Dostoevsky could hardly have rejected with more firmness the attempt of Chernyshevsky to establish a new ethics on the foundation of egoism. But while such passages are a clear challenge to the intention of recasting the moral code in Utilitarian terms, a more subtle and powerful rejection—one that will soon provide the inspiration for Notes from Underground—can be found in the pages describing the frenzied desire of the convicts to express the freedom of their personalities, even if in doing so they sacrifice all self-interest in the usual sense to attain only the momentary, irrational illusion of moral-psychic autonomy. What the prisoners value more than anything else, as Dostoevsky unforgettably shows, is “freedom or the dream of freedom,” and to keep this dream alive they will sometimes go to lengths that seem like madness.
So-called model convicts will sometimes suddenly break out in a self-destructive fashion. “And all the while,” Dostoevsky explains, “possibly the cause . . . is simply the poignant hysterical craving for self-expression, the unconscious yearning for himself, the desire to assert himself, to assert his crushed personality, a desire which suddenly takes possession of him and reaches the pitch of fury, of spite, of mental aberration, of fits and nervous convulsions. So perhaps a man buried alive and awakening in his coffin might beat upon the lid and struggle to fling it off, though of course reason might convince him that all his efforts would be useless; but the trouble is that it is not a question of reason, it is a question of nervous convulsions” (4: 66–67).
The man who had watched such explosions of stifled humanity erupting before his very eyes, and who was capable of analyzing them with such anguished penetration, could hardly accept Chernyshevsky’s “rational egoism” as the ultimate word of human wisdom. And we shall see that Dostoevsky had already begun symbolically to pit this ineradicable human need—the need for man to assert the freedom of his personality—against the Socialist ideal of the generation of the 1860s, with its peculiarly Russian attempt to integrate such an ideal with material determinism and a Utilitarian moral code.
1 N. S. Nekrasov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 12 vols. (Moscow, 1948–1953), 10: 479–480.
2 M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sobranie sochinenii, 20 vols. (Moscow, 1965–1977), 6: 46.
3 Pis’ma, 1: 317–318; June 17, 1863.
4 Ibid., 318.
5 Cited in V. S. Nechaeva, Zhurnal M. M. i F. M. Dostoevskikh, Vremya, 1861–1863 (Moscow, 1973), 308.
6 Pis’ma, 2: 605; October 9, 1859.
7 According to his intention, Dostoevsky’s sketches were generally accepted as a reliable account of documentary value, and later researches in the central historical archives of the Russian Army have tended to confirm this instinctive assessment, although there are some discrepancies between the documents and Dostoevsky’s version. A tendency has been noted to make the crimes of his compatriots more severe than the record indicates, and, it has been suggested, he did so in order implicitly to justify the extreme harshness of the punishments. But since he had no way of knowing what the facts really were, relying only on what he was told, he may not knowingly have distorted at all. It is possible that what Dostoevsky learned came closer to the truth than what the authorities had been able to verify from the testimony of sullenly hostile peasant informants.
8 Victor Shklovsky, Za i protiv (Moscow, 1957), 101.
9 Moreover, as V. A. Tunimanov has written, for the reader “it is not Goryanchikov who emerges from prison but the author-narrator, that is, Dostoevsky. The ‘conclusion’ of the book is not at all despairing, and one should not, evidently, exaggerate the pessimism of the Notes. . . .” See Tunimanov, Tvorchestvo Dostoevskogo, 1854–1862 (Leningrad, 1980), 80.
10 Ibid., 75.
11 R. L. Jackson, “The Narrator in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead,” in Studies in Russian and Polish Literature, in Honor of Waclaw Lednicki (The Hague, 1962), 197.
12 K. Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton, NJ, 1967), 186.
13 Jacques Catteau, “De la structure de la Maison des morts de F. M. Dostoevskij,” Revue des Etudes Slaves 54 (1982), 63–72.
14 Shklovsky, Za i protiv, 107.
15 B. M. Eikhenbaum, The Young Tolstoy, trans. Gary Kern (Ann Arbor, MI, 1972), 77.
16 L. N. Tolstoy, Tales from Army Life, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (London, 1951), 105.
17 I. S. Turgenev, Pis’ma, 13 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1961), 6: 66.
18 Cited in PSS, 4: 296.
19 Ibid., 297.
CHAPTER 27
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
The last important work that Dostoevsky published in Time was Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniyakh), a series of articles in which he launches a full-scale assault on the major pieties of the radical credo. Dostoevsky seizes the occasion of his first journey through Europe to explore the whole tangled history of the relationship between educated Russians and European culture. Within this framework he also discusses the larger issues then being posed by radical ideology: the basis of a new moral-social order; the question of Socialism; the future destiny of mankind. By the time he finishes he will have discovered both the literary and the ideological stance that will lead within two years to the composition of his first post-Siberian masterpiece, Notes from Underground.
Much like Americans such as Hawthorne, Emerson, and Henry James, cultivated Russians felt a need to define their own national individuality by comparing themselves with Europe, and Dostoevsky’s Winter Notes takes its place in a long line of works through which Russians have examined the roots of their own culture as it had evolved, since Peter the Great, under the successive waves of European influence. Only by making the prescribed pilgrimage to the West, only by ceasing to regard Europe through the haze of distance as some enchanted land, could a Russian discover what aspects of European influence in his homeland he might wish to preserve and what discard. As a result, the travel diary has always been one of the chief means by which Russian self-consciousness has been sharpened and affirmed; and Dostoevsky’s Winter Notes, true to type, thus gives us a fuller and franker expression of his convictions than any so far encountered in public print.
Like the vast majority of travelers to a foreign land, much of what Dostoevsky saw and felt corresponded gratifyingly to the expectations he had entertained before leaving. Roman Jakobson has amusingly pointed out the similarity in the reaction to Europe, and particularly to France, that can be observed over the time span of a century and a half in the writings of the most diverse variety of Russian visitors. Whether in 1800 or 1900, whether a Socialist radical, a patriotic Slavophil, a diehard reactionary, a moderate liberal, or a completely apolitical Symbolist aesthete—Russians have invariably responded to a homogeneous “myth of France” well represented in one of the letters by Dostoevsky already quoted.1 “Ours are simply carnivorous scoundrels,” he remarks to Strakhov, “and, most of the time, know it, but here they are completely convinced that this is how it must be. The Frenchman is pleasant, decent, polite, but false, and money for him is everything.”2
Long before he departed on his journey, Dostoevsky had been persuaded that Europe was a dying culture that had lost its spiritual bond of unity. It was thus a simple matter for him to pierce through the illusions of the glittering European surface and instantly to detect the corruption lying concealed underneath. True, some manifestations of this corruption might appear to be similar in Paris and Petersburg; rogues and scoundrels existed as surely in the one place as in the other. But Dostoevsky’s letter shows the tactic that he will use in Winter Notes to evade the consequences of such awkwardly impartial reflections. Russians are conscious of their moral delinquency; they feel it as such; and hence they have preserved the indispensable basis of morality. Europeans have become so depraved that the very meaning of their own conduct escapes them and they complacently take evil for good. This insistence on the moral stultification of Europe runs as a leitmotif all through Winter Notes and eme
rges as its ultimate conclusion. But such a generalization, hardly unexpected for the regular readers of Time, is of less interest at the moment than the manner and means by which it is expressed.
Written in the first person, Winter Notes is a continuous dialogue with those whom Dostoevsky addresses as “my friends” (5: 49). They have been urging him to communicate his impressions of Europe. Very well! The “winter notes” are his answer to their demands. Dostoevsky determines to dedicate himself to conveying his “sincere observations,” though he is certain that his friends will have a predetermined attitude toward Europe—one of awe—that does not surge up in his own reactions. His first contacts with European life in Germany had violated all the rules and regulations of the “renowned authorities.” Nothing—neither Unter den Linden nor the Cologne cathedral—had aroused the proper desire to genuflect! All this was terribly disturbing, even inexplicable, until he returned to his hotel room one day feeling ill and examined his symptoms: “My tongue was yellow and malignant. . . . I thought, ‘Can it be, can it really be that man, this lord of all creation, is dependent to such a degree on his liver? What baseness!’ ” (5: 48).
If for no other reason, this reference to the liver inevitably recalls the opening sentences of Notes from Underground; and while the anatomical allusion may seem at first glance only a casual coincidence, closer scrutiny reveals a deeper relation. Indeed, the rhetorical strategy used here is an anticipation of the one so masterfully deployed in the fictional work, where the author, again writing in the first person, also dramatizes a split in his consciousness between a pattern of behavior that might be considered normal and reasonable and an unexpected emotive reaction that surges up from some instinctive and visceral level of the personality. Both works, in addition, maintain the same close “dialogical” relation with the reader (“my friends”), who becomes an implicit and invoked presence within the text and is constantly appealed to as an interlocutor.
In this first chapter of Winter Notes, precisely the same situation exists between Dostoevsky and his readers as he will later recreate for the underground man. These readers anticipate an attitude of wide-eyed reverence before the glories of Europe, and the author shares this expectation sufficiently so that, when his own involuntary responses fail to correspond, he can only laugh at himself for his incapacity. But at the same time, he feels his irreverence to be a more authentic reaction than the automatic obeisance that his readers expect. Hence, his irony cuts two ways, being directed both against himself (for having somehow failed to measure up to Europe) and against the reader (for being unable to tolerate any but a hackneyed and conventional point of view). Such an “inverted irony,” which turns back on the writer as a means of turning against an imagined judge and critic in the person of the reader, is precisely the one that will be used in Notes from Underground.
Dostoevsky wishes the reader to understand that his reaction is by no means as aberrant as may appear. Quite the contrary, it springs directly from the whole ambivalent relation of the Russian psyche to European culture. It expresses the adoration of Europe induced by education, the self-hatred provoked by such adoration, and then the irrepressible need to assert independence even if only in a self-mocking manner. The Russian refusal to acknowledge the secret of its ambivalent relation to Europe is reflected by Dostoevsky’s inverted irony, which jestingly anticipates such outraged reactions and overcomes them at the same time.
His meditations on the anomalies of the Russian attitude toward Europe naturally led Dostoevsky to think back on the origins of his fateful relationship, and he sketches its history in a chapter that, though labeled “completely superfluous,” contains the very heart of the matter. “I began to ponder,” he says, “on this theme: how Europe has, at various times, been reflected in us and constantly broken in on us with its civilization, and . . . how many of us now are really civilized through and through?” (5: 55). In the past, despite the brilliant French surface of the court of Catherine the Great, the Russian landowner and apprentice courtier had still kept his old habits and feelings. These were admittedly brutal, barbarous, and revolting, but they were still his own, they were still Russian; and the people felt more at home with this generation than with their more “humane” offspring. Then came Chatsky, the hero of Griboyedov’s comedy Woe from Wit, who had assimilated the culture of Europe and, on returning home to Russia, found life there unbearable. The first of the superfluous men, Chatsky flees back to Europe, lamenting that there is no longer any place for him in his homeland. “One thing I cannot understand,” writes Dostoevsky. “Chatsky was after all a very intelligent man. How could it happen that an intelligent man could find nothing here to do? All of them found nothing to do, for a period of two or three generations” (5: 62).
As for the latest Russian type, the progressive and radical, he neither acts out a farce like Catherine’s courtier nor is troubled by self-doubt; he has become completely and complacently European. “For how self-assured we are now in our civilizing mission. . . . There is no such thing as a native soil, as a people. Nationality?—only a certain system of paying taxes! The soul?—a tabula rasa, a bit of wax, out of which you can paste together on the spot a real man, a universal general man, a homuncule—all that’s necessary is to apply the fruits of European civilization, and read two or three books!” (5: 59). One can already hear the jeering, provocative voice of the underground man in these sentences, which contain exactly the inflections of his tone: a partial identification (“we”) with ideas he really abhors and implicitly rejects through the very sarcasm by which they are affirmed. Visibly, Dostoevsky’s meditations on the manner in which Europe has been assimilated into the Russian psyche, and his attempt to dramatize this symbiosis through his own reactions as a representative figure, have led him stylistically to the very threshold of his next creation.
With the fourth chapter of Winter Notes, Dostoevsky finally crosses the French border and, as we recall, discovers that his railroad compartment has been invaded by police spies. No doubt he wished his Russian readers to feel the proper shudder of horror at such surveillance, and to conclude that the vaunted liberties of the West were simply so many shams: Russians had no reason to be envious of European “liberty.” But Dostoevsky could not let the matter rest, and reinforces this exposure of European hypocrisy by contrasting the presumed Russian reaction with the European violation of the norms of political decency. The elderly couple who ran one of the hotels at which he stayed in Paris, and who requested information about him for the police, anxiously explained that all this documentation was absolutely “ne-cess-ary”—and a very respectable and worthy couple they were, the essence of bourgeois propriety. “But the word ‘ne-cess-ary,’ far from being pronounced in any apologetic or derogatory tone, was uttered, rather, precisely in the sense of the completest necessity to the point of being identical with their own personal convictions” (5: 67–68). Such, presumably, would not have been the case in Russia, where people bowed to force and the pressure of historical necessity without allowing it to obliterate their moral awareness.
Dostoevsky then quickly moves on to London, the city in which the soullessness and heartlessness of Western life—its crass materialism, its unashamed contempt for anything other than the sordid pursuit of worldly gain—was mirrored in the most arrogantly brazen fashion. The chapter on London bears as its title the single, flamboyant name of the false god of the flesh execrated in the Old Testament, “Baal.” It is this god, transposed into a symbol of modern materialism, before whom all of Western civilization now bows down in prostrate worship; and the results can be seen in the canvas that Dostoevsky brushes in with a palette even darker in hue than that of Dickens, the inspired native poet of the city’s sordidness and mass misery. London is nothing but a pitiless wilderness of wild, half-naked, besotted proletarians, gloomily drowning their despair in debauchery and gin. And over all this chaos of restless, preoccupied crowds, of whistling and roaring machinery, of heart-rending scenes of brutalized d
egradation, reigns the great idol to whom all render homage—the spirit of Baal embodied in the resplendent and majestic London World’s Fair.
During his eight days in London, Dostoevsky paid an obligatory visit to the famous Crystal Palace to see the second London World’s Fair, which had opened in May 1862 and was dedicated to exhibiting the latest triumphs of science and technology. A monument of modern architecture originally constructed for the first London World’s Fair in 1851 by Sir Joseph Paxton, the huge cast-iron and glass building, covering nineteen acres and located on high ground just outside the city, had since been transformed into a museum. The Crystal Palace thus became for Dostoevsky an image of the unholy spirit of modernity that brooded malevolently over London; and in his imagination this spirit takes on the form of the monstrous Beast whose coming was prophesied in the Apocalypse:
Can this really be the accomplished ideal?—you think;—is not this the end? is not this really the “one herd.” Will we not have to accept this really as the whole truth and remain silent once and for all? All this is so majestic, victorious, and proud that it takes your breath away. You observe these hundreds of thousands, these millions of people, obediently flowing here from all over the world—people coming with one thought, peacefully, unceasingly, and silently crowding into this colossal palace; and you feel that something has been finally completed and terminated. This is some sort of Biblical illustration, some prophesy of the Apocalypse fulfilled before your eyes. You feel that one must have perpetual spiritual resistance and negation so as not to surrender, not to submit to the impression, not to bow before the fact and deify Baal, that is, not to accept the existing as one’s ideal (5: 69–70).3
19. Main hall of the Crystal Palace. From Scientific American, March 19, 1851.
Dostoevsky thus acknowledges the power of this idol by his awe-struck description of its shrine, but his words are equally plangent when he portrays the fate of its victims and sacrifices. Any vestiges of human feeling among them seemed to have been obliterated; all he could detect was a frantic search for sensual pleasure and for oblivion. “The people are always the people,” Dostoevsky observes after sketching some London street scenes, “but here everything was so colossal, so striking, that you seemed to grasp tangibly what up to now you had only imagined. Here you no longer see a people, but the systematic, submissive and induced lack of consciousness” (5: 71). What lay at the bottom of all this external splendor, attained at the price of so much human misery, was “the same stubborn, dumb, deep-rooted struggle, the struggle to the death between the general Western principle of individuality and the necessity of somehow living together, of somehow establishing a society and organizing an ant-heap. Even turning into an ant-heap just so as to organize something, just so as not to eat each other up—otherwise, one turns into a cannibal!” (5: 69).4
Dostoevsky Page 55
