Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  It was clear to an observer like Mme Panaev, who felt genuinely sorry for Dostoevsky, that he was an abnormally high-strung personality whose irritability and susceptibility should be discounted as the symptom of some affliction. This was apparently the view of Belinsky as well. When Turgenev would gleefully relate some of Dostoevsky’s latest enormities to the critic, his response was, “Well, you’re a fine one! You latch on to a sick man, you egg him on, as if you didn’t know that when he gets worked up he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”9 The situation was only envenomed by Grigorovich, a notorious purveyor of gossip, who reported to Dostoevsky everything said about him in his absence; and so Dostoevsky usually arrived at the reunions already boiling with rage.

  Matters came to a head one day sometime in the fall of 1846, when Turgenev went too far in his mockery. Mme Panaev describes the scene: “Once, while Dostoevsky was present, Turgenev depicted his meeting in the provinces with a person who imagined himself a genius, and painted the ridiculous side of this individual in a masterly fashion. Dostoevsky, white as a sheet and quivering from head to foot, took flight, not waiting to hear the rest of Turgenev’s story. I remarked to them all: why drive Dostoevsky out of his mind like that? But Turgenev was in the very highest spirits and carried away the others, so that nobody paid any attention to Dostoevsky’s sudden exit. . . . From that evening, Dostoevsky no longer visited us, and even avoided meeting any member of the circle in the street. . . . He saw only [Grigorovich], who reported that Dostoevsky abused us vehemently . . . that he had become disenchanted with all of us, that all [of us] were envious, heartless, and worthless people.”10 By November 1846 Dostoevsky writes to Mikhail, “They [the Pléiade] are all scoundrels eaten up with envy.”11

  The persecution of the Pléiade turned Dostoevsky’s life into sheer torture. His physical and nervous equilibrium had already shown signs of fragility, and it buckled completely under the new strain. In the spring of 1846 Dostoevsky suffered what he describes as “a severe shock to the whole nervous system.”12 This shock, according to the diagnosis of the time, had caused an excessive influx of blood to the heart and resulted in an inflammation of that organ; it was checked by the application of leeches and two bloodlettings. Dostoevsky was declared out of danger after this treatment but was advised to follow a severe diet, to avoid strong emotions, and to lead an orderly and regular life—advice more easily given, in his case, than followed. In the late spring Dostoevsky’s friend Valerian Maikov suggested that he consult Dr. Stepan Yanovsky, a young medical man just then establishing his practice. Much interested in literature, Yanovsky struck up a friendship with Dostoevsy that lasted for the remainder of their lives. His reminiscences of Dostoevsky in the mid-1840s contain details about his health, although, unfortunately, Yanovsky refers specifically only to a “local ailment” that took several months to cure.13 (Such discretion leads one to suspect that the ailment might have been venereal.)

  5. F. M. Dostoevsky in 1847

  After a few weeks the two young men became fast friends; and Dostoevsky also consulted Yanovsky about the nervous disorders that continued to plague his life. These had grown worse since the days when he believed that someone was snoring beside him at night; now they took the form of veritable “hallucinations,” which he was afraid heralded the onset of what he called a “kondrashka” (apoplexy), that is, one of his fainting fits. While reassuring Dostoevsky that his “hallucinations” were the result of nerves, Yanovsky does report one severe attack of “apoplexy” during the summer of 1847.

  So far as Dostoevsky’s hallucinations are concerned, there is nothing but the report of their existence to be gleaned from Yanovsky’s pages. It is likely, though, that Dostoevsky describes them in The Insulted and Injured (1861), a novel that contains many autobiographical details about his life during the mid-1840s. The narrator, an impoverished young author, writes: “I gradually began at dusk to sink into that condition which is so common with me now at night in my illness, and which I call mystic terror. It is a most oppressive, agonizing state of terror of something that I cannot define, something ungraspable and outside the natural order of things, but which may yet take shape this very minute, as though in mockery of all the conclusions of reason, and come to me and stand before me as an undeniable fact, hideous, horrible, and relentless. . . . [I]n spite of all the protests of reason, . . . the mind . . . loses all power of resistance. It is unheeded, it becomes useless, and this inward division intensifies the agony of suspense. It seems to me something like the anguish of people who are afraid of the dead” (3: 208).

  Dostoevsky later described the same symptoms in conversation with Vsevolod Solovyev, the famous historical novelist. “Two years before Siberia,” he said, “at the time of my various literary difficulties and quarrels, I was the victim of some sort of strange and unbearably torturing nervous illness. I cannot tell you what these hideous sensations were; but I remember them vividly; it often seemed to me that I was dying, and the truth is—real death came and then went away again.”14 His hallucinations contributed to undermine his psychic balance and to make it impossible for him to control his emotions in the face of opposition or hostility.

  All sorts of rumors and stories ridiculing Dostoevsky now began to make the rounds in Petersburg literary circles. At the end of 1846 a satirical poem about Dostoevsky, jointly written by Turgenev and Nekrasov, circulated in manuscript. Called “The Knight of the Rueful Countenance,” it labels Dostoevsky a “pimple” on the face of Russian literature, jeers at his inflated opinion of his literary prowess, and ridicules him for having fainted dead away on being presented to a beautiful, aristocratic society belle who wanted to meet the author of Poor Folk.15 This humiliating incident actually occurred at a ball given by Count Vielgorsky at the beginning of 1846.

  If Dostoevsky displays such a remarkable ability to portray feelings and states of suspicion, persecution, and exasperation reaching the pitch of hysteria, and if he has a tendency to see human relations in terms of a struggle for psychic domination, the reason is surely that he was all too familiar with such phenomena in his own psyche. The combination of excessive vainglory and egoism with an equal desire for acceptance and love is one that he often depicted, and these same incompatibles are manifest in his disastrous relations with the Pléiade.

  These unhappy occurrences led to some critical self-scrutiny. One of the most poignant letters contains an apology for Dostoevsky’s behavior during a holiday at Revel with his brother, and reveals his inability—which he would later embody in so many of his characters—to harmonize his true inner sentiments with his outward behavior. “I remember that you once told me,” he writes Mikhail, “that my behavior with you excluded mutual equality. My dear fellow. This was totally unjust. But I have such an awful, repulsive character. . . . I am ready to give my life for you and yours, but sometimes, when my heart is full of love, you can’t get a kind word out of me. My nerves don’t obey me at such moments. I am ridiculous and disgusting, and I always suffer from the unjust conclusions drawn about me. People say that I am callous and without a heart. . . . I can show that I am a man with a heart and with love only when external circumstances themselves, accidents, jolt me forcibly out of my usual nastiness. Otherwise I am disgusting. I attribute this lack of balance to illness.”16 Such self-analysis goes a long way to explain Dostoevsky’s genius for portraying the contradictory fluctuations of love-hate emotions in his characters, and his limitless tolerance for the gap between deeply felt intention and actual behavior in human affairs.

  6. Feodor’s older brother, M. M. Dostoevsky, in 1847

  Dostoevsky had a stormy interview with Nekrasov prompted by reports that Nekrasov was reading the satirical poem about him aloud at various Petersburg gatherings, and in fact these malicious attacks remained a constant in the stormy relations beween the members of the Pléiade and Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky’s entire attitude to the generation of the 1840s, as he later depicted it in his works, was profoundly affected by his misadventu
res with the Belinsky Pléiade. For he never tired of satirizing the discrepancy between the moral posturings of members of this generation and the petty sordidness of their lives and conduct. And if he felt particularly qualified to undertake the task of unmasking their evasions and hypocrisies, it was because he could always draw on his unhappy memories to confirm his brilliantly devastating exposures.

  1 Cited in DZhP, 121.

  2 Ivan Turgenev, Literary Reminiscences, trans. David Magarshack (New York, 1958), 148.

  3 Pis’ma, 1: 84–85; November 16, 1845.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid., 84.

  6 DVS, 1: 140.

  7 Ibid., 141.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ibid., 142.

  10 Ibid., 142–143.

  11 Pis’ma, 1: 102; November 26, 1846.

  12 Ibid., 90; April 26, 1846.

  13 See DVS, 1: 154–157.

  14 DVS, 2: 191.

  15 It is reprinted in DZhP, 121–122.

  16 Pis’ma, 1: 107–108; January–February 1847.

  CHAPTER 9

  Belinsky and Dostoevsky: I

  Belinsky’s age, as well as his authoritative position, excluded the intimate rivalry that pitted Dostoevsky against his contemporaries; and Dostoevsky, quite naturally, also felt an immense gratitude toward the man who had catapulted him to fame. Belinsky never joined in the persecution and openly expressed his disapproval; but despite all the good will on both sides, the acquaintance that began so promisingly in the late spring of 1845 ended in a quarrel in the first half of 1847. This short span of time remained one of the most important and memorable in Dostoevsky’s life.

  Belinsky was a powerful and passionate personality who stood squarely at the center of the Russian culture of his time; and the memoir literature concerning him is enormous. But the most heartfelt and moving tribute he ever received was the one written by Dostoevsky, remembering, almost thirty years later, the exalted state of rapture in which he had emerged after his first interview with the great critic. “I left in a state of ecstasy. I stopped at the corner of his house, looked up at the sky, at the luminous day, at the passersby, and with my whole being I felt that a solemn moment had occurred in my life, a decisive cleavage; something entirely new had begun, but something that I had not anticipated even in my most impassioned dreams. . . . ‘Oh, I will be worthy of that praise; and what people, what people! . . . such men are only to be found in Russia; they are alone, but they alone have the truth, and . . . the good and the true, always conquer and triumph over vice and evil. We shall win; oh, to be of them, with them!’ . . . That was the most wonderful moment in all my life.”1

  Dostoevsky’s period of elation, however, ended with the publication of Poor Folk. The book was attacked vehemently from many sides, the main criticisms being that it was terribly long-winded, tedious, and its language too obviously an imitation of Gogol’s stylistic mannerisms. He was cheered by the prospect of an impending critical campaign in his favor led by Belinsky, which would include lengthy articles by Odoevsky and Sollogub (he now called the latter “my friend”). “In me,” he had told Mikhail just before the novel was published, “they find a new original current (Belinsky and others) . . . I go deep and search for the whole by examining the atoms, while Gogol grasps the whole directly and thus is not as profound as I am.”2

  7. V. G. Belinsky in 1843

  But the critical campaign in his favor never materialized; and the essay that Belinsky published a few weeks later in Notes of the Fatherland must have proved a bitter disappointment. Even before the publication of this article, Belinsky had begun to nourish reservations about Dostoevsky that he had tried (tactfully but unsuccessfully) to communicate to the young author. During the summer and fall of 1845, Dostoevsky was hard at work on his next important novel, The Double (Dvoinik), and parts were read at Belinsky’s. Annenkov remembers that Belinsky “constantly drew Dostoevsky’s attention to the necessity of . . . acquiring a facility in rendering one’s thoughts, ridding oneself of the complexities of exposition.”3 Belinsky apparently could not accustom himself to the author’s then still diffuse manner of narration with its incessant returns to what had already been said. Dostoevsky, according to Annenkov, “heard the critic’s recommendations out in a mood of affable indifference.”4 But while he may have been self-confidently indifferent to such tentative suggestions, made in the still friendly and private atmosphere of the Pléiade, the same advice had an entirely different edge when confronted in cold print. Every word of qualification struck a mortal blow at Dostoevsky’s boundless vanity and overweening sense of self-importance.

  The Double was published in Notes of the Fatherland early in February 1846, and Belinsky’s article on Dostoevsky discusses both of his works. The general view of The Double, like his view of Poor Folk, is highly favorable. “For everyone initiated into the secrets of art, it is clear at a glance that, in The Double, there is even more creative talent and depth of thought than in Poor Folk.”5 But the negative criticism is equally unequivocal. “It is obvious that the author of The Double has not yet acquired the tact of measure and harmony, and, as a result, many criticize even Poor Folk not without reason for prolixity, though this criticism is less applicable here than to The Double.”6 Such remarks were instantly snapped up by the Pléiade and gleefully repeated. This was the moment that Dostoevsky suffered the severe nervous illness referred to earlier, and the shock of his disappointment obviously contributed to his malady. “All this,” he tells Mikhail, “was hell for me for a time, and I fell sick from chagrin.”7 Dostoevsky managed to survive this blow, however, and his friendship with Belinsky apparently remained unimpaired.

  Then, during the early fall of 1846, Dostoevsky unwittingly became involved in a rivalry that rocked all of Petersburg literary life and placed an additional strain on his relations with Belinsky. For the critic had broken with Kraevsky, the powerful proprietor of Notes of the Fatherland, and joined his friends Nekrasov and Panaev, who had obtained editorial control of The Contemporary (Sovremennik)—the famous periodical founded by Pushkin. All of Kraevsky’s contributors were now summoned to choose between their old affiliation and their loyalty to Belinsky’s literary and moral ideals.

  Dostoevsky had already begun his customary system of taking advances for unwritten work and was heavily in debt to Kraevsky. Moreover, despite his reverence for Belinsky, his personal feud with the Pléiade had been getting worse, and he had now become friendly with another coterie of lively intellectuals, one of whose members, the talented young Valerian Maikov, had replaced Belinsky at the key post of chief critic of Notes of the Fatherland. Dostoevsky refused to align himself entirely on the side of The Contemporary, and the consequences of his effort to stay above the battle soon made themselves felt. “I have had the unpleasantness of quarreling definitively with The Contemporary in the person of Nekrasov,” he writes Mikhail in November 1846. “He became annoyed because I continue to give stories to Kraevsky, to whom I am in debt, and because I would not declare publicly that I do not belong to Notes of the Fatherland.”8

  The very next month, Belinsky spoke of Dostoevsky again in a survey of Russian literature for 1846, and the terms in which he criticizes him are now much sharper and much less apologetic. Reading between the lines, we can glimpse Belinsky’s suspicion that Dostoevsky’s work was moving in a direction opposed to the one he would have wished him to follow. Though he does not renounce his protégé, the effect of his soaring compliments is considerably modified by a more serious objection. The Double, he says, also “suffers from another important defect: its fantastic setting. In our days the fantastic can have a place only in madhouses, but not in literature, being the business of doctors, not poets.”9 Such remarks, from the erstwhile ecstatic admirer of Hoffmann, are enough to justify Dostoevsky’s charge that Belinsky “is such a weak person that even in literary matters he keeps continually changing his mind.”10

  As for Dostoevsky’s next story, “Mr. Prokharchin,” published in the Octob
er 1846 issue of Notes of the Fatherland, Belinsky shows no mercy. He finds it “affected, maniéré, and incomprehensible.” As if accepting the personal accusations of the Pléiade against Dostoevsky, he writes that “this strange story” seems to have been “begotten” by “something in the nature of—how shall we say?—ostentation and pretension.”11 Nothing could have been more wounding to Dostoevsky, under the circumstances, than such a thrust from the man whose moral authority still remained for him unimpaired.

  The final break between the two occurred sometime in the months immediately following the publication of this article. Belinsky’s letters contain allusions to Dostoevsky that repeat the gossip making the rounds and express dissatisfaction with his work. Dostoevsky’s stock, quite evidently, was rapidly falling to a new low, and the reports that he may have given Belinsky about his work in progress would hardly have restored him to the critic’s esteem. For Dostoevsky abandoned the two stories he had intended to write for Belinsky’s proposed almanac, which would have remained within the accustomed range of the Natural School, and had now surrendered to a new source of inspiration. “All that is nothing but a stale repetition of what I have long since said,” he writes Mikhail at the end of October 1846. “Now more original, living, and luminous ideas are begging to be put on paper. . . . I am writing another story, and the work goes, as it once did for Poor Folk, freshly, easily, and successfully.”12 This work was “The Landlady” (Khozyaika), of which he speaks again enthusiastically three months later.