By the time he meets Nastenka, the bloom of such imaginary romances has long since begun to fade, and the dreamer has become aware of the insubstantiality of their deceptive delights. The meetings with Nastenka finally provide him with that one day (or rather, several “white nights”) of real life, and he knows that as a result his own existence will be changed forever. The dreamer’s love for Nastenka is untainted by selfishness, and he even tries to help her make contact with her elusive fiancé. When the latter appears at last, there is not a trace of jealousy or resentment in his response, even though he knows he is condemned once again to the gloom of his lonely chamber. “May your sky be clear, may your sweet smile be bright and untroubled, and may you be blessed for that moment of blissful happiness which you gave to another, lonely and grateful heart! My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?” (1: 141).
“White Nights” thus terminates on a note of benediction for the one moment of “real” happiness that the dreamer has been vouchsafed. The splendors of the ideal and the imaginary fade into insignificance before the reality of love for a sprightly snip of a girl of glowing flesh and blood. This is Dostoevsky’s vibrantly poetic contribution to the attack on Romantic mechtatelnost’ so common in Russian literature of the late 1840s; and though his little story cannot compete with the novels of Herzen and Goncharov on the same theme, nowhere in Russian literature is it expressed with more sensitivity and lyrical grace. “White Nights” was the only one of Dostoevsky’s minor stories to be greeted favorably by the critics, but it also provided the occasion for a friendly polemic with Aleksey Pleshcheev, who in response wrote his own “Friendly Advice,” dedicated to Dostoevsky.
Pleshcheev’s main character, also a dreamer, sounds very much like Dostoevsky’s and even echoes some of his phrases. But he attains the object of his heart’s desire, marries a wealthy and ordinary young lady—and then settles down to lead the most Philistine existence imaginable! For Pleshcheev, the dreamer’s passion for Nastenka is itself only a less grandiose, more commonplace form of Romantic self-delusion. The Soviet critic who makes this point also remarks that the enticements of mechtatelnost’, even though thematically condemned, are nonetheless painted by Dostoevsky in the most glowing colors.6 The power of imagination is glorified in the very act of seeming to censure its effects, and a good deal of the story’s appeal certainly derives from this ambiguity. Indeed, Dostoevsky pronounces his negative judgment with such elegiac tenderness that one cannot help suspecting a greater sentimental attachment to the richness of Romantic culture than he would perhaps have been willing to acknowledge.
Indeed, Dostoevsky was tied to Romanticism by too many emotional fibers of his being to detach himself from it entirely. If he was always ready to satirize and parody the fatuity of Romantic attitudes, or their use as a screen for egoistic impulses (“in the foreground is of course himself, our dreamer, in his precious person”), he would nonetheless always continue to believe in the importance of maintaining the capacity to be stirred by the imaginative and the ideal. During the 1860s, the theme of Dostoevsky’s early story would become one of the main issues at stake in the battle between the generations. And no matter how much Dostoevsky later belabored the pretensions and the moral vacuity of the Romantic generation of the “fathers,” he would always prefer the latter to their offspring, who fanatically insisted on reducing “real life” exclusively to the matter-of-fact, prosaic, and even grossly material.
Discouraged with turning out copy for Kraevsky, and longing to write in peace and at leisure, Dostoevsky complains to Mikhail in 1846 that what he yearns for is “at last [to] work for Holy Art, a holy work carried out in purity and simplicity of heart—a heart which has never yet so trembled and been stirred as now by all the new images being created in my soul.”7 Dostoevsky has thus by no means abandoned the Romantic Idealist conception of art as only distinguishable in form, but not in substance, from religion, nor would he ever do so in the future.
At about the same time, though, Belinsky was expressing a preference for a socially didactic art as the only kind he could now endure. In December 1847 he writes to Botkin, “I no longer require any more poetry and artistry than necessary to keep the story true; . . . the chief thing is that it should . . . have a moral effect upon society. If it achieves that goal even entirely without poetry and artistry, for me it is nonetheless interesting, and I do not read it, I devour it. . . . I know that I take a one-sided position, but I do not wish to change it and I feel sorrow and pity for those who do not share my opinion.”8
Dostoevsky and Belinsky had broken off relations sometime between January and April of 1847, and Belinsky’s final judgment on his erstwhile disciple was a totally negative one. “I don’t know if I’ve informed you,” the critic wrote to Annenkov early in 1848, “that Dostoevsky has written a story, The Landlady—what terrible rubbish! . . . each work of his is a new decline. . . . I really puffed him up, my friend, in considering Dostoevsky—a genius! . . . I, the leading critic, behaved like an ass to the nth degree.”9 Nor, as we know, did the usually generous and warm-hearted Belinsky find any more favorable words to say about Dostoevsky as a person. “Of Rousseau, I have only read The Confessions and, judging by it . . . I have conceived a powerful dislike of that gentleman. He is so much like Dostoevsky, who is profoundly convinced that all of mankind envies and persecutes him.”10
Even during his darkest days of despair over the poor reception of his works, Dostoevsky still clung to the hope that he could reverse the process of his downfall. He had begun to block out a new major novel probably as early as October 1846, and in December he writes Mikhail that he has agreed to give Kraevsky “the first part of my novel Netotchka Nezvanova.”11 Dostoevsky, we know, was repeatedly forced to break off work on both this novel and “The Landlady” in 1847 for journalistic assignments that brought in much-needed extra cash, though doing so with great reluctance. He knew that only a substantial literary success could halt his precipitous decline in public favor, and he was well aware that a new group of literary competitors was looming on the horizon. “A whole host of new writers have begun to appear,” he had remarked uneasily to Mikhail in April 1846. “Some are my rivals. Herzen (Iskander) and Goncharov stand out the most among them.”12 In the December letter, he confesses to Mikhail, “I can’t help feeling that I’ve begun a campaign against all our literature, journals, and critics, and that with the three parts of my novel in Notes of the Fatherland this year I will again affirm my superiority in the teeth of all who wish me bad luck.”13 It would take over a year, however, before the first installments of Netotchka Nezvanova began to appear at the beginning of 1849.
The unfinished state of Netotchka Nezvanova makes it difficult to obtain any overall sense of what Dostoevsky was trying to do; but it seems clear that the work was designed as a Bildungsroman, depicting the life history of Netotchka as written by her in maturity and reflecting the experiences that shaped her life. The direct influence of George Sand is felt in this novel fragment more strongly than anywhere else in Dostoevsky, and his young heroine was probably intended as a Russian analogue to Lucrezia Floriani, or to Sand’s even more famous Venetian cantatrice Consuelo (in the novel by that name). The book would have been the Romantic autobiography of an artist, so beloved of novelists in the 1830s, and in choosing this old-fashioned genre as a model, Dostoevsky was following the same stylistic impulse that had led him to the sentimental epistolary novel in Poor Folk, the Doppelgänger technique in The Double, and the Romantic folk-tale in “The Landlady.” In each case, he took a form that had become outmoded and attempted to revitalize it with a new, contemporary significance.
Judging by the three episodes that Dostoevsky completed, this significance would have centered on an immediate cultural issue. As a result of the concerted attack on Romantic values, doubts about the function and the status of art had begun to be expressed everywhere in Russian literature of the late 1840s. Dostoevsky wished to por
tray a character that unites a dedication to art with an equally firm commitment to the highest moral-social ideals. Netotchka’s life begins in the shadow of an artistic obsession that disorients her moral sensibility. But, triumphantly overcoming this initial handicap, her love of art would go hand in hand with a sensitive and fearless moral-social conscience. With this work, then, Dostoevsky was endeavoring to steer a middle way between the discredited Romantic glorification of art and the temptation, so easily succumbed to by Belinsky, to discard the values of art entirely in favor of the utilitarian and the practical.
The question of the supreme moral-spiritual significance of art was one that concerned Dostoevsky deeply. He firmly believed that in following his own literary path he was not betraying the humane outlook that he fully shared wth the Natural School. The subtitle of the novel—The History of a Woman—makes clear that Dostoevsky, like George Sand, intended to emphasize motifs involving the status of the female sex. Moreover, Netotchka’s success in becoming a great artist in the face of her miserable origins would reveal all the wealth of neglected talent in the socially outcast and despised, as well as in her supposedly inferior biological status.
In all these ways, Dostoevsky was endeavoring to tap some of the interest in “the woman question” then so prominent on the Russian literary scene and that had already been utilized in such novels as Polinka Sachs and in Herzen’s story “The Thieving Magpie.” Herzen anticipates Dostoevsky in also having taken a female artist (a gifted serf actress) as the heroine of his tale, but he shows her destruction when she rejects the sexual advances of her owner and patron. Dostoevsky’s aim, unprecedented in the Russian novel of his time, was to depict a talented and strong-willed woman who refuses to allow herself to be crushed—who becomes the main positive heroine of a major novel. In doing so he hoped once again, as with Poor Folk, to reestablish his independent position on the Russian social-cultural scene and offer an alternative both to Herzen’s bleakness and despair and to Goncharov’s unappealing submission to meshchantsvo (bourgeois practicality) in A Common Story.
Netotchka’s earliest notions of art are colored by the egoistic cruelty of her stepfather, the artist Yefimov; and she remembers that “the idea became instantly established in my imagination that an artist was a special kind of person not like other people” (2: 62). This first part of Dostoevsky’s novel contains one of the bitterest indictments of Romantic egoism in its “artistic” variety that can be found in the literature of the time. Only Dickens’s Harold Skimpole in Bleak House (published four years later) can compare with the character Yefimov as a moral condemnation of the heartlessness of Romantic aestheticism. The second sequence of Netotchka Nezvanova whisks the heroine, by a miracle of fate, into that very world she had dreamed about under the influence of Yefimov’s obsession. Here, Netotchka learns to understand the significance of her own twisted psychic history. She absorbs the moral that those who have suffered because of the egoism of others should not become oppressors in their turn, and various characters in her new family struggle with and manage to conquer the temptation of egoistic resentment.
The relations between Princess Katya and Netotchka are of particular interest, since they develop into the type of psychological duel that Dostoevsky would later use in so many variations. The impressionable Netotchka, starved for affection, falls passionately in love with the beautiful Katya in a fashion whose erotic overtones are perfectly explicit. Katya is aware of Netotchka’s infatuation, but she refuses to respond to it because her fierce pride resents Netotchka’s intrusion into a world over which Katya had herself reigned supreme. Katya is thus the first of Dostoevsky’s “infernal women” whose wounded pride stands in the way of their acceptance of love and generates, rather, hatred and persecution of the lover; but in this early phase, where the drama is played out between children, the wound is not yet so deep that it can no longer be healed.
It is evident from Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Katya that he was already a master of the love-hate dialectic that was to become so important a feature of his major works. In Katya for the first time it becomes completely self-conscious. When asked about her past behavior by Netotchka, she replies, “Well, I always loved you, always! But then, I was not able to bear it; I thought, I’ll devour her with kisses, or I’ll pinch her to death” (2: 220). This is the naïve form in which Katya explains her ambiguous feelings, which stem from the unwillingness of the prideful ego to surrender its own autonomy to the infringement represented by the temptation of love. In Netotchka Nezvanova, this conflict is still presented purely in moral-psychological terms, but the self-sacrifice of Netotchka (who takes the blame on herself for Katya’s misbehavior), and Katya’s response of love in return, already contain the emotive-experiential basis of Dostoevsky’s Christianity. Salvation for Dostoevsky would always depend on the capacity of the prideful ego (which later becomes identified with the prideful intellect) to surrender to the free self-sacrifice of love made on its behalf by Christ.
The unfinished Netotchka Nezvanova is primarily of interest because it sheds so much light on Dostoevsky’s internal evolution as a writer. Here he moves decisively beyond the limits of the Natural School and already stands at the threshold of the world of his major novels. The setting of his action is no longer confined to the slums of Petersburg or to the world of the bureaucratic chancelleries and their inhabitants, nor can his characters any longer be classified in the well-defined and by this time fairly conventional social-ideological categories of his earlier stories (the downtrodden people, the dreamer). For the first time Dostoevsky’s horizon embraces the higher social sphere of the enlightened, cultivated aristocracy, and his people are now complex individuals grasped primarily in terms of their own quality of personality and in the light of Dostoevsky’s fully elaborated and original psychology of sadomasochism. The significance of Netotchka Nezvanova is that it enables us to pinpoint this pivotal moment in Dostoevsky’s literary career.
Starting out as a member of the Natural School and as a disciple of Gogol, Dostoevsky distinguished himself immediately by his psychological handling of social themes in Poor Folk. More and more, though, he became concerned with the psychic distortions suffered in the struggle of the personality to assert itself and to satisfy the natural human need for dignity and self-respect in a world of rigid class barriers and political despotism. But so long as Dostoevsky’s stories continued to use the familiar iconography of the Natural School, a social causation was always at least implied for the psychic malformation of his characters—even if not stressed sufficiently to satisfy Belinsky. In “The Landlady,” however, Dostoevsky suggested strongly for the first time that such malformations can lead to a masochistic “enjoyment” of self-degradation that reinforces the bonds enslaving personality and makes its captivity partially self-imposed. Nonetheless, the symbolism of the story still attributes the “cause” of Katerina’s emotional imprisonment to a malevolent external force.
It is only with Netotchka Nezvanova that we can see how Dostoevsky’s explorations of personality gradually led him not only to reverse the hierarchy between the psychological and the social assumed by the Natural School but also to entirely disengage his psychology from its earlier direct dependence on social conditioning. For here Dostoevsky brings the theme of sadomasochistic “sensuality” to the foreground as the major source of cruelty and oppression in human relations, and the conquest of such “sensuality” now becomes the overriding moral-social imperative. Even though the social position and relations of the characters serve to frame and motivate the action, Dostoevsky’s focus is no longer on external social conditions and their reflection in the consciousness and in behavior (as with Devushkin or Golyadkin). Rather, it is on the personal qualities that the characters display in the battle against the instinctive tendency of the injured ego to hit back for whatever social-psychic traumas it has been forced to endure. The world of Netotchka Nezvanova is thus no longer exclusively social-psychological but has already become the moral-ps
ychological universe of his later fiction. For the capacity to overcome the sadomasochistic dialectic of a wounded egoism—the capacity to conquer hatred and replace it by love—has now emerged as the ideal center of Dostoevsky’s moral-artistic cosmos.
But all this exists as yet only in germ, as yet contained within the limits of a world where the conflicts have not been driven to the extreme and where nothing (except death) is irreparable. The truly tragic dimension of the later Dostoevsky is still lacking, the sense of the immitigable and the irreconcilable, the clash of contending values, each with its claim to absolute hegemony—love and justice, faith and reason, the God-man and the Man-god—which Dostoevsky alone among all the great novelists has known how to convey with such unrivaled force.
The last installment of Netotchka Nezvanova was published in the May 1849 issue of Notes of the Fatherland without the name of Dostoevsky as author. He had been arrested on April 23, and Kraevsky was forced to obtain special permission to use the manuscript he had already received from the political suspect now under lock and key. No more of the book was written, and Dostoevsky did not take it up again when he began to think of resuming his literary career six or seven years later. His name vanished from sight after his arrest, and what remained predominant until he returned was the negative verdict of Belinsky on everything he had written after Poor Folk. Belinsky had died a year earlier, on May 28, 1848, and Dostoevsky’s reaction reveals how deeply attached he still was, for all their disagreements, to the combative, volatile, and lovable figure of “furious Vissarion.” Visiting Dr. Yanovsky the same day, Dostoevsky made his entrance with the words, “Old fellow, something really terrible has happened—Belinsky is dead!”14 Dostoevsky remained to spend the night, and at three in the morning he suffered an attack of convulsions similar to that of his “kondrashka.”
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