Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Riesenkampf’s reminiscences of Dostoevsky are the chief source of information about his life at this time, and they give us our first glimpse of the qualities in his character that were always to make relations with him so difficult and so mutable. “Feodor Mikhailovich was no less good-natured and no less courteous than his brother, but when not in a good mood he often looked at everything through dark glasses, became vexed, forgot good manners, and sometimes was carried away to the point of abusiveness and loss of self-awareness.”2 The inability to bridle his temper—a trait of character that he shared with his father—was to plague Dostoevsky all his life, and to place a heavy burden of tolerance on his friends. Dostoevsky once became exasperated at a social gathering made up largely of members of the foreign colony in Petersburg and, writes Riesenkampf, he “let fly with such a philippic against foreigners that the startled Swiss took him for some sort of enragé and thought it best to beat a retreat.”3 Dostoevsky’s xenophobia, so disagreeably vehement later, went a long way back and could easily be aroused.

  Riesenkampf attributes this extraordinary irascibility to the poor state of his friend’s health. To his medical eye, Dostoevsky’s sallow complexion indicated some blood deficiency, and he noted, too, a tendency to chronic infection of the respiratory organs. And this was not all—for Dostoevsky was continually prey to nervous disorders of various kinds. “He constantly complained to me that, during the night, it seemed that somebody near him was snoring; as a result . . . he was unable to settle down. At such times he got up and spent the rest of the night reading, or most often in working on various stories.”4 Such bouts of insomnia were always followed by periods of extreme irritability, when he would quarrel with everybody for little or no reason. To make matters worse, Dostoevsky was haunted by fears of falling into a lethargic sleep and being buried alive; to forestall such a mishap, he would leave notes asking not to be entombed before the lapse of a certain number of days. Nonetheless, Dostoevsky made great efforts to conceal his various discomfitures and bore them stoically; it was only because they lived together that Riesenkampf became aware of them at all. “In the circle of his friends he always seemed lively, untroubled, self-content.”5

  During his first several years of freedom from the academy, Dostoevsky began to lead the life of a young man about town and to savor some of the delights of a St. Petersburg resident. He assiduously attended the plays and ballets at the Alexandrinsky Theatre. He turned out when Franz Liszt and Ole Bull came to town, when the famed Italian tenor Rubini was performing for a Russian audience. Andrey—who came to live with his brother in the fall of 1841 for a year—mentions occasional card parties in the flat with his fellow officers.6 From a remark to Mikhail on the inconveniences of living with Andrey (“Impossible to work or to amuse oneself—you understand”),7 we surmise that, when the occasion arose, Dostoevsky did not deprive himself of the other pleasures readily available to young men in the capital.

  All these amusements, of course, required a liberal supply of funds, and Dostoevsky was chronically short of cash. This was not so much poverty as a careless prodigality, combined, perhaps, with a bad social conscience. For Dostoevsky received his salary as an officer as well as a large share of the income from the family estate—which was now administered by his brother-in-law, Peter Karepin, who, at the age of forty, had married Dostoevsky’s seventeen-year-old sister Varvara. But he was always in debt nonetheless, and he fell into the self-defeating habit of drawing his salary in advance, as well as borrowing at murderous rates of interest. The thrifty Baltic German Riesenkampf, whom Mikhail had asked to keep an eye on Dostoevsky’s expenses, was appalled by his total lack of the bourgeois virtues. Not only did he spend recklessly on amusements, but he allowed himself to be fleeced unmercifully by his soldier-servant, who supported a mistress and her family on the pickings garnered from Dostoevsky’s expenditures.

  Dostoevsky graduated from the academy in August 1843 and was placed on duty in the drafting department of the St. Petersburg Engineering Command. Relieved of the burden of his studies, he became involved in all sorts of translation schemes from which he hoped to realize a quick profit. A year later, announcing his long-cherished plan to retire from the service, he asked Karepin for the sum of a thousand silver rubles in return for surrendering his share in the family estate when it came to be divided among the heirs. Karepin at first refused this proposition as harmful to the interests of the rest of the family and, feeling called upon to give the young man some fatherly advice, urged him not to lose himself in “Shakespearean dreams.”8 This Philistine animadversion to Shakespeare threw Dostoevsky into a towering rage, and he replied with a series of bitter and insulting letters filled with resentment against the father figure who now blocked his path to freedom. Dostoevsky’s demands were unquestionably inordinate under the circumstances, and he does not cut a favorable figure when he deliberately exaggerates the extent of his need or threatens to turn over his share of the estate to his creditors. But he was desperate to scrape together all he could so as to pay his debts before taking the plunge into independence.9

  These are the major events of Dostoevsky’s life during this five-year period, and what they show is that, beginning in 1843, he began seriously to try to carve out a place for himself in the St. Petersburg Grub Street. This date, as we know, marked the beginning of the major mutation in his literary ideas that extended over the next two years. Since these years coincide quite exactly with the movement of Russian literature from Romanticism to the “philanthropic” social realism of the Natural School, Dostoevsky’s personal development can best be understood in the context of this more general evolution.

  Mikhail arrived in St. Petersburg to take examinations in the winter of 1840–1841, and at his farewell party, in January, Dostoevsky regaled their assembled friends with readings from his works in progress. These were, according to Riesenkampf, two plays, entitled Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov—and that, unfortunately, is all that posterity knows about them. Like Stendhal and Balzac, Dostoevsky probably began with the ambition of writing for the stage for the same reasons given in their case by Victor Brombert: “The novel was simply not a road to quick or sensational success. The lure of the theater, with its promise of immediate glory, audible applause, money, and women, was far greater.”10 Tragedy was the form that enjoyed the most critical prestige at the height of the Romantic period, and it was then also being cultivated both by Shidlovsky and Mikhail.

  In the early 1840s, Dostoevsky’s mind and imagination were filled not only with the characters of Shakespeare and Schiller but also with those of Racine and Corneille. Responding indignantly to Mikhail’s criticism of the classicist form of Racine and Corneille, Feodor springs to their defense by vaunting “the burning, passionate Racine, enraptured by his ideal,” and he has special praise for Phèdre, whose struggle with her guilt-haunted conscience anticipates so many of Dostoevsky’s characters. Indeed, with his subtle analysis of the secret recesses of a moral conscience divided against itself, no earlier writer is closer to Dostoevsky’s psychology than the devoutly Christian Jansenist Racine.11 Corneille also arouses Dostoevsky’s enthusiasm, and he remarks that “with his gigantic characters and Romantic soul he is almost Shakespeare.”12 Such comments display Dostoevsky’s admirable independence of judgment, his ability to appreciate the creative force wherever he finds it regardless of literary fashion.

  Dostoevsky apparently gave up the effort to complete his two plays sometime in 1842, but if we are to judge by a reference a couple of years later to a work called The Jew Yankel, he did not cease to write for the stage. For in January 1844 he asks Mikhail for a loan and swears “by Olympus and by my Jew Yankel (my completed drama, and by what else? perhaps by my moustaches, which I hope will grow one day) that half of what I get . . . will be yours.”13 It is impossible to judge from this jesting promise whether the play was really completed or whether Dostoevsky merely hoped that, like the moustaches, it too would grow. The Jew Yankel is a minor character
in Gogol’s historical novel, Taras Bulba, and whether Dostoevsky finished the play or not, his name indicates that Dostoevsky has shifted his literary model from Pushkin and Schiller to Gogol. That he should even think of making such a character the central figure of a play, rather than Mary Stuart or Boris Godunov, clearly highlights the trend of the times. Tragedy in the grand Romantic style was dead, and the Gogol period of Russian literature—the period of tragicomic realism and social satire—had now begun to sweep all before it.

  The confluence of a number of causes united, in 1843, to transform the Russian literary world. One factor was the publication in 1842 of Gogol’s Dead Souls and of his short story, “The Overcoat.” Another was the internal evolution of the critic Belinsky, who at that time was in charge of the critical section of the journal Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski). A third was that Russian journalism, just at that moment, began to catch up with the new French vogue for what came to be called in Russian “the physiological sketch” (after the French physiologie)—that is, local color sketches of urban life and social types, a form that became popular after the revolution of 1830. The combined effect of all these events gave birth to the Natural School of Russian writers in the 1840s—a group in which, with the success of Poor Folk, Dostoevsky immediately took a prominent place.

  Gogol, to be sure, was not unappreciated before 1842, and Belinsky had hailed him in 1835 as the rising young star of Russian literature. Everybody had been impressed with the vigor, freshness, and originality of Gogol’s work, which earned him immediate personal acceptance by such luminaries as Pushkin and Zhukovsky, but the Russian critical establishment was far from being ready to accord him the status he had been given by Belinsky as “the leader of our literature.”14 The view of Gogol that Dostoevsky imbibed was thus scarcely such as to encourage an attitude of deference or a desire for emulation: the great figures of the Romantic pantheon were much more glamorous, and there was no disagreement about their stature. Dostoevsky had read Gogol by 1840, but there is no indication as yet of any serious literary influence.

  Matters were to change drastically two years later, largely as the result of an epoch-making shift in Belinsky’s ideas. We do not know exactly when Dostoevsky first began to read Belinsky and accept him as an authority. But from everything we already have learned, it is probable that he would have been indifferent to what he may have seen of Belinsky’s work between 1838 and 1840. For these were the years when the young critic was going through his celebrated “reconciliation with reality.” He was then under the influence of M. A. Bakunin, the future revolutionary anarchist, who at this point in his astonishing career was preaching an interpretation of Hegel as a doctrine of total political quietism and unquestioning acceptance of “reality.” Belinsky, with his usual fervid extremism, accepted such ideas wholeheartedly and took them to lengths that caused even Bakunin to protest. The result was a series of articles whose thesis is well described in the memoirs of I. I. Panaev. “Carried away by Bakunin’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy . . . Belinsky . . . spoke with contempt of writers who showed the necessity for social reform. . . . He spoke with particular indignation of George Sand. Art represented for him some sort of higher, isolated world, enclosed in itself, occupied only with eternal truths and not having any link with the squabbles and trifles of our life.”15

  One of the first manifestations of Belinsky’s dislike of contemporary French literature—including Hugo, Lamartine, de Vigny, and Balzac—was an attack, in the spring of 1839, on Polevoy, its chief critical advocate in Russia. Shidlovsky and his young friend Feodor Dostoevsky certainly discussed this jeremiad. About the same time, Shidlovsky attended a benefit for Polevoy that included a vaudeville skit about a young student, Vissarion Glupinsky (glupy means stupid or silly), who “explains Hegelian philosophy and objective individuality to everybody, etc.”16 The author of this work remained anonymous (but was probably Polevoy); and it indicates the opinion about Belinsky that Dostoevsky would have gathered from his own literary circle.

  Belinsky moved from Moscow to Petersburg in the winter of 1839 and, partly under the stimulus of a new milieu and a new group of friends, began to change his ideas quickly. Also, he was deeply troubled by the opposition of such Moscow luminaries as A. I. Herzen and T. N. Granovsky, whose opinions he could not help respecting, to his uncritical adulation of Russian “reality.” During the winter of 1841, his new circle gathered at the home of Panaev once a week for conversation and conviviality, and here Belinsky became acquainted for the first time with the newest French thought. Panaev translated the articles of Pierre Leroux from the Revue Indépendante, just then beginning to appear; the conclusion of George Sand’s Spiridion was put into Russian especially for Belinsky’s benefit; Thiers’s Histoire de la révolution en 1789 was read, as well as Louis Blanc’s vehemently socialist Histoire des dix ans. “His [Belinsky’s] previous indignation against George Sand,” Panaev writes, “was replaced by the most passionate enthusiasm for her. All his previous literary authorities and idols—Goethe, Walter Scott, Schiller, Hoffmann—faded before her. . . . He would only speak of George Sand and [Pierre] Leroux.”17

  The result of all this, in a little more than a year, was to transform Belinsky from his previous disdain for social-political concerns into a violent partisan of the new French social doctrines. In the fall of 1841, he writes to his friend V. P. Botkin that “the idea of Socialism” had become for him “the idea of ideas, the being of beings, the question of questions, the alpha and omega of belief and knowledge. . . . It has (for me) engulfed history and religion and philosophy.”18 It is clear that, whatever “Socialism” may mean to Belinsky, it is infinitely more than the adoption of a new set of social-political ideas. And when he tries to speak about it in more detail, we see that what has impressed him most is the apocalyptic and messianic aspect of all the Utopian Socialist tenets—the idea, particularly strong in the Sand-Leroux preachments, that Socialism is the final realization on earth of the true teachings of Christ. For the last chapters of George Sand’s novel Spiridion reveal that the unsullied doctrine of Christ, shamefully travestied by the despotic Roman Catholic Church, is the same as that proclaimed by the French Revolution. The great Christian heretics of the past have always upheld the eternal evangel of liberty, equality, and fraternity, which is nothing but the modern social-political translation of the original meaning of the Christian doctrine of love.

  The influence of such ideas, intermingled with other Sandian notions bearing on the relations between the sexes, is perceptible in Belinsky’s exposition of his new credo. “And there will come a time—I fervently believe it—when no one will be burned, no one will be decapitated, when the criminal will plead for death . . . and death will be denied him . . . when there will be no senseless forms and rites, no contracts and stipulations on feeling, no duty and obligation, and we shall not yield to will but to love alone; when there will be no husbands and wives, but lovers and mistresses, and when the mistress comes to the lover saying: ‘I love another,’ the lover will answer: ‘I cannot be happy without you, I shall suffer all my life, but go to him whom you love,’ and will not accept her sacrifice, . . . but like God will say to her: I want blessings, not sacrifices. . . . There will be neither rich nor poor, neither kings nor subjects, there will be brethren, there will be men, and, at the word of the Apostle Paul, Christ will pass his power to the Father, and Father-Reason will hold sway once more, but this time in a new heaven and above a new world.”19 This will be the realization, as Belinsky rightly says himself, of the dream of “the Golden Age,” and this dream is what Belinsky refers to as “Socialism.”

  Belinsky’s conversion to this kind of Socialism initiated a new phase in Russian culture of the 1840s. Annenkov, who had left Russia in the midst of Belinsky’s Hegelian period, returned to Petersburg in 1843 to find, much to his surprise, that the Petersburg literati were enthralled by the very same works he had heard about in Paris. “Proudhon’s book, De la propriété
, then almost out of date, Cabet’s Icarie, little read in France itself except by a small circle of poor worker-dreamers, the far more widespread and popular system of Charles Fourier—all these served as objects of study, of impassioned discussions, of questions and expectations of every sort, and understandably so. . . . Whole phalanxes of Russians . . . were overjoyed at the chance to change over from abstract, speculative thought without real content to just the same kind of abstract thought but now with a seemingly real content. . . . The books of the authors already named were in everybody’s hands in those days; they were subjected to thoroughgoing study and discussion; they produced, as Schelling and Hegel had done earlier, their spokesmen, commentators, interpreters, and even, somewhat later—something that had not occurred in connection with earlier theories—their martyrs, too.”20

  All this intellectual agitation at first went on only in the closed small circle of Belinsky’s friends—the nucleus of what later came to be called his Pléiade.21 But this circle was composed, at the same time, of the core of his staff of Notes of the Fatherland, and the ideas that were stirring them soon began to find their way into its pages. There was, for example, a renewed flurry of interest in George Sand, whose novels now began to be translated almost as soon as they appeared in Paris. Much more notice was also given to the new French literature, and attention was discreetly called to its subversive social message. Most important of all, however, was the providential publication of Dead Souls—a true godsend for Belinsky. For this gave him a new Russian work of major artistic stature through which he could translate his ardent social concerns into immediately relevant Russian terms.