Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Erich Auerbach has remarked that Russian Realism, unlike the other European literatures of the nineteenth century, “is based on a Christian and traditionally patriarchal concept of the creatural dignity of every human individual regardless of social rank and position” and “is fundamentally related to old-Christian rather than to modern occidental realism.”23 In The Village of Stepanchikovo, we can catch Dostoevsky in the process of discarding his Western-oriented beliefs of the 1840s or, more exactly, transforming the predominantly social emphasis of his earlier commitments to Christian values into one inclining toward a more traditional Christian sense of universal moral culpability and responsibility for evil and sin. It is only a love for one’s fellow man springing from such a sense, we may interpret him as saying, that can escape the onus of pharisaical pride and insulting condescension and both judges and pardons at the same time.

  1 Pis’ma 1: 221–222; June 1, 1857.

  2 Ibid., 2: 585–586; November 3, 1857.

  3 Ibid., 1: 236; May 31, 1858.

  4 Ibid., 2: 593; September 13, 1858.

  5 Ibid., 594–595; December 13, 1858.

  6 Ibid., 594.

  7 Ibid., 593.

  8 Ibid., 1: 246.

  9 Ibid., 251; September 13, 1858.

  10 Ibid., 252; September 19, 1859.

  11 DVS, 1: 323.

  12 Pis’ma, 1: 264; October 11, 1859.

  13 “Pis’ma M. M. Dostoevskogo k F. M. Dostoevskomu,” in DMI, 525; October 21, 1859.

  14 L. P. Grossman, “Derevnya Dostoevskogo,” in F. M. Dostoevsky, Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli (Moscow, 1935), 28.

  15 Cited in PSS, 3: 505.

  16 L. P. Grossman, “Dostoevsky—khudozhnik,” in Tvorchestvo F. M. Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1959), 344–348.

  17 Traces of the original play form are still evident in Uncle’s Dream, especially at the beginning of Chapter 3, which describes the characters as part of the stage scenery. “Ten o’clock in the morning. We are in Marya Alexandrovna’s house in the main street, in the very room which the lady of the house calls her salon. . . . In this salon there are well-painted floors, and rather nice wall-papers that were ordered expressly for the walls. In the rather clumsy furniture red is the predominating color. There is an open fireplace, over the mantelpiece a mirror, before the looking-glass a bronze clock with a Cupid on it in very bad taste” (2: 303). What we have are probably the remains of an intermediate draft halfway between stage directions and narrative. The chapter begins in the present tense and then shifts, with no explanation, into the narrative past, as if Dostoevsky at this point were uncertain exactly how to handle the transition from the dramatic present of the play form to narrative.

  18 Pis’ma, 3: 85–86; September 14, 1873.

  19 Ibid., 1: 246; May 9, 1859.

  20 See Thomas Mann, “Dostoevsky—in Moderation,” published as the preface to The Short Novels of Dostoevsky, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, 1945), xvii. The German text is included in Thomas Mann, Neue Studien (Stockholm, 1948).

  21 See “Neizdanny Dostoevsky,” LN 83 (Moscow, 1971), 607.

  22 Besides the underground man and, in Colonel Rostanev, the future idiot, we also catch a prefiguration of Raskolnikov in one of the subplots. A seedy young fortune hunter, a cultivated but more craven variation of the Foma type, persuades Tatyana Ivanovna into a runaway elopement. When caught red-handed and stopped in the nick of time, the culprit turns out to be a Raskolnikov avant la lettre, who pleads that he was not inspired by “mercenary motives.” “I should have used the money usefully,” he babbles. “I should have helped the poor. I wanted to support the movement for enlightenment, too, and even dreamed of endowing a university scholarship” (2: 123).

  23 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 521.

  CHAPTER 20

  Homecoming

  The publication of Dostoevsky’s two Siberian novellas marks the end of his artistic exile and the beginning of his return to the center of Russian cultural life. These works appeared in print during 1859, and at the very end of this year, in mid-December, Dostoevsky finally realized his long-awaited dream of returning to St. Petersburg. This homecoming, however, did not take place all at once; even after arriving in European Russia, he was forced to stagnate for a few months in Tver, a city on the railroad line between Petersburg and Moscow. The Ministry of War had denied him the right to live in either of the two cities where he could obtain competent medical treatment, advising him to ask for authorization from the tsar through the Third Section.

  Early in July 1859, Dostoevsky began the journey from Siberia to European Russia, which took about a month and a half and again involved a huge sum of money, which he scraped together with the help of a loan from Pleshcheev. The party paused at Omsk for a few days to pick up Pasha Isaev, who had been withdrawn from the Siberian Cadet Corps. A moving moment occurred when Dostoevsky’s tarantas, rolling through the Ural Mountains, reached the frontier between Asia and Europe. Ten years before, a prisoner in shackles, Dostoevsky had passed this frontier in the midst of a howling snowstorm; now it was a fine summer afternoon when they stumbled on “the handsome column with an inscription, and beside it, in an izba, an invalid [a wounded veteran acting as caretaker]. We got out of the tarantas, and I crossed myself; God, at last, had led me to see the Promised Land. Then we took out our plated flask full of a tangy wild-orange brandy . . . and we drank our good-bye to Asia with the invalid; Nikolaev [the guide] also drank and the coachman too (and how he drove afterwards).”1

  Much of Dostoevsky’s energies during the months passed in Tver were taken up with negotiations over his permission to move to Petersburg, but as a self-described “literary proletarian”2 whose only source of livelihood was his pen, he was constantly turning over ideas for new works and calculating the possibilities of squeezing a little more out of his past publications. Although Mikhail supplied him with funds, and even with indispensable clothing (not to mention a new fur hat for Marya Dimitrievna), Dostoevsky was painfully aware that his brother could not long continue to support such a financial burden.

  Dostoevsky, however, had no intention of resting on his laurels, especially since he was aware that those he had acquired in the past had become almost invisible in the eyes of a new generation of readers. Now that his two novellas were out of the way, we find him juggling with a baffling variety of literary projects whose relation to what he actually wrote remains, except in a few instances, extremely conjectural. From Dostoevsky’s letters, we gather that he was worried about the lack of “the passionate element” in The Village of Stepanchikovo (as compared with Turgenev’s A Nest of Gentlefolk), but his ambition to emulate Turgenev was soon swept aside by other plans that he excitedly announces to Mikhail as “definitive,” only to sweep them away a few days later for still others. What he wished to hit upon, and desperately needed to find, was an idea that would be certain to create a genuine literary sensation and to attract the public attention that would raise his prestige and financial value.

  On October 9, he announces to Mikhail that he has firmly decided to undertake writing the future House of the Dead at once—a project that would allow him to take advantage of the sympathy inspired in the reading public by a returning political exile. Dostoevsky writes of “the depiction of characters unheard of previously in literature, and the touching, and finally the most important—my name. Remember that Pleshcheev attributed the success of his poems to his name (do you understand?). I am convinced that the public will read this with avidity.”3

  Dostoevsky’s letters also disclose a dialogue being carried on between the two brothers over a joint literary venture. So far, we have seen Mikhail Dostoevsky only as an ex-journalist and minor short-story writer turned cigarette manufacturer, who, out of the goodness of his heart, had supplied his more gifted brother with funds and acted as his literary agent. His cigarette business, however, was a very small affair, largely dependent on the labor of his family. Mikhail had given up liter
ature only as a result of the direst necessity and had never abandoned the idea of returning to it one day. The new atmosphere in Russia now enabled Mikhail to realize his dream. “Here in Petersburg,” the liberal historian K. D. Kavelin wrote at the beginning of 1856, “it is impossible any longer to recognize the [previous] caravansary of militarism, the cudgel, and benightedness. Everything is talked about, . . . sometimes stupidly, but all the same discussed and, as a result of this, studied.”4 Under the impetus of this heady sense of freedom, 150 new newspapers and journals were started in Russia between 1856 and 1860, and on June 19, 1858, Mikhail submitted to the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee a plan for a weekly “political and literary” periodical to be entitled Time (Vremya). Permission to publish such a journal was granted at the end of October 1858, and the censor appointed to oversee it was none other than the novelist Ivan Goncharov.

  A month after Mikhail submitted his proposal, he explained what he had in mind to his brother; and Feodor replied with enthusiasm: “Most important: a literary feuilleton, a critical review of the journals . . . enmity toward the mutual back-scratching now so widespread, more energy, fire, sharpness of mind, firmness—that’s what we need now! . . . I have written down and sketched out several literary essays along these lines: for instance, on contemporary poets, on the statistical tendency in literature, on the uselessness of tendencies in art—essays written heatedly and even cuttingly, but, most important, readably.”5

  Several more years were to pass, however, before Dostoevsky had the opportunity to express such opinions in print. Nothing was done by Mikhail, probably for financial reasons, to get his new publication under way in 1858, and 1859 found it still in the planning stage. “Look at others, neither talents nor abilities, and yet they rise in the world, amass a capital,” Dostoevsky writes disconsolately in November 1859. “I am convinced . . . that you and I are much cleverer, more capable, and knowledgeable about affairs than Kraevsky and Nekrasov. Why, they are just peasants about literature. And yet they get rich, and we are strapped for cash. . . . No brother . . . it’s necessary to take a risk and engage in some literary enterprise—a journal, for example.”6 Dostoevsky was now thinking not of a weekly periodical (gazeta) but of a monthly “thick” journal (zhurnal) that would compete with those of Kraevsky and Nekrasov.

  Nothing had been decided when, in December 1859, Dostoevsky arrived in St. Petersburg. His family had rented an apartment for him and his new wife and stepson, furnished it as best they could, and even hired a cook, who eagerly awaited their appearance because it frightened her to live there alone. Other people, more discreetly, were also watching for the arrival of the Dostoevskys. The military governor-general of Petersburg wrote the Petersburg chief of police on December 2 that, by order of the tsar, the secret surveillance under which ex-ensign Dostoevsky had been kept in Tver was to be continued on his homecoming to the capital.

  Dostoevsky’s return to the scene of his early literary triumphs was celebrated only in the small circle of his intimates. Dr. Yanovsky recalled that “in Petersburg we all . . . were at his housewarming: there were Apollon Maikov, Alexander Milyukov, his brother Mikhail with his family, many others, and also Speshnev, who had gotten into Petersburg that very day.”7 Dostoevsky was thus again unexpectedly brought face-to-face with the man he had once called his “Mephistopheles” and who, in the entourage of the governor-general of Eastern Siberia, Nikolay Muravyev, had himself just returned from exile. Muravyev was an energetic administrator with liberal pretensions who enjoyed rubbing elbows with such political exiles as his second cousin Mikhail Bakunin. He had appointed Speshnev editor of a local, government-sponsored journal in Irkutsk, and attached him to his personal staff. During his sojourn in St. Petersburg, Muravyev succeeded in having Speshnev’s rights as a nobleman restored. Bakunin, who by this time had escaped from Siberia largely as a result of Muravyev’s laxity, had also been much impressed with Speshnev, who had come to Petersburg to examine personally the leaders of the new radical generation. As Pleshcheev writes to Dobrolyubov: “Today, on my name day, I was overjoyed not only by your letter, but also by the visit of a man very close to my heart—Speshnev; he is traveling from Siberia with Muravyev and will unfailingly be at Chernyshevsky’s, whom he wants to meet. I also gave him your address. I recommend him as a person. . . . He is in the highest degree an upright character with a will of iron. It can absolutely be said that, among us all—he was the most remarkable figure.”8

  There is, regrettably, no word from Dostoevsky of his impressions of Speshnev after their long years of separation. We must be content to imagine Dostoevsky’s thoughts as he greeted the man who had once lured him along the dangerous path of revolutionary adventure. Both would have been able to rejoice, at any rate, that their great dream of the liberation of the serfs was on the point of being realized; both could congratulate each other that their sacrifices had not been in vain. Whether they would have agreed on anything else is highly questionable, but in those days of rapturous expectation, when all Russia was poised on the edge of the great new challenge of freedom, it made very little difference.

  Everything seemed possible then, and for a few years—a very few—all shades of social-political opinion were united as never before by the prospect of impending change. It was not a government sycophant but the intransigent Chernyshevsky himself who had recently declared in The Contemporary (February 1858) that “the new life, which now begins for us, will be as much more beautiful, prosperous, brilliant, and happy, in comparison with our former life, as the last one hundred and fifty years were superior to the seventeenth century in Russia.”9 It may be doubted whether Chernyshevsky himself meant such words to be taken with entire literalness, but no matter—they reflect and express a mood prevalent among all sections of the Russian intelligentsia in those glorious days when “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

  All were joined together in favor of liberation and reform and against the hardened and selfish reactionaries who opposed the beneficent measures proposed by the tsar to ameliorate the body politic. The little group who came to celebrate Dostoevsky’s return all shared in this celebratory mood, and there was no sense as yet that the ally of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov could not also, at the same time, remain the friend of Dostoevsky and Maikov. It would take a few short years to bring matters to a head and to make personal relations of this kind, or at least the old cordiality, forever impossible. But tensions had not yet gone that far, and it should be said that Dostoevsky would honestly try in the future, even if unsuccessfully, to keep them from reaching this point of rupture.

  A feeling of celebration was thus everywhere in the air at that moment of Russian history, and Dostoevsky had ample reasons of his own for a sense of buoyancy and jubilation. The Siberian cycle of his life, which began when he left St. Petersburg in shackles, had now been completed. Despite his epilepsy and the disappointments of his marriage, he had managed to survive, and even to thrive, in the onerous years he had just lived through, emerging from his worst ordeal—the four years in the prison camp—with the conviction that he had acquired new powers there both as a writer and as a man.

  He knew he would no longer write “trifles” and that he could face whatever fate had in store for him, if not with serenity, then at least with unflinching courage: he had been tried and not found wanting. He had begun to publish again and never doubted for a moment, whatever the relative failure of his fledgling efforts, that he would once again regain his literary eminence. His head and his notebooks were full of plans for new stories, novels, and essays, and he was certain that his unique experiences had given him invaluable insights into the soul of the Russian people that only he could communicate. As the prospective editor of a monthly journal, he was about to throw himself into the fray at the most exciting and tumultuous moment of Russian culture during the nineteenth century. A new life was just beginning for him—the life of literature, for which he had longed so desperately as a convict and a soldier—and he coul
d hardly wait to get to work.

  And work he would, in the next five years, as literary editor and chief contributor to his own journals—reading manuscripts, interviewing and writing to contributors, correcting proof, and, all the while, turning out a flow of copy with a fecundity, a prolificity, an abundance little short of astonishing if we remember that he was incapacitated for days at a time by the constant recurrence of his epilepsy. These were the years in which he wrote two major books (The Insulted and Injured and House of the Dead), three short works of fiction (including Notes from Underground), a lively series of travel sketches of Europe (Winter Notes on Summer Impressions), and produced, in addition, a continual flow of literary essays and polemical journalism.

  —But all this takes us into the thick of the next part, and we should not encroach on it any further. Let us end the narrative of this portion of Dostoevsky’s life at the joyous moment when his old friends have gathered round to greet the returning exile and drink his health and happiness. Let us take leave of him before the spontaneous conviviality of this reunion has been fractured by ideological enmity, before the burdens he is about to assume have begun to weigh him down, and while he is still basking in the heady exuberance of his homecoming.