Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  1 Pis’ma, 1: 270; October 23, 1859.

  2 Ibid., 2: 603.

  3 Ibid., 605; October 9, 1859.

  4 A. A. Kornilov, Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie pri Alexander II (Moscow, 1909), 31.

  5 Pis’ma, 2: 593; September 13, 1858.

  6 Ibid., 1: 286; November 12, 1859.

  7 See the fragment of Yanovsky’s unpublished letter to A. G. Dostoevsky in LN 86 (1973), 377.

  8 DMI, 490–491.

  9 Cited in William F. Woehrlin, Chernyshevskii: The Man and the Journalist (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 193.

  PART III

  The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865

  CHAPTER 21

  Into the Fray

  Dostoevsky’s presence in St. Petersburg was soon noticed by the larger literary fraternity in which he was so eager to resume his place. Just a few days after establishing residence, he was elected a member of the newly founded Society for Aid to Needy Writers and Scholars, usually called the Literary Fund. Dostoevsky lent his support to the activities of the fund, and not only through his participation in the numerous readings and events that the society organized to fill its coffer. Difficult as it is to imagine, he also performed the tasks of an efficient and conscientious administrator. Elected secretary of the fund’s administrative committee in 1863, he kept the records of the meetings and handled the considerable correspondence of this organization with skill and dispatch.

  The very first benefit organized by the Literary Fund took place on January 10, 1860, and Dostoevsky would certainly have been attracted by the program, which announced a reading by Turgenev of his newly written, deeply meditative, and highly controversial essay, “Hamlet and Don Quixote,” a work that marked an important moment in the social-cultural debate of the early 1860s. An amicable exchange of notes between the two a few months after the benefit reveals that the rancorous breakup of their friendship in 1845 had been, at least for the moment, forgotten. Dostoevsky thoroughly absorbed the essay, whose ideas left significant traces on his own thinking and on his image of the self-sacrificing Don Quixote type in Prince Myshkin. For Turgenev’s famous pages proved to be a panegyric of the man of faith, Don Quixote, who is held up for admiration in preference to the worldly, skeptical, disillusioned Hamlet, “sick-lied o’er by the pale cast of thought.” Don Quixote is inspired by an ideal greater than himself (even if a comically deluded one), and this elevates him to a moral superiority that towers over the indecisive Hamlet.

  Turgenev pretended to be dissecting two eternal psychological types that always had existed in human nature; but everyone knew that the Hamlets of Russian literature were the “superfluous men,” the well-meaning but powerless and hopelessly impractical members of the gentry liberal intelligentsia. The Don Quixotes, on the other hand, were those who had died on the European barricades in 1848 (like the protagonist of Turgenev’s own Rudin) and those members of the younger generation in Russia ready once again to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the people. So as not to leave any doubt concerning the implications of his categories, Turgenev mentions both the Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier and, for good measure, Jesus Christ as examples of the Don Quixote type. Perhaps intending to mollify the hostility of the younger radical publicists like Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, Turgenev now indicates agreement with much of their indictment of the Russian Hamlets. But, as we shall see, their antagonism to his work was too deeply rooted in the social-cultural situation to be so easily overcome.

  In April 1860, Dostoevsky himself came into public view as a participant in some amateur theatricals organized by the Literary Fund. Pisemsky had hit on the idea of presenting plays with celebrated literary figures filling the roles, and Dostoevsky was invited to join the fun in the role of the postmaster Shpekin in Gogol’s The Inspector-General. The evening was a howling success; all cultivated Petersburg turned out to see the notorious lions of literature disporting themselves behind the footlights. So much laughter was provoked by the appearance of Turgenev, Kraevsky, and Maikov—arrived to present their “gifts” to the supposed inspector-general and to complain about the depredations of the governor—that those who wished to enjoy the play protested publicly against the unseemly uproar. Among these indignant spectators was the Grand Prince Konstantin Nikolaevich, the brother of the tsar, who was known to have worked behind the scenes in favor of the abolition of serfdom, and who had also come to catch a glimpse of the literary luminaries. “I do not believe,” writes the journalist Peter Weinberg (with whom Dostoevsky would soon cross swords), “that anyone familiar with Feodor Mikhailovich in the last years of his life could possibly imagine him as a comic . . . knowing how to stimulate a pure Gogolian laughter; but it was really so, and Dostoevsky-Shpekin was . . . faultless.”1

  The distractions of his renewed social life notwithstanding, Dostoevsky’s energies were focused on reestablishing his literary reputation. All of his time in the spring of 1860 went into planning and drafting two new books, a major novel and the sketches that were to become Notes from the House of the Dead. By this time, the planned novel had become essential to fill the obligatory slot reserved for the installment of a major fictional work in every issue of a Russian “thick” monthly. On June 18, Mikhail asked permission of the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee to publish a journal on the basis of the title and program already approved but as a monthly instead of a weekly. The request was approved, and the remainder of the year was occupied by the preparations for publication.

  Even aside from the question of a regular income, Dostoevsky was eager to join the journalistic fray. Just a few months earlier, The Contemporary had printed Chernyshevsky’s The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy, a work destined to become the philosophical bible of the radical generation of the 1860s, and its appearance had blown up a fierce journalistic storm. Chernyshevsky propounds a simple-minded materialism that sees man as being subservient to the laws of nature (as defined in terms of the sciences of the day, particularly chemistry and physiology), a materialism that—as even a commentator sympathetic to the general thrust of his position admits—“left no room for the irreducible and irrational in human behavior, for all those facts where we deal not with things and objects, but with willing and choosing human beings and their relationships. The problem of freedom was Chernyshevsky’s greatest stumbling block, and he would have swept it away into unreality had he not let it reappear by the backstairs in his idea of man as the creator as well as the creature of his environment.”2

  The problem of freedom was indeed one that Chernyshevsky attempted to eradicate, since he did not hesitate to proclaim that nothing such as free will exists, or can exist, as an objective datum. The notion of will or “wanting,” he writes, “is only the subjective impression which accompanies in our minds the rise of thoughts and actions from preceding thoughts, actions or external facts.”3 As for ethics and morality, Chernyshevsky adopted a form of Benthamite Utilitarianism that rejects all appeal to any kind of traditional (Christian) moral values. Good and evil are defined in terms of “utility,” and man seeks primarily what gives him pleasure and satisfies his egoistic self-interest, but since he is a rational creature, man eventually learns through enlightenment that the most lasting “utility” lies in identifying his own self-interest with that of the majority of his fellows. Once this realization has dawned, the enlightened individual attains the level of a selfishly unselfish “rational egoism,” which, according to Chernyshevsky, is the highest form of human development.

  Such conceptions, which spread quickly among the younger generation, provided the philosophical underpinnings for the new morality preached by the radical ideology of the 1860s, and no ideas could have set Dostoevsky’s teeth more on edge. For if he had acquired any new convictions at all during the searing experiences of his last ten years, it was to convince him of two ineluctable truths. One was that the human psyche would never, under any conditions, surrender its desire to assert its freedom; the other was that a Christian morality of love and self-sac
rifice was a supreme necessity for both the individual and society. Without these inherited moral values, life among the peasant convicts would have been a literal hell for Dostoevsky, and he shuddered at the thought that it was precisely these values the radicals had now set out to undermine and destroy. An eventual clash with Chernyshevsky and his followers among the generation of the 1860s was thus sooner or later inevitable. This fateful moment, however, did not arrive until several years later, and only after a great deal of social turbulence had ended all hope of accommodation.

  Meanwhile, in the fall of 1860, the first two chapters of House of the Dead appeared in The Russian Word. Difficulties with the censorship then delayed the publication of further installments. In January 1861 the journal reprinted the introduction and first chapter; three more chapters followed at weekly intervals. At the end of January, a continuation of the work was announced, but this promise was never kept, and Dostoevsky’s name abruptly vanished from the list of contributors assembled by the resourceful editor, A. Gieroglifov. The reason, of course, was that the first issue of Time appeared at the beginning of the year, and Dostoevsky had no intention of allowing so valuable a literary property to benefit a rival publication.

  The announcement of the program of Time was sent out in September, and while Dostoevsky’s name could not be displayed because he was an ex-convict, the characteristic stamp of the writer’s fiery temperament would have been immediately apparent in its apocalyptic accents. “We live,” declares the first sentence, “in an epoch in the highest degree remarkable and critical.” Russia is in the midst of a great transformation, and the important social-political changes being awaited, which will finally resolve “the great peasant question,” are only the external symptoms of a more fundamental mutation: “This transformation consists in the fusion of enlightenment, and those who represent it, with the principle of the people’s life, . . . the people who, 170 years ago, recoiled from the Petrine reforms, and since that time, torn away from the educated class, have been living their own separate, isolated, and independent existence” (18: 35).4

  Dostoevsky carefully separates his own position from that of both the Slavophils and Westernizers. The people’s rejection of the Petrine reforms, he asserts, was not merely a negation of change and development, as implied by the Slavophils; rather, it had led them to seek change in their own way and on their own terms. Dostoevsky goes back even farther than the reforms of Peter the Great in search of their creativity and finds it in the religious fermentation of the Raskol—the refusal of a substantial portion of the population to accept the Greek-inspired reforms of the Russian liturgy—which had led to a schism (raskol) within the Russian Church in the seventeenth century and the proliferation of various dissenting sects of Old Believers. Even though, as Dostoevsky concedes, the results of the schism were “sometimes monstrous” (18: 36), the raskolniki nonetheless represented an attempt to create an indigenous Russian culture independent of European influence, and he intimates that the positive values of Russian life for which the upper class was seeking so eagerly could perhaps be found among the dissident sects.

  Meanwhile, with equal extremism, the upper class had been assimilating European culture through every pore and moving in exactly the opposite direction. This does not mean, writes Dostoevsky, that in striving to create a truly national culture the upper class will simply renounce everything it has acquired. Indeed, such acquisitions have laid the foundation for the great world-historical role that Russia will be called on to play in the future: “We . . . foresee with reverence . . . that the Russian idea, perhaps, will be the synthesis of all those ideas which Europe had developed, with such persistence and courage, in each of its nationalities; that perhaps everything antagonistic in these ideas will find reconciliation and further development in Russian nationality [narodnost’]” (18: 37).

  Dostoevsky’s famous doctrine of Russian “pan-humanism” is already expressed here in 1861 in Time, and though his views will later take on a more pronounced Slavophil cast, he evaluates even the Russian Westernizers positively, rather than, as the Slavophils were wont to do, as irredeemably corrupted by European influence. Such a comprehensive attitude toward those whom Dostoevsky would later call the “Russian Europeans” will always separate him from the pure Slavophils. The precise lineaments of the Russian culture of the future that Dostoevsky envisages remain obscure; nor will they gain more clarity in his later pronouncements. The emphasis is on the necessity of fusion, which Dostoevsky urges in accents that vibrate with the pain of the still-aching scars of his prison years. These memories now lead him to insist that the upper class must undertake “the spread of enlightenment, energetically, quickly, and at whatever cost—this is the major problem of our time, the first step toward every activity” (18: 37).

  The journals of the Dostoevsky brothers, first Time and then its successor Epoch (Epokha), have thus taken their place in Russian literature as the mouthpieces of an independent social-cultural tendency called pochvennichestvo.5 The pochvenniki believed in the primacy of helping to forward a new Russian cultural synthesis from the fusion of the people and their cultivated superiors. For the radical intelligentsia, on the other hand, all other issues were secondary to that of improving the lot of the peasantry in the manner they considered most consistent with social justice. The program of Time was broad enough and vague enough, however, to appeal to a large spectrum of opinion among the intelligentsia; and the slogan of pochvennichestvo, given the influence of Herzen’s ideas, did not have any particularly compromising connotations in the eyes of the radicals at that moment. Time was initially considered to be just another progressive journal, with what would be called, at the end of the decade, a pronounced Populist (narodny) slant.

  However, Dostoevsky had also recruited Nikolay Strakhov and Apollon Grigoryev as his two leading contributors, knowing that both were firmly opposed to many aspects of the radical ideology of the 1860s. Strakhov, who was to become an intimate friend of Tolstoy as well as Dostoevsky, was then at the start of a notable career as critic and publicist—a career during which he would advocate philosophical Idealism and defend a moderately Slavophil and eventually pan-Slavic social-political position. Like many of the radicals he was to confront in print, Strakhov was the son of a priestly family and had been educated in a seminary. Unlike his opponents, he had later studied mathematics and natural science and had taken an advanced university degree in biology. Such qualifications gave him a scientific competence far superior to that of the average Russian publicist, and he combined these credentials with a devotion to Hegel and German Idealism that made him acutely aware of the limitations of scientific knowledge when confronted with the eternal “accursed questions” of human existence.

  Strakhov first attracted Dostoevsky’s attention through articles he had printed in the journal The Torch: a series on science called Letters about Life and a review of P. L. Lavrov’s recent Studies on the Question of Practical Philosophy. Lavrov, who would soon emerge as a leading spokesman for the ideology of the Russian Populists, had been attacked by Chernyshevsky for not being a vigorous enough materialist, and Lavrov’s book had then been used as the pretext to develop his own ideas in The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy. Strakhov, on the contrary, found Lavrov too much of a materialist for his taste, and launched a counterattack in defense of human freedom and moral autonomy against all attempts to make them subservient to material conditions. “The will,” Strakhov declared, “is subordinate, in an essential and necessary fashion, to one thing only—the idea of its own freedom, the idea of its independent, original and conscious self-determination.”6

  Strakhov possessed an impressive culture and professional mastery to which Dostoevsky could not pretend, and their daily conversations sharpened the novelist’s awareness of the implications of his own views. “Our conversations were endless,” Strakhov writes, “and they were the best conversations I was ever lucky enough to have in my life.” What captivated him about Dostoevsky wa
s “his unusual mind, the speed with which he seized on every idea after just a simple word or allusion.” Strakhov also noted another trait of Dostoevsky’s intellectual physiognomy that has particular relevance for the ideological character of his great creations. “He was . . . a person in the highest degree excitable and impressionable. A simple idea, sometimes very familiar and commonplace, would suddenly set him aflame and reveal itself to him in all its significance. He, so to speak, felt thought with unusual liveliness. Then he would state it in various forms, sometimes giving it a very sharp, graphic expression, although not explaining it logically or developing its content. Above all, he was an artist, he thought in images and was guided by feeling.”7

  14. Nikolay Strakhov in the 1850s

  If Dostoevsky received a certain intellectual schooling from Strakhov, what he derived from Apollon Grigoryev stirred much deeper levels of his personality. Grigoryev had long been a well-known man of letters and by 1861 was near the end of a stormy existence as a poet, critic, and occasional writer of prose fiction. He was a charismatic presence who exercised his fascination on a whole group of young contributors, including Strakhov, who later collected and published his critical essays, and the daily editorial meetings of Time provided ample opportunity for the exchange of ideas. Dostoevsky would certainly have found the tempestuous Grigoryev more to his taste as a human being than the prudish, finicky Strakhov. For Grigoryev was one of those “broad” Russian natures—much like the young poet Shidlovsky, the friend and inspirer of Dostoevsky in his youth—who combined the most refined and exalted artistic and spiritual aspirations with drink-sodden and disorderly lives.