To be sure, while Dostoevsky’s characters struggle with the psychological and sentimental problems that provide the substance of all novels, more important, his books are also inspired by the ideological doctrines of his time. Such doctrines, particularly in his major works, furnish the chief motivations for the often bizarre, eccentric, and occasionally murderous behavior of characters like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, or both Stavrogin and Kirillov in Demons. The personal entanglements of the figures in the novels, though depicted with often melodramatic intensity, cannot really be understood unless we grasp how their actions are intertwined with ideological motivations.

  It thus seemed to me, when I set out to write my own work on Dostoevsky, that its perspective should be shifted, and that the purely personal biography should no longer dominate the explanatory context in which he was creating. Much less space is thus given in my books to the details of Dostoevsky’s private life and much more to the clash of various ideas prevailing during the period in which he lived. The most perceptive reader of my first four volumes, the much lamented and gifted novelist and critic David Foster Wallace, remarked that “Ellman’s James Joyce, pretty much the standard by which most literary bios are measured, doesn’t go into anything like Frank’s detail on ideology or politics or social theory.” This is not to say that I ignore Dostoevsky’s private life, but it remains linked to other aspects of his era that provide it with a much larger significance. Indeed, one way of defining Dostoevsky’s originality is to see in it this ability to integrate the personal with the major social-political and cultural issues of his day.

  The above remarks about the shortcomings of the critical literature on Dostoevsky apply primarily to books in the various languages other than his own (mainly English, French, and German). It certainly cannot be said that the ideological and philosophical background of Dostoevsky’s creations has not been explored in Russian scholarship and criticism. Indeed, my own analysis of this background is greatly indebted to several generations of Russian scholars and critics such as Dimitry Merezkhovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Leonid Grossman, as well as to philosophers such as Lev Shestov and Nikolay Berdyaev. But as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, it became difficult for Russian scholars, up until very recently, to build on these initiators and to continue to study Dostoevsky impartially and objectively. His greatest works, after all, had been efforts to undermine the ideological foundations out of which that revolution had sprung, and it was thus necessary to highlight his deficiencies rather than his achievements. As for émigré scholars, with very few exceptions their works dwelt on the moral-philosophical implications of Dostoevsky’s ideas rather than on the texts themselves. While utilizing all this interpretative effort with gratitude, I have tried to rectify what seemed to me its limitations, whether caused by ideological restrictions or by nonliterary concerns.

  Placing Dostoevsky’s writings in their social-political and ideological context, however, is only the first step toward an adequate comprehension of his works. For what is important about them is not that his characters engage in theoretical disputations. It is, rather, that their ideas become part of their personalities, to such an extent, indeed, that neither exists independently of the other. His unrivaled genius as an ideological novelist was this capacity to invent actions and situations in which ideas dominate behavior without the latter becoming allegorical. He possessed what I call an “eschatological imagination,” one that could envision putting ideas into action and then following them out to their ultimate consequences. At the same time, his characters respond to such consequences according to the ordinary moral and social standards prevalent in their milieu, and it is the fusion of these two levels that provides Dostoevsky’s novels with both their imaginative range and their realistic grounding in social life.

  Dostoevsky’s innate propensity to dramatize ideas in this way was noted in an extremely acute remark by one of his closest associates, the philosopher Nikolay Strakhov. “The most routine abstract thought,” he wrote, “very often struck him with an uncommon force and would stir him up remarkably. He was, in any case, a person in the highest degree excitable and impressionable. A simple idea, sometimes very familiar and commonplace, would suddenly set him aflame and reveal itself to him in all its significance. He, so to speak, felt thought with unusual liveliness. Then he would state it in various forms, sometimes giving it a very sharp, graphic expression, although not explaining it logically or developing its content” (3: 42). It is this inborn tendency of Dostoevsky to “feel thought” that gives his best work its special stamp, and why it is so important to locate his writings in relation to the evolution of ideas in his lifetime.

  He came to fame in the 1840s, when his first novel, Poor Folk, was hailed by Alexander Herzen as the foremost example of a genuinely Socialist creation in Russian literature. Indeed, all that Dostoevsky published during the 1840s bore the hallmark of his acceptance of the Utopian Socialist ideas then in vogue among a considerable portion of the intelligentsia—ideas that can be considered to have been inspired by Christianity, though recasting its ethos in terms of modern social problems. Nonetheless, although Utopian Socialism did not preach violence to attain its aims, and Dostoevsky’s works are filled with the need for sympathy and compassion, he belonged to a secret group whose aim was to stir up a revolution against serfdom (the existence of this organization did not become known until long after his death). Before this underground cabal could take any action, however, its members were included in the arrest and sentencing of the innocuous discussion group known as the Petrashevsky Circle, to which they all belonged.

  The members of this group were submitted to the ordeal of a mock execution before learning of their true sentences, in Dostoevsky’s case imprisonment with hard labor in Siberia. As a result, Dostoevsky’s previously “secular” Christianity underwent a crucial metamorphosis. Hitherto it had been dedicated to the improvement of life on earth; now this aim, without being abandoned, became overshadowed by an awareness of the importance of the hope of eternity as a mainstay of moral existence. His period of imprisonment also convinced him that the need for freedom, particularly the sense of being able to exercise one’s free will, was an ineradicable need of the human personality and could express itself even in apparently self-destructive forms if no other outlet were possible. Al
so, as Dostoevsky wrote himself, the four years he spent in the prison camp were responsible for “the regeneration of [his] convictions” on a more mundane level. This was a result of his growing awareness of the deep roots of traditional Christianity in even the worst of peasant criminals, who bowed down during the Easter service, with a clanking of chains, when the priest read the words “accept me, O Lord, even as the thief.” The basis of Dostoevsky’s later faith in what he considered the ineradicable Christian essence of the Russian people arose from such experiences.

  When he returned to Russia after a ten-year Siberian exile, he thus found it impossible to accept the reigning ideas of the new generation of the 1860s that had arisen during his absence. Promulgated by Nikolay Chernyshevsky and N. A. Dobrolyubov, these ideas were a peculiar Russian mixture of the atheism of Ludwig Feuerbach, the materialism and rationalism of eighteenth-century French thought, and the English Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. Russian radicalism had acquired a new foundation, labeled “rational egoism” by Chernyshevsky, that the post-Siberian Dostoevsky found it impossible to accept. The first important work he launched against this new credo was Notes from Underground, in which the underground man’s belief in the determinism of all human behavior—a determinism asserted by Chernyshevsky to be the final, definitive word of science—clashes irresistibly with the moral sensibilities that, despite his desire to do so, the tormented underground man cannot suppress.

  Crime and Punishment was a response to the ideas of another radical thinker, Dimitry Pisarev, who drew a sharp distinction between the slumbering masses and those superior individuals like Raskolnikov who believed they had a moral right to commit crimes in the interest of humanity. In the end, however, Raskolnikov discovers that his true motive was to test (unsuccessfully) whether he could overcome his Christian conscience to achieve such a goal. The masterly novel Demons, still the best ever written about a revolutionary conspiracy, is based on the Nechaev affair, the murder of a young student belonging to an underground group led by Sergey Nechaev. This totally unscrupulous agitator with a will of iron composed a Catechism of a Revolutionary whose Utilitarian approval of any means to obtain presumably beneficial social ends makes Machiavelli look like a choirboy.