Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  4. The Academy of Military Engineers

  For the young man from Moscow whose head was filled with thoughts of “the beautiful and sublime,” the moral mediocrity of his comrades came as a withering disillusionment. And if he had been outraged by the incident of the government courier, one can well imagine his horror at the savagery of the upper classes toward all those to whom they stood in a position of authority. The memoirs of D. V. Grigorovich give a searing picture of this feature of academy life, and even at a distance of sixty years, such memories brought back “a painful feeling.”12 Merciless tormenting of the lower-classmen was one of the privileges enjoyed by the older students. The authorities closed their eyes to this cruel sport so long as external discipline was maintained, and any protest or resistance could bring on a mass beating that frequently landed the offender in the hospital.

  On finding himself thrown into this milieu, Dostoevsky’s first reaction was to feel himself a complete stranger and an outcast. Using the language of the Romantic literature that he was then absorbing, he writes to Mikhail just six months after his admission: “the atmosphere of [man’s] soul is composed of the union of heaven and earth; what an unnatural child man is; the law of spiritual nature is broken. . . . It seems to me that the world has taken on a negative meaning, and that from a high, refined spirituality there has emerged a satire.”13 Dostoevsky was already beginning to think of human life as an eternal struggle between the material and the spiritual in man’s nature; and he would always continue to regard the world as a “purgatory,” whose trials and tribulations serve the supreme purpose of moral purification.

  A younger fellow student whom Dostoevsky befriended, and who later became a noted artist, gives this picture of Feodor: “His uniform hung awkwardly, and his knapsack, shako, rifle—all those looked like some sort of fetters that he was obliged to wear temporarily and which weighed him down.”14 Grigorovich tells us that Dostoevsky “already then exhibited traits of unsociability, stayed to one side, did not participate in diversions, sat and buried himself in books, and sought a place to be alone.”15 A. I. Savelyev, a young officer then on duty in the academy, remarks that “he was very religious, and zealously performed all the obligations of the Orthodox Christian faith. He could be seen with the Bible, Zschokke’s Die Stunden der Andacht [a famous collection of devotional essays with a strong emphasis on the necessity of giving Christian love a social application], etc. After the lectures on religion by Father Poluektov, Feodor would converse with him for a long while. All this struck his comrades so much that they dubbed him the monk Photius.”16 Nor did he content himself only with harboring social-Christian ideas in solitude; he tried courageously to put them into practice by opposing some of the abuses of academy life.

  Savelyev recalls that Dostoevsky and his friend Ivan Berezhetsky stood out from the run of students by their “compassion for the poor, weak, and unprotected.” They “employed every means to stop this customary violence, just as they tried to protect the watchmen and all those who looked after the services of the school.”17 Physical maltreatment of the teachers of foreign languages, especially Germans, was also a favorite indoor sport at the academy, and this too Dostoevsky fought against, though not always with success.

  He was the editor of the lithographed student newspaper—which would indicate a certain amount of public authority and acceptance. And, even though known as solitary, he did have a small circle of like-minded friends, some of whom were destined to play an important role in his life. With Grigorovich he shared a passionate interest in literature and the arts; with A. N. Beketov, who was to become the center of a “progressive” circle in the 1840s, a deep social concern and moral passion; Berezhetsky, who vanishes from sight except for this brief moment of his friendship with Dostoevsky, may have attracted him by his mixture of humanitarianism, intellectual pretentiousness, and haughty elegance. It is Berezhetsky who is mentioned in all the memoirs as Dostoevsky’s closest friend in the academy. Savelyev pictures them strolling through the ample rooms of the palace and talking of contemporary poetry (Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Vyazemsky) while the rest of the student body were at the regular Tuesday evening dance class or engaged in outdoor sports. Another memoirist depicts them arguing loudly about Schiller, with Dostoevsky running after Berezhetsky in the corridors to drive home the final word.

  Writing to Mikhail at the beginning of 1840, Feodor says that, in the preceding year, he had had a friend for whom he had felt “the love of a brother”; “I had a companion at my side, the one creature I loved in that way.” This could only have been Berezhetsky, with whom he communed over the works of Schiller. “I learned Schiller by heart, talked him, dreamed him. . . . Reading Schiller with him, I verified in him the noble, fiery Don Carlos and Marquis Posa and Mortimer. That friendship brought me so much sorrow and joy! . . . the name of Schiller has become near and dear to me, a kind of magic sound, evoking so many reveries; they are bitter, brother.”18 The temperature of male friendship in early nineteenth-century Russia was extremely high, and a passionate male attachment under the magical aegis of Schiller was a fairly common occurrence in the 1830s.19 What it represented, in this instance, may be deduced from the names of the Schillerian characters whom Dostoevsky believed he saw embodied in his friend—all are young men inspired by high idealism, by love, or by friendship to serve the great social causes of freedom and justice.

  Why the recollection of his friendship with Berezhetsky should have been “bitter” to Dostoevsky we do not know; some rift had occurred. Here the lucubrations of the underground man may help to fill us in. “Once indeed, I did have a friend. But I was already a tyrant at heart; I wanted to exercise unbounded sway over him. . . . I required of him a disdainful and complete break with [his] surroundings. . . . But when he devoted himself to me entirely I began to hate him immediately and repulsed him—as though all I needed him for was to win a victory over him, to subjugate him and nothing else” (5: 140). This passage may represent Dostoevsky’s mature self-judgment on the perversity of his own character—perversities that we shall soon have ample occasion to see him exhibiting. The difficulties of Dostoevsky’s position in the academy no doubt led him to impose such great demands on his friend’s sympathy and patience that they finally became intolerable. One may perhaps date the beginning of Dostoevsky’s critical attitude toward “Schillerism” as a mode of behavior from such an experience.

  The most important event in Dostoevsky’s life during his years at the academy was the death (or the murder) of his father. At the time of the presumed murder, Dostoevsky had not laid eyes on his father for two years. After depositing his sons in St. Petersburg, Dr. Dostoevsky returned to Moscow and never saw them again. For reasons of health (his application for retirement complains of rheumatic attacks and failing eyesight), he resigned his post and went to live in Darovoe. Deprived of the support of Marya Feodorovna, and of his one or two friends on the hospital staff, he went to pieces morally in the solitude of the provinces. Alyona Frolovna, who continued in her post as housekeeper, heard him carrying on long conversations with his dead wife as if she were present, and it was at this time that he took to drinking heavily. One of the two young village girls who had served the Dostoevskys as housemaids in Moscow became his mistress and bore him an illegitimate child in 1838. Whether Feodor had any knowledge of what was happening to his father at the time is highly unlikely—one cannot imagine from where he would have obtained the information.

  Freud, in his famous article “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” built an elaborate construction on Dostoevsky’s presumptive reaction to the news of the murder, which, according to psychoanalytic theory, fulfilled the parricidal impulses that he had been harboring because of Oedipal rivalry but suppressing all along. Overcome with guilt on hearing the news, which objectified his most secret and most unbearable wishes, he punished himself by means of his first true epileptic seizure. In fact, there is no source material at our disposal that shows any early evidence of the epilepsy from w
hich Dostoevsky suffered in later life. The “facts” that Freud adduces can be shown to be extremely dubious at best, and at worst simply mistakes; the case history Freud constructed in the effort to “explain” him in psychoanalytic terms is purely fictitious.20 There are, as we shall see, good reasons to accept Freud’s aperçu that Dostoevsky felt implicated in the murder and emotionally assumed a large share of the guilt, but these reasons are quite other than the ones that Freud alleges.

  The problems involved in launching his two sons properly on their future careers were a constant source of anxiety for Dr. Dostoevsky. Nothing seemed to go as planned, and unanticipated expenses kept mounting. There is a good deal of discussion in the correspondence about three hundred rubles that Dr. Dostoevsky had paid, in addition to the regular fee of the preparatory school, so that his sons could receive supplementary instruction in artillery and fortifications—only to learn from them finally that “the three hundred rubles were not at all necessary for [Kostomarov].”21 The news of Mikhail’s rejection by the academy was a great blow, and so was Feodor’s failure to obtain free admission. Dr. Dostoevsky’s letters are full of concern and trepidation; but though his own financial resources were being strained to the utmost, he tried to meet the demands of his sons. A joint letter from them in December 1837 thanks him for the receipt of seventy rubles, which they say is more than sufficient to satisfy their needs. “We have received your letter, and along with it seventy rubles, money soaked in the sweat of toil and your own deprivation. Oh, how that makes it precious to us now! We thank you, thank you from the bottom of our heart, which is fully aware of everything you are doing for us.”22 This is the somewhat exalté style—an imitation of the tone of their parents’ letters—in which both Mikhail and Feodor write to their father. But both were aware that their sentiments were fully justified by the objective situation.

  Dr. Dostoevsky’s chagrins were by no means finished even after his sons had settled into the harness of their respective establishments. Feodor, for reasons that still remain obscure, failed to be promoted during his first year of study, and on receiving the letter announcing the unhappy news, Dr. Dostoevsky suffered a partial stroke. Dostoevsky explained the setback, in letters to both his father and Mikhail, as a result of the enmity of some professors, and he lists his course grades, which are excellent, as proof of the injustice. However, he neglected to list his grade in military drill, which was abysmally low and may have been the real cause of his failure. Since he knew that favoritism was rife in the academy, he may well have believed that his deficiencies in drill alone would not have been enough to cancel out all his other work. Whatever the explanation for his setback, there is no doubt that the whole affair left Dostoevsky with a very bad conscience so far as his father was concerned. And when he tells Mikhail that “I would regret nothing if the tears of our poor father did not burn my soul,”23 at least the last part of this utterance may be taken at face value.

  It is quite likely that Dostoevsky also felt troubled at the reiterated demands he made on his father for extra money. These requests were all couched in terms of necessity; but their real source was Dostoevsky’s desire not to cut too sorry a figure among his more affluent comrades. Dostoevsky may have held most of his fellow students in contempt, but he could not endure the idea of being considered by them both personally odd and socially inferior, and the struggle to maintain his social status and self-esteem is naïvely evident in his letters. He writes his father in the spring of 1839 for money so that he can buy an extra pair of boots besides those issued, order his own tea in addition to the regular ration, and acquire a locker for his books. In justifying this request, he explains to his father that he is merely conforming to the “rules” of his present society. “Why be an exception?” he asks, revealing his own dilemma. “Such exceptions are sometimes exposed to the most awful unpleasantnesses.”24

  The “rules” he talks about, however, were imposed by the need to maintain a becoming social position in the eyes of his comrades. This is confirmed by the memoirs of Count Peter Semenov (who became a noted explorer and natural scientist). It so happened that Semenov shared the same bivouac at Peterhof with Dostoevsky. “I lived in the same camp with him, in the same linen tents . . . and I got along without my own tea (we received some in the morning and the evening), without any more boots than I was issued, and without a trunk for my books, though I read as much as F. M. Dostoevsky. As a result, all this was not actual need but simply a desire not to be different from other comrades who had their own tea and boots and trunk.”25

  So far as one can judge, Dostoevsky never wrote home for funds without receiving the sum requested. In March 1839, he wrote that he was fifty rubles in debt (without explaining why or for what), and asked for ten rubles in addition to pay for expenses at camp. In answer, he received bills that could be exchanged for ninety-four rubles. Two months later he made an additional request, and this drew a response in which Dr. Dostoevsky paints a somber picture of the state of affairs at Darovoe—a picture in accord with the known facts. He reminds his son that, for the last several years, there had been poor harvests, and predicts that this year will bring on total ruin. Even the previous year, he says, things had been so bad that the straw roofs of the peasant huts had been used for fodder; “but that was nothing compared to the present distress. From the beginning of spring not a drop of water, not even dew. Heat and terrible winds have ruined everything. What threatens is not only ruin but total starvation. After this can you continue to grumble at your father for not sending you money?”26 All the same, the amount Dostoevsky had asked for was dispatched with the warning to use it sparingly. This letter was written on May 27, 1839; Dr. Dostoevsky died sometime in early June, perhaps a week or two later. His despairing communication to his son was, literally, his last testament, and Dostoevsky must have received it almost simultaneously with the news of his father’s death.

  It is not necessary to inquire here into the conflicting versions that have been given of the presumed murder. Whether it was a spontaneous outburst of rage or carefully concerted in advance, whether the cause was the unbearable exactions and severity of Dr. Dostoevsky—who made the hapless peasants pay dearly for his own grief and desolation, or whether his fate was sealed by the notable restiveness of the peasants in that region during 1839 because of the burning drought—none of these questions can be answered conclusively. Death apparently came by suffocation, and no marks of foul play were visible on the body. Dr. Dostoevsky was reported to have died of an apoplectic stroke, and though murder was rumored throughout the district, the family decided to let the matter rest. The Kumanins had no great love for the irascible doctor; murder would have been almost impossible to prove and, even if proved, would have meant the exile of almost all the male serfs and the effective destruction of the children’s patrimony. Andrey Dostoevsky surmises that his two older brothers were told that their father had been murdered almost from the start.27

  From all of this, one can well surmise that Dostoevsky may have been overwhelmed by a shock of guilt and remorse on hearing of his father’s death and learning its cause. The uneasiness he had felt all through this period—an uneasiness caused both by his failure to gain promotion and by the awareness that he was exploiting his father’s meager resources to appease his craving for social status—could have suddenly exploded in a frenzy of self-accusation. If his father had been mistreating the peasants abominably, was he not to blame? Was it not to satisfy his purely fanciful “needs” that his father had come to his horrible end?

  If we assume that the turmoil of Dostoevsky’s psyche can be described in some such terms, then we can come close to providing a specific explanation for Dostoevsky’s behavior in the 1840s and for the character of his work. Nothing would have been more natural than for him to try to relieve his guilt by projecting it externally in social terms, where it assumed the particular humanitarian form of joining a conspiracy to spread propaganda against serfdom. The sensitive humanitarian had alre
ady been shocked at the beating of a peasant coachman. How much more would he have been overwhelmed by the scenes at Darovoe that his tortured imagination conjured up—scenes for which he could not avoid assuming some of the responsibility? And thus his sense of guilt became transformed into the burning hatred of serfdom. Only through the destruction of the monstrous system could the trauma of his guilt be assuaged, and it was for this goal that he ultimately embarked on the path that led him to Siberia.

  To this extent, and for these far more self-evident reasons, one can accept Freud’s view that Dostoevsky emotionally assumed a burden of parricidal guilt. But Freud’s acceptance of the family tradition that the shock of the news brought on Dostoevsky’s first epileptic seizure is contradicted by the letters of Dostoevsky himself in 1854, when he first mentions the disease; and it seems unlikely in view of all the other circumstances. None of the people who knew Dostoevsky in the academy and who left memoirs refer to any such attack. All were writing after Dostoevsky’s death, when the existence of his epilepsy had long been public knowledge. Dostoevsky was then living in common quarters with a hundred other classmates and was constantly under surveillance; an epileptic attack would have been very hard to conceal.

  Dostoevsky’s only recorded response to the death of his father—a letter to Mikhail in mid-August 1839—makes no mention of any unusual perturbation on receipt of the news. “My dear brother! I have shed many tears over the death of father”—this is all that is said. What seems to trouble Dostoevsky most is the fate of his younger brothers and sisters, not so much practically as morally; he finds distasteful the idea that they will be educated by the Kumanins. Hence he fervently approves of Mikhail’s plan—never put into practice—to retire to Darovoe after becoming an officer and devoting himself to their upbringing. “The harmonious organization of the soul in the midst of one’s own family, the development of all tendencies on Christian principles, the pride of family virtues, the fear of sin and dishonor—this is the result of such an education. The bones of our parents will sleep tranquilly in the moist earth.”28 This is, clearly, the kind of upbringing and education that he felt he had been given, and that he now tends to idealize under the shock of his loss. There is a total sense of identification with his father in such words, which leads to the desire to perpetuate the values of the family tradition as Dostoevsky now sees them.