Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  “Mystic, atheist, Freemason, member of the Petrashevsky circle, artist, poet, editor, critic, dramatist, journalist, singer, guitarist, orator”—these are some of the disparate aspects of Grigoryev as seen through the eyes of his contemporaries.8 Dostoevsky wrote that Grigoryev “was, perhaps, of all his contemporaries . . . the most Russian of men as a temperament (I am not saying—as an ideal, that is understood)” (20: 136). His poetry and criticism were held in great esteem by some of the best judges of his time, but he would disappear for weeks on end to indulge in drunken sprees and riotous debauches among the Gypsies, and many of his best essays were written in debtors’ prisons. “I remember him,” writes one of his closest friends, the poet Polonsky, “believing neither in God nor the Devil—and on his knees in church, praying to the last drop of his blood. I remember him as a skeptic and as a mystic, I remember him as a friend and enemy, fighting with people and flattering Count Kushelev [the owner of a periodical] about his infantile compositions.”9 It has been suggested that traits of Grigoryev, who liked to call himself “the last Romantic,” were later embodied in the equally tumultuous and surprisingly poetic Dimitry Karamazov.10

  For Grigoryev, the true values of Russian life were to be found not in a chimerical and idealized Eden before Peter or in the downtrodden peasantry but rather among those surviving groups—like the Moscow merchant class depicted in Ostrovsky’s plays, often staunch Old Believers—who had managed to flourish while zealously clinging to their own mode of existence. He was himself a great connoisseur of Russian folk culture and of the Gypsy music he found so irresistible. Some of his best poems, rediscovered and collected at the beginning of the present century by Alexander Blok, attempt to translate the fiery passion and despairing poignancy of his Gypsy revels into words.

  15. Apollon Grigoryev in the 1850s

  Grigoryev’s mature essays sketch an original philosophy of Russian culture whose major theses certainly affected Dostoevsky’s own opinions. The central figure in this history is Pushkin, whose work, as Grigoryev interprets it, marks a watershed in Russian cultural self-consciousness. Before Pushkin, foreign influences had been accepted, assimilated, and revered, but in Pushkin, for the first time, one can observe a struggle between the “predatory” types that imitated Western paradigms—the egoistic Romantic and Byronic heroes of his early poetry—and the gently ironical Ivan Petrovich Belkin or the youthfully pure-hearted narrator of The Captain’s Daughter by whom they are replaced. These are purely Russian characters in their mildness, unaffectedness, and simplicity; and they indicate Pushkin’s desire to return to his native soil, with its “truly human, i.e., Christian”11 values, after succumbing to the seduction of foreign ideals. Grigoryev sees all of post-Pushkin Russian literature in terms of this struggle between “predatory” (khishchny) and Russian “meek” (smirenny) types, and he works out his cultural typology in a whimsically breathless and involuted style reminiscent of his beloved Thomas Carlyle. His essays contain both broadly impressive generalizations and penetrating observations on a host of writers up to and including contemporaries such as Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Pisemsky, and he is now generally acknowledged to be the greatest literary critic of mid-nineteenth-century Russia.

  Grigoryev’s ideas helped to give a concrete literary-cultural content to Dostoevsky’s own most intimate experiences. The “return to one’s native soil,” whose necessity had presented itself to him so agonizingly in the prison camp, now proved to be the path taken by the greatest of all Russian writers—and it was the one destined to be followed by all Russian literature! For Dostoevsky, Grigoryev’s contention that “meek” types are the true carriers of Russian moral-social values would have been taken as precious confirmation of his own artistic premonitions. Much of Dostoevsky’s later works may indeed be seen as a dramatization of the conflict between Grigoryev’s “predatory” Western (or Western-influenced) types and genuinely Russian “meek” ones—a conflict whose clash of values, portrayed as a duel between moral-spiritual absolutes, he would one day succeed in raising to the level of high tragedy.

  Grigoryev also shared with Dostoevsky a view of art as a means of metaphysical cognition—the chosen vehicle by which the secrets of the Absolute reveal themselves in time and history. Both men defended the status of art against the mocking onslaught of the radical Utilitarians. Grigoryev drew the same conclusion as his Danish predecessor, Kierkegaard, that life could not be contained within rational categories of any kind. “To me ‘life’ is truly something mysterious,” he writes Dostoevsky, “it is something inexhaustible, ‘an abyss which swallows all finite reason,’ to use an expression from an old mystic book, a boundless space in which the logical conclusions of the cleverest mind will often get lost, like a wave in the ocean; [life is] even something ironic, but at the same time full of love, in spite of this irony.”12

  One passage from a letter of Grigoryev to Apollon Maikov, written while Dostoevsky was still in Siberia and hence before the two men could have exchanged ideas, will illustrate this similarity in fundamental outlook: “I do not know what I find more repulsive: Petersburgian progress . . . the dilettantism of orthodoxy, or finally the cynical atheism of Herzen. All these amount to the same thing and have the same value, and ‘these three’ all come equally from one cause: from a lack of faith in life, the ideal and art. All this results from the utilitarian Utopia of sensual felicity or spiritual slavery and Chinese stagnation under the pressure of external unity in the absence of inner unity, i.e., Christ, i.e., the Ideal, i.e., Measure, Beauty, in which alone truth is contained and which alone can bring truth to man’s soul.”13 The identification of Christ in this passage with the Ideal and with Beauty could not be more Dostoevskian.

  Most striking of all, perhaps, is the temperamental affinity revealed by Grigoryev’s reference, in a line of his poetry, to “the mad happiness of suffering,” and by his reiteration, in a letter, that “there are sufferings of the soul capable of passing over into a sense of beatitude.” How can one not think of Dostoevsky, asks the Italian Slavist Wolf Giusti, after reading such utterances?14 Both men share a common devotion to the Christian faith as it had developed in their homeland, and just as Dostoevsky had recently declared, with reference to the Christian Crusades, that “Europe and its task will be completed by Russia,”15 so Grigoryev believed that the historical life of Europe was “exhausted, and another is beginning; it will come out of Orthodoxy, a new world lies in this force.”16 But, again like Dostoevsky, he was too much a product of Romanticism and too much a modern to accept either his Christian faith or Orthodoxy without a struggle. “From wherever I begin,” he acknowledges, “I always arrive at the same single point: at this deep and sorrowful need to believe in the ideal and the Jenseits [the supernatural].”17 No Russian contemporary of Dostoevsky comes closer than Grigoryev to sharing the same tangled complexity of impulses and attitudes.

  It was with such comrades-in-arms that Dostoevsky sallied forth to participate in the journalistic wars of the 1860s. Victory certainly cannot be said to have attended his banner, but while the pochvenniki were in the field, they furnished a respectable opposition to the triumph of what has been called (inaccurately, so far as Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov are concerned) Russian Nihilism. Moreover, these wars served to provide Dostoevsky with the materials that he was soon to transmute and elevate, by the power of his genius and personal vision, into the artistic-ideological synthesis of the great novels of the middle and later 1860s.

  With the launching of Time, the routine of Dostoevsky’s life was established for the next five years. All of his energies were absorbed by his work both as editor and contributor, and it is impossible to dissociate his private existence from the quotidian task of running the magazine. Its editorial offices were located in the residence of Mikhail Dostoevsky, and both Feodor and Strakhov lived close by, the latter having moved from another apartment specifically to be nearer at hand. This section of the city was a busy and populous lower-class district, whose grimy and
muddy streets, always swarming with hordes of merchants, tradesmen, and laborers, Dostoevsky later portrayed in Crime and Punishment. And, as Strakhov recalls nostalgically, “amid these surroundings, which filled us with sadness and repulsion, we all lived through very happy years.”18

  16. Mikhail Dostoevsky’s home and the offices of Time

  Strakhov’s memoirs describe a life of unremitting literary labor, with Dostoevsky working round-the-clock and quitting his desk only to sleep. Dostoevsky wrote at night, starting about midnight and continuing until five or six in the morning; he then slept until two or three, and began his day around that time. The staff of the journal convened at three in the afternoon, “and there [in the offices] we leafed through the newspapers and journals, caught up with everything new, and often then went to dinner together.”19 Very often too Dostoevsky visited Strakhov’s daily tea in the early evening, when a group of friends would gather for talk and conviviality.

  17. F. M. Dostoevsky, 1861

  Strakhov also stresses the complete absorption of Dostoevsky and his collaborators in the internecine warfare which, at that agitated moment, imparted so much unaccustomed animation to the Russian periodical press. To be an editor then was an invigorating endeavor. A journal like Time was invariably in the center of a cross fire, and nothing was more important than to know who was a friend and who a foe. “Dostoevsky, Apollon Grigoryev, and I could be certain that, in each new issue of a journal, we would invariably come across our names. The rivalry between various journals, the intense attention given to their tendency, the polemics—all this turned the job of journalism into such an interesting game that, once having experienced it, you could not help but feel a great desire to plunge into it again.”20

  Despite his own career as a publicist, Strakhov harbored an unconquerable disdain for the rough-and-tumble of journalistic infighting. He had, as he remarks proudly, belonged to a literary circle of the 1840s for which “the very summit of culture would have been to understand Hegel and to know Goethe by heart.”21 These two names (especially the latter) had become symbols for a social-cultural attitude au-dessus de la mêlée, of a concern with “eternal” issues far removed from the petty disputes of day-by-day social existence; and Strakhov was shocked, on his first contact with the Milyukov Circle, to find himself exposed to a wholly different point of view. The tendency in this circle, which Dostoevsky had joined soon after his return from exile, “had been formed under the influence of French literature. Political and social questions were thus in the foreground, and swallowed up purely artistic interests. The artist, according to this view, should investigate the evolution of society and bring to consciousness the good and evil coming to birth in its midst; he should, as a result, be a teacher, denouncer, guide. Hence it almost directly followed that eternal and general interests had to be subordinated to transient and political ones. Feodor Mikhailovich was totally steeped in this publicist tendency and remained faithful to it until the end of his life.”22

  Dostoevsky’s passion for journalism derived from the desire to remain in touch with the burgeoning social-cultural issues of his time and to use them for artistic purposes. He made no distinction, unlike the more pretentious Strakhov, between what Goethe called “the demands of the day” and those of his literary career. “I rather looked at journalism cross-eyed,” Strakhov admits, “and approached it with some haughtiness.”23 Precisely because Dostoevsky made no distinction between “eternal” issues and those of the current scene—because he could sense the permanently significant in and through the immediate and seemingly ephemeral—he was ultimately capable of writing those ideological novels that constitute his chief claim to glory.

  Dostoevsky effortlessy came into close personal contact during these years with a wide range of Russian social-cultural opinion. Indeed, he could see all its nuances embodied in the flesh as he spoke to the youthful members of the younger generation who swarmed into the editorial offices of his journal and who, if they were lucky, were invited to attend editorial meetings where manuscripts were read aloud and final decisions taken. Time was constantly on the lookout for new young writers and remained unusually receptive to their fledgling efforts. Many names later well known, some in the annals of the extreme left wing (such as P. N. Tkachev), published their first work under Dostoevsky’s aegis. “Perhaps never again in his life,” remarks V. S. Nechaeva, “would Dostoevsky have the same chance to come into contact with young people of such diverse backgrounds and situations, but united by an interest in social and literary questions, as when he was at the head of Time and Epoch.”24

  Dostoevsky’s editorial policy attempted to combine a sympathy for the aspirations of the predominantly radical youth for social justice and political reform with an unremitting hostility to the aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical tenets of radical ideology. This effort to reconcile the irreconcilable led to inevitable tensions between the various groups of contributors to Time, who made up two opposing factions. At the center of one was the tempestuous Grigoryev, with Strakhov as a fellow-traveler, “though,” writes Strakhov, “his emotions were not at all stirred by the search for pochva, but rather by an implacable hatred of materialism.”25 On the other side, most of the young radicals gathered around A. E. Razin, the self-educated son of a peasant serf family and the author of a popular introduction to a scientific view of the universe for schoolchildren entitled God’s World, who was, in addition, a close friend of Dobrolyubov. Between the two was a group composed of the Dostoevsky brothers and the survivors of the gentry liberal circles of the 1840s—Milyukov, Pleshcheev, Apollon Maikov, and others less well-known.26

  Grigoryev left Petersburg in the spring of 1861 in part because of dissatisfaction with the editorial policy of Time; in particular with Dostoevsky’s refusal to attack more vigorously the radicals on The Contemporary—Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. Dissatisfied as well with Dostoevsky’s relatively mild rebuttal of Dobrolyubov’s views on art, Strakhov admits, “I could not contain myself and I wished to come as quickly as possible into a straightforward and decisive relationship with Nihilist doctrines. . . . I regarded its appearance in literature with great indignation.”27 Dostoevsky did not share the same animus, and his observations of the current scene reveal the extremely unstable synthesis he was trying to work out between a sympathetic and a critical attitude toward the radicals. Much attention is given by Dostoevsky to the relative freedom of the press that had permitted the rise of an “accusatory literature” (for example, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Provincial Sketches) exposing abuses. Such writing had recently come under attack from both the Right (which did not relish the criticism of existing conditions) and the Left (which believed that such criticism did not go far enough). The Contemporary, in the person of Dobrolyubov, had made a point of ridiculing complacent liberal journalists who, while pillorying minor bureaucratic misdeeds, refused to utter a word about the system as a whole or to suggest that a total transformation of society was necessary to remedy the outrages they reported. Dostoevsky tries to steer prudently through these dangerous shoals, indicating his approval of what he calls “beneficent publicity” on the one hand but without expressing any indignation at the jibes of the radicals on the other. While keeping his distance on all matters of substance, he thus displays in this discreet and allusive fashion at least a sympathetic tolerance for the radical position in the social-cultural skirmishes of the early 1860s.

  Only in the last two sections of the first number of Time, however, do the limits of Dostoevsky’s agreement with the radicals begin to emerge more conspicuously. On the issue of literacy, Dostoevsky insists that it is the obligation of the upper class to take the lead in making such literacy accessible, and this duty leads him into some reflections on the “superfluous men”—members of the gentry liberal intelligentsia—who were then under heavy attack from the radicals. Not content with their sarcastic sallies against the characters of Turgenev’s stories and novels, the attack had been continued, with mounting ferocity, b
y Dobrolyubov, and had recently reached a crescendo in his sensational article, “What Is Oblomovism?” (the term coined by Goncharov to describe the lethargy of his protagonist, Oblomov). Listing the most famous examples of superfluous men in Russian literature, all the greatest creations of the best-known writers—Pushkin’s Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin, Herzen’s Beltov, Turgenev’s Rudin—Dobrolyubov had described them without exception as blood brothers of the supine Oblomov.28

  The complaint made by the superfluous men had always been that conditions in Russia offered no arena for the employment of their abilities. But with the liberation of the serfs in 1862, a life of honorable action inside Russia was possible, and indeed had become a task devolving on all men of good will. Even Herzen was ready to agree that “the day of the Onegins and the Pechorins is over. . . . One who does not find work now has no one else to blame for it.”29 Dobrolyubov had insisted that the entire class of gentry liberals should be thrown into the discard, but Herzen had argued that they could still be useful. Essentially, this was also Dostoevsky’s opinion; where the two men differed was in their notion of what “work” and “usefulness” implied in the new post-liberation Russia.

  Herzen always remained a radical revolutionary, and “work” for him did not mean the end of his hostility to a regime that he opposed on principle in the name of democratic Socialism. For Dostoevsky, on the other hand, the time had come for the superfluous men, those fine flowers of the Russian intelligentsia (among whom he would later number Herzen himself), to devote themselves to the humdrum task of bettering the lot of their fellow Russians. Suppose, Dostoevsky writes mockingly, each of these gentlemen undertakes to teach just one child how to read. Such a proposal, of course, would shock their pretensions, and Dostoevsky conveys their horrified response in his ironically dialogic manner: “Is that an activity for people like us! . . . we who conceal titanic powers in our breast! We wish to, and can, move mountains; from our hearts flows the purest well-spring of love for all humanity. . . . It’s impossible to take a five-inch step when we wish to walk in seven-league boots! Can a giant teach a child to read?” To which Dostoevsky replies in his own voice: “There it is: sacrifice all your titanism to the general good; take a five-inch step instead of a seven-league one; accept wholeheartedly the idea that if you are unable to advance further, five inches is all the same worth more than nothing. Sacrifice everything, even your grandeur and your great ideas, for the general good; stoop down, stoop down, as low as the level of a child” (18: 68).