Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  The core of Dostoevsky’s portrait of Belinsky is concentrated in an argument between the young writer and the critic concerning the problem of the moral responsibility of the individual (a fundamental Christian moral value) and hence the issue of free will. This issue was of such epochal importance for the later Dostoevsky that one might be inclined to think he had smuggled it back anachronistically into the 1840s. Valerian Maikov, however, attacked Belinsky on this very subject in the winter of 1846–1847, and his attack was launched from a Utopian Socialist position appealing to the figure of Jesus Christ as the great symbol of man’s moral freedom from material determination.

  As Dostoevsky presents it, the dialogue begins with Belinsky’s denial that the suffering and oppressed lower classes had any personal moral responsibility for their actions. “ ‘But, do you know,’ he [Belinsky] screamed one evening (sometimes in a state of great excitement he used to scream), ‘do you know that it is impossible to charge man with sins, and to burden him with debts and turning the other cheek, when society is organized so vilely that man cannot help committing crimes, when he is economically pushed into crime, and that it is stupid and cruel to demand from men what, by the very laws of nature, they cannot accomplish even if they wanted to.’ ”17 The Belinsky speaking here is no longer the old “humanist” who responded to the emotive appeal of Christian moral-religious values; this is the voice of the admirer of Littré, and perhaps also the reader of Max Stirner, who would see the moral will as helpless or nonexistent and the criminal acts of the oppressed only as a natural and legitimate expression of their “egoistic” needs.

  The conversation turns to the personality of Christ; and it is revelatory of the time that no discussion of social problems could avoid taking a position about Christianity. Dostoevsky continues: “ ‘I’m really touched to look at him,’ said Belinsky, interrupting his furious exclamations, turning to his friend [also present] and pointing at me [Dostoevsky]. ‘Every time I mention Christ his face changes expression as if he were ready to start weeping. Yes, believe me, you naïve person’—he turned again to me abruptly—‘believe me that your Christ, if he were born in our day, would simply vanish in the face of contemporary science and of the contemporary movers of mankind.’ ”18

  If Dostoevsky’s face registered such extreme emotion, it was because Belinsky’s words about Christ were of a coarseness of which Belinsky was fully capable. “That man [Belinsky],” Dostoevsky writes in 1871 to Strakhov, “reviled Christ to me in the most obscene and abusive way.”19 Moreover, Belinsky’s comments betray the manifest Left Hegelian influence of Strauss, who had attributed Christ’s charismatic powers to the fact that he lived in a pre-rational world. The reply to this Left Hegelian thrust is uttered by Belinsky’s unnamed friend and is appropriately Utopian Socialist: “ ‘Well, no: if Christ appeared now, He would join the movement and would lead it . . . .’ ‘All right, all right,’ Belinsky agreed with surprising suddenness—‘He would, as you say, join the Socialists and follow them.’ ”20 Belinsky’s uncertainty on this crucial point reveals his own transitional state of mind, although at the end of 1846, Belinsky had not long to go before calling the Utopian Socialists “social and virtuous asses.”21

  Dostoevsky’s comment on the interchange leaves no doubt about the ideological crosscurrents that were really involved. “Those movers of mankind whom Christ was destined to join were the French: George Sand above all, the now totally forgotten Cabet, Pierre Leroux, and Proudhon, then only just having begun his career. . . . There was also a German before whom [Belinsky] bowed to with deference then—Feuerbach. Strauss was spoken of with reverence.”22 Christ would thus have, quite accurately, joined the movement of the preponderantly Utopian Socialist and moral-religious French; the Left Hegelian Germans that are mentioned had rejected all claims to the supernatural but had not rejected Christian moral values. Dostoevsky’s judicious phrasing leaves those like Stirner, who had rejected such values, out of the group that Belinsky believed “Christ was destined to join.” In fact, the argument on which he reports—the argument not only of Belinsky with Dostoevsky, but also of Belinsky with himself—was really being carried on between the two competing doctrines then disputing for the ideological mastery of the Left throughout the world.23

  “In the last year of [Belinsky’s] life,” concludes Dostoevsky, “I no longer went to visit him. He had taken a dislike to me, but I was then passionately following all his teaching.”24 Just what Dostoevsky means by “all his teaching” is terribly vague. Is it the teaching of moral-religious Utopian Socialism? Is it the teaching of Belinsky’s insulting Left Hegelian tirade against Christ, and his denial of free will and responsibility because of the overwhelming weight of “the laws of nature”? Dostoevsky wants the reader (who was now inclined, after a decade’s infatuation with scientific materialism, to revere Christian moral values) to understand that he was converted to Belinsky’s atheism and materialism; but there is good reason to doubt this, and not only from Dostoevsky’s works of this time. Dostoevsky’s closest friends in the next several years refused to surrender the moral-religious inspiration of Utopian Socialism and were critical of Belinsky and of his intellectual heirs who soon appeared on the literary scene.

  The enormous importance of the encounter between the powerful critic and the young novelist is more symbolic than historical, more literary than literal. Dostoevsky’s verbal skirmishes with Belinsky were of crucial significance for him as the future novelist of the spiritual crises of the Russian intelligentsia, but they did not lead to any decisive change in his ideas and values. The force of Belinsky’s impact, though, no doubt explains why Dostoevsky was so determined to tidy up his biography and to give to life the artistic symmetry that, according to his final view of Russian culture, it should rightly have had. For if Belinsky had not really introduced Dostoevsky to Socialism, he had introduced him to atheistic Socialism—the only kind that the Dostoevsky of the 1870s believed to be intellectually honest and self-consistent.

  The mechanical “scientific” materialism that Belinsky admired in Littré did succeed in becoming the philosophical dogma of the Russian Left for much of Dostoevsky’s life. And moral values were derived from a Utilitarian egoism that, if it stemmed more directly from Bentham than from Max Stirner, fully shared the latter’s supreme contempt for all sentimental humanitarianism. Dostoevsky thus had good reason to regard his disputes with Belinsky as having foreshadowed the later development of Russian social-political and cultural life, and his encounter with Belinsky certainly colored his own reaction to such changes. For his Christianity always retained the strongly altruistic and social-humanitarian cast of the 1840s, and it was always pitted against a “rationalism” that served to justify a totally amoral egoism.

  There can be no question either that the religious theme of Dostoevsky’s great novels was profoundly affected by the challenge of Belinsky. Not that atheism, or doubts about the beneficence of God, first loomed on his mental and emotional horizon in 1845. It would be naïve to imagine that the little boy whose consciousness had been stirred by the book of Job, or the young man who had participated in Shidlovsky’s tormented soul searchings, should have needed Belinsky to introduce him to such matters; but it was Belinsky who first acquainted Dostoevsky with the new—and much more intellectually sophisticated—arguments of Strauss, Feuerbach, and probably Stirner. And though his religious faith ultimately emerged unshaken—even strengthened—from the encounter, these doctrines did present him with an acute spiritual dilemma. Traces of this inner crisis can certainly be found in the wrestlings of Dostoevsky’s own characters with the problems of faith and Christ.

  Feuerbach had argued that God—and Christ—were merely fictions representing the alienated essence of mankind’s highest values. The task of mankind was thus to reappropriate its own essence by reassuming the powers and prerogatives alienated to the divine. The Left Hegelians, to be sure, did not recommend this as a task for any particular individual to undertake—it was
only mankind as a whole that could recoup this great human treasure, but Stirner comes very close to urging everyone immediately to embark on their own personal deification. The effect of all this on the young Dostoevsky is not difficult to foresee. Nobody has portrayed more brilliantly the tragic inner dialectic of this movement of atheist humanism, and if Dostoevsky had no effective answer to Belinsky in 1845, he amply made up for it later by the creation of his negative heroes. For when such characters reject God and Christ, they invariably engage in the impossible and self-destructive attempt to transcend the human condition, and to incarnate the Left Hegelian dream of replacing the God-man by the Man-god.25

  The long-range effect of this crisis was probably to sharpen Dostoevsky’s sense of the absolute incompatibility between reason and faith. This paved the way for his later commitment to an irrationalism for which he had been prepared both by his religious and philosophical education and by the psychic experience he called “mystic terror.” Like Kierkegaard, with whom he has so often been compared in the last half-century, Dostoevsky also later indicated that a paradoxical “leap of faith” was the only source of religious certainty. And the similarity of solution derives from the identity of the point of departure: Kierkegaard greatly admired Feuerbach for stressing how impossible it was to combine religion with the scientific and rational character of modern life. “Feuerbach,” writes Karl Löwith, “perceived this contrast in exactly the same way that Kierkegaard did; but the latter drew the equally logical, but exactly opposite, conclusion: that science, and natural science in particular, is simply irrelevant to the religious situation.”26 Dostoevsky too finally chose to take his stand with the existential irrational of the “leap of faith” against Feuerbach’s demand that religion be brought down to earth and submit to the criterion of human reason.

  It would require many years, however, before Dostoevsky would begin to draw such conclusions. For the moment, he sought a more congenial atmosphere than he had found in the Pléiade or with Belinsky personally. A new group of friends, the little-known Beketov Circle, provided the emotional support he was looking for as his literary reputation declined and relations with Belinsky became tense.

  1 Pis’ma, 2: 364; May 18/30, 1871.

  2 Victor Considérant, La destinée sociale, 3 vols. (Paris, 1851), 2: 38.

  3 V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1948), 165–166.

  4 P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 35.

  5 Ivan Turgenev, Literary Reminiscences, trans. David Magarshack (New York, 1958), 123.

  6 V. G. Belinsky, Izbrannye pis’ma, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1955), 2: 259.

  7 Annenkov, Decade, 211–213.

  8 Belinsky, IP, 2: 286.

  9 Belinsky, Works, 369.

  10 V. Evgenyev-Maksimov, Sovremennik v 40–50 godakh (Leningrad, 1934), 143–144.

  11 Annenkov, Decade, 208.

  12 Maxime Leroy, Histoire des idées sociales en France, 3 vols. (Paris, 1946–1954), 2: 442.

  13 Belinsky, IP, 2: 389.

  14 DW (no. 1, 1873), 6–7.

  15 Ibid., 148.

  16 Ibid., 7.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Pis’ma, 2: 364; May 18/30, 1871.

  20 DW (no. 1, 1873), 8.

  21 Evgenyev-Maksimov, Sovremennik, 117.

  22 DW (no. 1, 1873), 8.

  23 When Arnold Ruge, the editorial impresario of the Left Hegelians, arrived in Paris in August 1843 to recruit contributors for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, the atheism of the Left Hegelians proved a major obstacle. “Almost without exception they [the French] were believers and held to Robespierre’s anathema of godless philosophy.” David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London, 1969), 37–38. Writing to Feuerbach from Paris in May 1844, Ruge says disgustedly, “All parties base themselves directly on Christianity.” Cited in Werner Sombart, Der proletarische Sozialismus, 2 vols. (Jena, 1924), 1: 119.

  24 DW (no. 1, 1873), 9.

  25 See Henri de Lubac, Le drame de l’humanisme Athée (Paris, 1950), esp. part 3, and also the penetrating remarks, based on a wide knowledge of the sources, in Andrzej Walicki, W kregu konserwatywnej utopi (Warsaw, 1964), chap. 14.

  26 Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (New York, 1967), 334–335.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Beketov and Petrashevsky Circles

  The first mention of Dostoevsky’s new acquaintances occurs in mid-September 1846—after the crisis induced by the failure of The Double. “I take my dinner with a group,” he writes Mikhail. “Six people . . . including Grigorovich and myself, have gotten together at Beketovs.”1 These were months when Dostoevsky was “almost in a panic of fear about my health,”2 but the psychological aid provided by his friends seems to have restored him completely. “Brother,” he writes two months later, “I am reborn, not only morally but also physically. Never have I felt in myself so much abundance and clarity, so much equanimity of character, so much physical health. I am indebted for much of this to my good friends . . . with whom I live; they are sensible and intelligent people, with hearts of gold, of nobility and character. They cured me by their company.”3 The security supplied by his new milieu was of great importance in helping him to weather the perturbations brought on by Belinsky’s rejection.

  The center of the group was Aleksey N. Beketov, who had been one of Dostoevsky’s intimates at the Academy of Military Engineers, and the group included his two brothers, then still students, Nikolay and Andrey. Grigorovich spoke of Beketov as “the embodiment of goodness and straightforwardness,” around whom people unfailingly clustered because of his outstanding moral qualities. He was the sort of person who “became indignant at every sort of injustice and was responsive to every noble and honorable endeavor,” and it was he who set the dominating tone, which was strongly social-political. “But whoever spoke, and whatever was spoken about . . . everywhere one could hear indignant, noble outbursts against oppression and injustice.”4

  Nothing more is known about the Beketov Circle, which came to an end when the two younger brothers left for the University of Kazan early in 1847. N. Flerovsky, a student at Kazan in 1847, remembered that “They propagated the teaching of Fourier, and here the results were the same as in Petersburg”; presumably he meant that they attracted others and formed a circle.5 The Beketovs were evidently Fourierists; and Dostoevsky’s reference to “the benefits of association” points to the Utopian Socialist orientation of the group. Dostoevsky preferred not to call attention to this new affiliation in his later writing, for his connection with them calls into question the portrait he painted of himself as he was supposed to have been in the 1840s. Far from being a political innocent, abruptly baptized into Socialism, atheism, and materialism all at once by the great intellectual agitator Belinsky, Dostoevsky was a committed moral-religious progressive who stoutly maintained his convictions in the face of Belinsky’s attacks and then allied himself with others of the same persuasion.

  It was at the Beketovs that he became acquainted with the well-known poet, then still a student, Aleksey Pleshcheev, who has already been mentioned and whose name turns up everywhere in the annals of the progressive intelligentsia during the 1840s. The attractive and well-bred scion of an aristocratic family—gentle, tenderhearted, cloudily rhapsodic—Pleshcheev became a close friend of Dostoevsky. During the 1840s, the two young men were inseparable, and, as public evidence of this amity, they dedicated stories to each other. The ethos of Pleshcheev’s work, which constantly evokes the image of the Utopian Socialist Christ, was close to Dostoevsky’s heart. Even in a poem that became “the hymn of several generations of revolutionaries,”6 the poet enjoins his comrades, condemned like himself to torture and execution, to pardon “our senseless executioners”7 with Christian forgiveness.

  It was also through the Beketovs that Dostoevsky struck up an equally close friendship with Valerian Maikov. Two years younger than Dostoevsky, Maiko
v had a brief but meteoric career in Russian letters beginning in 1845 and ending with his untimely death by a stroke in the summer of 1847. During this short span, however, he made a considerable splash by taking over the post of chief critic on Notes of the Fatherland from Belinsky, turning the journal into an organ of the Utopian Socialist Beketov tendency and setting himself up as rival of the powerful reigning arbiter of taste and ideas. Not only did Maikov visit the Beketovs’, he was also among the early members of the circle gathered around Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevsky, whose Friday evenings also attracted Pleshcheev and were soon to become the rallying place for the progressive intelligentsia in Petersburg.

  Maikov praised Dostoevsky fervently and was the only voice raised to defend him against Belinsky’s criticisms. The death of his friend a few months later was a terrible blow to Dostoevsky, depriving him of the one person in the Petersburg literary world thoroughly in tune with the writing he had been producing after Poor Folk, but the memory of Valerian Maikov was kept alive by the close ties Dostoevsky had established with the Maikov family. Their home was the center of a literary-artistic salon at which Dostoevsky, despite his notorious explosiveness, was a frequent and welcome guest. His affection for Valerian was transferred to Apollon, a slightly older brother who had already acquired some reputation as a poet and who was to remain the most loyal of Dostoevsky’s few intimates in later years.

  Valerian Maikov’s vigorous defense of his friend’s literary talent also represented an effort to advance beyond Belinsky as a cultural critic. Hostile to the remnants of German Romantic and Idealistic thought still lurking in the background of Belinsky’s criticism, Maikov proposed to replace them with an empirical foundation drawn from psychology. Art, he said, was grounded in what he called “the law of sympathy,” according to which man understands everything by comparison with himself; he absorbs the world and domesticates it to his feeling (in art) and his understanding (in science and philosophy).8 Psychology—the study of the inner life of man—thus becomes the key offering access to the secrets of the universe. Maikov shared Fourier’s preoccupation with the human psyche as an all-important realm that had never been adequately explored.