Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  1 Cited in Istoriya Russkoi literatury XIX v., ed. N. D. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1915), 3: 45.

  2 B. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy, vol. 1 (Leningrad, 1928), 223–224.

  3 I. S. Turgenev, Literary Reminiscences, trans. David Magarshack (New York, 1958), 194.

  4 Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgins, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 4: 1574–1584.

  5 Ibid.

  6 I. S. Turgenev, Pis’ma, 13 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1961), 4: 303.

  7 G. M. Fridlender et al., Istoriya Russkogo romana, 2 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1962), 1: 501.

  8 See, for example, the remark in Pisarev’s essay “Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism” (1861) that “the Russian peasant has perhaps not yet acquired sufficient stature to realize his own personality and rise to a reasonable egoism and respect for his own individuality” (or, more literally, his own I). Dimitry Pisarev, Selected Philosophical, Social and Political Essays (Moscow, 1958), 77.

  9 Cited in V. E. Evgenyev-Maximov, Sovremennik pri Chernyshevskom i Dobrolyubove (Leningrad, 1936), 514.

  10 P. V. Annenkov, Literaturnye vospominaniya (St. Petersburg, 1909), 549–550.

  11 Evgenyev-Maximov, Sovremennik, 548.

  12 D. I. Pisarev, Sochineniya, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1955), 2: 8–9, 10–11.

  13 Ibid., 11, 10.

  14 Ibid., 15.

  15 Turgenev, Pis’ma, 4: 358–359.

  16 Ibid., 385.

  17 Nikolay Strakhov, Kriticheskiya stat’i, 2 vols. (Kiev, 1902–1908), 1: 201.

  18 Ibid., 37.

  19 Biografiya, 237.

  20 Pis’ma, 1: 302; July 31, 1861.

  21 Biografiya, 259.

  22 DMI, 536.

  23 Ibid., 310; June 6/July 8, 1862.

  24 “The bourgeois,” writes Herzen, “weeps in the theatre, moved by his own virtue as portrayed by Scribe, moved by his mercantile heroism and the poetry of shopkeeping.” Cited in A. S. Dolinin, “Dostoevsky i Gertsen,” Poslednie romany Dostoevskogo (Moscow–Leningrad, 1963), 220–221.

  25 A. I. Gertsen, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow, 1954–1966), 26: 203–204.

  26 Ibid., 27: 247.

  27 G. F. Kogan, “Razyskaniya o Dostoevskom,” LN 86 (Moscow, 1973), 596.

  28 L. P. Grossman and Vyacheslav Polonsky, Spor o Bakunine i Dostoevskom (Moscow, 1926). For a witty summing up of the opposing arguments, which concludes that Grossman’s thesis is a myth, see Jacques Catteau, “Bakounine et Dostoevski,” in Bakounine: Combats et débats (Paris, 1979), 97–105.

  29 Kogan, “Razyskaniya,” 596.

  30 Biografiya, 243–244.

  31 L. P. Lansky, ed. “N. N. Strakov o Dostoevskom,” LN 86 (Moscow, 1973), 560.

  32 Ibid.

  33 Ibid., 560–561.

  34 Ibid., 562.

  CHAPTER 26

  Time: The Final Months

  On returning to Petersburg in the fall of 1862, both Dostoevsky and Strakhov took up their work on Time again with renewed vigor. Grigoryev had also returned from self-imposed exile in Orenburg and was once again a rallying presence. By mid-year, Time’s subscription list had gone over the four thousand mark, thus reaching the level of such long-established publications as Notes of the Fatherland. Financial security was at last in sight for the hard-pressed Dostoevskys, who had worked like galley slaves to establish their publication on a sound economic footing. Even more encouraging, their editorial portfolio was overflowing with manuscripts that kept pouring in from all corners of Russia and testified to the growing prestige acquired by Time in the brief span of two years.

  The editors of Time, however, found themselves in an increasingly awkward predicament. The government ban of The Contemporary in July 1862, along with the simultaneous arrest of Chernyshevsky, had caused a sharp shift in the social-cultural climate. It was no longer possible to criticize radical ideas—no matter how respectfully, or with how many qualifications—without seeming to support the repressive measures of the regime. To cease to argue with the radicals would have meant to abandon Time’s very reason for being, but to continue with the same editorial policy was to court disaster and even execration.

  Some notion of the tense and suspicious atmosphere then reigning in literary circles may be gathered from Nekrasov’s astonishing frankness in his letter to Dostoevsky explaining why another promised contribution would not be forthcoming. Rumors were circulating, he admitted, “that I betrayed Chernyshevsky [to the authorities] and walk around freely in the open air in Petersburg. . . . In view of all this, I must not, for the time being, give any further cause for ambiguous rumors.”1 Dostoevsky was upset by the implications of this letter and had every reason to take umbrage at Nekrasov’s insinuation that Time might be considered reactionary. Even though his articles during 1862–1863 reveal his growing disenchantment with the radicals and an increasing tilt toward Slavophilism, Time had not become conservative in any sense that would have gained favor with the authorities. It continued to refer to the Raskol, which was officially illegal and rejected the whole apparatus of the Russian state, as proof of the capacity of the Russian people to create their own indigenous forms of culture; and Dostoevsky repeatedly adduces the communal system of landholding as additional evidence of such capacity. Indeed, he could hardly have been clearer in his agreement with the basic tenets of Herzen’s Russian Socialism.

  The reappearance of The Contemporary at the end of February 1863 brought into the field against Time a new and exceedingly formidable foe, the scathing satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, who had now joined the editorial staff of the revived journal; and he was promptly assigned the task, formerly entrusted to the bellicose but inept Antonovich, of carrying on the fight against the pochvenniki. Saltykov-Shchedrin, whose Provincial Sketches had appeared in Katkov’s The Russian Messenger, and some of whose sketches had also graced the pages of Time, had not previously been known as a flaming radical. Since Dostoevsky had frequently expressed great admiration for his talents, his sudden intervention as a prominent antagonist was bitterly resented.

  Although the argument was carried on anonymously, each recognized the inimitable stamp of the other’s style and tone. Saltykov-Shchedrin labeled Time’s contributors as “meek little birds,” constantly living in fear and trembling even though “no one has injured you. No one opposes you, no one even thinks about you.” There was much more in this condescending vein, including the prediction that Time would soon “Katkovize,” that is, wholly join the anti-radical camp; but meanwhile, it is trying to maintain an impossible position. “What is the guiding thought of your journal? None. What have you said? Nothing. You have continuously striven to utter some sort of truth on the order of ‘soft-boiled boots’ [a Russian expression for nonsense], you always have sat between two stools, and your naïveté extends so far that you have not wished to notice that you have tumbled to the ground.”2 This was only the beginning of an increasingly fierce exchange between these two major figures that, a year later, would culminate in a brilliant burst of parodistic dialogue skits on both sides. Nor did Dostoevsky forget to include two satirical barbs against Saltykov-Shchedrin in his very next work, Notes from Underground.

  Russia, however, was then occupied by events far surpassing in immediate importance the internal squabbles of its native intelligentsia. January 1863 marked the outbreak of still another Polish revolt against Russian hegemony. If Russian opinion had been favorable to the Polish desire for more local independence, feelings quickly shifted after the uprising began with a massacre of sleeping Russian soldiers in their barracks. The Poles also demanded, in addition to independence, a restoration of the Polish borders of 1772, which included Lithuania, White Russia, and much of the Ukraine. The pressure exerted by France and England on behalf of these claims only succeeded in whipping up Russian nationalism to a fever pitch, and the support of the radicals for the Polish cause (some young Russian officers even deserted and fought with the Poles) ended whatever influen
ce the extreme left still may have had in society at large. Herzen’s support for the Poles, assumed much against his better judgment (he was won over by the volatile Bakunin, always spoiling for a revolution), dealt a deathblow to The Bell.

  The radicals within the country could hardly express support for the Polish cause in the Russian press. Of course, an event of such gravity did not pass unnoticed; but coverage was limited—as in the case of Time—to a neutral summary of official dispatches and an account of the international diplomatic maneuverings. In Moscow, however, Katkov was carrying on a blistering campaign against the Poles and the Russian radicals, whom he threw together into one unsavory heap, and he became the much-applauded man of the hour, the admired voice of Russian patriotic indignation. The failure of the Petersburg press to raise its voice with equal vehemence was bitterly resented in Moscow. The Muscovites were all too ready to take the relative silence as a sign of treason, and they did not hesitate to hurl such an accusation against the first available target offering itself to their fury. Unfortunately for Time, this target turned out to be an article by Strakhov that, although intended as a public avowal in favor of the Russian cause, was written in such tortuous and elusive terms that it could be misread as a justification of the desperate Polish revolt.

  Time was suppressed by the government in May 1863; and it is a sad irony that Dostoevsky’s journal should have been shut down at the very moment it was battling most ferociously with The Contemporary. Dostoevsky explains what happened in a letter to Turgenev a month after the axe had fallen. “The idea of the article (Strakhov wrote it) was as follows: that the Poles despise us as barbarians to such a degree, are so boastful to us of their ‘European’ civilization, that one can scarcely foresee for a long time any moral peace (the only durable kind) with us. But, as the exposition of the article was not understood, it was interpreted as follows: that we affirmed, of ourselves, that the Poles have a civilization so superior to ours, and we are so inferior, that obviously they are right and we are wrong.”3

  Such a charge was indeed instantly made by a writer in the Moscow Gazette—a newspaper edited by Katkov—and it was echoed elsewhere. When Dostoevsky wrote a reply, the censorship banned its publication, and, as he indignantly reports to Turgenev, “certain journals (the Day, among others) have seriously undertaken to prove to us that Polish civilization is only a surface civilization, aristocratic and Jesuitical, thus not at all superior to ours,”4 when this was the very point of Strakhov’s article. The tsar, already ill-disposed toward Time, decided that the moment had come to put an end to this persistent journalistic nuisance once and for all. The order to ban the publication, handed down on May 24, 1863, was justified not only on the basis of Strakhov’s article but also because of “the harmful tendency of the journal.”5

  So ended the life of Time, and its demise left Mikhail saddled with a huge load of debt. The event was disastrous from every point of view and produced a further strain in the relations between Strakhov and Dostoevsky. To be sure, Strakhov could not be held entirely to blame because, as editor in charge, Dostoevsky had read and approved his essay. The two remained on ostensibly friendly terms, although the whole disaster left a festering resentment that came out much later in mutually hostile private remarks.

  The suppression of Time dealt a severe blow to Dostoevsky’s personal fortunes and deprived him of his sole regular source of income. Luckily, he was not left completely without resources for the future, because the various major works published in its pages had managed to reestablish his literary reputation. The Insulted and Injured had brought him back to public attention, and his Notes from the House of the Dead had raised him to a fame far surpassing the transient glory he had achieved with Poor Folk in 1845. We examined House of the Dead earlier for its documentary value; let us now take up the text as a work of art.

  Prison memoirs have become so familiar to us (and Russian literature is now, alas, so rich in examples of them) that one tends to forget it was Dostoevsky who gave his country the first masterpiece of this kind. But so it was: his House of the Dead created the genre in Russia, thus responding to an immense curiosity concerning the conditions of life of those “unfortunates” who ran afoul of the state, especially those convicted of political crimes. The politicals usually came from the ranks of the educated, and any public allusion to their fate was certain to excite the liveliest interest. “My figure will disappear,” Dostoevsky had written to Mikhail in October 1859. “These are the notes of an unknown, but I guarantee their interest. There will be . . . the depiction of characters unheard of previously in literature, and . . . finally, the most important, my name. . . . I am convinced that the public will read this with avidity.”6 Dostoevsky counted on his readers to accept the work as an accurate report of his prison years, and so they did.7 But his presence as a political convict would pervade the book as a whole rather than being placed in the foreground. This double perspective is carefully maintained, and must be kept in mind if we are to avoid the error of taking the work as either an unadorned memoir or a purely fictional construct; in fact, it is a unique combination of both.

  House of the Dead obviously owes its origins to the accidents of Dostoevsky’s existence, but it also fits quite neatly into a genre much cultivated in Russian literature at that moment. Many accounts of personal experience written in a loose, sketchlike form and tied together in a seemingly haphazard fashion were then being produced; and Dostoevsky was familiar with them all. On leaving prison camp, he had read Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches and the popular vignettes by S. T. Aksakov about hunting and fishing. Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Stories were also published shortly after Dostoevsky’s release, and he hastened to read these too, as well as everything else that came from Tolstoy’s pen. Herzen’s masterly memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, had begun to appear during the mid-1850s in The Bell, and new installments were published throughout the remainder of the decade.

  The sudden emergence of this semi-journalistic literary mode may be attributed partly to a temporary relaxation of the censorship, which encouraged writers to speak more freely than they had done in the past without the protective disguise of “fiction” (Herzen, living in exile, did not have to worry about the censorship at all). Writers thus instinctively turned back to the form of the physiological sketch, much favored during the 1840s—another period of relative literary freedom—which had emphasized the accurate observation of social types embedded in their environment, and aimed at depicting people in the routine of their everyday existence. Most early sketches of this type had focused on urban characters and city life, but the renaissance of the form in the 1850s extended its thematic range to take in the life of the peasantry.

  Since the aim of such sketches was to convey an impression of truthfulness, they were not linked together by any sort of novelistic intrigue that might arouse suspicion concerning the verisimilitude of the life being portrayed. Such relative plotlessness then became a distinctive feature of the Russian novel when writers like Turgenev and Tolstoy went on to more complex genres than the sketch and the short story. Dostoevsky stands out as the great exception to this tendency of Russian nineteenth-century prose and had already begun to experiment with the elaborately plotted roman-feuilleton technique, which he would soon raise to new heights. But House of the Dead, among many other things, is also a tribute to his literary versatility and proves that he could adapt his technique to his material and to whatever artistic purpose he chose. It was important, above all, that the reader have no doubts about the veracity of his account, and so Dostoevsky, eschewing all “novelistic” effects, developed his own original variation of the larger sketch forms used by the Russian writers he admired.

  Unlike those of either Turgenev or Tolstoy, Dostoevsky’s sketches reach the reader through the interposition of two frame narrators. The first is the presumed editor of the book, who appears in the introduction and gives the impression of being a well-educated, curious, and observant person; not a native of Siberia
, he has spent a considerable time there—probably in some administrative capacity, like Dostoevsky’s friend Baron Wrangel. This first narrator supplies a tongue-in-cheek picture of life in that remote region (“the inhabitants are simple folk and not of liberal views; everything goes on according to the old-fashioned, solid, time-honored traditions”) that drips with polite sarcasm and indicates to the Russian reader that the region was really a sink of iniquity (4: 5). His words are also an invitation to look carefully beneath the surface of the prose for hidden meanings, and this signal was surely meant to alert the reader not to take completely at face value the information provided by the first narrator about the second. The nominal author of the sketches is a former landowner, Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov (the name suggests someone who has suffered greatly: gore in Russian means “grief” or “misfortune”), who has served a ten-year sentence for murdering his wife in a fit of jealous rage during their first year of marriage. Goryanchikov lives in complete seclusion, earns his scant living by giving lessons to local children, and shuns all contact with the world, presumably unable to adjust to normal life after his years in penal servitude.

  When Goryanchikov dies suddenly, the first narrator manages to rescue some of the dead man’s papers from being thrown away. One bundle contains a “disconnected description of the ten years spent by Alexander Petrovich in the prison camp.” These pages break off occasionally and are interspersed with passages from another story, “some strange and terrible reminiscences”—a probable reference to the murder, which haunts Goryanchikov. Hence this portion of the posthumous text is not reproduced, and the editor decides that only Goryanchikov’s account of his prison years is “not devoid of interest.” For since Goryanchikov reveals “an absolutely new, till then unknown world,” the editor decides to offer his sketches for public scrutiny (4: 8).