Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Certain incidents vividly etched in Dostoevsky’s boyish imagination what he came to regard as this ethos in action. One involved the housekeeper and nyanya, Alyona Frolovna, whose tall and corpulent personage loomed large in the lives of all the children. Alyona was a free Moscow townswoman, but she brought with her the pagan superstitions and the ritual formalism that the Russian lower classes blended so naturally with their Christianity. Alyona was charged with teaching the children manners; and she informed them solemnly that it would be a deadly sin to eat any food without first having taken a bite of bread, “for so God had ordained!” Suffering from frequent nightmares, she always attributed her outcries, which woke the entire family, to the nocturnal visits of the domovoy—the Russian house-demon or hobgoblin—who had been strangling her with his claws. Alyona had never been married, and called herself a “bride of Christ” (the phrase made a great impression on the children); her sister—a nun living in a cloister near Petersburg—came to visit her once a year, and always spent the day with the Dostoevsky family.17

  The figure of Alyona was thus surrounded for the children with a certain sublime nimbus of the sacred, and this must have made the incident on which Dostoevsky reports even more symbolically striking. It occurred shortly after the Dostoevskys had purchased their country property and was only the first of the misfortunes destined to become linked with this unhappy spot for the family. Most of the peasant huts had been destroyed in the fire of 1833, and the loss, as well as the cost of replacement, was a staggering financial blow for the hard-pressed family. While they were still reeling under the shock of the news, Alyona’s response was to offer the savings being accumulated for her old age: “Suddenly, she whispered to mother: ‘If you should need money, take mine; I have no use for it; I don’t need it.’ ”18 This impulsive gesture remained in the memory of the twelve-year-old Feodor as typical of the capacity of the Russian people, in moments of moral stress, to live up to the Christian ideals they nominally revered but that, in the ordinary course of daily life, they so often violated or betrayed.

  Dostoevsky’s family, rooted in its clerical and merchant origins, had remained relatively untouched by the skepticism and religious incredulity so prevalent among the Russian gentry. As a child, he never felt any separation between the sacred and the profane, between the ordinary and the miraculous; religion was never for him a matter of ritual occasions. The texture of his everyday life was controlled by much the same supernatural forces that, in a more naïvely superstitious form, also dominated the mentality of the Russian common people.

  “Every Sunday and every religious holiday,” writes Andrey, “we unfailingly went to church for mass and, the evening before, to vespers.”19 More important was that the entire mental world of the parents was religiously oriented, and that God permeated every aspect of the young Dostoevsky’s quotidian existence—much as he would have done centuries earlier in an English Puritan or German Pietist household. Andrey tells us that, after the conclusion of the purchase of their estate, his parents immediately went off to utter a prayer of thanksgiving at the chapel of the Iversky Madonna—the most revered icon in Moscow, which the people, in 1812, had wished to carry into battle against the French. The same reflex occurred when the family suddenly heard the news of the fire on their country estate. “I remember that my parents fell on their knees before the icons in the living room,” writes Andrey, “and then left to pray to the Iversky Madonna.”20

  One has only to glance at the letters of Dostoevsky’s parents to be struck by this piously devout aspect of their mentality and to observe them speaking of God with the same combination of sentimental unction and intense practicality that is so striking—and now seems so strange—in Defoe’s novels, or in the sermons of English Puritan divines. For all his medical degree and scientific education, Dr. Dostoevsky never lost the clerical stamp of his early training, and the style of his letters is full of Church Slavonic expressions that reveal his thorough acquaintance with ecclesiastical literature. “How great is the divine mercy!” he writes to his oldest son Mikhail. “How unworthy are we to give thanks to the great and bountiful God for His inexpressible mercy to us! How unjustly have we grumbled, yes, let this serve as an admonitory example for the remainder of our lives, since the All-Highest sent us this transitory trial for our own good and our own welfare!”21 The occasion for this edifying outburst was the acceptance of Mikhail (who had been refused admittance to the Academy of Military Engineers in 1837) into another school of the same kind.

  The letters of Dostoevsky’s mother are more personally expressive in tone, and influenced by the late eighteenth-century sentimental novel rather than by the lives of the saints. But here too the intermingling of the sublime and the trivial, the religious and the mundanely practical, is in evidence. Mme Dostoevsky writes her husband from the country: “I . . . have given thanks to God a hundredfold that He was gracious enough to hear my prayers and brought you safely to Moscow. Do not grumble against God, my friend, do not grieve for me. You know that we were punished by Him; but also granted His grace. With complete steadfastness and faith, let us rely on His sacred providence and He will not withhold His mercy from us.”22 What misfortune Mme Dostoevsky refers to here is unknown; in any case, the remainder of the letter is taken up with a lawsuit concerning Darovoe, and with other purely business matters relating to the crops and the peasants.

  It may be taken for granted that the children were continually being admonished and instructed in much the same style. And for the most gifted of them all, young Feodor, this habit of mind began to stir reflections very early on the most profound and insoluble of religious enigmas—that of God’s relation to man, and the existence of evil, pain, and suffering in a world where the will of a beneficent God presumably prevails. Such reflections would surely have been stimulated by the continual discomfiture with life that his father never hesitated to voice and that, from time to time, take on a truly Job-like note. “True,” he writes his wife, “I will not hide from you that there are sometimes minutes in which I anger my Creator by grumbling against the briefness of the days given me by my lot in life; but do not think anything of it; it will pass.”23 It is improbable that Dr. Dostoevsky, like the father of Kierkegaard, ever rose in revolt against God and cursed him because of the harshness of his fate, but the temptation to do so was continually there and, given his explosive irritability, would scarcely have been concealed.

  Years later, when Dostoevsky was reading the book of Job once again, he wrote his wife that it put him into such a state of “unhealthy rapture” that he almost cried. “It’s a strange thing, Anya, this book is one of the first in my life which made an impression on me; I was then still almost a child.”24 There is an allusion to this revelatory experience of the young boy in The Brothers Karamazov, where Zosima recalls being struck by a reading of the book of Job at the age of eight and feeling that “for the first time in my life I consciously received the seed of God’s word in my heart” (9: 287). This seed was one day to flower into the magnificent growth of Ivan Karamazov’s passionate protest against God’s injustice and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, but it also grew into Alyosha’s submission to the awesomeness of the infinite before which Job too had once bowed his head, and into Zosima’s teaching of the necessity for an ultimate faith in the goodness of God’s mysterious wisdom. It is Dostoevsky’s genius as a writer to have been able to feel (and to express) both these extremes of rejection and acceptance. While the tension of this polarity may have developed out of the ambivalence of Dostoevsky’s psychodynamic relationship with his father, what is more important is to see how early it was transposed and projected into the religious symbolism of the eternal problem of theodicy.

  No less important than the children’s religious instruction was their secular education. Dr. Dostoevsky knew that an open sesame to any sort of advancement in Russian society for his sons was fluency in French, and a language tutor named Souchard (whose day school they attended) was engaged simul
taneously with the deacon who gave them religious instruction. The only text we know assigned by Monsieur Souchard was Voltaire’s La Henriade—a heroic epic filled with the religious orthodoxy appropriate to the theme. Souchard, in addition, was so ardent a Russian patriot that he asked for (and received) special permission from Nicholas I to russify his name. Such a personage was not likely to imbue his pupils, as did so many of the tutors of aristocratic families, with dangerously subversive notions, whether in religion or in politics. Herzen, for example, was told by his French tutor that Louis XVI had been rightfully executed as a traitor to France.

  The secular education of the Dostoevsky children was also carried on by the parents themselves in nightly reading sessions, and it is striking to see by how many threads this early ideological and artistic stimulation is tied to the maturer Dostoevsky. He remembered in 1863 how “I used to spend the long winter evenings before going to bed listening (for I could not yet read), agape with ecstasy and terror, as my parents read aloud to me from the novels of Ann Radcliffe. Then I would rave deliriously about them in my sleep” (5: 46). This was the unforgettable fashion in which he first became acquainted with the novelistic mode that transformed the art of narrative at the end of the eighteenth century. The main structural features of this mode are a plot based on mystery and suspense, characters who always find themselves in situations of extreme psychological and erotic tension, incidents of murder and mayhem, and an atmosphere calculated to impart a shiver of the demonic or supernatural. Dostoevsky would later take over such features of the Gothic technique and carry them to a peak of perfection that has never been surpassed.

  Dr. Dostoevsky also read them Karamzin’s History of the Russian State, the first work to disinter the Russian past from dusty monkish chronicles and poetic legend and to present it as a national epic appealing to a wide circle of cultivated readers: Karamzin, as Pushkin remarked, discovered the Russian past as Columbus had discovered America. Writing in the great eighteenth-century tradition of admiration for enlightened despotism, Karamzin stressed the importance of the autocratic power in maintaining Russian unity and preserving national independence once the Tartar yoke had been thrown off. Andrey tells us that Karamzin was his brother Feodor’s bedside book, a work he read and reread continuously.

  Second in importance only to his History was Karamzin’s famous Letters of a Russian Traveller—a brilliant account of his Wanderjahre in Switzerland, Germany, France, and England; this book too was read aloud and discussed in the Dostoevsky family circle. Karamzin’s work provided several generations of Russian readers with a splendid panorama of the mythical European world they tried so desperately to emulate from afar. The impression they derived from the book, however, would no doubt have been rather mixed. The early stages of the French Revolution coincided with Karamzin’s first visit to France, and while, like so many others, the Masonic liberal Karamzin greeted the revolution with joy, its later phases also filled him with dismay and disillusion. By the time he published his Letters, he warned his countrymen against following the European path, insofar as this had led to subversion and social chaos. Karamzin’s Letters thus helped to propagate the idea, so important for Russian thought in the nineteenth century, that Europe was a doomed and dying civilization.

  The influence of Karamzin’s Letters on Dostoevsky was profound. Early in the book, Karamzin drops in to pay a call on Kant, the sage of Königsberg, who expounds for his young Russian visitor’s benefit the two main ideas of the Critique of Practical Reason (published just the year before). Kant explained that the consciousness of good and evil is innate to mankind, written indelibly into the human heart. Earthly life, however, reveals a glaring contradiction: the virtuous in this world, those who choose to live by the good and obey the moral law, are not always the ones who prosper and receive their just reward. But if, as we must assume, the Eternal Creative Mind is rational and beneficent, then we must also assume that this contradiction will not be left unresolved. Hence we postulate the existence of an immortal life after physical death in which the good receive their reward, even though this postulate can never be proven by human reason. “Here,” Karamzin reports Kant as saying, “reason extinguishes her lamp and we are left in darkness. Only fancy can wander in this darkness and create fictions.” Dostoevsky thus first came across these two ideas, both defying a strictly rational explanation—that moral consciousness (conscience) is an ineradicable part of human nature, and that immortality is a necessary condition of any world order claiming to make moral sense—when he read Karamzin as a boy. What he acquired subsequently only built on this foundation.25

  Many other Russian works were also read in the family circle. Andrey mentions a whole series of recent historical novels by Russian imitators of Walter Scott, the newest literary products of Romantic Nationalism. The children became familiar with the poetry of Zhukovsky, the ballad poetry of the German Romantics, and the works of Derzhavin, whose famous ode to God, written in the tradition of philosophical Deism, powerfully evokes the immensity of the universe and the immeasurable majesty of God’s creative power.

  The years of Dostoevsky’s childhood and adolescence were thus a period of intense literary and intellectual assimilation. He became thoroughly familiar with all the styles and forms of Russian prose, beginning with Karamzin and the historical novel and ranging through such works as Begichev’s family chronicle novel The Kholmsky Family (a precursor of War and Peace), and Dahl’s colloquial sketches of peasant life, which foreshadow Turgenev. Among Russian novels, two were his particular favorites: Narezhny’s Bursak (a picaresque tale in the tradition of Gil Blas), and Serdtse i dumka (Heart and Head), by one of the most original novelists of the 1830s, Alexander Veltman, who here uses the motif of the double for comic and satiric purposes.

  It was thus Russian culture that loomed largest on Dostoevsky’s horizon as a child and overshadowed all the others. Here too, as in the case of his religious education, the contrast with the majority of his contemporaries is marked. Russian parents of the upper class took little personal interest in the education of their children; they turned them over to foreign tutors and governesses as soon as they were out of swaddling bands to acquire the requisite polish of European manners. As a result, while the young Russian nobleman more often than not would be “at home in the literature and history of Western Europe,” he was apt to be “quite ignorant of Russian letters and the past of his own homeland.”26 Herzen’s first reading experiences, for example, were provided by his father’s extensive library of eighteenth-century French literature; and he does not mention a single Russian book in My Past and Thoughts among those he loved as a child. Tolstoy immortalized his good-hearted German tutor in Childhood, but whereas he could recite some poems of Pushkin at the age of eight, he had stumbled on them himself and never received any tutoring in Russian literature or history before going to school a year later. Turgenev too had French and German tutors but only learned to read and write in Russian from his father’s serf-valet; it was at the age of eight, after breaking into a room containing a moldering library, that the first Russian book he ever read (Kheraskov’s hoary old epic, the Rossiada) came into his hands. Dostoevsky was thus taught at an early age to identify himself emotionally with Russia and its past.

  Dr. Dostoevsky did not foresee that the type of education he gave them would inspire in both Mikhail and Feodor an all-exclusive love for literature that, as they matured, turned into dreams of pursuing literary careers. Such dreams were unquestionably stimulated by two decisive literary encounters whose echoes later resounded in Dostoevsky’s writing. In 1831, Dr. Dostoevsky took his wife and older sons to a performance of Schiller’s The Robbers (Die Räuber). His second son, then ten years old, remembered the evening all his life, and referred to it in a letter shortly before his death. “I can justly say,” he writes, “that the tremendous impression I carried away from it then acted very richly on my spiritual side.”27

  This, presumably, was Dostoevsky’s first enc
ounter with the work of the German poet whose role in Russian culture of the early nineteenth century was perhaps more important than that of any other foreign writer.28 In the Diary of a Writer for 1876, he remarks that “[Schiller] soaked into the Russian soul, left an impression on it, and almost marked an epoch in the history of our development.”29 Certain themes from Schiller’s violent Sturm-und-Drang theatrics in The Robbers remained with Dostoevsky all his life. Near its end, when Dostoevsky came to write his own version of The Robbers in The Brothers Karamazov, the abundance of Schillerian references indicates to what extent Dostoevsky could still express his own deepest values in Schillerian terms. There is Karl Moor’s stormy revolt against divine and human fatherhood, offset by his acknowledgment of a moral power stronger than his own will and to whom alone is reserved the task of meting out divine justice. There is also Franz Moor’s use of the cynical doctrines of eighteenth-century materialism to justify his parricidal villainy, though despite his professed atheism he cannot overcome his terror of hell and eternal damnation. It finally proves impossible for him to eradicate that spark of conscience about which Kant had spoken.

  Two years after this first decisive literary encounter, during one of the summers at Darovoe, Dostoevsky gobbled up all the novels of Walter Scott; Andrey depicts him as always carrying around a copy of Quentin Durward or Waverley. “As a result of this reading,” Dostoevsky once wrote, “I carried with me into life so many beautiful and lofty impressions that, surely, they provided my soul with great strength in the fight against seductive, passionate, and corrupting impressions.”30 Some indication of what these impressions were is given in Netotchka Nezvanova, where the young orphan Netotchka finds consolation in her discovery of Scott’s novels. “The feeling for the family portrayed so poetically in the novels of Scott . . . forced itself into my soul deliciously and powerfully as an answer to my memories and sufferings. This feeling for the family was the ideal in whose name Scott created his novels, a feeling to which they gave an exalted historical meaning, and which they depicted as the condition for the preservation of mankind” (2: 450–451).