Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Certain traits of Dostoevsky’s character may be attributed to the effects of his relationship with his father. All the people who had any prolonged personal contact with Dostoevsky remark on the secretiveness and evasiveness of his personality; he was not someone who opened himself easily or willingly to others. There is scarcely a memoir about him that does not comment on this lack of expansiveness, and one suspects that this elusiveness may well have developed from the need to dissimulate as a means of coping with his father’s combination of capriciousness and severity. The pathological shyness from which Dostoevsky suffered all his life can possibly also be attributed to an unwillingness to expose himself, a fear of being rebuffed and emotionally abused that had become second nature.

  Most important of all, as Freud noted, is that Dostoevsky internalized as a child a highly developed sense of guilt. Instead of Oedipal sexual rivalry, however, it is more helpful, at this stage of Dostoevsky’s life, to view his guilt feelings in the light of the paternal insistence on scholastic achievement as a moral obligation, and as the only defense against grinding poverty and loss of status. The importance given to this aspect of life in the family is well illustrated by a ceremony that took place every year on Dr. Dostoevsky’s name day (and which later turns up in The Village of Stepanchikovo, performed for Colonel Rostanev, a father of ideal kindness). The two older boys and eventually the oldest girl prepared a morning greeting for their father on that joyous occasion. This meant memorizing a French poem, copying it on fine paper, presenting it to their father, and then reciting it by heart—with as good an accent as they could muster—while he followed with the written text. “Father was very touched,” Andrey says, “and warmly kissed the purveyor of greetings”;34 clearly the most welcome present he could receive was this evidence of their progress in learning French.

  Dostoevsky’s genius first reveals itself by the creation of characters desperately eager to satisfy their bureaucratic superiors in some routine clerical task (not so far removed from schoolwork, after all); consumed with guilt at their velleities of rebellion; and oppressed by their sense of social inferiority. No wonder! All through his childhood, Dostoevsky had been placed psychically in exactly the same position by his father, and by the obvious social situation of his family.

  The ambivalence of Dostoevsky’s emotions about his father was also, unquestionably, of the greatest significance for his future. No doubt it was in the fluctuations of his own psyche between resentment and filial piety that he first glimpsed the psychological paradoxes whose exploration became the hallmark of his genius. And one can locate the emotive roots of his Christian ideal in the evident desire of the young Dostoevsky to resolve this ambivalence by an act of self-transcendence, a sacrifice of the ego through identification with the other (in this case, his father). Whether one calls such a sacrifice moral masochism, as Freud did, or, more traditionally, moral self-conquest, the fact remains that Dostoevsky as a boy and youth was not only hostile and inimical to his father but also struggled to understand and to forgive him. This struggle then became fused with the Christian images and ideals that he was taught from the very first moment that he awoke consciously to life. All of Dostoevsky’s later values can thus be seen as deriving from the synthesis of this early psychic need with the religious superstructure that gave it a universal and cosmic import, and elevated it to the stature of the fulfillment of man’s destiny on earth.

  1 DW (January 1877); see also, for the self-comparison with Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for A Raw Youth, ed. Edward Wasiolek, trans. Victor Terras (Chicago, 1969), 425, 544–545.

  2 ZT, 21.

  3 A. M. Dostoevsky, Vospominaniya (Leningrad, 1930), 17–18.

  4 DVS, 1: 44.

  5 DW (1873, no. 1), 6.

  6 Pis’ma, 2: 549; August 16, 1839.

  7 V. S. Nechaeva, V seme i usadbe Dostoevskikh (Moscow, 1939), 109.

  8 Ibid., 5.

  9 DVS, 1: 76.

  10 Nechaeva, V seme, 77.

  11 DVS, 1: 87.

  12 Nechaeva, V seme, 81.

  13 Ibid., 99.

  14 Ibid., 106.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Ibid., 109.

  17 Ibid., 111.

  18 DVS, 1: 55, 57.

  19 Ibid., 57.

  20 DZhP, 33.

  21 DVS, 1: 64.

  22 Nechaeva, V seme, 83.

  23 DVS, 1: 209. Tolstoy’s second son, Ilya, born in 1866, writes in his memoirs: “The world was divided into two parts, one composed of ourselves and the other of everyone else. We were special people and the others were not our equals. . . . It was mostly maman, of course, who was guilty of entertaining such notions, but papa, too, jealously guarded us from association with the village children. He was responsible to a considerable degree for the groundless arrogance and self-esteem that such an upbringing inculcated into us, and from which I found it so hard to free myself.” Edward Crankshaw, Tolstoy: The Making of a Novelist (New York, 1974), 253.

  24 DW (July–August 1877), 752.

  25 DVS, 1: 72.

  26 Ibid., 76.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Ibid., 75.

  29 DZhP, 26.

  30 DVS, 1: 82.

  31 Ibid., 83–84.

  32 Ibid., 84.

  33 Pis’ma, 1: 52; October 31, 1838.

  34 DVS, 1: 59.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Religious and Cultural Background

  Dostoevsky’s contemporary, Alexander Herzen, remarks in his memoirs that “nowhere does religion play so modest a role in education as in Russia.”1 Herzen was, of course, talking about the education of the male children of the landed or service aristocracy, whose parents had been raised for several generations on the culture of the French Enlightenment and for whom Voltaire had been a kind of patron saint. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, such parents had long since ceased to be concerned about Orthodox Christianity, even though they continued to baptize their children in the state religion and to structure their lives in accordance with its rituals. The war years and the post-Napoleonic period, in Russia as elsewhere, were marked by a wave of emotionalism and a revival of religion. But in Russia this stimulated the growth of Freemasonry and various revivalist sects rather than any massive return to the official faith. Most upper-class Russians would have shared the attitude exemplified in Herzen’s anecdote about his host at a dinner party who, when asked whether he was serving Lenten dishes out of personal conviction, replied that it was “simply and solely for the sake of the servants.”2

  Parents with such ideas would scarcely consider it indispensable to provide their offspring with any kind of formal religious education. It was only at fifteen (after he had read Voltaire, as Herzen remarks) that Herzen’s father “brought in a priest to give religious instruction so far as this was necessary for entrance into the University.”3 Tolstoy, though raised largely by devout female relatives, was also never given any religious education as a child. Turgenev’s monstrous mother held the religion of the common people in such contempt that, instead of the usual prayers, she substituted each day at table the reading of a French translation of Thomas à Kempis.

  Only against such a background can one appreciate the full force of Dostoevsky’s quiet words: “I came from a pious Russian family. . . . In our family, we knew the Gospel almost from the cradle.”4 This is, as we know from Andrey, literally true: the children were all taught to read by their mother from a well-known eighteenth-century religious primer, translated from the German and titled One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories from the Old and New Testaments. Coarse lithographs accompanying the text depicted various episodes from the scriptures—the creation of the world, Adam and Eve in Paradise, the Flood, the raising of Lazarus, the rebellion of Job the just man against God. The very first impressions that awakened the consciousness of the child were those embodying the teachings of the Christian faith, and the world thereafter for Dostoevsky would always remain transfigured by the glow of this supernatural illumination. Dost
oevsky was to say later that the problem of the existence of God had tormented him all his life; but this only confirms that it was always emotionally impossible for him to accept a world that had no relation to a God of any kind.

  One of his earliest childhood memories was that of saying his prayers before the icons in the presence of admiring guests. “I put all my trust in Thee, O Lord!” the child intoned. “Mother of God, keep me and preserve me under Thy wing!”5 In the Dostoevsky household, such a childish performance of a religious ritual was evidently a source of pride and social satisfaction. To reinforce the effect of this early religious initiation, a deacon came to the house regularly to give formal instruction. This clergyman also taught at the neighboring Catherine Institute for Girls, a fashionable school for daughters of the aristocracy; and this meant that, unlike the majority of the Russian non-monastic clergy, he would have been highly literate. “He possessed an uncommon verbal gift,” writes Andrey, “and the entire lesson . . . was spent telling stories, or, as we called it, interpreting the Scriptures.”6 The children also were required to study the introduction to religion composed by the metropolitan Filaret, whose first sentence Andrey still remembers after more than half a century: “The One God, worshipped in the Holy Trinity, is eternal, that is, has no beginning nor end to his being, but always was, is, and will be.”7 The attempt of theologians to rationalize the mysteries of faith, it would appear, never held any appeal for Dostoevsky. What stirred his feelings to the depths was the story of the Advent as a divine-human narrative full of character and action—as an account of real people living and responding with passion and fervor to the word of God.

  Religion not only loomed large because of its manifest status in the eyes of his parents and relatives, it was also involved quite naturally with the most exciting experiences of his earliest years, the events that stood out as joyful breaks in his monotonous and laborious routine. The name of Dostoevsky has become so inalterably associated with that of St. Petersburg that one tends to forget he was born in Moscow—“the city of innumerable churches, of everlasting bells, of endless processions, of palace and church combined,” the city that the peasants called “our Holy Mother.”8 The beating heart of all this intense religious life was the Kremlin; and whenever the Dostoevsky family went for an outing in the city, they invariably directed their steps toward this sacred spot. “Every visit to the Kremlin and the Moscow cathedrals,” Dostoevsky remembered later, “was, for me, something very solemn.”9 Time and again he wandered through its forest of bulbous cupolas, listened to the many-tongued harmony of its bell towers, contemplated its treasured relics and richly decorated cathedrals, from whose walls the Orthodox saints, as the much-traveled Théophile Gautier saw them, stared down with eyes that seemed “to menace, though their arms extended to bless.”10

  The stout walls and crenelated battlements of the Kremlin bore mute testimony to its function as a fortress as well as a religious sanctuary, and reminded the onlooker that it was not only a place of sacred worship but also a monument to Russia’s historical grandeur. The God-anointed tsars were crowned in the Cathedral of the Assumption; another church contained the sepulchers of all the past rulers of Russia, who, clothed in flowing white robes and with a halo encircling their head, appeared on the wall above each tomb. In Russia, as a student of its ecclesiastical history reminds us, “the national and religious elements have been identified far more closely than in the West,”11 and one of the great landmarks of this symbiosis is the Kremlin. The Russian struggle against foreign invaders—whether pagan Tartar, Mohammedan Turk, German or Polish Catholic, or Swedish Lutheran—has always been a struggle on behalf of the Orthodox faith. By the early nineteenth century the two powerful idea-feelings of religion and nationalism had been inseparable for Russians for a thousand years. One can well understand how they must have blended together in Dostoevsky’s consciousness, during these childhood excursions, into an inextricable mélange of ardor and devotion that he later found it impossible to disentangle.

  Up until the age of ten, when his parents acquired their small property in the country, Dostoevsky and his brothers and sisters left the city only once a year. Mme Dostoevsky always took the older children, accompanied by some relatives or friends, for an annual spring excursion to the monastery of the Trinity and St. Sergey about sixty miles from Moscow. This journey required several days by carriage and terminated in a vast fortress-like beehive of churches, monasteries, and hostelries that, over the centuries, had clustered around the spot where St. Sergey had first constructed a hut in the northern forests in the fourteenth century.

  A famous hermit and ascetic, St. Sergey became the patron saint of Moscow when, after he had blessed the armies of Prince Dimitry and sent two of his priestly followers to accompany the troops, Dimitry’s forces inflicted a crushing defeat on the hitherto invincible Tartar hordes. Since that time, the name of St. Sergey had become “at least as dear to every Russian heart as William Tell to a Swiss or as Joan of Arc to a Frenchman.”12 St. Sergey’s humble dwelling in the woods grew into one of the main foci—more important even than the Kremlin—for the indigenous Russian amalgam of religious-patriotic sentiment. Its importance as such a symbol was reinforced in the seventeenth century, when it became the center of national resistance against the Polish invaders in the Time of Troubles.

  Each year the Dostoevsky children visited this vast religious caravansary, swarming both with peasant pilgrims in bark shoes and elegant visitors in glittering uniforms and gowns in the very latest French mode. Each visit, as Andrey recalls, constituted an “epoch” in the lives of all the children;13 for his brother Feodor they were unforgettable. One of the most famous stories in the canonical life of St. Sergey is that of the bear that emerged from the woods to come face-to-face with the saint. Subdued by the sanctity of the holy man, the animal peacefully accepted some of the bread and water that was St. Sergey’s only nourishment, returning each subsequent day to share this frugal meal. This friendship between the beast and the saint is depicted among the frescoes on the entrance tower to the monastery, and Dostoevsky as a child must have seen it many times. In The Brothers Karamazov, when Father Zosima preaches to a young peasant about the innocence of animals and of all of nature, it is the story of St. Sergey and the bear that he uses to point the moral.

  One can gauge from such details how completely Dostoevsky’s childhood immersed him in the spiritual and cultural atmosphere of Old Russian piety and brought him emotively close to the beliefs and feelings of the illiterate peasantry still untouched by secular Western culture. For the Russian upper class, of course, religion and the people were inseparable, and it was by frequenting the servants’ quarters that the offspring of the aristocracy first became acquainted with the sources of their native culture and the deep religious roots of Russian folk-feeling. The role that Pushkin assigned to his old nurse as a transmitter of folk tradition has immortalized this crucial encounter in the lives of so many educated Russians. Dostoevsky also went through a similar archetypal initiation, but for him the contrast between his home environment and that of the servants and the peasants was much less accentuated. One can scarcely imagine him hiding in a closet, like the young Tolstoy, to watch the exciting and unfamiliar spectacle of the saintly fool (yurodivy) who lived in the Tolstoy household saying his nightly prayers amid sobs and exclamations. There was nothing exotic about the people and their faith to Dostoevsky as a child, and both entered his world in a more natural fashion.

  One of the recurring events that the Dostoevsky children looked forward to with the greatest eagerness was the visit of the wet nurses who had been employed to suckle them in infancy. These peasant women lived in villages close to Moscow, and once a year, during the winter lull in peasant life, they came to pay a ceremonial call on the family and spend two or three days as guests. Such visits always gave rise to an orgy of storytelling in the late afternoon, after the children had done their lessons and it was too cold to go outdoors. Andrey remembered these
stories as being a mixture of fairy tales and Russian folk legends; but his four-year-older brother Feodor recalled another type of story.

  “Who has read the Acta Martyrum?” Dostoevsky asks the readers of his Diary of a Writer (1877). “In the whole of Russia the knowledge of the Acta Martyrum is extremely widely diffused—of course, not of the book in toto, but of its spirit, at least. . . . In childhood I heard these narratives myself, before I even learned to read.”14 These stories of the lives of the saints were steeped in the special spirit of Russian kenoticism—the glorification of passive, completely nonheroic and nonresisting suffering, the suffering of the despised and humiliated Christ—that is so remarkable a feature of the Russian religious tradition.15 Even a skeptical foreign observer like the French liberal Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, who had vast personal acquaintance with Russian life and culture, was still struck toward the end of the nineteenth century by the admiration of the Russian common people for “the spirit of asceticism and renunciation, the love of poverty, the craving for self-sacrifice and self-mortification.”16 It was impressions such as these, garnered in earliest childhood from the lips of humble peasant storytellers, that nourished Dostoevsky’s unshakable conviction that the soul of the Russian peasant was imbued with the Christian ethos of love and self-sacrifice.