Dostoevsky
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“The Black Cat” is also the story of a crime executed in secret and ultimately discovered because of an oversight caused by panic and terror. Above all, “The Black Cat” contains the narrator’s comment on his inexplicable sadism toward the cat he supposedly loves. Such behavior is attributable to “the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which gives direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?”3 This passage may surely be seen as one of the sources leading to the philosophical-psychological dialectic of the first part of Notes from Underground.
Yet, for all his admiration of Poe’s talent, Dostoevsky does not consider him the equal of another “fantasist,” E.T.A. Hoffmann, whom Dostoevsky had read as an adolescent with reverence. What gives Hoffmann the upper hand, he maintains, is that the supernatural and unearthly interpenetrate and fuse in his work with the commonplace and the verisimilar. Sometimes Hoffmann “even seeks his ideal outside the earthly, in some sort of extraordinary world that he accepts as superior, as if he himself believed in the existence of this mysterious enchanted world.” Poe is inferior to Hoffmann as a “poet,” since the German Romantic constantly infuses his work with aspiration toward “an ideal”—and in such aspiration Dostoevsky locates “the purity, and the real, true beauty inherent in man” (19: 88–89). Dostoevsky’s own best post-Siberian creations attempt to strike a balance between the two writers, rivaling Poe for vividness and verisimilitude but never losing Hoffmann’s sense of the unearthly and the transcendent as a controlling force in human life.
Dostoevsky thus tried to be both a writer like Poe and a poet like Hoffmann; for him these two aspects of literature should not ever be separated. Indeed, the necessity of keeping the two united was an issue very much on his mind precisely at this moment, and it was one that continued to preoccupy his thinking about art and life. For the most important function of art, he believed, was to inspire man by providing him with an ideal of transcendence toward which he could eternally aspire. This was the very position he asserted when, in the second number of Time, he launched his first open attack against the radical camp.
At first sight, Dostoevsky’s article, “Mr.—bov and the Question of Art,” appears to be only a response to a recent article of Dobrolyubov devoted to the stories of the Ukrainian-Russian author Maria Markovich, who wrote under the pseudonym of Marco Vovchok. In reality, however, Dostoevsky’s article contains the results of long meditations on the question of art that extend from the beginning of his literary career through his Siberian years.
During the mid-1840s, Dostoevsky had disagreed with Belinsky over the social function of art and had argued that the artist should be accorded absolute freedom. Several years later, exactly the position that Dostoevsky had rejected as a young writer was codified into an influential theory by Chernyshevsky in The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality. Artists, insisted the radical critic, had the obligation to subordinate their inspiration to “life,” and “life” was defined essentially in terms of the immediate task of obtaining social justice. Chernyshevsky’s ideas stirred up a huge controversy in Russian criticism, which then became stylized into an opposition between Gogol and Pushkin. The first was elevated by the radicals into an exemplar of what they wished literature to be, an accusation and exposé of the evils of Russian society; the second was celebrated by their opponents as the image of the serene Olympian dedicating his divine gifts to the “eternal” entanglements of the human condition. Both were praised and denounced with equal fervor and equal lack of discrimination, and Dobrolyubov particularly enjoyed heaping scorn on what he called Pushkin’s “anthology-pieces” and “toy rattles.”4
All this began during Dostoevsky’s years in prison camp, but he caught up with the polemic once he emerged and began to read the periodicals. Indeed, since he then started to work on a series of essays titled Letters on Art, whose subject would have been “the significance of Christianity in art,”5 there is evidence that he wished to add his own voice to the raging debate. This work, if ever written, has not survived; but some glimpse of its ideas may surely be obtained in the article “Mr.—bov and the Question of Art.”
In line with the general policy of Time, Dostoevsky tries to dissociate his polemic from any invidious personal connotations, and he praises Dobrolyubov as being “almost the only one of our critics who is now being read” (18: 72). At the same time, Dostoevsky also tries to cover his flanks with a broadside against one of the bulwarks of the “Pushkinian” camp, the Notes of the Fatherland, and by defending the importance of Belinsky against a deprecating reference to the critic as not having given enough importance to the “historical” study of Russian literature. “In two pages of Belinsky,” Dostoevsky retorts, “. . . more is said about the historical aspect of Russian literature than in all the pages of the Notes of the Fatherland from 1848 up to the present” (18: 71). No quarter is given to the critic of that journal, S. S. Dudyshkin, who might have been considered one of his allies against Dobrolyubov. Dostoevsky thus publicly aligns himself with the radicals, for whom Belinsky was an unsurpassable master, and establishes his credentials as a nonpartisan commentator who, even if picking a quarrel with Dobrolyubov, can hardly be considered to belong to the party of the enemy.
To begin, Dostoevsky sets the two extreme positions in confrontation with each other and demonstrates that both are self-contradictory. The partisans of the freedom of art, who do not tolerate constraints and directives, at the same time object to “accusatory” literature and its themes. As a result, they infringe the very principle of the freedom of art they presumably wish to defend. The radical Utilitarians demand that art be useful, but, since they are indifferent to artistic quality, they too find themselves in contradiction with their own leading principle: “A work without artistic value can never and in no way attain its goal; moreover, it does more harm than good to its cause; hence the Utilitarians, in neglecting artistic value, are the first to harm their own cause” (18: 79).
Even though both poles are thus rejected as being internally inconsistent, it is obvious that Dostoevsky believes the mistake of the partisans of art to be only a venial sin, while that of the Utilitarians implies a denial of the very right of art to exist. It is true, Dostoevsky acknowledges, that Dobrolyubov does not specifically go to such lengths, but Chernyshevsky had, after all, compared art to school texts whose “purpose is to prepare the student for reading the original sources and later to serve as reference books from time to time.”6 And even if the Utilitarians do not openly reject art, they not only hold it in very low esteem but seem to resent artistic quality as such; if not, why do they “detest Pushkin, and label all his inspiration as affectations, grimaces, hocus-pocus and grace-notes, while his poems are considered trifles fit only for anthologies?” (18: 79).
As proof of the ultimate contempt of the Utilitarians for art, Dostoevsky singles out Dobrolyubov’s praise of Marco Vovchok. Dostoevsky concentrates his fire on one of her stories, “Masha,” which portrays the inner resistance of a young serf girl to her enslaved condition. For Dobrolyubov, this story illustrated the depth of the Russian common people’s longing for freedom; it stood as a lesson for all those who believed that the Russian peasant was too undeveloped as an individual to harbor any desire for emancipation. In words that startlingly anticipate those Dostoevsky will soon use in House of the Dead, he writes: “the strength which lies in them [the Russian common people], finding no free and proper outlet, is compelled to force an unconventional way for itself . . . often in a way fatal to itself.”7
The tendency of Marco Vovchok’s work, Dostoevsky
declares, is worthy of the highest praise, “and we are ready to rejoice in [her] activity” (18: 92). But it is one thing to approve of her intentions; it is quite another to overlook the glaring artistic deficiencies of her stories, which, in Dostoevsky’s opinion, ruin whatever persuasive power the worthy ideas embodied in them might have exercised. To prove his point, Dostoevsky simply reprints the extracts from the story given by Dobrolyubov himself; he does not think it necessary to argue the case in detail, allowing the stilted sentiments and casebook reactions to speak for themselves. Masha, he comments, is “a tent-show heroine, some sort of bookish creature of the study, not a woman” (18: 90). And if Dobrolyubov thinks that reading “Masha” will cause supporters of serfdom to change their minds, then he is woefully mistaken. How can an author prove that a particular sentiment (for example, a hatred of serfdom) exists among the Russian common people when she lacks the artistic ability to portray characters who resemble Russians at all? The characters of “Masha” are “some sort of supernumeraries out of a ballet dressed up in Russian caftans and sarafans; they are paysans and paysannes, not Russian peasant men and women.” Hence, Dostoevsky informs Dobrolyubov, “artistic form is in the highest degree useful, and useful precisely from your point of view” (18: 92–93). For the falsity of “Masha” will only persuade those who already hold a contemptuous opinion of the Russian peasant that, since no alternative image can be convincingly projected, the time-honored one they still cling to must be accurate.
If Dostoevsky had been concerned merely to indict the absurdities of both the partisans of art and the radical Utilitarians, and to establish his own independent position in this literary controversy, then he might have terminated his article after disposing of Marco Vovchok. But he was hunting for bigger game, and his real quarry was Chernyshevsky’s Feuerbachian aesthetics, with its devaluation of the whole realm of the supernatural and the transcendent and its aim of exposing art as a substitute religion. No more than Chernyshevsky could he make his argument in any explicit form; but the drift of his words is unmistakable when placed in this context.
For Chernyshevsky, art was merely a deceptive alternative for the material satisfactions of real life and served as an imaginary surrogate just so long as these satisfactions are withheld. “If a man is obliged to live in the tundras of Siberia . . . ,” Chernyshevsky had written, “he may dream of magic gardens with unearthly trees with coral branches, emerald leaves, and ruby fruit, but on transferring his residence to, say, the Kursk province, and being able to roam to his heart’s content in a modest but tolerable orchard with apple, cherry, and pear trees. . . . The dreamer will forget not only about The Arabian Nights but also about the orange groves in Spain.”8 Dostoevsky, however, rejects the notion that art exists only as an imaginary replacement for the lacks of man’s material needs. Man has other needs as well, and, Dostoevsky affirms, “art is for man just as much a need as eating or drinking. The need for beauty, and the creations embodying it, are inseparable from man, and without it man would perhaps have no wish to live. Man thirsts for [beauty] . . . and it is perhaps in this that lies the greatest mystery of artistic creation, that the image of beauty which emerges from its hands immediately becomes an idol without any conditions” (18: 94).
It is clear from his use of the word “idol” that Dostoevsky is touching on the relations of art and religion. The images of art have traditionally provided the objects of religious reverence because man has a need to worship something entirely transcending the bounds of human life as he knows it. Man has always displayed an unconditional need for beauty inseparable from his history; without it, as Dostoevsky poignantly suggests, he would perhaps not wish to go on living at all. The creations of art thus immediately become “idols,” objects of worship, “because the need for beauty develops most strongly when man is in disaccord with reality, in discordance, in struggle, that is when he lives most fully, for the moment at which man lives most fully is when he is seeking something, . . . it is then that he displays the most natural desire for everything that is harmonious and serene, and in beauty there is harmony and serenity” (18: 94). For Dostoevsky, as well as for Chernyshevsky, this quest is the result of a lack in the real world of human struggle and deprivation; but there can be no question for Dostoevsky of bridging the gap between the real and the ideal merely by material means. Since man “lives most fully” in Dostoevsky’s universe only when he is in disaccord with reality, it is evident that the novelist’s vision of what is ultimately important in human life totally differs from that of Chernyshevsky.
Indeed, the idea that man could ever attain total contentment with his life on earth is linked by Dostoevsky with images of the death of the spirit and of moral decadence. At such moments, Dostoevsky writes, “it is as if life slowed down, and we have even seen examples of how man, having attained the ideal of his desires, not knowing what to strive for any longer, satisfied to the gills, fell into some kind of melancholy, even provoking such melancholy in himself; how he sought for another ideal in his life, and, satiated beyond measure, not only failed to value what he enjoyed but even consciously diverged from the proper path, stimulating in himself tastes that were eccentric, unhealthy, stinging, discordant, sometimes monstrous, losing the feel for, and the aesthetic sense of, healthy beauty and demanding the exceptional in its stead.” To adopt, as an ideal for mankind, the aim of the fullest material satisfaction is thus the equivalent of encouraging moral perversity and corruption. For this reason, a genuine “beauty” embodying the “eternal ideals” of mankind—ideals of harmony and serenity far transcending the human realm—is “an indispensable exigence of the human organism” (18: 94). Only such ideals, which man continually struggles to attain and to realize in his own existence, can prevent him from sinking into apathy and despair.
This conception of beauty as some form of transcendent expression of mankind’s eternal ideals provides Dostoevsky with a vantage point from which to combat the narrow definition of “usefulness” in Utilitarian aesthetics. For if art is entrusted with the task of expressing mankind’s eternal ideals, then to prescribe a particular role for it in terms of “utility” implies that one knows in advance the outcome of the entire historical destiny of the human race. But such knowledge, of course, is outside the human ken: “How, indeed, can one determine clearly and independently exactly what must be done to arrive at the ideal of all our desires, to achieve everything that humanity wishes and toward which it aspires?” Since we cannot do this, “how [can we] determine in full certainty what is harmful and useful”; indeed, we cannot even tell how, and in what degree, art has been “useful” to humanity in the past.
Who would have predicted, for example, that the works of two “old fogies” such as Corneille and Racine could play “a decisive and unexpected part in the circumstances of the historical life of a whole people” (that is, during the French Revolution) (18: 78)? The manifold ways in which art interacts with society are impossible to foresee; works that seem to have no direct social relevance at all may well, under certain circumstances, exercise the most powerful and direct influence on the life of action. But if we are not able to understand exactly how this comes about, “it is very possible that we also delude ourselves too when we strictly and imperatively dictate mankind’s occupations and show art the normal path of its usefulness and its genuine mission.” The Utilitarians wish to limit art to the social needs of the present, and regard any concern with the past—such as an admiration for The Iliad—as shameful escapism, a retreat into self-indulgent enjoyment and idle dilettantism. Dostoevsky recognizes the moral concern motivating such an erroneous position, and says that “this is why we feel so much sympathy for them [the radicals] and wish them to be respected” (18: 95–96).
In any case, since Russian culture has now become part of European civilization as a whole, it is only natural for Russian writers to draw freely on the common treasures of “the historical and universally human” (18: 99). Moreover, a contemporary writer can use t
he past to express the most burning issues of the present—a point Dostoevsky illustrates with a brilliant analysis of the poem “Diana,” written by the bête noire of the radical critics, the lyricist A. A. Fet. This finely chiseled little work, quite Parnassian in feeling, describes a moment of disappointed expectation: the poet suddenly imagines that a statue of the goddess Diana will come to life and descend from her pedestal to walk through the streets of Rome. But, alas! “the motionless marble / whitely gleamed before me with unfathomable beauty” (18: 97).
Dostoevsky interprets the poem, especially these last two lines, as “a passionate appeal, a prayer before the perfection of past beauty, and a hidden inner nostalgia for that same perfection which the soul is seeking, but which it must long continue to seek, while long continuing to be tormented with birth-pangs before it is found” (18: 97). The “hidden inner nostalgia” that Dostoevsky discerns in this text is surely a longing for a new theogony, a new apparition of the sacred that would come to replace the beautiful, though lifeless, pagan idol; it is a longing for the birth of Christ, for the God-man who was indeed one day to walk on earth and supplant the immobile and distant Roman goddess. And since Dostoevsky has described his own time as one of “striving, struggle, uncertainty, and faith (because our time is a time of faith),” he interprets Fet’s poem as expressing the most urgent of contemporary themes.9