Aside from contesting the ideas he opposed, Dostoevsky also aspired to create a Christian moral image that would serve as a positive example for the new generation. The Idiot is an attempt to portray such a Christian ideal to counter the “rational egoism” that Dostoevsky was attacking; but it was finally impossible for him to have Prince Myshkin end in anything but disaster. Such a worldly failure is of course inherent in the paradigm of Christ’s self-sacrifice; but Dostoevsky by this time had also come to believe that “to love man like oneself, according to the commandment of Christ, is impossible. The law of personality on earth binds. The ego stands in the way.” It is only in the afterlife that “the law of personality” could be decisively overcome.
The 1870s marked a new phase in Dostoevsky’s work because these years saw a mutation in radical ideology itself. Radical publicists such as N. K. Mikhailovsky and Peter Lavrov had now rejected the Western notion of “progress” as the only path of social evolution. Without surrendering their unrelenting opposition to the tsarist regime, these thinkers, in a criticism of capitalism influenced by Marx’s denunciation of the “primitive accumulation” that turned peasants into proletarians, began to search in their homeland for alternatives to the relentless pauperization of the lower class they saw taking place in Europe. With the serfs having been liberated in 1861, it was feared that the same process would inevitably occur in Russia. Dostoevsky had observed the results of this social transformation during his first trip to Europe in 1862 and denounced it as the triumph of the flesh-god Baal.
The radicals thus began to reevaluate the merits of Russian peasant life, and this brought them much closer to Dostoevsky than in the past. Such a change of perspective is surely one reason why his next novel, A Raw Youth, was unexpectedly published in the radical journal, Notes of the Fatherland. It contains a brilliantly limned portrait of the main character, an intellectual caught between an unsatisfied need for religious faith and his attraction to the stabilities of such faith among the peasantry. It also includes the first (and only) important peasant character in any of Dostoevsky’s novels, a figure who provides the book with a moral anchor amidst its all too complicated romantic intrigue.
The Russian radicals had now accepted the moral-social values of Russian peasant life, rooted in the Orthodox Christian faith, but they still refused to accept that faith themselves, the source of such values, and continued to cling to their atheism. Such an inner contradiction lies at the heart of Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, which bravely attempts to cope with this issue by employing the theme of theodicy. How could a God, presumably of love, have created a world in which evil existed? The radicals of the 1860s had simply denied the existence of God, but those of the 1870s, as Dostoevsky wrote in a letter, were rejecting not God “but the meaning of His creation.”
No modern writer rivals Dostoevsky in the grandeur of his presentation of this eternal Christian dilemma—the fierceness of his attack on the presumed goodness of God, on the one hand, through Ivan Karamazov, and his attempt to counter it with the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor and the preaching of Father Zosima on the other. These pages bring Dostoevsky into the company of Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, and of Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare, rather than of fellow novelists, who rarely venture into such exalted territory. Each of his central figures is elaborated on a richly symbolic scale influenced by some of the greatest works of Western literature, among which his own novel now takes an undisputed place.
The power and pathos of Dostoevsky’s novels and journalism, his impassioned wrestling with the deepest issues confronting Russian society, raised him above the bitter quarrels then taking place and that, just a month after his own death in 1881, led to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. It is no accident that, when he read Pushkin’s poem “The Prophet” in public, as he often did in the last ten years of his life, Dostoevsky was hailed as a prophet himself by enraptured listeners who found solace in his words preaching universal conciliation in the name of Christ. It was also a testimony to his stature that his funeral procession, almost a mile in length, included a vast array of organizations and groups of differing social-political orientations. All of them were united by their admiration for the writer whose works had so illuminated, in such moving and spellbinding forms, the problems assailing all literate Russians in his lifetime, and whose genius had raised their indigenous conflicts to universal heights.
One of Dostoevsky’s dreams for his work had been to bring about the unity of Russian culture; and if he did not succeed during his lifetime, it may be said that he attained this goal with his death. Moreover, the unanimity of esteem felt by Russians at that moment has been continued in the worldwide reverence accorded to his major novels up through our own day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A few years after the publication of the fifth and final volume of my books on Dostoevsky (2002), the idea was broached of attempting to follow the model provided by Leon Edel with his five-volume work on Henry James. This multi-volumed text, shortened to one, has been highly praised and widely read; and it was suggested by Princeton University Press that perhaps a one-volume condensation of my five, if done properly, would be equally welcomed. At first I encountered such a prospect with some reluctance. The length of my treatment of Dostoevsky was the result of placing his life and writings in the context of a much larger social, historical, and ideological background than had previously been attempted; and I did not wish to lose the new insights that, as I was pleased to see widely acknowledged, this context provided. Moreover, my books contained independent analyses of both his literary and journalistic writings that I wished to remain intact as far as possible. In them I had tried to illuminate Dostoevsky’s unique fusion of the issues of his own life and time with those both of Russian culture as a whole and of the religious-metaphysical “accursed questions” about the meaning of life that had always plagued Western mankind. Hence my hesitation about a one-volume edition; but this was overcome when I was assured that my original volumes would remain in print, and so would be easily available to new readers wishing for a wider horizon.
The decision thus was made to search for an editor to undertake the arduous and taxing task of composing the one-volume manuscript. The choice eventually fell on Mary Petrusewicz, an experienced writer and editor with a PhD degree in Russian literature who taught undergraduate and continuing education courses in the humanities (including courses on Dostoevsky) at Stanford University. Her editorial duties, performed in an exemplary manner after initial consultation for safeguarding what I considered essential, took two years to be completed. I then reviewed the resulting manuscript and made key authorial additions, adjustments, and textual revisions to ensure that this condensed book represented the best and smoothest adaptation of the five previous volumes. She has herself described the principles that guided her excellent work in the Editor’s Note appended to the present book (p. 933) and that, as the reader will see, focuses on what seemed to me of greatest importance—to bring out, as she says, “the full power of Dostoevsky’s texts.”
Hanne Winarsky, the literary editor of Princeton University Press, kept a close eye on the enterprise as it was being carried out, and I should like to thank her most gratefully for her comments and suggestions. Robin Feuer Miller, whose own book on The Idiot is a major contribution to the comprehension of this most autobiographical of Dostoevsky’s novels, also must be thanked most warmly. Her detailed comparison of the new one-volume version with the original five volumes was invaluable in scrutinizing the work of transformation, and I can only add my own voice to that of the appreciation equally expressed in the note of the editor herself.
My wife, Marguerite Frank, a professional and published mathematician and a discriminating and avid reader of literature as well, has been a sharp and discerning critic of all of my volumes. Through these many years she has helped me to maintain them as close as possible to the highest intellectual and literary standards. In this instance
she was dissatisfied with my treatment of perhaps the most complex of all the female characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, the beautiful and ill-fated Nastasya Filippovna of The Idiot. In the past, I had always used her comments to guide my own revisions. But now she so much altered and enriched my own initial view that I asked her to express them herself; and the pages devoted to Nastasya Filippovna in the present book thus come from her pen. Let me conclude by citing what I wrote in the Preface to my fifth volume: “Nothing I can say will adequately express what every one of my books owes to her participation.”
TRANSLITERATION
For Russian words, I use the Library of Congress system without diacritics, and I use -ya instead of -ia and -yu instead of -iu, the adjectival endings -yi and -ii are rendered by -y: yurodivy instead of yurodivyi, Dostoevsky instead of Dostoevskii. The soft sign is omitted in proper names: Gogol rather than Gogol’.
Citations to Dostoevsky’s texts and correspondence are made to the volumes of the great Academy of Sciences edition: F. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Leningrad, 1972–1990). For the other texts cited here, I have used the translation of Diary of a Writer by Kenneth Lantz. For my quotations from Dostoevsky’s early short stories and novels up to and including Notes from Underground, I have used the translations of Constance Garnett (altering her version where this seemed indicated). For the later novels, I have consulted various translations: those of Constance Garnett, Jessie Coulson, and Richard Pevear and Larissa volokhonsky for Crime and Punishment; for The Idiot, Constance Garnett; for The Gambler, Victor Terras and Constance Garnett; for The Eternal Husband, Constance Garnett; for Demons, David Magarshack and Constance Garnett; for A Raw Youth, the translations of both Constance Garnett and Andrew McAndrew. For The Brothers Karamazov, I have used mainly the translation of Constance Garnett revised by Ralph Matlaw, but supplemented with the versions of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, as well as that of Ignat Avsey.
All citations have been checked with the Russian text and alterations made as necessary.
ABBREVIATIONS
Biografiya
Orest Miller and Nikolay Strakhov. Biografiya, pis’ma i zametki iz zapisnoi knizhki F. M. Dostoevskogo (St. Petersburg, 1863).
DMI
F. M. Dostoevsky materialy i issledovaniya, ed. A. S. Dolinin (Leningrad, 1935).
DRK
F. M. Dostoevsky v Russkoi kritike (Moscow, 1956).
DSiM
F. M. Dostoevsky, stati i materialy, ed. A. S. Dolinin, 2 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1922–1924).
DVS
F. M. Dostoevsky v vospominaniakh sovremennikov, ed. K. Tyunkina, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1990).
DW
A Writer’s Diary, Feodor Dostoevsky, trans. and annotated Kenneth Lantz, intro study Gary saul Morson (Evanston, Ill, 1993). I cite Dostoevsky’s Dnevnik pisatelya in this English version, though with numerous revisions of the translation.
DZhP
Leonid Grossman, Dostoevsky na zhiznennom puti (Moscow, 1928).
LN
Literaturnoe Nasledstvo (Moscow, 1934–1973).
Pis’ma
F. M. Dostoevsky, Pis’ma, ed. and annotated by A. S. Dolinin, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1928–1959).
PSS
F. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, ed. and annotated by G. M. Fridlender et al., 30 vols. (Leningrad, 1972–1990). This definitive edition of Dostoevsky’s writings contains his correspondence and provides an extensive scholarly apparatus.
PSSiP
I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, ed. P. Alekseev, 28 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1960–1968).
ZT
Leonid Grossman, Zhizn’ i trudy Dostoevskogo (Moscow–Leningrad, 1935).
PART I
The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849
CHAPTER 1
Prelude
The last years of the reign of Alexander I were a troubled, uncertain, and gloomy time in Russian history. Alexander had come to the throne as the result of a palace revolution against his father, Paul I, whose increasingly erratic and insensate rule led his entourage to suspect madness. The coup was carried out with at least the implicit consent of Alexander, whose accession to power, after his father’s murder, at first aroused great hopes of liberal reform in the small, enlightened segment of Russian society. Alexander’s tutor, selected by his grandmother Catherine the Great, had been a Swiss of advanced liberal views named La Harpe. This partisan of the Enlightenment imbued his royal pupil with republican and even democratic ideas; and during the first years of his reign, Alexander surrounded himself with a band of young aristocrats sharing his progressive persuasions. A good deal of work was done preparing plans for major social reforms, such as the abolition of serfdom and the granting of personal civil rights to all members of the population. Alexander’s attention, however, was soon diverted from internal affairs by the great drama then proceeding on the European stage—the rise of Napoleon as a world-conqueror. Allied at first with Napoleon, and then becoming his implacable foe, Alexander I led his people in the great national upsurge that resulted in the defeat of the Grand Army and its hitherto invincible leader.
The triumph over Napoleon brought Russian armies to the shores of the Atlantic and exposed both officers and men (the majority of the troops were peasant serfs) to prolonged contact with the relative freedom and amenities of life in Western Europe. It was expected that, in reward for the loyalty of his people, Alexander would make some spectacular gesture consonant with his earlier intentions and institute the social reforms that had been put aside to meet the menace of Napoleon. But the passage of time, and the epochal events he had lived through, had not left Alexander unchanged. More and more he had come under the influence of the religious mysticism and irrationalism so prevalent in the immediate post-Napoleonic era. Instead of reforms, the period between 1820 and 1825 saw an intensification of reaction and the repression of any overt manifestation of liberal ideas and tendencies in Russia.
Meanwhile, secret societies—some moderate in their aims, others more radical—had begun to form among the most brilliant and cultivated cadres of the Russian officers’ corps. These societies, grouping the scions of some of the most important aristocratic families, sprang from impatience with Alexander’s dilatoriness and a desire to transform Russia on the model of Western liberal and democratic ideas. Alexander died unexpectedly in November 1825, and the societies seized the opportunity a month later, at the time of the coronation of Nicholas I, to launch a pitifully abortive eight-hour uprising known to history as the Decembrist insurrection. An apocryphal story about this event has it that the mutinous troops, told to shout for “Constantine and konstitutsiya” (Constantine, the older brother of Nicholas, had renounced the throne and had a reputation as a liberal), believed that the second noun, whose gender in Russian is feminine, referred to Constantine’s wife. Whether true or only a witticism, the story highlights the isolation of the aristocratic rebels; and their revolution was crushed with a few whiffs of grapeshot by the new tsar, who condemned five of the ringleaders to be hanged and thirty-one to be exiled to Siberia for life. Nicholas thus provided the nascent Russian intelligentsia with its first candidates for the new martyrology that would soon replace the saints of the Orthodox Church.
Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on October 3, 1821, just a few years before this crucial event in Russian history, and these events were destined to be interwoven with his life in the most intimate fashion. The world in which Dostoevsky grew up lived in the shadow of the Decembrist insurrection and suffered from the harsh police-state atmosphere instituted by Nicholas I to ensure that nothing similar could occur again. The Decembrist insurrection marked the opening skirmish in the long and deadly duel between the Russian intelligentsia and the supreme aristocratic power that shaped the course of Russian history and culture in Dostoevsky’s lifetime. And it was out of the inner moral and spiritual crises of this intelligentsia—out of its self-alienation and i
ts desperate search for new values on which to found its life—that the child born in Moscow at the conclusion of the reign of Alexander I would one day produce his great novels.
CHAPTER 2
The Family
Of all the great Russian writers of the first part of the nineteenth century—Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Herzen, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Nekrasov—Dostoevsky was the only one who did not come from a family belonging to the landed gentry. This is a fact of great importance, and influenced the view he took of his own position as a writer. Comparing himself with his great rival Tolstoy, as he did frequently in later life, Dostoevsky defined the latter’s work as being that of a “historian,” not a novelist. For, in his view, Tolstoy depicted the life “which existed in the tranquil and stable, long-established Moscow landowners’ family of the middle-upper stratum.” Such a life, with its settled traditions of culture and fixed moral-social norms, had become in the nineteenth century that of only a small “minority” of Russians; it was “the life of the exceptions.” The life of the majority, on the other hand, was one of confusion and moral chaos. Dostoevsky felt that his own work was an attempt to grapple with the chaos of the present, while Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth and War and Peace (he had these specifically in mind) were pious efforts to enshrine for posterity the beauty of a gentry life already vanishing and doomed to extinction.1
Such a self-definition, made at a later stage of Dostoevsky’s career, of course represents the distillation of many years of reflection on his literary position. But it also throws a sharp light back on Dostoevsky’s past, and helps us to see that his earliest years were spent in an atmosphere that prepared him to become the chronicler of the moral consequences of flux and change, and of the breakup of the traditional forms of Russian life. The lack, during his early years, of a unified social tradition in which he could feel at home unquestionably shaped his imaginative vision, and we can also discern a rankling uncertainty about status that helps to explain his acute understanding of the psychological scars inflicted by social inequality.
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