Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  To be a Russian, then, means to be united with other Russians by a bond that evokes a sense of mutual moral responsiveness; and this bond, stemming from the heart, goes deeper and is more primary than all the false ideas that may distort Russian vision or blunt Russian moral sensitivity. Many Dostoevsky characters, in a few years, will be caught precisely in such an inner struggle between their Russian heart and the evil, corrupting, and amoral power of non-Russian ideas. As Dostoevsky explores and contemplates his past for the benefit of Maikov, what emerges is the first faint outlines of the rational/irrational dichotomy so characteristic of his post-Siberian creations. And this dichotomy has already begun to take on many of the specific moral, psychological, and ideological connotations to which Dostoevsky will later give such brilliant expression.

  Dostoevsky’s letter to Maikov is precious as a source for the analysis of his own personal and artistic evolution. But how much truth is there in his belief that the Russian intelligentsia as a whole had been only superficially affected by “French ideas”? So far as Dostoevsky himself is personally concerned, he had always lived in uneasy tension with the subversive impulses (inspired primarily by hatred of serfdom) that had led him into the ranks of a revolutionary conspiracy. With regard to the Russian Westernizers, whom Dostoevsky naturally tended to interpret by analogy with himself, the situation is much more complex. One has the impression that Dostoevsky believed them all, or at least a sizable portion of them, to have also rallied behind the tsarist regime during the war. And if this is what he did mean, then he was woefully mistaken. For not only the Westernizers but the patriotic Slavophils as well had been appalled by the corruption, disorder, and incompetence revealed by the regime of Nicholas I in the Crimean struggle. The majority of the intelligentsia, of whatever political stripe, shared the feelings expressed in the diary of A. I. Koshelev, a relatively liberal Slavophil, who wrote that Russian defeats in the Crimean War “did not distress us too much because we were convinced that even the defeat of Russia would be more bearable and more useful than the condition in which it had found itself in recent years. The mood of society and even of the people, if in part unconscious, was of the same nature.”5 Removed as he was from the centers of Russian social and cultural life, and living in a predominantly military milieu hostile to any independent thinking, Dostoevsky was evidently unaware of such subversive stirrings.

  Still, if we look at Russian culture as a whole, we can see an evolution similar to Dostoevsky’s own taking place among the Russian Westernizers in the years covered precisely by his arrest and exile. This massive shift of Russian social-cultural attitudes may be dated from a famous article of Belinsky’s, published in 1847, in which he lauded the world-historical role of the Russian people, and Dostoevsky certainly had it in mind when assuring Maikov that the influence of French ideas on educated Russians had been only a momentary deviation from the true Russian path. During the 1850s, the most significant development in Russian thought was the gradual assimilation of Slavophil ideas by educated opinion as a whole, and the amalgamation of such ideas into a new synthesis with those of the former Westernizer party. Since the most important publications in which this synthesis had been worked out were all issued abroad, Dostoevsky could have had no knowledge of them in his Siberian banishment.

  To a great extent, this new synthesis of ideas was devised and propagated by Alexander Herzen, who now occupied the dominating place in Russian culture formerly held by Belinsky in the 1840s. Herzen, who had gone to live in Europe in 1847, had been stirred by the intoxicating hopes of the French revolution of 1848, and had also been horrified at the pitiless repression of the French working-class uprising during the notorious June Days of 1848, when it was crushed by the National Guard at the orders of the bourgeois government of the new French Republic. Herzen poured all his anguish and his disgusted disillusionment with Western political ideals into his deeply moving From the Other Shore—a work that still retains its force as a profound meditation on the historical destiny of modern Western civilization. His conclusion was that Western Europe would never make the inevitable transition to the new Socialist millennium because the principles of private property, monarchical centralism (ultimately deriving from Roman Catholicism), and obedience to civic authority were too strongly ingrained in the European character to permit a decisive break with the centuries-old past of its tradition.

  From the Other Shore is a piercing cry of despair, uttered by Herzen as he saw his old ideals as a Russian Westernizer shot to pieces in the fusillades marking the end of the 1848 uprisings all over the Continent. But in a series of important utterances in the next few years (in The Russian People and Socialism, On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia, and many other publications less well known), Herzen went from negation to affirmation, and what he now affirmed stood in the sharpest contrast to what he had formerly believed. For he prophesied that backward Russia, precisely because it had remained outside the main current of European social-historical development, was the chosen instrument of history to lead the world into the new Socialist era. Taking up some of the ideas of the Slavophils and uniting them with those of the Westernizers, Herzen produced a grandiose amalgam that inflamed the Russian imagination and decisively affected the course of Russian social-cultural thought throughout the remainder of the century.

  “From the Slavophils,” writes Andrzej Walicki, “Herzen took over the view of the village commune as the embryonic stage of a new and higher form of society and the conviction that collectivism (which he called the ‘socialist element’ or even ‘communism’) was a national characteristic of the Russian people. . . . Like the Slavophils, Herzen valued the self-government principle of the communes and the unaffected spontaneity of relations between its members, which were not governed by contracts or codified laws. Finally, like the Slavophils, Herzen believed that the Orthodox faith in Russia was ‘more faithful to the teaching of the Gospels than Catholicism,’ that religious isolation had fortunately enabled the Russian people to . . . remain apart from the ‘sick’ civilization of Europe.”6

  When there were rumors of the coming conflict between Russia and Turkey in 1849, Herzen wrote to the Italian revolutionist Giuseppe Mazzini that Russia would probably succeed in taking Constantinople (he did not foresee the intervention of the Western powers) and that this conquest would be the signal for the future worldwide revolution. He imagined that the peasant soldiers of Nicholas’s army, once victory had been gained, would refuse to return home to serfdom. Calling instead on the other Slavs freed from the Turks to join them, they would lead a general Slav uprising, with Russia at the head of a new Slavic democratic and social federation. “For Russia is the Slavic world organized, the Slavic state. To her belongs the hegemony.”7 Such words illustrate the convergence between Dostoevsky’s new convictions and the dominating trend of Russian culture at the time.

  Herzen went to live in London in 1852, and established there the first Free Russian Press in exile. In the next few years he began to issue his own writings, as well as to found a number of new publications. Among these was an almanac, issued at irregular intervals, called The Polar Star (Polyarnaya Zvezda, the title of a similar almanac once edited by the Decembrist poet Ryleev), and, most important, his famous weekly, The Bell (Kolokol). Herzen’s ideas, after a few years, began to receive the widest diffusion inside Russia, and The Bell was read everywhere (even, rumor had it, in the Imperial Palace itself), despite being banned from the country and available only in copies smuggled across the frontier. By the late 1850s and early 1860s, the basic tenets of Herzen’s “Russian Socialism”—with its strong overtones of messianic nationalism and its positive reevaluation of peasant life and institutions—had become the general ideology of the Russian Left, despite the increasingly vehement quarrels over how they should be applied to the existing Russian social-political situation.

  Dostoevsky’s letter to Apollon Maikov thus provides us with a rewarding glimpse into that psychological-ideological
matrix, still in its formative stage, out of which Dostoevsky’s future works would emerge, and it also reveals his literary plans. Dostoevsky confides to Maikov that he had thought out during his years in camp what he calls “my grand, definitive story.” But he had not begun to write it on his release because of his love affair with Marya Dimitrievna, “which distracted and absorbed me completely,” and instead had begun “a comic novel, but so far have only written individual adventures of which I have enough; now I am sewing up the whole.”8 Whether these words refer to Uncle’s Dream or The Village of Stepanchikovo is not clear. In any case, Dostoevsky was convinced, as he wrote to Wrangel a few months later, that only a novel “will make me a name and attract attention to myself,”9 but he was also persuaded that permission would not be given him to publish a work of fiction.

  What he now pinned his hopes on, above all, was his Letters on Art, the work he intended to write (or had partially written) devoted to “the mission of Christianity in art”10 and dedicated to the daughter of Nicholas I. Unfortunately, no trace of any such text has turned up among Dostoevsky’s papers, although his literary journalism of the early 1860s unquestionably reflects the ideas he was pondering over at this time—the relation of art to a transcendental or supernatural ideal. Continuing his efforts to prove his loyalty to the throne, Dostoevsky also wrote another poem, “On the Coronation and Conclusion of Peace”—an invocation of the blessings of God on the new tsar and savior of Russia—which he dispatched through General Gasfort to Wrangel.

  At the exact moment that he was racking his brains over the best way to bring his name back into literary circulation, the task of reminding the cultural world of his existence was accomplished for him with no special effort on his part. In the issue of The Contemporary dated December 1855, a sketch by Panaev contains a section obviously alluding to the critical excitement caused by Poor Folk as a result of Belinsky’s praise, and then, with the ensuing collapse of the author’s momentary fame, his abandonment by all those who had previously trumpeted his glory. “Poor fellow!” writes Panaev. “We killed him, we made him ridiculous. It was not his fault. He could not maintain himself at the height on which we had placed him.”11 Although no names were mentioned, all of the people who counted for Dostoevsky—all the former members of the Belinsky Pléiade with whom he had once been friendly, and all his literary colleagues and rivals—would have been perfectly well aware at whom Panaev was poking fun.

  Panaev’s attack, aimed at a man who had spent four long years in prison camp for a political crime and was still serving out his sentence in the Russian Army, was a distinctly vicious blow. But in the narrow little world of St. Petersburg journalism, where editors and writers rubbed elbows every day with high officials of the bureaucracy, rumors about Dostoevsky’s two poems had filtered down and led to a revival of all the antipathy against him that had once been so widespread. Dostoevsky read this insulting lampoon, and we can deduce his outrage from Aleksey Pleshcheev’s letter to him in April 1859. “I told [Nekrasov] frankly that you had decided not to turn to [his journal] except in case of extreme need because they treated you badly; Nekrasov, after hearing me out, said that if . . . The Contemporary spoke shamefully of you while you were in exile, then that was very disgusting.”12

  Nekrasov’s uneasiness could well have been caused by a work of his own that Dostoevsky never saw. This mysterious text, finally published in 1917, is a satirical account of how Nekrasov had brought the manuscript of Poor Folk to Belinsky. The withering depiction of Dostoevsky it contains was another response to Dostoevsky’s efforts to achieve rehabilitation. The best part of the fragment is the image of the genuine tortures caused Dostoevsky by his mixture of excruciating shyness and inordinate vanity. The same comedy, so reminiscent of The Double, is repeated here: Dostoevsky has not the strength to ring Belinsky’s doorbell and retreats back down the staircase, but when Nekrasov remarks that Belinsky might be displeased, he returns in a flash and the two enter.

  Chudov [Nekrasov] only then understood all the irresolution of Glazhievsky [Dostoevsky] when he saw to what an astonishing degree the author of “A Stony Heart” quailed before the threatening eyes of the critic. At moments of intense timidity he had the habit of squeezing himself together, of retreating into himself to such an extent that ordinary shyness cannot convey the slightest idea of his condition. It could only be characterized by the very word he had invented himself, stushevat’sya, to vanish, disappear, efface oneself, which now came into Chudov’s head.13 Glazhievsky’s entire face suddenly became crestfallen, his eyes vanished under his brows, his head went into his shoulders, his voice, always muffled, lost all its clarity and freedom, sounding as if the man of genius had found himself in an empty cask inadequately supplied with air; and meanwhile his gestures, disconnected words, glances, and the continuing trembling of the lips, expressing suspicion and fear, had something so tragic about them that it was not possible to laugh.14

  The mixture of sympathy and derision with which Nekrasov regards his erstwhile friend is the most vivid evocation we have of some of the impressions Dostoevsky created on others in the 1840s. But Nekrasov could not know that the figure he described no longer existed. For Dostoevsky had sloughed off completely his crippling insecurity and hypochondria in the prison camp. “If you believe there is still anything remaining in me of that nervousness, that apprehensiveness, that tendency to suspect that I had every conceivable illness, as in Petersburg,” he tells Mikhail, “please change your mind, there is not a trace of that, as of many other things.”15 Dostoevsky had been steeled by suffering. And when, on returning from exile, he began to take up the polemical cudgels against The Contemporary a few years later, the once ridiculous and timorous “little idol” whom it had been so easy to sneer at proved to be a redoubtable antagonist.

  Dostoevsky’s prowess as a polemicist soon became evident in his vehement opposition to the ideas now being propounded in The Contemporary by its most notable and influential critic, N. G. Chernyshevsky. More than anyone, Chernyshevsky formulated the ideals and aims of the radical “generation of the 1860s” against which Dostoevsky would unleash the full force of his considerable combative skills.

  The son of an obscure priest, and educated in a seminary, Chernyshevsky entered the University of St. Petersburg in 1846, and there he met people who brought him into contact with the ideas current in the Petrashevsky Circle and became converted to Socialism. It was only a matter of chance, as he noted in his Diary, that he had not begun to frequent the Petrashevsky Circle himself and had escaped the roundup. Chernyshevsky’s opinions about literature had been formed on the essays of Belinsky’s last period, and the young publicist thus discusses writing mainly in terms of social content, evaluating it in the light of his own preference for a literature continuing the Gogolian tradition (as interpreted by Belinsky) of denunciation and exposure of the evils of society. These articles ruffled the sensibilities of the gentry literati grouped around The Contemporary, the representatives of the older generation of the 1840s, who did not appreciate either his unceremonious handling of their own works or his sarcastic jeering tone, which struck them as a breach of good taste.

  Chernyshevsky had been educated in a provincial seminary, as had the young Nikolay Dobrolyubov, whom he soon recruited to aid him; so had a good many others who became well-known as writers, journalists, and publicists giving voice to the sentiments of a new generation. They were the first of the raznochintsy, the men without official rank or status, who play so dominant a role in Russian culture throughout the remainder of the century. The differences that quickly surfaced between the two generations can be traced to the gulf created by their class backgrounds and the dissimilarities in their education.

  The gentry literati looked down on the “seminarians,” as they were called contemptuously, because of their coarseness and lack of breeding. For their part, the seminarians abhorred culture and the reverence for art as a source of wisdom that distinguished the slightly older generation o
f the 1840s. For Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, such reverence still smacked of religion. As the scions of clerical families, both had been intensely religious in their youth, but they had converted to atheism with equal zeal under the influence of Feuerbach and his Russian Left Hegelian followers such as Belinsky and, more specifically, Herzen. All the same, the stubborn streak of fanaticism in their makeup, and their supreme contempt for the amenities of culture as shameful frivolities, can plausibly be attributed to the heritage of their clerical ancestry.16 In any case, they were—or wished to be—hard-headed materialists and positivists, whose energies were devoted to bringing about those radical social changes in which they saw the only hope for the future. The social-cultural influence of the earlier generation, in their view, was one of the major obstacles to a reshaping of the Russian personality along more virile and energetic lines, and such remolding was a necessary precondition for any further progress. A good dose of class antipathy thus envenomed with personal distaste the clashes of opinion that soon began to occur between the two groups.

  What had been, at the beginning, only a low murmur of discontent from the gentry literati turned into a cry of outrage when Chernyshevsky published his doctoral thesis, The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality, and then reviewed it himself (anonymously) in the pages of The Contemporary. Even earlier, Chernyshevsky’s public defense of this work, in the amphitheater of the University of St. Petersburg, had taken on the character of a deliberate defiance of the authorities with distinct social-political overtones. For in rejecting the principles of German Idealist aesthetics, he was in effect attacking all attempts to entice mankind into living in a world of imaginary pleasures and satisfactions when the real material needs of the vast majority still remained to be satisfied. Naturally, no such argument could be made explicitly, but all of Chernyshevsky’s readers knew what was involved when, as Marx had already done with Hegel for much the same reasons, he rejected the Idealist point of view and, as it were, brought art back to earth.