Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  The moment Dostoevsky was given access to reading material, he threw himself on whatever was available with indiscriminate eagerness, but what he comments on, in his letters to Mikhail, are the new works appearing in Notes of the Fatherland—mostly translations. In this period (known as “the era of censorship terror”), Russian literature was muzzled by a censorship fiercer than any it had known for a long time, and few Russian writers were willing to say anything that might be considered in the least provocative. The notoriously obscurantist Count Buturlin, who headed a special commission to tighten the censorship, was reputed to have said that “if the Gospel were not as widespread as it was, it would be necessary to ban it on account of the democratic spirit it disseminated.”23 Nonetheless, Dostoevsky tried to write. “I have,” he tells Mikhail in his first letter, “thought out three stories and two novels; one of them I am now writing, but I am afraid to work too much.”24 In the next letter, he explains why: “When I was attacked by similar nervous states in the past, I made use of them to write—I can always do more and better writing in this condition—but now I have to hold back, so as not to finish myself off for good.”25

  In prison, the only project Dostoevsky completed was the charming story now called “A Little Hero.” It was given to Mikhail after Dostoevsky had been sent to Siberia, and eight years later it was printed anonymously in Notes of the Fatherland. Taking place in a world that Dostoevsky rarely touches: the world of wealthy landowners living on their country estates—the world of Turgenev and Tolstoy—the story is purely personal, a deft psychological sketch notable in Dostoevsky’s work only for the “normalcy” of the youthful passions it depicts. Nevertheless, the main intrigue—the boy’s worshipful adoration of his beloved—is noteworthy, because his love consists in an act of self-sacrifice to aid a suffering soul and in keeping a secret. Might not Dostoevsky have seen himself precisely in some such terms at this particular moment?

  As one scrutinizes what Dostoevsky wrote and said—in answer to unspecified accusations, and attempting to parry the suspicions of his interrogators—it is clear that he tried to protect himself as best he could; and he made the same effort on behalf of others. “When I went off to Siberia,” he later wrote, “I took with me at least the consolation of having behaved honorably in the investigation, not imputing my guilt to others, and even sacrificing my own interests if I saw the possibility of protecting others from trouble in my deposition. But I held myself in check. I did not confess everything, and for this I was punished more severely.”26 The mixed military-civil court that sentenced Dostoevsky gauged the severity of its punishment according to whether the accused had exhibited any repentance or had freely revealed facts otherwise unknown. Dostoevsky did neither.

  The most important document that Dostoevsky wrote for the Commission of Inquiry was an “Explanation,” which he was asked to submit immediately after the preliminary questioning on May 6. Even though no formal accusations were ever made, the questions put to him indicated the grounds on which he had been taken into custody. Accordingly, he attempted to clarify his actions so as to justify whatever about them might be considered suspicious or subversive. He gives an image of Petrashevsky as a strange and eccentric character, constantly and fussily occupied with futilities, a person hardly to be taken seriously from any practical point of view and of no possible danger to the state. By inference, Dostoevsky’s participation in such activity was equally innocuous.

  Dostoevsky said nothing about the Palm-Durov group because their existence had not yet been discovered. Claiming he had spoken only three times at Petrashevsky’s and only on nonpolitical topics, he attempts to justify what could be considered his “freethinking” and “liberalism.” In the most bizarre vindication recorded in the entire annals of the Petrashevsky proceedings, he maintains that, far from proving any hostility to the régime, whatever inflammatory words he may have uttered should be taken as an exhibition of his trust in the government as the guardian of the rights enjoyed by the citizens of a civilized state! “I was always offended by this fear of speech, much more apt to be offensive to the government than agreeable to it. . . . This means that one assumes the law does not adequately protect the individual, and that it is possible to be destroyed because of an empty word, an incautious phrase.”27 It is impossible to imagine Dostoevsky advancing such an argument except with bitter irony; no one could believe that the government of Nicholas I was insulted by the terrified silence of its citizens and wished them to utter their opinions on social-political topics more vociferously!

  Dostoevsky also tried to answer the more concrete charges that he could conceive being leveled against him, and in doing so he discusses his views in a manner that reveals certain patterns of thought whose constancy entitles us to accept them as his genuine convictions. “In the West,” he writes, “a terrible spectacle is taking place. . . . The age-old order of things is cracking and falling to pieces.”28 In his view “the Western revolution” is “a historical necessity of the contemporary crisis in that part of the world.”29 Dostoevsky has thus already developed his apocalyptic view of Europe on the brink of crisis and collapse, and he also draws the same sharp line between Europe and Russia that was to remain a permanent feature of his thought. Vigorously denying that he considered any such revolution “a historical necessity” for his fatherland, he writes, “In my eyes, nothing could be more nonsensical than the idea of a republican government in Russia.”30 Dostoevsky had no theoretical objections to autocratic rule; nor, it might be recalled, had most of the early Utopian Socialists, such as Fourier, who appealed unsuccessfully to several monarchs to finance the establishment of phalansteries in their countries. If Dostoevsky was willing to participate in a conspiracy against the autocracy now, it was only because his hatred of serfdom had reached a pitch of intensity that swept aside all ancillary considerations.

  Relying on an image popularized in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and given authority by the Romantic historian Augustin Thierry, Dostoevsky describes European history as a more than one-thousand-year-old “stubborn struggle between society and an authority deriving from a foreign civilization of conquest, force, and repression.”31 No such problem existed in Russia, where it had been the native autocracy that time and again had saved the country from enslavement and chaos. Russia had twice been rescued, Dostoevsky writes, “solely by the efforts of the autocracy: first from the Tartars, and second in the reforms of Peter the Great, when solely a warmly childlike faith in its great pilot made it possible for Russia to endure such a sharp swerve into a new life.”32 The same view of the providential role of the reigning tsars will crop up again and again in his later utterances.

  Indeed, Dostoevsky would have welcomed a tsar willing to save the country again by eliminating the intolerable blight of serfdom. “If reforms are pending,” he writes, “such reforms must come from an authority even much more reinforced during this period; otherwise, the matter will have to be dispatched in a revolutionary fashion. I do not think that admirers of a Russian revolt can be found in Russia. Well-known examples are recalled to this day, though they occurred long ago.”33 This menacing reference to the bloody uprisings of Pugachev and Stenka Razin, prefiguring the kind of revolts that might be provoked again unless liberating changes were made, was hardly calculated to reassure Dostoevsky’s judges. But when all hope of such reforms “from above” had been crushed after 1848, it was such reasoning that had persuaded Dostoevsky to participate in the desperate venture organized by Speshnev. Dostoevsky writes in conclusion: “I recall my words, repeated by me at various times, that everything of any value in Russia, beginning with Peter the Great, invariably came from above, from the throne; while from below, up to the present, nothing had been manifested except obstinacy and ignorance. This opinion of mine is well known to my acquaintances.”34

  The gravest charge that Dostoevsky knew had been made against him was that he had read aloud Belinsky’s Letter to Gogol, which is equally violent against all those institutions
of throne, state, and church that the erstwhile satirist had taken under his wing. Dostoevsky claimed that he had read the exchange of letters in a perfectly neutral manner, and he blocks in a picture of his personal relations with the most notorious radical of his time as a way of justifying his interest in the explosive missive. “I criticized him for striving to give literature a partial significance unworthy of it,” he writes, “degrading it to the description . . . solely of journalistic facts or scandalous occurrences. . . . [You] only bore everybody to death when you clutch at everyone coming and going in the street . . . and begin to preach at him forcibly and teach him reason. Belinsky became angry with me, and finally from coolness it came to a formal quarrel, so that we did not see each other all through the last year of his life.”35

  Regarding the Letter itself, Dostoevsky explains: “I [was] firmly convinced that it could not lead anyone into temptation, although it is not lacking in some sort of literary value. . . . I do not agree exactly with a single one of the exaggerations that it contains.”36 This rather feeble disclaimer is as far as Dostoevsky could go in concealing his fundamental agreement with Belinsky’s powerful assault. Dostoevsky at this point makes his one and only concession to the perils of the situation and expresses regret at his lack of caution: “I have only now understood that I made a mistake and that I should not have read that work aloud.”37

  To conclude his “Explanation,” Dostoevsky returns to the question of his relations with Petrashevsky (“I know absolutely nothing of the secrets of Petrashevsky”),38 and he proceeds to discuss Fourierism in general for the benefit of the commission. “Fourierism, and along with it every Western system, is so unsuited to our soil, so unrelated to our conditions, so alien to the character of our nation—while, on the other hand, it is so much a product of the situation of things there in the West, where the proletarian question is being solved at any cost—that Fourierism, with its relentless necessity, at the present time, among us who have no proletariat, would be killingly funny.”39 What he writes corresponds, as we have seen, exactly with utterances that he had made freely in the Palm-Durov Circle. And Dostoevsky had already found the tone in which he would later depict the Utopian Socialists: he would never portray them except in a satirical and parodistic manner.

  By June, the commission had learned a good deal about what had gone on in the Petrashevsky Circle, discovered the existence of the Palm-Durov group, and got wind of the plan discussed there to lithograph prohibited texts for illegal circulation. Called in four more times for interrogation and presented with a further list of questions, Dostoevsky had to pick his way carefully among dangerous pitfalls, and we can watch him trying not to be trapped in an outright lie, or seeming to hold back information, while guarding against any utterance that might prove injurious to himself or to others. He denied that his youthful friend Golovinsky had advocated a revolution in order to obtain the liberation of the serfs or had envisaged “a revolutionary dictatorship” during the period of turmoil and transition to a new government. His replies to all such questions were evasive or consisted of elaborate circumlocutions intended to confuse the issue entirely. No wonder General Rostovtsev commented that, as a witness, Dostoevsky had been “clever, independent, cunning, stubborn.”40

  The final examination of all the defendants took place before the mixed military-civil court appointed to pass sentence on the accused. Each was summoned into its presence in mid-October, told he was to be judged according to military law (much more severe than the civil code), and asked to submit in writing anything further he wished to add to his testimony. Some of the Petrashevtsy took this opportunity to throw themselves on the mercy of the authorities in a humiliating fashion. To cite one instance, Akhsharumov wrote: “I repent everything and ask for pardon, and I write this not because I wish to be spared the punishment I deserve, but out of remorse, with a pure heart; feeling myself gravely guilty toward thee, as my Sovereign, I consider it my duty as a Christian and a subject to plead for pardon. Forgive me, Sire, if it is possible, because of my remorse and in memory of the service of my father.”41

  Dostoevsky, however, maintained his reserve and dignity to the end, and replied in quite another style. “I can add nothing new to my defense,” he says, “except perhaps this—that I never acted with an evil and premeditated intention against the government—what I did was done thoughtlessly and much almost accidentally, as for example my reading of Belinsky’s letter.”42 It was not the government of Nicholas I that he abhorred but the horrifying institution of serfdom, which he detested with an implacable hatred.

  The Commission of Inquiry completed its work on September 17, 1849. The decision of the mixed military-civil court, handed down on November 16, condemned fifteen of the accused, including Dostoevsky, to execution by firing squad; others were given lesser sentences to hard labor and exile. This judgment was then sent for review to the highest military court, the General-Auditoriat, which declared that a judicial error had been committed and ruled more harshly than the military-civil court. It pointed out that, under the law used for field courts-martial, all the prisoners should have been equally condemned to death by execution. Dostoevsky’s dossier was also revised by the higher court. Originally, he had been sentenced for having read aloud and circulated Belinsky’s Letter, and also for having failed to denounce Grigoryev’s “A Soldier’s Conversation” to the authorities. A third charge was now added: he had “taken part in deliberations about printing and distributing works against the government by means of a home lithograph.”43

  Once having asserted the full rigor of the law, the General-Auditoriat asked the tsar to show mercy. Instead of death, a list of lesser sentences was appended and submitted for the tsar’s scrutiny, and he accepted the plea for mercy. It was known that Nicholas enjoyed playing the role of all-powerful but clement ruler, and Senator Lebedev confided to his journal that the General-Auditoriat had probably increased the severity of the recommended sentences in order to allow Nicholas more amply to exhibit his forbearance.44 No mercy, however, was shown to Petrashevsky, whose sentence—exile and hard labor in the mines for life—was simply confirmed. For most of the others (though not all), Nicholas shortened the length of the sentences.

  Dostoevsky, initially condemned to eight years of hard labor instead of outright execution, enjoyed a reduction in his period of penal servitude to four years, after which he was ordered to serve in the Russian Army for an indeterminate time. Dostoevsky regarded this latter provision as a special dispensation personally granted in his favor by the tsar (the same sentence was given to Durov). A convict sentenced to hard labor lost all his civil rights and did not regain them even after having completed his sentence, but Dostoevsky’s civil rights would automatically be restored by military service. He believed this to have been the first time that a convict had been allowed to regain his civil rights, and that it “occurred according to the will of the Emperor Nicholas I, taking pity on his youth and talent.”45 Whether justified or not, this conviction nonetheless helps to explain some of Dostoevsky’s later favorable utterances about Nicholas.

  Final disposition of the case was made on December 21. The law called for a mock execution to be staged when a sentence of death had been commuted by an act of imperial grace, but this ceremony was usually just a ritual formality. In this case, however, explicit instructions came from the tsar that only after all the preparations had been completed for putting them to death were the prisoners to be told that their lives had been spared. Nicholas carefully orchestrated events to produce the maximum impact on the unsuspecting victims of his regal solicitude. And Dostoevsky thus underwent the extraordinary emotional adventure of believing himself to have been only a few moments away from certain death, and then of being miraculously resurrected from the grave.

  Once their interrogation had been completed in October, the prisoners learned nothing more about the deliberations concerning their case. The dreary days rolled by with deadening monotony. “My incarceration had alr
eady gone on for eight months,” writes Akhsharumov in his memoirs, “I had ceased talking to myself, moved about the room somewhat mechanically, or lay on my cot in apathy.”46 On the morning of December 22, though, the prisoners became aware of an unusual animation in the corridors of the fortress, whose deathly stillness had been broken only by the peal of the church bells. Looking out of the window of his cell, Akhsharumov noticed a number of carriages lining up in the courtyard—so many of them, indeed, that it seemed the line would never end. Suddenly, he saw them being surrounded by squadrons of mounted police. Only then did it occur to him that the bustle and stir might have something to do with the Petrashevsky case, and that he had lived to see the day when the tedium of his imprisonment was finally to be relieved.