Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Dostoevsky’s portrait of Shidlovsky is only one of the numerous passages in his letters in which we can observe him busily assimilating the tenets of what may be called metaphysical Romanticism, with its strong emphasis on man’s relation to a world of supernatural or transcendental forces. During the summer of 1838, as Dostoevsky proudly informs Mikhail, he read “all of Hoffmann in Russian and in German (Kater Murr has not been translated),” as well as “the Faust of Goethe and his shorter poems.”13 This was exactly the moment when the young critic Belinsky was telling his friends that Hoffmann was as great as Shakespeare. Another young critic, P. V. Annenkov, whose reminiscences provide a penetrating and insightful portrait of this period, recalled that “the fantastic world of Hoffmann’s stories seemed . . . a particle of revelation or disclosure of the omnific Absolute Idea.”14 It is again indicative of this era of cultural fluctuation that even Herzen, destined to become one of Russia’s most influential social-political voices, and who had already come under the influence of Saint-Simonism, should have made his début as a writer in 1837 with a celebration of the metaphysical Romanticism of Hoffmann. Dostoevsky was thus in step with the time in his reading and catching up rapidly with the latest taste.

  Dostoevsky probably learned a good deal from Hoffmann’s genius for depicting pathological emotional states and subconscious criminal impulses, as well as for creating a unique poetic atmosphere—a blend of the realistically trivial with a richly imaginative and fantastic dream world. Many years later, in comparing Hoffmann with Poe, Dostoevsky expressed a preference for the German over what he considered the too practical and too down-to-earth American. Poe, he said, confined his fantasy only to the framework of his stories; once given the situation, everything else is presented with startling exactitude and verisimilitude. Hoffmann, on the other hand, “personifies the forces of nature in images,” allows the supernatural to intrude overtly, and “even sometimes seeks his ideal outside the confines of the earthly.” This, in Dostoevsky’s view, makes Hoffmann “immeasurably superior to Poe as a poet” (13: 524). Despite this preference, Dostoevsky’s own work is closer to Poe than to Hoffmann: he too has an uncanny ability to visualize and dramatize the extraordinary within the conventions of realism, and without any (overt) supernatural intrusion.

  Dostoevsky’s tendency now, whenever he wishes to describe his inner life, is to employ the categories of Romantic metaphysics—for example, he remarks in a letter to Mikhail on being a “foreign presence” in the academy, and on the world as a “purgatory of celestial spirits” (a phrase with a very Schillerian ring). As his letter continues, his mood of depression is replaced by one of stormy rebellion: “But just to see the harsh covering under which the universe languishes, to know that one explosion of the will is enough to shatter it and to fuse with the eternal, to know and to remain like the lowliest of mortals . . . that’s terrible! How cowardly man is! Hamlet! Hamlet!”15 Hamlet’s failure becomes a sign of man’s degradation: humanity is not strong enough to live up to its own exalted self-awareness.

  Time and again, in leafing through Dostoevsky’s letters, one sees how well-schooled he had become in this Romantic proclivity for casting his personal problems into cosmic terms. A passage in another letter is important as the first indication of Dostoevsky’s acceptance of a philosophical irrationalism whose roots are to be found in the widespread vogue of Schelling in Russia. Mikhail had written to his brother that “to know more, one must feel less.” Feodor’s answer is a vehement assertion to the contrary. “What do you mean by the word to know?” he asked belligerently. “To know nature, the soul, god, love. . . . These are known by the heart, not the mind.” Dostoevsky argues that thought cannot unriddle the mystery of creation because “mind is a material faculty,” and as such is not in touch with transcendental truth. “Mind is an instrument, a machine, moved by the fire of the soul.” It is the soul (Dostoevsky also uses the word “heart”) that is the true medium for attaining the highest knowledge, for “if the goal of knowledge is love and nature, this opens up a clear field for the heart.” Poetry is thus just as much a medium of knowledge as philosophy, because “the poet, in the transport of inspiration, unriddles God.”16

  If, along with these quotations, we recall Dostoevsky’s absorption of the works of Schiller in communion with Berezhetsky, we can see how strongly he came under the influence of metaphysical Romanticism. And—from important motifs of the later Dostoevsky—it is clear how deep and longlasting this influence was to remain. It will require his long years of hardship and suffering, and the extraordinary experiences he was forced to undergo, before Dostoevsky would be able to transform these influences into the life-tempered genuineness of his tragic art. Dostoevsky’s accusation of cowardice leveled against Hamlet will one day be critically recast in Raskolnikov’s frenzied self-accusations over his inability to be a “Napoleon” and inwardly remaining one of “the lowliest of mortals.” Nor would Dostoevsky forget the idea of suicide—of an “explosion of the will”—as a supreme gesture of metaphysical defiance when he creates the character of Kirillov in Demons. Despite his growing affinity for the new French social Romanticism, metaphysical Romanticism retained its significance for Dostoevsky because it was never spiritually rejected or overcome as a whole. It opened his sensibility to the early nineteenth-century forms in which man struggled to express his age-old religious questionings, and it provided some of the paradigms through which he would ultimately affirm his own genius.

  Equally important in its effect on Dostoevsky, however, was the competing literary current of French social Romanticism. There is, it must be admitted, a certain artificiality in separating these two Romanticisms from each other too sharply. How, for example, is one to dissociate the metaphysical from the social in such a writer as Schiller? Auerbach has said of one of Schiller’s plays, Louise Millerin, that it is “a dagger thrust to the heart of absolutism,”17 and the same phrase can well be applied to them all. Another German critic has written that “what Schiller furthered in his creations from The Robbers to Don Carlos was . . . what the French Revolution translated into fact.”18 The inflammatory effect of Schiller on the birth of more than one revolutionary vocation in Russia is well-known, and if Dostoevsky and Berezhetsky took on themselves the chivalric task of protecting the weak and helpless in the academy, one may be sure that their reading of Schiller had aroused their social conscience. All this being true, however, a distinction can still usefully be drawn between those influences that taught Dostoevsky to view human life primarily in some absolute or transcendental perspective and those that sharpened his awareness of the concrete social issues of his contemporary world.

  Such issues were being posed most luridly in the new French literature that Dostoevsky had been encouraged to read by Cournant’s course. And Shidlovsky’s friendship with Polevoy brought Dostoevsky, even if at one remove, into the orbit of the chief critical advocate of the political liberalism and moral humanitarianism of the French Romantic school. In the same letter in which he speaks of having read Hoffmann and Goethe, Dostoevsky also boasts to Mikhail of having gotten through “almost all of Balzac” and “all of Hugo except Cromwell and Hernani.”19 “Balzac is great,” he writes enthusiastically. “His characters are the creations of universal mind! Not the spirit of a time but the struggle of thousands of years has prepared such a result in the soul of man.”20 This is Dostoevsky’s first ecstatic response to a writer who, as Leonid Grossman has said, played Virgil to his Dante. No predecessor in the European novel was more important for Dostoevsky than Balzac, and such works as Eugénie Grandet and Le père Goriot were to serve as trailblazers clearing the path for his own productions.

  It was Balzac who took over the historical novel of Scott and used it for the treatment of contemporary social life. It was Balzac who first spoke of Scott as having taught him that the modern novel was “un drame dialogué”—and no one would develop the form in this direction more brilliantly than Dostoevsky. Of all of Dostoevsky’s contem
poraries, only Balzac can compare with him in uniting a visionary social observation of astonishing exactitude with an inner drama of the soul that spans the entire range of moral experience from the satanic to the divine.

  For Balzac, modern French society was nothing but the battleground of a ruthless struggle for power between the old aristocracy of birth and the new freebooters of high finance. In this conflict to the death, all the time-honored moral foundations of the human community were being destroyed. “The Golden Calf,” as Harry Levin writes, “[had] indeed usurped the altar and the throne,”21 and Europe was doomed because it could no longer muster any higher values to oppose the unrestricted reign of material interests. This vision of European society, blocked out in Balzac’s monumental proportions, forms part of the background for Dostoevsky’s later vision of the West. If Karamzin had given him a sense that Europe was moribund, it was Balzac who probably first persuaded him that Europe was totally in thrall to Baal, the flesh-god of materialism, and that it could not escape the catastrophe of a bloody class struggle—a conviction shared, after all, by his fellow Balzacians Marx and Engels. But Balzac’s work also gave the young Dostoevsky what may have been his first glimpse of the doctrines of the Saint-Simonian school (in L’Illustre Gaudissart), which opposed the inhumanity of early capitalism and preached a “new Christianity,” interpreting Jesus as the prophet of a “religion of equality.”

  Great as was Dostoevsky’s admiration for Balzac, it was rivaled, if not surpassed, by his worship of Victor Hugo. To judge the significance of this admiration properly, we should remember that, by this time, Hugo and his writings had become a red flag—a symbol for the great wave of social humanitarianism released by the revolution of 1830. “La charité, c’est le socialisme,” wrote Lamartine in 1834,22 indicating the Christian sources of the new social movement, and it was as an expression of such Christian sentiments that Hugo spoke of his own work:

  J’ai, dans le livre, avec le drame, en prose, en vers,

  Plaidé pour les petits et pour les misérables;

  Suppliant les heureux et les inexorables;

  J’ai réhabilité le bouffon, l’histrion,

  Tous les damnés humains, Triboulet, Marion,

  Le laquais, le forçat, et la prostituée.23

  More than thirty years later, Dostoevsky still considered Hugo’s writings to be inspired by “a Christian and highly moral” idea. “It can be formulated as the regeneration of fallen mankind, crushed by the unjust weight of circumstances, the inertia of centuries and by social prejudices . . . [and as] the justification of the humiliated and of all the rejected pariahs of society” (13: 526).

  Hugo’s overriding importance for Dostoevsky is exhibited in a passage in a letter to Mikhail early in 1840, in which he compares Homer and Hugo: “Homer (a legendary figure perhaps like Christ, incarnated by God and sent to us) can be paralleled only with Christ. . . . You see, in The Iliad Homer gave the entire ancient world the organization of its spiritual and earthly life, exactly in the same sense as Christ to the new. . . . Victor Hugo as a lyric poet, with a pure angelic character, with a childlike Christian tendency in his poetry, and no one can compare with him in this. . . . Only Homer, with the same unshakable confidence in his mission, with his childlike faith in the god of poetry whom he serves, is similar in the tendency of the source of his poetry to Victor Hugo.”24

  Quite aside from its relation to Hugo, this passage demonstrates Dostoevsky’s early acquaintance with ideas then considered quite “advanced.” If he is willing to entertain the thought that Homer and Christ have both been sent by God, and that their status in relation to mankind is approximately the same, then the youthful Dostoevsky can hardly be accused of any simple-minded acceptance of conventional religious notions; his words smack much more of the Utopian Socialist doctrine of religion as “progressive revelation”25 than of Christian orthodoxy. Moreover, it is highly significant that Victor Hugo, in the modern world, plays the same role of prophetic mouthpiece of God as is assigned to Homer in the ancient one. Dostoevsky’s thought seems to be that Christ had proclaimed for modernity “the organization of its spiritual and earthly life,” and that Hugo, inspired by this divine source, was expressing in his poetry the true meaning of Christ’s teaching. This would indicate that Dostoevsky’s Christianity had already become strongly social and humanitarian, and was practically identical with what was being called “Socialism” in France. During the summer of 1838, no doubt on Shidlovsky’s recommendation, Dostoevsky plowed through Polevoy’s six-volume History of the Russian People. This was the first Russian work utilizing the doctrines of the liberal French Romantic school of historians such as Thierry and Michelet, and it stressed the importance of the spirit of the people, rather than, as did Karamzin, that of the state and of morally enlightened despots.

  One of the secrets of Dostoevsky’s genius may well have been his refusal ever to decide emotively between the personal and literary tensions created by his equal devotion to the two Romanticisms. We see his commitment to the supernatural, otherworldly, and more traditionally Christian outlook of metaphysical Romanticism—Christian at least in spirit, and even though the artist is substituted for the priest and the saint. But we also have the strong tug of his feelings toward the practical application of the Christian values of pity and love—toward the “philanthropic” groundswell of the French social Romanticism flooding in ever more irresistibly after 1830. The one keeps its eyes devoutly fixed on the eternal, the other responds to the needs of the moment. The former concentrates on the inner struggle of the soul for purification, the latter combats the degrading influence of a brutalizing environment. The supreme value attributed to suffering comes into conflict with compassion for the weak and the oppressed; the need to justify God’s ways to man clashes with the desire to refashion the world. Dostoevsky felt the competing pull of both these moral and religious imperatives, and the balance of their opposing pressures helps to account for the unremittingly tragic impact of his best work.

  1 Pis’ma, 4: 242; May 5, 1839.

  2 DVS, 2: 191.

  3 Pis’ma, 1: 56; January 1, 1840.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid., 51; October 31, 1838.

  6 Cited in G. Prochorov, “Die Brüder Dostojewski und Shidlovski,” Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie 7 (1930), 320.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Cited in V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1948), 14.

  9 Pis’ma, 1: 56; January 1, 1840.

  10 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1971), 65.

  11 Ibid., 66.

  12 “From Adam Smith he sought his training / And was no mean economist; / That is, he could present the gist / Of how states prosper and stay healthy / Without the benefit of gold, / The secret being that, all told, the basic staples make them wealthy. / His father failed to understand, / And mortgaged the ancestral land” (1.7). Translation by Walter Arndt (New York, 1963).

  13 Pis’ma, 1: 47; August 9, 1838.

  14 P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 13.

  15 Pis’ma, 1: 46; August 9, 1838.

  16 Ibid., 50; October 31, 1838.

  17 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 440.

  18 Cited in Benno von Wiese, Friedrich Schiller (Stuttgart, 1959), 448.

  19 Pis’ma, 1: 47; August 9, 1838.

  20 Ibid.

  21 The Gates of Horn (New York, 1963), 191.

  22 Cited in David Owen Evans, Social Romanticism in France, 1830–1848 (Oxford, 1951), 81.

  23 “With book and play, in prose, in verse, I have / Taken up the cause of the weak and those in misery; / Pleading with the happy and the pitiless; / I have raised up the clown, the comedian, / All human beings who are damned, Triboulet, Marion, / The lackey, the convict, and the prostitute.” Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1882), 6: 91.

  24 Pis’ma, 1: 58; January 1, 1840.

  25
See D. G. Charlton, Social Religions in France, 1815–1870 (London, 1963), 84.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Gogol Period

  At the beginning of 1840, Dostoevsky was still an obscure student of military engineering with vague ambitions for a literary career but with nothing to show that such ambitions would ever be realized. By 1845, however, he was being hailed by Belinsky—the most powerful critical force in Russian literature—as the newest revelation on the Russian literary horizon. During these years, he went through a metamorphosis that set him firmly on the road he was to follow the rest of his life. “Brother,” he writes Mikhail in the spring of 1845, “as regards literature I am not as I was two years ago. Then it was childishness, nonsense. Two years of study have brought much and taken much away.”1 What took place during these two years to bring about such a realization?

  If we look for some answer in the events of Dostoevsky’s life, there is little we find there that seems illuminating. His studies at the academy went forward without further incident, and he was promoted to the rank of ensign in August 1841. He continued in the higher classes for officers, but he was now entitled to live outside the school. At first he shared an apartment with a fellow engineer named E. I. Totleben, and this chance acquaintance later played an important role in Dostoevsky’s life after his release from prison camp. Dostoevsky also shared an apartment in 1843 with a young medical student from Revel—a friend of Mikhail’s—named Igor Riesenkampf.