Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  These reflections on art conclude with a single sentence that, Dostoevsky believes, resolves the conflict between the two entrenched misunderstandings, and which he prints as an independent paragraph in italics: “Art is always actual and real; has never existed in any other way, and, most important, cannot exist in any other way” (18: 98). This idea was first expressed in Russian criticism by Valerian Maikov, Dostoevsky’s close friend in the 1840s; and he now reiterates it as the cornerstone of his own doctrine. If it sometimes seems that art deviates from reality and is not “useful,” this is only because we do not yet know all the ways through which art serves mankind and because we are, even if for the most laudable reasons, too narrowly focused on the immediate and the common good. Of course, artists themselves sometimes stray from the proper path, and in such cases the efforts of Dobrolyubov and his brethren to call them to order are quite legitimate. But Dostoevsky makes a sharp distinction between criticism, admonition, exhortation, persuasion, and the issuance of what are in effect dictates and ukazy as to how artists should create.

  All such efforts to regiment art are in any case doomed to futility; no true artist will obey them, and art will go its own way regardless of attempts to bridle its creative caprices. Such attempts are based on a total misunderstanding of the nature of art, which always has responded to, and has never separated itself from, the needs and interests of humankind. Dostoevsky thus defends the liberty of art not because he rejects the criterion of “utility,” but precisely with the certainty that the freer art will be in its development, the more useful it will be to the interests of humanity” (18: 102). Once again he takes up a totally original position, arguing both for the liberty and the utility of art, but—most important of all—defining such “utility” in terms of man’s eternal striving to incorporate within his life the inspiration of a supernatural religious ideal.

  This crucial aspect of Dostoevsky’s argument is of fundamental importance for an understanding of his own evolving view of life. It is significant, for example, that the instances of sane and healthy “beauty” he refers to—The Iliad, the Apollo of Belvedere, the poem of Fet—all have religious connotations, if only pagan ones, and he even goes out of his way to stress this point. “This marble is a god,” he says, speaking of the Apollo, “and spit at it as much as you like, you will not rob it of its divinity” (18: 78).10 Even though Dostoevsky limits himself to examples from classical antiquity, this line of reasoning could easily culminate in an affirmation of the importance of “Christianity in art.” Shortly after leaving prison camp in 1854, Dostoevsky had written that nothing in the world was “more beautiful” than the figure of Christ;11 and it was this beauty that provided moral inspiration for the modern world, just as the gods of Greek and Roman mythology had done for antiquity. Perhaps for reasons of ideological strategy, he deliberately underplays this Christian aspect of his argument and takes refuge in the Greco-Roman past; but it was not from the religion of the Greeks and Romans that Dostoevsky expected any answer to the anguishing questions confronting both modern Russia and modern man.

  What Dostoevsky says only by implication in this article is expressed openly in another essay written several months later, in which he offers a striking analysis of Pushkin’s poem, “Egyptian Nights.” The poem, one of his old favorites, describes Cleopatra offering to spend a night with any male who will agree to forfeit his life at dawn in return. Pushkin paints her challenge in voluptuous detail as she dwells on the delights awaiting the man who accepts her fatal invitation, and Katkov, that staunch pillar of the regime and the editor of The Russian Messenger, had spoken censoriously of the work as brazenly uncovering a secret that “should never see the light of day” (19: 134). Dostoevsky undertakes to enlighten Katkov as to the real significance of the poem, and one has the distinct impression that this reading is another fragment of his lost treatise on the role of Christianity in art.

  Far from being immoral, Dostoevsky interprets the poem as an expression of “frightful terror . . . the illustration of a perversion of human nature reaching such a degree of horror . . . that the impression left by it is no longer scabrous but frightening.” The poem vividly embodies the moral-psychic disorder induced by satiation—by the absence of any spiritual ideal. Cleopatra’s world is one in which “all faith has been lost,” and since “the future offers nothing . . . life must be nourished only by what exists” (19: 135–136). This is manifestly the universe as Chernyshevsky would have wished it to be, existence shorn of the splendors of the imaginary transcendent.

  Cleopatra is “the representative of this type of society,” and the poet depicts her in a moment of boredom when only a “violent sensation” can relieve her tedium. She has already exhausted all the byways of eroticism; now something extra is needed, and what stirs in her soul is “a fierce and ferocious” irony—spiced with the dreadful joy of anticipation as she mingles sensuality with the cruelty of an executioner. Never had she known anything so savagely exciting, and her soul gloats with the repulsive delight of the female spider “who, it is said, devours the male at the instant of sexual union.” “You understand much more clearly now,” Dostoevsky explains to his readers, “what sort of people it was to which our divine redeemer descended. And you understand much more clearly the meaning of the word: redeemer” (19: 136–137).

  If we transpose this remarkable reading from the classical past to mid- nineteenth-century Russia, we immediately obtain the outlines of much of Dostoevsky’s own world, with some of his major themes and his entire psychology of decadence. Indeed, in the novel he was then writing, The Insulted and Injured, Dostoevsky was in the course of making this transposition himself. His villain, Prince Valkovsky, is the first Russian embodiment of the psychology of the Cleopatra type, which will reappear in such figures as Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, and the elder Karamazov (who says of himself, “I’ve got quite the countenance of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period”) (14: 22). It is no accident that, three years later, Cleopatra turns up in Notes from Underground sticking gold pins into her slave girls for amusement.

  The late Greco-Roman world had just then taken on a symbolic contemporary meaning as a result of the ongoing social-cultural debate. All through the 1850s, Herzen had compared the state of Western Europe after 1848 with that of Rome in its decline, and he spoke of Europe’s revitalization by the impending Russian social revolution as parallel to the moral rejuvenation provided for the ancient world by the arrival of Christianity. Dostoevsky and Herzen thus shared much the same historical-philosophical vision of a declining European civilization destined to be redeemed by Russian Christianity. But while Herzen was simply using a historical analogy, Dostoevsky accepted this historical imagery as containing a literal truth. The loss of a religious ideal in the West had turned Europe into a society similar to that of Rome in its decadence, where various forms of moral disorder and perverted sensuality pullulated uncontrollably, and the Western ideas now being propagated by the radicals, Dostoevsky believed, would have exactly the same effect in Russia.

  Despite the attack on Dobrolyubov and the efforts of Strakhov and Grigorev, Time generally managed to preserve its progressive reputation during the first year of publication. Time highlighted the plight of the proletariat in Europe and strongly defended Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England, with its terrible pictures of proletarian misery, against the criticisms of the German economist Bruno Hildebrand. In one of the earliest references to Engels’s work in the Russian press, the writer of the Time article calls him “the most gifted and learned of all German Socialists,” and Socialism as an economic theory (euphemistically called “association”) was unambiguously championed in Time against laissez-faire doctrines. Proudhon, known to be close to Herzen, was always referred to with great respect.12

  Dostoevsky’s “progressivism,” with all its hesitations and reservations, was in evidence in the many subjects hotly disputed between him and the powerful Katkov, a bitter enemy of the radicals,
whose journal The Russian Messenger then proceeded to pillory Time and its collaborators all through 1861. The Russian Messenger at this period was the organ of a moderate liberalism within the Russian social-political spectrum. Katkov greatly admired Tocqueville, praised the English political system as a model, and supported laissez-faire economics in the name of individual freedom. Whatever Dostoevsky’s reservations about The Contemporary, his instinctive democratic Populism made him far more hostile to Katkov’s advocacy of Western bourgeois liberalism than to the Socialism of the radicals, who at least were defenders of the Russian commune, along with the Slavophils. Even though Dostoevsky, as a supporter of the regime, was a political ally of Katkov, his social sympathies were much closer to those of Chernyshevsky. The social-economic articles of Time thus resembled those in The Contemporary far more than they did those in Katkov’s journal. The powerful editor of The Russian Messenger tended to look with supreme disdain at a Russian culture in which the stupidities of The Contemporary could gain so wide a following, and his disabused reflections about the so-called achievements of Russian culture and the wonders of Russian nationality stirred Dostoevsky to a fighting fury.

  Even while springing to the defense of the radicals, Dostoevsky always does so from his own position and never conceals his disagreement with their theories. But he also never loses sight, at least at this stage of his career, of what he believed to be the purity of their dominating aim of bettering the lot of the downtrodden Russian peasant. Dostoevsky could not endure seeing the radicals maligned by those who, like Katkov, had never shared their passionate revulsion against injustice and yet now read them lessons in morality. “We see there,” Dostoevsky tells Katkov, “suffering and torments without relief. . . . In the painful search for a way out, [such a person] stumbles, falls. . . . But why blacken them with the epithet of dishonest?” (19: 173). In Dostoevsky’s refusal to accept such insults, we can already catch a glimpse of how he will treat some of his erring characters misled by radical ideologies.

  The Russian Messenger was not the only nonradical journal with which Dostoevsky exchanged potshots during 1861. A favorite target for his ire was Notes of the Fatherland, whose literary critic, S. S. Dudyshkin, had had the temerity to declare that Pushkin was not really a “national” poet. For Dostoevsky, such an opinion was equivalent to sacrilege, and he set out to destroy it in a slashing article that contains a brilliant reading of Evgeny Onegin. Dostoevsky interprets Pushkin much as Grigoryev was just then doing in an important series of articles published by Time on the development of the idea of nationality in Russian literature. Pushkin incarnated the moment when Russian culture, having assimilated Europeanism through every pore, became conscious that it could never be truly European and was confronted with the problem of its historical destiny. “This was the first beginning of the epoch,” Dostoevsky writes, “when our leading people brutally separated into two parties, then entered into a furious civil war. For the Slavophils and Westernizers are also a historical phenomenon and in the highest degree national” (19: 10). This vision of the history of Russian culture would later furnish the novelist with part of the social-cultural ground plan of Demons, in which Stavrogin, a reincarnation of the Onegin type, inspires both Slavophil (Shatov) and Westernizer (Kirillov) ideological offshoots.

  Indeed, some traits of Stavrogin begin to emerge as Dostoevsky transforms Grigoryev’s sweeping panorama—the history of the coming-to-consciousness of the Russian national psyche—into a complex drama of inner self-discovery. “Onegin’s skepticism carries something tragic in its very principle,” he writes, “and sometimes sounds with a ferocious irony.” He is caught, like Matthew Arnold’s traveler in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born, / With nowhere yet to rest [his] head,”13 in search of a new ideal to replace the old European one in which, like the entire highly civilized society to which he belongs, “he is no longer able fully to believe” (19: 11).

  Onegin’s existential anguish, writes Dostoevsky, is composed of both “bitter irony” and a total lack of self-respect because “his conscience murmurs to him that he is a hollow man,” and yet he knows that he is not: “is one hollow when one can suffer?” (19: 11). He represents “an entire epoch which for the first time looks at itself.” This Onegin type, becoming part of the consciousness of Russian society, has been reborn and reelaborated in each new generation: “In the personage of Pechorin [the protagonist of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time] it reached a state of insatiable, bilious malice, and of a strange contrast, in the highest degree original and Russian, of a contradiction between two heterogeneous elements: an egoism extending to self-adoration, and at the same time a malicious self-contempt” (19: 12).

  Dostoevsky sees “the jeering mask of Gogol” as revealing the same dilemma, and implies that Gogol “allowed himself to die, powerless to create and precisely to determine an ideal at which he would not be able to laugh.” The final stage of the process is found in Turgenev’s Rudin and the Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District, who “no longer laugh at their own activity and their own convictions: they believe, and are saved by this faith.” Both figures, in other words, are inspired by the humanitarian ideals of the 1840s, particularly by a deep compassion for the people, and hence have been rescued from despair: “they are almost no longer egoists” (19: 12). In this impassioned sketch of the history of the superfluous man in Russian literature, the intricacies of Dostoevskian psychology begin to merge with the course of Russian social-cultural development, and the conquest of egoism and the search for faith and an ideal become identified with a rediscovery of the values of the Russian common people.

  Indeed, as we shall soon see, these very ideas were being presented to an avid reading public in regular installments of The Insulted and Injured. The treacherous Prince Valkovsky claims that moral obligations are a sham because, “What isn’t nonsense is personality—myself. . . . I only recognize obligations when I see I have something to gain by them. . . . [W]hat can I do if I know for a fact that at the root of all human virtue lies the completest egoism. And the more virtuous anything is, the more egoism there is in it. Love yourself, that’s the one rule I recognize” (3: 365). Valkovsky is Dostoevsky’s first artistic reaction to the radical doctrines of the 1860s.14 For Dostoevsky uses Valkovsky to follow out the logic of Chernyshevsky’s position of “rational egoism” to the end—without accepting the proviso that egoism would miraculously convert itself into beneficence through rational calculation.

  During 1861, Dostoevsky made a clean polemical sweep of the existing social-political ideologies in Russia. Not only did he take on the radical left (The Contemporary), the liberal left (Notes of the Fatherland), and the liberal center (The Russian Messenger), but he also had his word to say about the new Slavophil publication Day (Den’). Despite his efforts at nonpartisan commentary, however, Time acquired the reputation, during its first year, of belonging to the camp of The Contemporary, and Strakhov and Grigoryev were chafing at the bit.

  Doing what he could to right the balance, Strakhov kept up a steady sniping fire against the radicals in articles written as letters addressed to the editor. Shrewd in spotting significant social-political trends, in June 1861 he singles out the explosive début of a new young radical publicist, Dimitry Pisarev, who had excitedly announced in The Russian Word that all the philosophy of the past was just “useless scholasticism.” Strakhov comments that “Pisarev has gone further than all” his fellow radicals on the path of negation: “He rejects everything . . . in the name of life, and life he obviously understands as the alluring variety of lively and unlimited pleasures.”15 In this acute observation, Strakhov picks out an important turn of radical ideology toward an unrestrained individualism that, in the very next year, would lead to a schism among the radical intelligentsia of decisive importance for Russian culture in the 1860s.

  Dostoevsky regularly appended footnotes to articles to dissociate himself from Strak
hov’s condemnation of radicals. What he reproached the radicals for, more openly in his notebooks than in public print, was their hastiness and impatience, their desire to leap over history and to bring about changes that could be realized only at a much later stage of Russian social development. “Where are you hurrying?” he asks Chernyshevsky in one note. “Our society is positively not ready for anything. The questions stand before us. They have ripened, they are ready, but our society is not ready in the least. It is disunited” (20: 153). Dostoevsky’s tolerance for the radicals was already beginning to stretch a bit thin, and it snapped the following year, when the contributors and readers of The Contemporary turned from intellectual disaffection to active political agitation.

  The basis for all further progress in Russia, as Dostoevsky saw it, was to work peacefully in favor of the advances made possible by the liberation of the serfs and the further impending reforms that Alexander II had announced. Time printed the full text of the manifesto announcing the liberation and referred to it as a “sublime event” initiating a glorious new phase of Russian history. The Contemporary, on the other hand, let the occasion pass without uttering a single word: the radicals had been bitterly disappointed by the terms of the liberation, which they considered imposed too great a tax burden on the peasantry in favor of the idle and undeserving landowners.

  1 For an analysis of “Mr. Prokharchin,” see Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton, NJ, 1976), 133–136.

  2 Jane Delaney Grossman, Edgar Allen Poe in Russia (Wurzberg, 1973), 34.

  3 E. A. Poe, “The Black Cat,” in Complete Works, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (New York, 1902; rpt. 1965), 4: 146.