Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  The intrigue of Gogol’s Dead Souls deals directly with serfdom as his chief protagonist Chichikov travels through the Russian provinces purchasing “dead souls,” serfs who have died but whose names are still on the tax list and retain some economic value. His provincial landowners are a remarkable gallery of mindless grotesques, limned by the hand of a master and totally appalling in the complacent sloth, triviality, and sordidness of their lives. Belinsky eagerly seized on the book as an exposure of the grim horrors of Russian reality, which, after his Hegelian debauch, he now found even more unbearable. Naturally, one could not speak about such matters too openly in public print; but Belinsky was a master at conveying his ideas in Aesopian language. There was no mistaking what Belinsky meant when he called Dead Souls “a purely Russian and national creation . . . pitilessly tearing the cover off reality and filled with a passionate, impatient, urgent love for the fruitful core of Russian life” (read: the enslaved Russian peasant).22

  Between 1843 and 1845, one spoke of little else in Russian literary journalism except Dead Souls. “It seemed as if [Belinsky] considered it the mission of his life,” Annenkov writes, “to make the content of Dead Souls immune to any supposition that it harbored in it anything other than a true picture, artistically, spiritually, and ethnographically speaking, of the contemporary position of Russian society. . . . He tirelessly pointed out, both by word of mouth and in print, what the right attitudes toward it were, urging his auditors and readers at every opportunity to think over, but to do so seriously and sincerely, the question as to why types of such repulsiveness as were brought out in the novel . . . exist in Russia without horrifying anyone.”23

  Belinsky’s critical campaign was accompanied by general exhortations to Russian writers to follow Gogol’s example. Literature, he now maintained, should turn to contemporary society for its material; and he declared George Sand the greatest of all moderns because he found in her the “vital convictions”24 lacking in Hugo and Balzac. By 1844, in a survey of Russian literature of the previous year, Belinsky was already hailing the appearance of a new school that “deals with the most vital problems of life, destroys the old inveterate prejudices and raises its voice in indignation against the deplorable aspects of contemporary morals and manners, laying bare in all its stark and grim reality ‘all that is constantly before the gaze, but which unseeing eyes heed not, all the frightful appalling mass of trivialities in which our life is steeped, all the depth of cold, disintegrated everyday characters with which our earth teems.’ ”25

  Belinsky here is talking about the young writers of the Natural School who had just begun to loom on the horizon and whose works were being published in Notes of the Fatherland. This group (not yet baptized) had emerged in response to Belinsky’s call for a new literature of social realism, but instead of taking the provincial world of Dead Souls as their model, its members were far more influenced by the Petersburg setting of “The Overcoat,” which coincided opportunely with the latest foreign literary fashion of the physiological sketch. D. V. Grigorovich, Dostoevsky’s erstwhile fellow student at the academy, recalls that “[i]mitators immediately began to appear in Russia. . . . Nekrasov, whose practical mind was always on the lookout, . . . imagined a publication in several small volumes: The Physiology of Petersburg.”26 Invited to write one of these sketches, and deciding to concentrate on the life of the Italian organ-grinders in Petersburg, Grigorovich began to haunt their performances and take notes. “I had . . . then already begun to feel . . . the desire to depict reality as it genuinely is, as Gogol depicts it in “The Overcoat”.”27 In the early autumn of 1844, running into Dostoevsky on the street, Grigorovich dragged him home to get his opinion of this new work.

  By the time he chanced upon Grigorovich, Dostoevsky had already begun to go through a similar literary evolution. Until 1842, and despite his sympathy for the compassionate humanitarianism of the French social Romantics, it is clear that Dostoevsky was still laboring in the literary traces of the dominant taste of the 1830s. There had been, after all, no current of critical opinion in Russia indicating any other direction to follow for a young aspirant to literary fame. Belinsky’s campaign on behalf of Gogol, however, and the transformation of Notes of the Fatherland into a Russian outpost of the French “Socialist” tendency, changed the entire picture at one stroke. And since Dostoevsky had become emotionally committed to the moral ideals of this movement a good while before Belinsky, it is not difficult to understand the alacrity with which he climbed aboard the new cultural bandwagon.

  Beginning in 1843, we find the first references to his intense and enthusiastic preoccupation with Gogol. Of all Russian writers, Riesenkampf tells us, Dostoevsky “was particularly fond of reading Gogol, and loved to declaim pages of Dead Souls by heart.”28 If The Jew Yankel was finished by the latter part of January 1844, then it must have been written sometime in the autumn and winter of 1843, and it would represent Dostoevsky’s first response to the changed climate of Russian literature created by the joint efforts of Gogol and Belinsky.

  Most of the other information about Dostoevsky’s literary activities depicts him as totally absorbed in the new trend. He was, for example, an assiduous reader of the French roman-feuilleton, which, in the early 1840s, had become a staple of French journalism and was one of the most effective means by which humanitarian and Socialist ideas were being propagated. He proposed to Mikhail in late 1843 a joint venture to translate and publish Eugène Sue’s Mathilde—the first novel in which Sue addressed social problems. (The project was abandoned for lack of funds.) Dostoevsky also read the muckraking Les mystères de Paris (in which Sue popularized certain Fourierist ideas), which, when it appeared in Russia in 1844, was enthusiastically promoted by Belinsky. “The author,” he wrote, “wished to present to a depraved and egoistic society worshipping the golden calf the spectacle of the sufferings of wretched people . . . condemned by ignorance and poverty to vice and crime.”29

  At the same time that he was reading Sue, Dostoevsky was also impressed, according to both Riesenkampf and Grigorovich, by Frédéric Soulié’s Mémoires du diable. Exploiting the tradition of Romantic satanism, Soulié combined it with a bitter social satire and wildly melodramatic intrigue. The aim of the book was to show that, under the Restoration and the July Monarchy, “virtue was normally persecuted and exploited, and vice, cunningly masked as virtue, was triumphant.”30 Dostoevsky was also interested in Émile Souvestre, who specialized in novels with parallel plot lines contrasting the fortunes of noble, self-sacrificing characters devoted to the welfare of humanity with those of cold, ambitious careerists who reach the highest rungs of the ladder in a depraved and unjust society. It is no surprise to see Dostoevsky working during the latter half of 1844 on a translation of George Sand’s La dernière Aldini: any work of Sand’s was an eminently marketable commodity. Here she exhibits the moral superiority of a true son of the people—the offspring of humble fisher-folk—to the spineless and decadent aristocracy of his native country. The book is filled with flashes of the revolutionary social Christianity now making its appearance in Sand’s incredibly voluminous production. “Liberalism,” proclaims the hero, “is a religion which should ennoble its followers, and, like Christianity in its early days, make the slave a freeman, the freeman a saint or a martyr.”31 Dostoevsky no doubt toiled over such pages with reverence, but having almost completed the job, he discovered to his dismay that the work had already appeared in Russian.

  Dostoevsky read widely in the numerous novels of George Sand and, as with the entire generation of the 1840s, such works greatly enriched his acquaintance with progressive and revolutionary ideas. In the moving obituary that he wrote forty years later, George Sand, he says, was more important in Russia than Dickens or Balzac because her readers “managed to extract even from novels everything against which [they] were being guarded.”32 The great satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin is even more explicit. “From the France of Saint-Simon, Cabet, Fourier, and Louis Blanc and, in particula
r, George Sand . . . flowed to us [in the 1840s] a faith in mankind; from there gleamed for us the certainty that the Golden Age was to be found not in the past but in the future.”33 George Sand had helped to inspire such a faith in Belinsky, and the novelist whom Renan once called an Aeolian harp, resounding to all the ideological currents blowing in the tempestuous 1840s, also performed the same signal service for Dostoevky.

  There are intriguing resemblances between Sand’s remarkable novel Spiridion (a combination of Gothic mystery story and spiritual autobiography) and certain features of The Brothers Karamazov.34 Both are set in a monastery; both involve the transmission of an ancient and semiheretical religious tradition; both stress that true religion should depend only on free moral choice, not on the tyranny of dogma or institutions; both contain as central characters an old and dying monk—the inheritor of this tradition, who is hated by his fellow monks—and an ardent young disciple inspired by his doctrine and his example; both dramatize the struggle between skeptical reason and true faith. In both novels, the struggle is resolved through a mystical vision that restores a selfless love for all of God’s creation and revives belief in the existence of conscience and the immortality of the soul; in each, the dying guardian of the tradition sends his young follower into the world to apply the doctrine of Christian love to the ills of social life.35 In 1876, Dostoevsky was certain that George Sand had “died a Deist with a firm belief in God and immortal life,” and he pointed out that her Socialism, based as it was “upon the spiritual thirst of mankind for perfection and purity,” coincides with Christianity in its view of human personality as morally responsible.36 Whether or not such comments were directly inspired by recollections of Spiridion, they well illustrate the sort of moral-religious Christian Socialism that George Sand helped to instill in Dostoevsky himself in the early 1840s.

  With the collapse of his hopes for La dernière Aldini, all of Dostoevsky’s plans for obtaining extra funds by translation went glimmering. Nor was he any more successful with another project that seemed promising—a complete Russian version of Schiller’s plays, with Mikhail as translator and himself as editor and publisher. Mikhail did put The Robbers and Don Carlos into Russian, and both were published in periodicals, but the expectation of a complete edition, with substantial profits, once again proved a will-o’-the-wisp. The only enterprise of Dostoevsky’s that succeeded was a translation of Eugénie Grandet, prompted by Balzac’s triumphal presence in Petersburg in the winter of 1843. Translated over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, it was published in the Repertoire and Pantheon in 1844, and this was the manner in which Dostoevsky’s name, prophetically linked to that of Balzac, first appeared in print. By this time he was already sharing a flat with Grigorovich, who, through his acquaintance with Nekrasov, had begun to gravitate toward the orbit of the Belinsky Circle.

  The idea for Poor Folk was conceived in the midst of this abundance of literary activity, all prompted by Dostoevsky’s acute awareness of the new literary temper of the times. “I am finishing a novel about the size of Eugénie Grandet,” he writes to Mikhail in the early fall of 1844. “A rather original novel. . . . I will give it to the Notes of the Fatherland.”37 Dostoevsky was obviously writing to satisfy the new exigencies for Russian literature laid down by Belinsky; but nothing else is really known about the gestation of the novel, except for a remark that he made while hard at work on the book. “I read like a fiend,” he says to Mikhail in the spring of 1845, just as he was putting the finishing touches to his manuscript, “and reading has a strange effect on me. I reread some book I’ve read before, and it’s as if new strength began to stir in me. I penetrate into everything, I understand with precision, and I myself draw from this the ability to create.”38

  It is thus primarily to literature that we should turn for the “sources” of Poor Folk. The title, as well as the style of the diary of the chief female character, Varvara, links her to Karamzin’s sentimental idyll Poor Liza, which laments tearfully over the sad fate of a beauteous and virtuous peasant maiden, seduced and betrayed by a weak-willed young aristocrat.39 Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and Pushkin’s “The Station Master” also played a role in the conception of the work and are referred to in the text. Less visible but perhaps no less crucial was Eugénie Grandet, which celebrates the unselfconscious heroism of a plain country girl who proves capable of true moral grandeur. According to Balzac, this obscure family drama was no less cruel and fateful than that of “the princely House of Atreus.”40 Balzac’s example may well have shown Dostoevsky the way to effecting a similar elevation in the human stature of his own humble protagonists.

  It is precisely the lofty moral stature of Dosotevsky’s humble and humiliated characters that distinguishes them from Gogol’s brilliant caricatures. Indeed, in a journalistic feuilleton written twenty years later, when Dostoevsky views his own literary evolution from the days of his early Romanticism up to his discovery of the theme of his first novel, he makes this very distinction between himself and Gogol. The feuilleton, titled “Petersburg Visions in Verse and Prose,” is written by Dostoevsky’s fictive alter ego, a “romantic dreamer,” and relates a “vision” he experiences while hurrying home one January evening and pausing on the banks of the Neva. There, his eyes open to “something new, to a completely new world” (13: 158). He begins to see “some strange figures, entirely prosaic, . . . just titular councilors, and yet, at the same time, fantastic titular councilors.” Behind them there was someone “who made faces before me, concealed behind all that fantastic crowd, and pulled some kind of strings or springs and all these puppets moved and laughed and everybody laughed!” Then the narrator catches a glimpse of another story that was no laughing matter—“some titular heart, honorable and pure, moral and devoted to the authorities, and together with him some young girl, humiliated and sorrowing, and all their story tore deeply at my heart” (13: 158–159). This story, of course, is the one that Dostoevsky tells in Poor Folk.

  The very text of the vision makes clear that Dostoevsky is talking about literature: the new world that swims into his ken is that of the master puppeteer Gogol—this is a discovery of Gogol. But Gogol is the first step; the second is the discovery of the situation of Poor Folk and of Dostoevsky’s approach to his characters (“honorable and pure,” “humiliated and sorrowing”). After the “vision,” Gogol’s characters, who normally arouse laughter, are seen in such a way that their story “tears deeply at the heart.”

  In another variant of the “vision” used thirty years later in A Raw Youth (1875), the narrator imagines Petersburg vanishing into the sky like smoke. He exclaims: “What if this [Petersburg] fog should part and float away? Would not all this rotten and slimy town go with it . . . and the old Finnish marsh be left as before, and in the midst of it . . . a bronze horseman on a panting, overdriven steed?” (8: 116). The image of Petersburg is associated here with Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman,” and the bronze horseman is Peter the Great as cast in the famous statue by Falconet. Pushkin’s protagonist Evgeny, whose fiancée has just been swept away in the flood of 1824 evoked in the poem, shakes his fist at the statue because it is Peter who is responsible for the ruin of Evgeny’s life. But once the bereaved Evgeny commits his impetuous act of lèse-majesté, he is so terrified and guilt-stricken that he goes out of his mind, imagining that he hears the ringing hoofs of the bronze horseman pursuing him; and his body is finally washed ashore in a hut on a lonely island devastated by the storm.

  Pushkin thus dramatizes the immense power of Petersburg to crush the lives of all those lowly and helpless folk who live in the shadow of its splendors, but, even more important, Pushkin treats the fate of poor Evgeny with sympathy and compassion rather than with the ridicule that Gogol employs for similar types. After the vision, this is exactly the attitude that Dostoevsky himself will adopt toward such characters. Pushkin, in other words, pointed the way for Dostoevsky to overcome his Romanticism without turning into a mere imitator of Gogol; the vision symb
olizes the moment when Dostoevsky became aware of how, by following the example of Pushkin, he could join the new Gogolian trend and affirm his artistic originality at the same time. If, after the vision, Gogol’s characters are seen freshly—and in such a way that their story “tears deeply at the heart”—it is because they are now being viewed through the prism of Pushkin. In short, the “completely new world” that the vision revealed to Dostoevsky was that of his own style of sentimental Naturalism, a synthesis of Gogol, Pushkin—and Dostoevsky.

  1 Pis’ma, 1: 76; March (February) 24, 1845.

  2 A. I. Riesenkampf, “Vospominaniya o F. M. Dostoevskom,” LN 86 (Moscow, 1973), 325.

  3 Ibid., 330.

  4 Ibid., 331.

  5 Ibid.

  6 DVS, 1: 95.

  7 Pis’ma, 1: 65; December 23, 1841.

  8 Ibid., 4: 450; September 5, 1844.

  9 It seems likely that Dostoevsky eventually got his thousand rubles. He told the commission investigating the Petrashevsky affair that he renounced his claim to his parents’ estate in 1845 in return for the immediate payment of a sum of money. N. F. Belchikov, Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev (Moscow, 1971), 123.

  10 Victor Brombert, Stendhal: Fiction and the Themes of Freedom (New York, 1968), 29.

  11 “The equivalence of love and hate, the one incessantly born from the other . . . is at the center of the Racinian psychology of love.” Paul Bénichou, Morales du grand siècle (Paris, 1967), 223.

  12 Pis’ma, 1: 58–59; January 1, 1840.

  13 Ibid., 69; and half of January 1844.

  14 V. G. Belinsky, Izbrannye filosofskie sochineniya, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1950), 1: 215.

  15 I. I. Panaev, Sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1912), 6: 212.

  16 Cited in Yu. Oksman, Letopis zhizn’ i tvorchestvo V. G. Belinskogo (Moscow, 1958), 195.