Young Russia minced no words in declaring its aims, and exhibited none of the reluctance to go to extremes still discernible in the other two proclamations. It demanded “a revolution, a bloody and pitiless revolution, a revolution which must change everything down to the very roots, utterly overthrowing all the foundations of present society and bringing about the ruin of all who support the present order.”16 This would mean the total transformation of a system in which “a small number of people who own capital control the fate of the rest” and in which, consequently, “everything is false, everything is stupid, from religion . . . to the family.”17 Accordingly, the leaflet demanded the total emancipation of women, the abolition of marriage (as “immoral”), the suppression of the family (as a barrier to the full development of the individual), the dissolution of convents and monasteries (as “centers of debauchery”), and the secularization of all church property.18
The ultimate objective of Young Russia was a democratic republic, but Zaichnevsky was less interested in the future than in the immediate task of preparing the revolution, which, like so many others, he was convinced was on the point of breaking out because of the peasant’s discontent with the terms of liberation. The first step was thus to attack all those, such as Herzen and the authors of The Great Russian, who advocated some sort of liberal compromise, and in his critical analysis of the policy advocated by Herzen in The Bell Zaichnevsky joins forces with the polemic against the superfluous men of the 1840s initiated by Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. All thought of compromise is rejected because, Young Russia declares, revolutions in the past had failed through lack of determination, and “we will go further, not only than the poor revolutionaries of 1848, but also than the great terrorists of the 1790s [in France].”19 The ultimate aim, of course, was to give power to the people, who would eventually rule themselves in a perfect democratic fashion, but such a transfer of sovereignty could occur only after the triumph of the revolution. Till then, it would be necessary to place all power in the hands of a revolutionary dictatorship, which would “stop at nothing” to establish “new foundations of society and the economy.”20 Well-read in the history of revolutions, Zaichnevsky himself gave the appropriate label to his own political outlook: Russian Jacobinism.
Such generalities pale into insignificance, however, beside the description of what might occur if the victorious revolution encountered any resistance. “The day will soon come when we will unfurl the great banner of the future, the red banner. And with a mighty cry of ‘long live the Russian Social and Democratic Republic,’ we will move against the Winter Palace to wipe out all those who dwell there.” Bloodshed would, so far as possible, be restricted to the tsar and his immediate entourage, but if the “whole imperial party” rose in defense of the royal family, then “we will cry ‘To your axes’ and then we will . . . destroy them in the squares, if the cowardly swine dare to go there. We will destroy them in their houses, in the narrow streets of the towns, in the broad avenues of the capital, and in the villages. Remember that, when this happens, anyone who is not with us is against us and an enemy, and that every method is used to destroy the enemy.”21 Such fantasies of mass carnage and extermination, coupled with a direct threat against the royal family, imparted a sinister aura to Young Russia that horrified most of its readers and caused Dostoevsky to despair of the mental capacities of its authors.
A vivid sense of the first reactions caused by Young Russia may be given in Dostoevsky’s own words, written eleven years after he found a copy wedged into the door handle of his apartment: “And here I, who heart and soul disagreed with these people, and with the meaning of their movement—I became suddenly vexed and almost ashamed, as it were, of their incompetence: ‘Why is everything so stupid and ignorant about them?’ ” He found himself greatly upset “by the educational, mental level, and the lack of even a minimal comprehension of reality—this, to me, was terribly oppressive” (21: 25). While such a proclamation might once have seem justified as a desperate last resort in a period of black reaction, its bold disclosure at the present time, after the liberation of the serfs, could only have struck Dostoevsky as catastrophic. Its effect on society, as he must have instantly foreseen, would inevitably be to precipitate a general revulsion against the radicals and all their objectives.
Bloodcurdling passages from the text of Young Russia provided grounds for the suspicion that its authors and their friends (the proclamation spoke in the name of a “Central Revolutionary Committee”) were responsible for the series of fires that began in Petersburg almost simultaneously with the pamphlet’s circulation. Whole areas of the city were devastated, including many of the poorer districts; thousands of the victims were left homeless. The Petersburg fires in the spring of 1862 surpassed anything known till then in the extent of damage and the mysterious inability to control the blazes. Public opinion, which the authorities did nothing to counteract, immediately connected the catastrophe with the call for total destruction trumpeted in Young Russia, and such an association was all the more inevitable because fire, called by peasants the Red Rooster, had always been one of their traditional weapons against the landowners.
An atmosphere of gloom and apprehension reigned throughout the city. Some notion of the frightened anecdotes that were circulating may be gleamed from a letter of Ivan Aksakov to another prominent Slavophil, Yury Samarin. Every store clerk, Aksakov tells him, had read Young Russia, and “this proclamation (even before the fires) had filled the people with horror in the literal sense of the word. . . . It made even more suspicious, in the eyes of the people, literacy, science, enlightenment—gifts coming from our hands, those of the gentry.”22 The tsar was reported to have told the lower ranks of the army and the noncommissioned officers of a plot against his life, and explained that he relied on them but not on the officers, because the upper ranks no longer believed in God. Aksakov continues: “The people, of course, did not understand the proclamation, but made out only that it preaches impiety, disrespect for ‘one’s father and mother,’ holds marriage in contempt and wishes to slit the throats of the royal family. . . . Turgenev told me (he was at the fire in the Shchukin Market)—that he heard with his own ears how the most ordinary grizzled muzhik shouted: ‘The professors burned this down.’ ‘Professors, students’—these words have already become known to the people!”23
Young Russia thus brought on a rising tide of resentment against the educated class and everything it represented. More than any other of his contemporaries, Dostoevsky had suffered at first hand from the split between the mentality of the people and that of the educated class and had dedicated his journal to the task of creating the unified Russian culture made possible at last by the liberation. Nothing would have seemed to him more ominous for the future, more of a setback for everything he hoped to advance, than the intensifying enmity that he saw swelling all around him between the two groups.
Dostoevsky or Mikhail (probably both in collaboration) wrote an article for Time asserting that there was not a scrap of evidence to link the blazes with Young Russia or to imagine that the students as a body sympathized with the gory ideas advocated in the proclamation. When this article was rejected by the censorship, the Dostoevskys wrote another, with no better success. Neither article could be published, but the proof sheets, which contain an annotation in the hand of the tsar, were extracted years ago from the cavernous files of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “Three scrofulous schoolboys, of whom the oldest is in fact not more than thirteen,” jeers the first suppressed article, “printed and distributed the stupidest leaflet, not even being able to cope very well with the foreign books from which they stole everything and of which they made a mockery. This stupid leaflet should have been greeted with a salvo of laughter.”24 Instead, the text continued, various decrepit gentlemen with the mentality of old peasant women were thrown into a panicky, paralytic fear and immediately started a campaign of wild tittle-tattle that has now infected everybody.
In view of the lynch
mob mentality of the moment, these articles represent a considerable act of political courage. Indeed, after being forbidden by the censorship, the articles were sent, by special order of the tsar, to the secret police and then to the commission set up to investigate the cause of the fires. One phrase that attracted attention was the reference to “three scrofulous schoolboys,” and when Mikhail Dostoevsky was called in for questioning on June 8, as the responsible editor of Time, he was asked to identify them by name. Poor Mikhail had to explain laboriously that the reference was only a “literary expression” and did not refer to actual schoolboys known to the editors of Time. “I have nothing at all to do with people who write such things as Young Russia,” he declared with firm dignity.25 This ended the matter so far as the Dostoevsky brothers were aware, although in fact Time narrowly escaped being prohibited. A decision to this effect was taken secretly and then withdrawn, with the proviso that Time should be kept under close observation. The sword of Damocles had thus already begun to swing invisibly over the heads of the hapless Dostoevskys, and it was to fall exactly a year later.
Others were spared the wait. Encouraged by the popular outrage directed against the suspected revolutionary destroyers of the capital, the government decided to strike while the city was still smoldering. On June 15 the Petersburg censorship committee suspended publication of both The Contemporary and the equally left-wing Russian Word for eight months. On July 7 Chernyshevsky was taken into custody along with an important member of the new revolutionary organization Land and Liberty (Zemlya i Volya), Nikolay Serno-Solovievich. By this time Dostoevsky was far away, embarked on his first trip to Europe during the summer of 1862, but we shall see that his thoughts turned constantly to home, and that the situation there filled him with anxiety and dismay.
1 Franco Venturi, The Roots of Revolution, trans. Frances Haskell (New York, 1966), 218.
2 Ibid., 199.
3 ZT, 116.
4 Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 237.
5 N. V. Shelgunov, Vospominaniya, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1967), 1: 333–334.
6 Ibid., 338–339.
7 Ibid., 336.
8 Strakhov, Biografiya, 232.
9 Shelgunov, Vospominaniya, 1: 164.
10 Ibid., 186.
11 L. F. Panteleev, Vospominaniya, ed. S. A. Reiser (Leningrad, 1958), 228.
12 Shelgunov, Vospominaniya, 1: 187.
13 These details are taken from the article of G. V. Krasnov, “Vystuplenie N. G. Chernyshevskogo s vospominaniyami o N. A. Dobrolyubove 2 Marta 1862 g. kak obshchestvennoe sobytie,” in Revolutsionnoe situatsiya v Rossii v 1858–1861, ed. M. V. Nechkina, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1965), 148.
14 Biografiya, 232–233.
15 Ibid., 233–234.
16 Cited in Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 292.
17 Ibid.
18 B. P. Kozmin, Iz istorii revolyutsionnoi mysli v Rossii (Moscow, 1961, 252).
19 Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 293.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 295–296.
22 Cited in N. G. Rosenblyum, “Peterburgskie pozhary 1862 g. i Dostoevsky,” LN 86 (Moscow, 1973), 30.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 49–54.
25 ZT, 114.
CHAPTER 25
Portrait of a Nihilist
Despite the overheated expectations of the young radicals, there is no reliable evidence that the stability of the regime was ever seriously threatened. Peasant discontent with the terms of the liberation, at Bezdna and elsewhere, was remarkably peaceful, nonviolent except for a few isolated cases, and inspired by unbroken loyalty to the tsar; the violence came entirely from the government. Dostoevsky’s opinion on how the authorities behaved at this critical juncture may be surmised from a scene in Demons that can be read as a comment on their lack of judgment. When a loyal delegation of factory workers comes to protest, on behalf of their comrades, against a rascally overseer who had swindled them of their wages, Governor-General von Lembke is terrified out of his wits and orders them flogged. Mistakenly assuming their appeal for justice to be a revolutionary uprising, von Lembke responds with force, and his deluded severity only serves to unleash all the social chaos that then breaks loose.
Even if no revolution was imminent in Russia during the early 1860s, however, the events we have been chronicling signify the sensational advent on the Russian historical scene, in full force and as a dominating group, of a new generation of the intelligentsia largely different in social composition from the previous one and bringing with it a whole new set of ideas and values. Everyone was aware of the change, and it was stated in telling words at the beginning of the next decade by N. K. Mikhailovsky, who now occupied the place of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky as the leading radical publicist: “What happened?—the raznochintsy arrived. Nothing further happened. Nonetheless this event . . . created an epoch in Russian literature.”1 Mikhailovsky confines his remarks to literature, because to speak openly of politics in this connection would have been dangerous, but of course his readers would easily take his meaning.
Who and what were the raznochintsy? They were the sons of priests, petty officials, impoverished landowners, sometimes serfs, enfranchised or not, all of whom had managed to acquire an education and to exist in the interstices of the Russian caste system. They had been nourished on the writings of the older generation of gentry liberals and gentry radicals such as Herzen, Ogarev, Granovsky, and Turgenev but recognized as their only real ancestor and predecessor the stormy figure of “furious Vissarion” Belinsky, a raznochinets like themselves, who had assimilated the rich literary and philosophical culture of the gentry but whose intransigent social behavior both shocked and delighted his noble friends by its defiance of hypocritical convention. The young Count Tolstoy, an impenitent upholder of gentry values, instantly objected in 1856 to the tone of Chernyshevsky’s criticism in a letter to Nekrasov, and he accurately traces the degeneration of literary manners back to its source: “All this is Belinsky! He spoke at the top of his voice, and spoke in an angry tone . . . and . . . this one [Chernyshevsky] thinks that to speak well one has to speak insolently, and to do so one has to stir oneself up.”2
At first, this new generation had vented their anger against existing conditions in the pages of literary journals; now they had moved on not only to distributing violent proclamations but also, it was widely thought, had set Petersburg ablaze. And just at this very instant, by an extraordinary stroke of historical fortune, a great novel appeared portraying a raznochinets hero in all his self-proclaimed rebelliousness and irresistible strength. Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, written during the previous two years and dedicated to the memory of Belinsky, was printed by Katkov’s Russian Messenger in March 1862, just between the first two proclamations and Young Russia and simultaneously with the literary-musical evening. Tugenev’s central figure, Bazarov, the son of a humble army doctor like Belinsky, was immediately accepted as a verisimilar literary image of the new social type of the 1860s. Turgenev wrote seven years later that “when I returned to Petersburg on the very day of the notorious fires in the Apraksin Marketplace, the word ‘Nihilist’ had been caught up by thousands of people, and the first exclamation that escaped from the lips of the first aquaintance I met on the Nevsky Prospect was: ‘Look what your Nihilists are doing! They are setting Petersburg on fire!’ ”3
Turgenev’s novel immediately became the exclusive storm center of social-cultural controversy; and the debates over the character of Bazarov, who personified the split between the gentry liberal intelligentsia of the 1840s and the radical raznochintsy of the 1860s, led to a new rift between two factions within the radical camp itself. These debates set the terms that dominated Russian social-cultural and literary life for the remainder of the decade, and they form an indispensable background for understanding some of Dostoevsky’s most important thematic concerns.
Herzen’s The Superfluous and the Bilious (1860), written after a secret visit by Chernyshevsky to London in the summer of 1859, reveals two of the
traits that will invariably be attributed to the raznochintsy type: an offensive and aggressive tone, and a deprecation of art. Herzen sharply conveyed the attitude of the new generation toward the superfluous gentry liberals. His “bilious” interlocutor, he says, “looked on us as on the fine skeleton of a mammoth, as at an interesting bone that had been dug up and belonged with a different sun and different trees.”4 For his part, Herzen comments acidly on “the depressing faces of the Daniels of the Neva, who gloomily reproach men for dining without gnashing their teeth, and for enjoying pictures or music without remembering the misfortunes of the world.” And he professes himself rather frightened by “the ease with which they [the bilious] despaired of everything, the vindictive pleasure of their renunciation, and their terrible ruthlessness.” For Herzen believed that “the denial of every personal right, the insults, the humiliations they had endured” had left all of “the bilious” with “a devouring, irritable and distorted vanity.”5 These pages are a preliminary sketch for Turgenev’s fuller and less ironically hostile treatment of the same type, whom he called, in a letter to Katkov, “the real hero of our time,” adding, “What a hero and what a time—you will say. . . . But that is how things are.”6
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