The intelligentsia is thus enjoined to subdue its pretensions and to do what it can within the limits of a possibility bounded by the existing (but greatly transformed) social-political situation. Such an injunction will determine Dostoevsky’s immitigable opposition to all attempts to stir up what he firmly believed could only be futile and self-destructive revolutionary unrest.
1 G. M. Fridlender, F. M. Dostoevsky—materialy i issledovaniya, 6 vols. (Leningrad, 1974–1983), 4: 243.
2 Strakhov, Biografiya, 204.
3 Ibid.
4 Wherever possible, references to Dostoevsky’s notebooks will be keyed to the texts included in the Academy of Sciences edition (PSS) of his works. The translations into English are indebted to those in The Unpublished Dostoevsky, ed. Carl Proffer, trans. by various hands, 3 vols. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1973–1976). Individual page references to the English text, however, will not be given.
5 The word pochva, whose literal meaning is “soil,” also has the accessory sense of “foundation” or “support.”
6 Cited in A. S. Dolinin, “F. M. Dostoevsky i N. N. Strakhov,” in Shestidesiatye gody, ed. N. K. Piksanov and O. V. Tsekhnovitser (Moscow, 1940), 240.
7 Biografiya, 225, 195.
8 In B. F. Egorov, “Apollon Grigoryev—kritik,” Uchenie Zapiski Tartuskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta 98 (1960), 194.
9 Cited in A. L. Volynsky, Russkie kritiki (St. Petersburg, 1896), 684.
10 V. G. Selitrennikova and I. G. Yakushkin, “Apollon Grigoryev i Mitya Karamazov,” Filologicheskie Nauki 1 (1969), 13–24.
11 Apollon Grigoryev, Sochineniya, ed. N. N. Strakhov (St. Petersburg, 1876), 247.
12 Ibid., 618.
13 January 9/21, 1858; in Apollon Grigoryev, Materialy dlya biografii, ed. Vlad Knyazhnin (Petrograd, 1917), 217.
14 W. Giusti, “Annotazioni su A. A. Grigorev,” Annali (Istituto Universitario Orientale, Sezione Slava), 1 (1958), 66. This is an extremely perceptive evaluation of the work and personality of Grigoryev.
15 Pis’ma, 1: 165; January 18, 1856.
16 Cited in V. V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. George L. Kline, 2 vols. (New York, 1953), 1: 405.
17 Ibid., 403.
18 Biografiya, 223.
19 Ibid., 224.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 173.
22 Ibid., 172.
23 Ibid., 200.
24 V. S. Nechaeva, Zhurnal M. M. i F. M. Dostoevskikh, Vremya, 1861–1863 (Moscow, 1973), 65.
25 Ibid., 68.
26 Ibid., 68–69.
27 Biografiya, 220.
28 N. A. Dobrolyubov, Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow, 1956), 199.
29 Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgens, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 4: 154.
CHAPTER 22
An Aesthetics of Transcendence
It was rare for an issue of Time to appear without one of Dostoevsky’s articles or an installment from one of his works in progress, and his presence was also constantly felt in the form of introductions to translations, as well as editorial notes appended to the articles of other contributors. Understandably concerned over the impression that would be created by the first issue of the journal, Dostoevsky rewrote almost entirely an article originally assigned to the poet D. D. Minaev. The result was the feuilleton “Petersburg Visions in Verse and Prose,” a unique mixture of Dostoevsky’s prose text with Minaev’s verse.
The piece has been recognized as a work of rare autobiographical value, containing a precious account of how Dostoevsky viewed the process of his own literary maturation from the days of his early Romanticism up to his discovery of the theme of his first novel. One immediate aim of the feuilleton was certainly to reintroduce himself to the Russian reading public by this evocative résumé of his literary past, but when he returns to the present, we catch a first glimpse of the changes that are already faintly discernible in his artistic outlook. In the revelatory passage that has come to be known as “the vision on the Neva,” the writer recalls how, at the beginning of his career, he had once walked across a bridge over the Neva during a bitterly cold winter day, looking at the frozen expanse sparkling and gleaming in the rays of the setting sun “so that it seemed as if . . . a new town was taking shape in the air”:
It seemed as if all that world, with all its inhabitants, strong and weak, with all their habitations, the refuges of the poor, or the gilded palaces for the comfort of the powerful of this world, was at that twilight hour like a fantastic vision of fairyland, like a dream which in its turn would vanish and pass away like vapor in the dark blue sky. . . . I seemed to have understood something in that minute which had till then been only stirring in me, but was still uninterpreted. . . . I suppose that my existence began from just that minute. . . . (19: 69)
Dostoevsky attributes an extraordinary importance to this imaginary transformation of the majestic city of Peter the Great into a dissolving phantasmagoria that might have been a waking dream. And this fusion of the fantastic and the real, he affirms, marked the beginning of his self-discovery as an artist. Using literary imagery, and still speaking in the fictional disguise of the feuilletonist, he recalls how he had once been in thrall to Romantic influences (Schiller, Hoffmann, Scott), which had given wings to his imagination and lifted him far above his immediate surroundings. Never deigning to cast even a glance at the world around him, he had desired to live “with all my heart and soul in those golden and passionate dreams exactly as if from opium.” But then, the revelatory impact of the vision made him aware of all those people he had hardly noticed before, “all those . . . strange, astonishing figures, totally prosaic . . . titular councillors [lower-level bureaucrats] and at the same time, as it were, some sort of fantastic titular councillors” (19: 70). As they emerged into view, they all appeared to be puppets moved by strings; and behind them was the puppet master (Gogol), laughing uproariously himself and provoking everyone else to laughter as well.
But the youthful Dostoevsky did not wish, like the puppet master of genius, to laugh at all the humble creatures surrounding him; instead, he invented another story about them that “tore deeply at my heart” (19: 70). This story, of course, was the sentimental tale Poor Folk. Dostoevsky’s characters became “fantastic” not because of the comic distortions provided by the oblique prism of Gogolian humor but through the unexpected delicacy of their feelings and responses. Here, then, was his own literary point of departure—the infatuation with Romanticism, the turn to Gogol, the realization that reality too contained its own kind of visionary strangeness, and the invention of a new variety of such bestrangement.
The vision on the Neva provides a penetrating glimpse into Dostoevsky’s pre-Siberian literary evolution, and he insists that the same vision, even if in slightly different forms, has continued to nourish his imagination ever since. “My dreams, if you like, are the same, but with other faces, although old acquaintances also sometimes knock at my door.” Dostoevsky thus continues to view the ordinary world around him as filled with the strange and the uncanny; in the horde of Christmas shoppers flowing through the Petersburg streets, he suddenly sees “just in front of me . . . some sort of figure, not real but fantastic. I, you see, am in no way able to shake off a state of mind disposed to the fantastic. Already in the 1840s they called me a fantasist and ridiculed me for it. Then, all the same, I did not crawl into a hole. Now, it’s understood—gray hair, the experience of life, etc., etc., and all the same I still remain a fantasist” (19: 73).
These words are a belated reply to Belinsky’s devastating criticism of The Double in 1846, and a defiant affirmation of Dostoevsky’s refusal to abandon his own particular mode of apprehending reality; but Dostoevsky is doing more here than simply defending his past. As an unrepentant “fantasist,” as a “mystic” and a “dreamer,” he also sees “other faces” that have begun to impinge among his old acquaintances. One is that of a poor impoverished clerk, totally beaten
down and subdued by life, so meek that he does not even turn his head when he is lashed by a coachman’s whip on the Nevsky Prospect. But one day, he suddenly breaks his silence to confess—something totally unimaginable! That he is really Garibaldi, the notorious bandit and “destroyer of the natural order of things” (19: 71–72). The Russian newspapers and journals, including Time, were in those days full of stories about Garibaldi’s heroic struggle for Italian independence against Austria, and the Italian patriot had become the darling of the progressive press. Like Poprishchin in Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” (Dostoevsky makes the comparison himself), who landed in a madhouse believing himself to be the king of Spain after reading in the newspapers about the vacancy of the throne, Dostoevsky’s clerk becomes obsessed with the idea that he and the great rebel Garibaldi are one and the same person.
To imagine such velleities of insurrection simmering in the breast of the humblest and most resigned of titular councillors is, of course, the very acme of “the fantastic.” “And when I dreamed this dream,” Dostoevsky admits, “I began to laugh at myself and the eccentricity of my dream” (19: 72). But then the dream turned out to be “true”—or at least confirmed as a possibility by a newspaper story about a similar clerk, retired and living in the direst poverty, who was found at his death to be worth a half-million rubles. An autopsy was to be performed on the corpse, but “it seems to me that no autopsy will elucidate mysteries like this one” (19: 75). “The prosaic” is shown once again to contain the most extravagant possibilities and the most baffling psychological enigmas.
Nonetheless, Dostoevsky takes a stab at elucidating the “mystery” with the aid of two alternative psychologies. One is derived from Pushkin’s “The Covetous Knight,” and in its light “my Solovyev [the name of the millionaire derelict] suddenly appeared to me as a colossal figure.” Like Pushkin’s nobleman, he enjoys the secret sense of power given by his boundless wealth—“he has only to whistle, and everything he needs will crawl to him obediently.” But he does not even whistle; it is power, not satisfaction, that he inwardly craves: “he needs nothing . . . he is above all desires.” Dostoevsky, however, decides not “to steal from Pushkin” in this instance (though he will not hesitate to do so in both The Idiot and A Raw Youth), and he invents another motivation for Solovyev. In his youth, the clerk had been quite normal, but then something occurred—“perhaps one of those moments . . . when he suddenly caught a glimpse of something, and that something frightened him” (19: 73–74). From that moment he began to save, in a manner that gradually became deranged, and his niggardliness was an aberrant manner of responding to the terror of whatever existential crisis had abruptly undermined his being.
What is striking about these two figures at first sight—and quite contrary to Dostoevsky’s emphasis—is their pronounced resemblance to his characters of the 1840s. Why should he have considered them “other faces” in relation to his early work? In their initial incarnation, any deviation from the path of perfect submission and absolute obedience was enough to plunge his characters into psychic derangement; nothing could have been further from their own thoughts than any impulse of willful insubordination. Although Dostoevsky’s downtrodden clerk resembles his earlier characters in every external feature, the obsession with being Garibaldi reveals something dramatically new—an acknowledgment of an urge to destroy the entire world as revenge for his frustrations. Now, in some hidden and suppressed corner of his psyche, the character himself internalizes the full social-political implications of his resentments, and his consciousness thus contains an explicit, ideologically subversive dimension.
Evidences of such a subversive change can also be found in Dostoevsky’s notes (1860–1861) for his proposed rewriting of The Double. Golyadkin realizes that his invitation to the daughter of his superior, at a party he had crashed, was really “a revolt against society”; the motif is enlarged so that a trivial event, pathetically comic in its original form, now becomes a threatening social-political gesture. Similarly, Golyadkin anticipates the underground man in his fantasies of political power, which swing back and forth between revolution and reaction: “Alone with Junior, dreams of becoming a Napoleon, a Pericles, a leader of the Russian revolt. Liberalism and revolution, restoring Louis XI with tears” (1: 434).
What was only potential in the earlier work is now developed in a fashion that converts the original comic pathos into a movement of despairing rebellion and a perverted will to power. Golyadkin’s psychology, the split in his personality between “ambition” and fear of the authorities, takes on a new ideological richness, and the same change of scale can be noted in the case of the millionaire derelict. With him we seem to be back in the world of “Mr. Prokharchin” (1846), who dies in misery while concealing a small fortune and whose avarice had been the result of having “caught a glimpse of something, and that something frightened him.”1 But here too Dostoevsky begins to conceive such a figure as analogous to Pushkin’s “The Covetous Knight,” and to portray his miserliness as another manifestation of a perverted will-to-power not unlike that of the clerk whose dreams are haunted by Garibaldi.
Even though this psychology is far from being fully developed as yet, Dostoevsky is moving toward viewing his early characters as endowed with some of the same elevation of thought and feeling as Pushkin’s great Romantic creations. After first rejecting Romanticism and shrinking its themes and motifs to the level of “the prosaic” in the 1840s, Dostoevsky thus reverses direction to enlarge his “sentimental Naturalism” with some of the grandeur that had once inflamed his youthful literary imagination. He is already beginning to feel his way toward the synthesis of his great novels, where a scrupulous depiction of “the prosaic” will be combined with “the fantastic” of psychological extremism, world-consuming ambition, and complex ideological ratiocination.
Part of Time’s considerable success was attributable to Dostoevsky’s flair for providing his readers with exciting literary sustenance from a great range of sources. At the same time, what he chose to print bears the inevitable mark of his own preoccupations, and his editorial comments often foreshadow his later works or illuminate the manner in which everything he read became grist for his creative mill.
During 1861, Time ran a series of accounts of famous recent murder trials in France. These are recommended as irresistible reading, “more exciting than all possible novels because they light up the dark sides of the human soul that art does not like to approach, or which it approaches only glancingly and in passing” (19: 89). What interests Dostoevsky are the psychological motives and behavior of those who kill. With such words, Dostoevsky is anticipatorily staking out the novelistic domain in which he will soon achieve his greatest triumphs. For he will raise the novel of mystery and criminal adventures to new heights by shifting the focus from such external plot action to the psychology (which for him will be inseparable from the ideology) of the criminal.
A lengthy preface in the first issue preceded three stories by Edgar Allen Poe, and both Dostoevsky’s text and the translations can be linked closely with his creations in the next few years. Dostoevsky’s preface, in the words of a Soviet Russian scholar, contains “the first serious and penetrating evaluation of the American writer made in Russia” (19: 282). Indeed, according to an American specialist, Dostoevsky’s preface of 1860 includes “the most perceptive observations yet made in any language specifically on Poe’s artistic technique.”2
What struck Dostoevsky in Poe was “the vigor of his imagination,” which he defines as “the power of specific detail”: Poe will invent the most extraordinary and even impossible situations, but in his stories “you will so clearly see all the details of the form of the existence presented to you” that the reader is absolutely convinced of their verisimilitude. Unlike Baudelaire, whose translations of Poe (including the prefatory essays) Dostoevsky had certainly read, he does not view him as a poète maudit condemned by the reigning vulgarity of American life; rather, he suggests quite brilliantly t
hat the outstanding feature of Poe’s imagination is typically American. Materialism was presumed to be the dominating aspect of American civilization, and “if there is the fantastic in Poe, it has, so to speak, something material about it. Clearly, he is fully an American even in his most fantastic stories” (19: 88–89).
The stories of Poe that Dostoevsky printed can all be related to the two great works he will write in just a few years—Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment. Even the least of Poe’s stories in Time—“The Devil in the Belfry,” hardly more than a broad comic anecdote—is an allegory of the intrusion of the irrational into an orderly world that has always run in accordance with its immutable laws. When the devil gets into the belfry of the sleepy town of Vondervotteimittis, the lives of the sedate burghers are thrown completely out of kilter because the belfry clock at noontime does not stop at twelve but goes on to chime thirteen. The two other stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” contain features that can be linked even more concretely with Dostoevsky’s artistic future.
Both are written in a first-person mode by a narrator unable to suppress a sense of guilt about his crimes and whose conscience finally bursts forth in self-betrayal. Both also illustrate the same irresistible pressure of the irrational to thwart the best-laid and most cunning calculations of the rational mind. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a motiveless murderer who kills because of a pathological obsession, believes he has committed the perfect crime, but he finally confesses because he thinks that others as well as himself hear the thunderous noise of the victim’s heart continuing to beat through the floor under which the corpse lies buried.
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