Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Turgenev was famous for his affability as a conversationalist, and during the animated dinner-table talk at the Hotel Clea, he amused the company by recounting the dangers that awaited Russians who innocently entrusted themselves to the delights of European residence. Probably some mention had been made of Dostoevsky’s impending first trip abroad. Such a trip was a great event in the life of any educated Russian, and Dostoevsky had recently expressed his own yearnings in a letter to the poet Polonsky. “How many times . . . have I dreamt of being in Italy. Ever since the novels of Ann Radcliffe, which I read when I was eight years old, all sorts of Catarinas, Alfonsos, and Lucias have been running around in my head. . . . Then it was the turn of Shakespeare—Verona, Romeo and Juliet—the devil only knows what magic was there! Italy! Italy! But instead of Italy I landed in Semipalatinsk, and before that in the Dead House. Will I never succeed in getting to Europe while I still have the strength, the passion, and the poetry?”20

  The financial situation of Time was now promising enough to allow him to realize this long-cherished dream; and he also desired to consult specialists in Europe about his epilepsy. He writes to his brother Andrey that he is traveling without his wife, partly for lack of funds, partly because Marya Dimitrievna wished to supervise Pasha’s preparation for the entrance examinations to the gymnasium. The plan was for Dostoevsky to join up with Strakhov, also making a first trip to Europe, in mid-July. On June 7, 1862, he left for the first of what were to be many Wanderjahren in Europe.

  The first leg of Dostoevsky’s trip took him from Russia through Germany, Belgium, and France to Paris, where he planned to spend a month. Some of the observations he garnered along the way can be found in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, written the following year and published in Time. This series of articles, despite its title, is filled with the most serious cultural and social-political reflections, even though such ideas appear in the midst of casual travel sketches whose lighthearted tone communicates a deceptive air of frivolity. For all his attempts to amuse and distract, these sketches nonetheless help us to understand important aspects of Dostoevsky’s first reactions to the spectacle of European life.

  His initial impressions of Berlin, Dresden, and Cologne were all disillusioning, and after the requisite sightseeing he rushed on to Paris “in the hope that the French would be kinder and more interesting” (5: 48–49). Before arriving in Paris, however, he paused along the way—very probably at Wiesbaden, with its inviting roulette casino—to try his luck at gambling. What happened on this first fling remains obscure; but Strakhov believes that Dostoevsky quickly acquired eleven thousand francs, and suggests that this easy win pushed him along the path to perdition.21 A later letter from Mikhail, informing his brother that he was forwarding some money from a publisher, indicates that Dostoevsky was again short of cash. “For God’s sake, don’t gamble any more,” his brother pleads. “How can you gamble considering our luck?”22 This episode was the first symptom of Dostoevsky’s addiction to roulette, which was to grip him so strongly in the future.

  Paris was the Mecca for all Russian tourists—whether those, like Herzen and Bakunin, who came to worship at the hallowed shrine of revolutionary upheaval or those, more numerous, who hastened to kick up their heels at the Bal Mabille and chase grisettes in the Latin Quarter. It was mid-June when he reached Paris—after first catching a disturbing whiff of the political climate in the Second Empire when four French police spies, with the assignment of inspecting all entering foreigners and telegraphing descriptions to the proper authorities, boarded the train and took seats in his compartment. He remained in Paris for two weeks, long enough to soak up the atmosphere of order and propriety, and he labels the city—jestingly, of course—“the most moral and virtuous city on the face of the earth” (5: 68). “The Parisian loves to do business, but it seems that even in doing business and in skinning you alive in his shop like a chicken, he skins you not, as in the old days, for the sake of profit, but out of virtue, in the name of some sacred necessity” (5: 76).

  Following in the footsteps of Herzen, who had diagnosed the French bourgeoisie as reflected in the plays of Eugene Scribe, Dostoevsky hastened to the theater to investigate how this image has evolved. In all of the plays by Dumas fils, Augier, Sardou, and the indefatigable Scribe, Dostoevsky found characters of unutterable nobility and impeccable virtue; all concern a young man who, in the first act, renounces a fortune for the highest motives, only to end in the last act by invariably marrying a poor girl who suddenly inherits incalculable wealth—unless it finally turns out that he, instead of being a penniless orphan, is really the legitimate son of a Rothschild. After seeing the sights, and consulting various medical authorities about his epilepsy, Dostoevsky summed up his impressions of the French in a letter to Strakhov a day before leaving for London. “By God!” he wrote. “The French are a nauseating people. . . . The Frenchman is pleasant, honest, polite, but false, and money for him is everything. No trace of any ideal.”23 Since Dostoevsky’s words coincide so perfectly with the portrait of the French given by the much more urbane and cosmopolitan Herzen in his sparkling Letters from France and Italy, we may view them as just another example of a recurring Russian reaction to bourgeois French life.24

  If what absorbed Dostoevsky in Paris was the stifling sense of bourgeois order and propriety, what overwhelmed him in London was the clamorous vitality of the city in all the nakedness of its clashing discords: “Even externally, what a contrast with Paris! This city day and night going about its business, enormous as the ocean, with the roaring and rumbling of machines, the railroad line constructed above the houses (and soon underneath the houses), that boldness in enterprise, this apparent disorder which is, in essence, a bourgeois order to the highest degree, this polluted Thames, this air filled with coal dust; these magnificent parks and squares and those terrifying streets of a section like Whitechapel, with its half-naked, wild and starving population. The City with its millions and the commerce of the universe, the Crystal Palace, the World’s Fair” (5: 69).

  For a socially conscious Russian, London was the capital city of the classic land of the dispossessed proletariat, and Dostoevsky’s attention was riveted by this aspect of lower-class life. Someone had described to him (and who could it have been if not the London resident Herzen?) how every Saturday night a half-million workers, with their wives and children, swarmed through the downtown streets to celebrate the beginning of their one day of leisure: “All of them bring their weekly savings, what they have earned by hard labor and amidst curses.” Everything remains open, all the butcher shops and the eating places continue to do business, and night is transformed into day as the streets are lit by powerful gas lamps: “It is as if a ball had been organized for these white negroes. The crowd pushes into the open taverns and in the streets. They eat and drink. The beer halls are decorated like palaces. Everybody is drunk, but without gaiety, with a sad drunkenness, sullen, gloomy, strangely silent. Only sometimes an exchange of insults and a bloody quarrel breaks the suspicious silence, which fills one with melancholy. Everyone hurries to get dead drunk as quickly as possible, so as to lose consciousness.” Dostoevsky wandered among such a crowd at two o’clock one Saturday night, and, he says, “the impression of what I had seen tormented me for three whole days” (5: 70–71).

  On another evening he strolled among the thousands of prostitutes plying their trade in the Haymarket; and he marveled both at the luxuriousness of the cafés, where accommodations could be rented for the night, and at the attractiveness of some of the women. He saw several that had “faces truly fit for a keepsake” (5: 71–72). Dostoevsky was accosted not only by prostitutes but also by women engaged in the charitable labor of trying to redeem these lost souls. Their black dresses suggest some early volunteers of the Salvation Army, which formally organized three years later, but Dostoevsky seized the opportunity to nourish his anti-Catholic prejudices. “It is a subtle and well-thought-out propaganda,” he writes. “The Catholic priest hi
mself searches out some miserable worker’s family. . . . He feeds them all, gives them clothes, provides heating, looks after the sick, buys medicine, becomes the friend of the family, and finally converts them all to Catholicism” (5: 73). The idea of Roman Catholicism has already become identified for Dostoevsky with that of a betrayal of the true spirit of the Christian faith, which substitutes for Christ’s message of charity and love the temptation of worldly goods and comforts.

  The most important event of Dostoevsky’s stay in London was his meeting with Herzen, whom he probably visited several times during the eight or so days of his English sojourn. Herzen’s masterly On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia (1851) had listed Dostoevsky among “the most noble and outstanding” people who had been condemned to Siberia for their political idealism. Poor Folk was singled out as evidence of the Socialist turn taken by Russian literature during the 1840s, and more recently Herzen had exhibited the liveliest interest in House of the Dead. On the pamphlet Young Russia, the two men also saw eye-to-eye. In an article printed in the July 15 issue of The Bell, just a few days after Dostoevsky’s first visit, Herzen, sounding for all the world like a pochvennik, writes of the pamphlet’s authors, “their fearless logic is one of the most characteristic traits of the Russian genius estranged from the people. . . . As a result of the slavery in which we lived, the alienation from ourselves, our break with the people, our impotence to act, there remained for us a painful consolation . . .—the nakedness of our negation, our logical ruthlessness, and it was with some sort of joy that we pronounced those final, extreme words which the lips of our teachers have barely whispered, turning white as they did so and looking around uneasily.”25

  Dostoevsky was a great admirer of Herzen’s brilliant part essay, part dialogue, From the Other Shore, and he praised it to its author. Indeed, few others writings of Herzen would have been as close to Dostoevsky’s heart as this bitter indictment of the illusions of Utopian Socialism, this denunciation of European civilization as hidebound to the social-political forms of the past and incapable of going beyond their limits, this torrent of scorn poured on the radical European intelligentsia for imagining that the masses would really pay attention to their high-flown lucubrations.

  Herzen had then developed his theory of Russian Socialism, in which his disillusionment with the European working class and its leaders gave way to a hope for the future founded on the traditional egalitarian Socialism of the Russian peasant and his native obshchina. Would not Dostoevsky have indicated his agreement with Herzen on this point—and to such a degree that the skeptical Herzen even recoiled somewhat from the fervency of Dostoevsky’s words? Such would seem to be the sense of Herzen’s own reference to their conversation in a letter to Ogarev, whom Dostoevsky had probably met a day or so earlier. “Dostoevsky was here yesterday—he is a naïve, not entirely lucid, but very nice person,” he writes. “He believes with enthusiasm in the Russian people.”26

  Dostoevsky must surely have been aware that in visiting Herzen, he was taking a step that might place him in danger. The Third Section kept a sharp eye on the activities of the Herzen household, and Chernyshevsky had been arrested after spies reported that Herzen was imprudently offering to print The Contemporary in London. Dostoevsky’s presence did not escape the vigilant operatives who kept Herzen under surveillance, and information was sent back to Russia that in London, Dostoevsky “had struck up a friendship with the exiles Herzen and Bakunin.”27 The flamboyant Bakunin, then also living in London, had recently made a sensational escape from Siberian exile by way of the United States.

  L. P. Grossman has argued that Bakunin was the direct prototype for Stavrogin in Demons, and a good deal of ink has been spilled over the question of their actual meeting.28 Dostoevsky’s imagination, however, though it certainly worked from prototypes, invariably fused all sorts of suggestions into a representative image; he never took only a single personage as an exclusive source of inspiration. Whether the two men ever met thus becomes a minor question so far as Dostoevsky the artist is concerned, though it may well have occurred because Bakunin so assiduously attended Herzen’s Sunday afternoon receptions. In any event, Dostoevsky’s name was placed on the list of those persons who visited Herzen not simply out of curiosity but because they sympathized “more or less with his criminal intentions.”29 A special command was issued to search his luggage on his way home.

  Dostoevsky and Strakhov joined forces in Geneva in late July and traveled together through Switzerland and the north of Italy by way of Turin, Geneva, and Livorno to Florence. In Florence they spent a week in a modest pensione on the Via Tornebuoni. The two Russians were inseparable, and Strakhov has left an engaging image of Dostoevsky in his unaccustomed role as tourist: “all his attention was focused on people, on grasping their nature and character, and on the general impression of life going on around him in the streets.”30 This account agrees with Dostoevsky’s own remarks in Winter Notes, but one wonders whether he was as little interested in the Uffizi as Strakhov pretends (casting himself, of course, in the role of civilized art lover). The two men read Hugo’s Les misérables (just then coming out), with Dostoevsky eagerly buying volume after volume and passing them on to Strakhov. Most of all they walked and talked, and Strakhov paints an idyllic image of these leisurely conversations.

  His amicable portrait, however, has been challenged by an unfinished draft of an article entitled “Observations” found in the Strakhov archives, which uncovers some of the tensions that eventually led Strakhov, shortly after Dostoevsky’s death, to denounce his erstwhile friend in a scurrilous letter to Tolstoy. Dedicated to Dostoevsky, it seems to have been composed in Florence or shortly thereafter, and it begins by recalling one of those dialogues that its author later depicted with such accents of nostalgia. “In one of our walks through Florence,” he writes, “you declared to me very heatedly that there was in the tendency of my thought a defect that you hated, despised, and would persecute until your dying day. Then we shook hands firmly and parted.”31 So much for the cameo of unruffled concord that Strakhov later offered to a gullible world!

  Why should Dostoevsky have reacted so heatedly and insultingly? Strakhov had always been in favor of a hard line with the radicals, and his remarks seem to refer to this position. No one, he argued, should be permitted to escape the logical consequences of his convictions and actions; no excuses should be made on the ground that people did not understand the full implications of their own ideas. “You found unbearable and repugnant,” writes Strakhov, “that I often led our reasoning to the conclusion which, in the simplest fashion, can be expressed as: ‘but really, it is impossible that 2 plus 2 does not equal 4.’ ”32

  Strakhov was thus insisting that the radicals be made to assume the full onus of their beliefs. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, did not as yet wish to pin them against the wall, and he had replied to Strakhov that their seeming inconsistency should be given a more charitable interpretation: “obviously the people who say 2 plus 2 does not equal 4 do not at all intend to say this, but, without question, think and wish to express something else.”33 For Dostoevsky, illogicality is not a proof of error but the indication of a conflict between what is said and what is actually meant; the error is a clue to something hidden and concealed under the idea that must be understood as its real meaning. These words reveal the basis on which, so far, Dostoevsky had refused to condemn the radicals in toto, no matter how hostile he was to their expressed ideas. For underneath these he continued to sense a desire for the good that should be recognized and acknowledged.

  Another passage in Strakhov’s allusive text takes a sudden leap from the realm of social politics to that of the ultimate basis of morality. “Is man really good?” Strakhov asks abruptly. “Are we really able boldly to deny his rottenness?” His answer to this question is emphatically negative, and he supports his conclusion by an appeal to the testimony of the Christian faith: “The ideal of the perfect man, shown us by Christianity, is not dead and
cannot die in our souls; it has grown together with it forever. And thus, when the picture of contemporary humanity is unrolled before us and we are asked: Is man good? we immediately find in ourselves the decisive answer: ‘No, rotten to the core!’ ”34 The fragment contains enough for us to understand why Dostoevsky could have been stirred to such anger and hostility against his presumed “friend.”

  Despite a widely held belief to the contrary, Dostoevsky did not share Strakhov’s “Christian” view that man is “rotten to the core” (which represents the opinion only of an extreme Augustinian or Reformation Christianity). Dostoevsky believed that since man, and Russian man in particular, was capable of remorse and repentance, the hope of his redemption should never be abandoned. No doubt Strakhov understood this to be the root cause of Dostoevsky’s refusal to renounce all sympathy with the radicals once and for all, and his response that he “would hate, despise, and persecute” such a cast of mind for the remainder of his days. Strakhov was indeed striking here at Dostoevsky’s deepest pieties, at his fundamental faith in the treasures of Christian love concealed in the soul of the ignorant Russian people; and such a sacrilege Dostoevsky could not forgive.

  After their week in Florence together the two men parted company, Strakhov going on to Paris and Dostoevsky intending to journey south to Rome and Naples. For unknown reasons he changed his mind and by the beginning of September was back in Petersburg ready to take up his post again as de facto editor and chief contributor to Time.