Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  English (Western) society was thus dominated by the war of all against all, which at best, since some form of social order had to be created, could lead only to the “ant-heap”—to the total, unthinking compliance of human volition with the commands of the social Moloch. How different, we can well imagine Dostoevsky thinking, with the spirit that ruled in the Russian village, no matter how backward and meager in resources! Had he himself not written, just a year before, that the West was incapable of putting the principle of communality into practice because there it “has not fused with life,” while in Russia it already existed as an accepted social fact and only awaited further favorable development?

  Shortly after his meeting with Dostoevsky, Herzen once again stated much the same conclusion more sweepingly in a series of open letters addressed to Turgenev entitled Ends and Beginnings (Europe was at the end of its historical life, Russia at the beginning). “Petty-bourgeoisiedom,” Herzen states bluntly, “is the final word of the civilization based on the unconditioned rule of property,” and Russia would be able to utter a new “word” in world history because it had never accepted this principle of property as sacrosanct.5 The radical Russian Socialist Herzen and the pochvennik Dostoevsky thus shared the same aversion to Western society and placed the same hopes in the presumed Socialist proclivities of the Russian peasant. But for Dostoevsky these Socialist proclivities were rooted in an exalted conception of Christian self-sacrifice that the enlightened atheist and liberated man of the world Herzen would hardly have been willing to accept as an ideal.

  The last three chapters of Winter Notes are devoted to Paris, and these pages come closest to giving Dostoevsky’s readers some of the ordinary fare contained in Russian accounts of Europe. All his impressions are highly stylized in the manner of the famous French satirist of the bourgeoisie, Henri Monnier, whom Dostoevsky had read with appreciation as a young man. Monnier’s most famous phrase—ma femme et mon parapluie!—had been cited by Dostoevsky in a letter seventeen years earlier,6 and the image of the complacent, self-satisfied, pompously ridiculous French bourgeois whom Monnier pilloried reappears in Dostoevsky’s pages, sketched even more acidly by a pen dipped in caustic contempt.

  In general, the image that Dostoevsky conveys is of a society rotten to the core with greed for gold yet consumed with vanity at its own moral perfection. All of French life under Napoleon III is seen as a sinister comedy, staged exclusively for the purpose of allowing the bourgeoisie to enjoy both their continual accumulation of wealth and the spectacle of their ineffable virtue. Dostoevsky writes that “all their [the workers] ideal is to become property owners and to possess as many things as possible” (5: 78). While the bourgeoisie fears everyone—the working class, the communists, the Socialists—all such apprehensions are the result of a ludicrous mistake. No group in the West really represents any threat to the hegemony of the spiritual principle embodied in the bourgeoisie.

  What, after all, has become of the ideals of the French Revolution under the Second Empire, the ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité? In momentary accord with Karl Marx and the Socialists, Dostoevsky views political freedom and legal equality, unaccompanied by economic equality, simply as repulsive fictions invented by the bourgeoisie to delude the proletariat. As for fraternité, this, Dostoevsky says, is in the most curious position of all. Europe is always talking about brotherhood and has even raised it to the status of a universal ideal, yet brotherhood is the very antithesis of the European character:

  In the French nature, indeed, in the Western European nature in general, brotherhood is not present. Instead, we find the personal principle, the principle of isolation, a vigorous self-concern, self-assertion, self-determination, within the bounds of one’s own ego. This ego sets itself in opposition, as a separate, self-justifying principle, against all of nature and all other humans; it claims equality and equal value with whatever exists outside itself. (5: 79)

  Dostoevsky then goes on to describe what brotherhood really is; and though he speaks in purely moral terms, every Russian reader would instantly know that the social reality to which he was referring is the Russian peasant obshchina, with its land held in common and its democratic administration for the good of all. True brotherhood, as in the obshchina, is an instinctive mutual relation between the individual and the community in which each desires only the welfare of the other. The individual does not, as in the West, insist on his exclusive rights as an isolated ego; he freely brings these rights to the community in sacrifice without even being asked to do so. Reciprocally, the community, without making any demands or imposing any conditions on the individual, guarantees him equal protection and status with all.

  Dostoevsky illustrates this ideal situation in the form of a dialogue between the individual and the community. “My greatest joy,” the individual says, “is to sacrifice everything to you, without hurting you by so doing.” But the community, as Dostoevsky sees it, then responds: “You offer us too much. . . . Take everything that is ours too. Constantly and with all our might, we shall struggle to increase your personal freedom and your individual fulfillment. . . . We are all behind you; we guarantee your safety; we watch eternally over you.” And then, turning back to the skeptical reader once more, Dostoevsky falls into the jeering tone of the underground man: “There’s a Utopia for you, gentlemen! Everything is based on feelings, on nature, not on reason. Why, this actually humbles reason. What do you think? Is this a Utopia or not?” If by Utopia one means a not yet realized ideal, then for Dostoevsky the exchange he had just sketched was not Utopian at all; he firmly believed that such a ballet of moral sublimity actually existed—though in forms that were often imperfect and distorted—at the heart of Russian peasant life. And this state of social harmony was not only impossible for, but even incomprehensible to, the European personality, which could not conceive of obtaining anything for itself without a struggle against others. “Its demands are made belligerently, it insists on its rights, requires an equal status—and that is the end of brotherhood” (5: 80–81).

  Dostoevsky insists that brotherhood requires a much higher development of personality than has been attained in the West: “Understand me: a voluntary, totally conscious sacrifice of oneself in the interests of all, made under no sort of compulsion, is in my opinion a sign of the highest development of the personality. Voluntarily to sacrifice one’s life for all, to die on the cross or at the stake, is possible only with the very strongest development of personality” (5: 79). This sacrifice, moreover, must be made without the slightest suggestion or thought of recompense; if such an idea is present, then it ruins everything by destroying the underlying moral nature of the act of self-sacrifice and turning it into a Utilitarian calculation. “One must make the sacrifice,” Dostoevsky explains, “so as to give all and even desire that nothing can be given in return, so that nobody is deprived of anything on your behalf.” From which it follows that true brotherhood cannot be artificially established or created: “it must live unconsciously in the nature of the entire race, in a word: to have the brotherly principle of love—one must love. One must instinctively be drawn to brotherhood . . . despite the age-old sufferings of a nation, despite the barbarous crudity and ignorance that has taken root there, despite age-old slavery and the invasion of foreign races—in a word, the need for brotherly communication must be in the nature of a people, must be born with them or have been assimilated as a way of life from time immemorial” (5: 80). It is thus only the Russian people who are capable of brotherhood; all attempts to establish this principle in the West, as an alternative to the horrors of the war of all against all, are doomed to failure.

  This is the context in which Dostoevsky raises the question of Socialism, which had just then ceased to have much importance in Europe but was still crucial in Russia. It was the Socialists, Dostoevsky concedes, who really took the ideal of fraternité seriously and tried to find ways of putting it into practice. They proclaim: “All for one and one for all!”—and nothing be
tter than such an ideal, Dostoevsky agrees, can possibly be imagined. But when the Socialists confront as their major obstacle the nature of European man, to whom the principle of brotherhood is spiritually alien, they appeal to his reason, and try to convince him that brotherhood will be to everyone’s advantage once it is established. The Socialists argue, preach, explain, draw up plans and projects, and point out with great specificity just what benefits will accrue and “just how much each must freely contribute, at the detriment of his personality, to the commune” (5: 81).

  Dostoevsky, to do him justice, does not accuse the Socialist ideal of involving any compulsion. On the contrary, he explicitly recognizes that the Socialists desire a voluntary acceptance of their goals, yet he accepts as axiomatic that Socialism—the Utopian Socialism of the mid-nineteenth century, with its endeavor to establish ideal communities and to transform human relations—involves an encroachment on the rights of personality. This postulate, so self-evident for Dostoevsky that he does not take the trouble to explain it, must be understood in the perspective of his implicit comparison with the Russian commune. The Russian, for whom brotherhood is a vital instinct, experiences no inner conflict as the results of the self-sacrifices demanded by life in his village. But the European, whose primary instinct is egoistic self-interest, can only feel the demands of the Socialist commune as an infringement of the complete autonomy of his individual personality. For this reason, the rational motive of self-interest—the motive that the Russian radicals, following Chernyshevsky, were making the cornerstone of their worldview—is the “hair” that will destroy the innate Russian instinct of true brotherhood once it gets into the machinery.

  To buttress this conclusion, Dostoevsky mentions a few incidents from the checkered history of Socialist communities (those of Cabet and Victor Considérant), about which he was well informed. Most such attempts quickly fell apart as a result of internal bickering, and Dostoevsky draws what seems to him the pertinent lesson:

  Naturally there is something very tempting about living, if not fraternally, then at least on a purely rational basis, i.e., it is fine when all protect you and require of you only work and agreement. But here a mystery arises: it seems that man is completely protected, promised food, drink, and work, and for all this he is asked in return only a small drop of his personal freedom for the good of all, the tiniest, tiniest drop. But no, man does not like to live by such calculations, even this tiny drop is burdensome. It seems to him, stupidly, that this is prison and that he is better off by himself because—he is completely free. And, you know, even though he is flayed alive for this freedom, obtains no work, starves to death, and his free will is equal to nothing—all the same, it seems to this eccentric fellow that his free will is better. (5: 81)

  In this momentous passage, we can observe the bitter lessons of Dostoevsky’s prison years, with their nightmarish proof of man’s ineradicable need to feel free, combining with his reflections on Socialism, on the Russian commune, and on the relations of Russia with Europe, to create the outlines of the underground man. For the “eccentric fellow” (chudak) who materializes in this quotation, and refuses to give up the tiniest drop of his freedom as the price for joining the Socialist commune, unmistakably provides the first glimpse of this memorable character.

  Faced with the choice of preserving the full autonomy of personality or surrendering part of it in order to obtain some self-advantage, mankind, Dostoevsky firmly believed, would instinctively choose suffering and hardship for the sake of freedom. This is why rationalist Socialist communes are doomed to failure, and why the acceptance of European ideas by Russian radicals—ideas that accentuate the self-regarding elements of the human psyche—is so disastrous. Dostoevsky thus considers the revolt of the chudak, under such circumstances, as inevitable and even salutary (which explains his seeming identification with the similar revolt of the underground man against the laws of nature). In both instances, we have a defense and assertion of the positive value of moral-psychic freedom. But, as Dostoevsky also indicates, the consequences of such behavior without any possibility of reconciliation between the individual and society will inevitably be self-destructive; and only a world governed by the Christian moral-social ideals still alive in the Russian commune can thus ward off chaos. Only in such a world will the freedom of the personality be respected; only here will the individual be inspired by the spirit of love to surrender his personality, not for a Utilitarian doctrine of self-interest but for the good of all. From Dostoevsky’s point of view, then, whatever we may think of its plausibility, his opposition to the philosophy of “rational egoism” was a defense of the Russian commune; and this commune was the destined foundation, singled out by the hand of Providence, on which the Christian Socialist society of the future would be built. He was convinced that, once realized in Russia, it would blossom into a new and glorious phase of world history.

  Dostoevsky’s Winter Notes thus brings us right to the threshold of his great creative period, which begins with the composition of Notes from Underground two years later. It is not so much that Winter Notes contains some of the major symbols and motifs of Notes from Underground—the liver complaint, the ant-heap, the Crystal Palace, the “stupid” recalcitrance of the “eccentric fellow” to surrender even the tiniest drop of his freedom to the artificial and rational Socialist community. Even more important is the rhetoric of inverted irony, which the underground man will simply internalize at a much higher level of philosophical and psychological self-awareness. For he will concentrate within himself all the contradictions arising from the ambivalent Russian attitude toward Europe as represented by the two radical ideologies that Dostoevsky had so far encountered in his lifetime: the rational egoism and materialism of the 1860s and the philanthropic and Romantic Utopian Socialism of the 1840s.

  1 Roman Jakobson, “Der Russische Frankreich-Mythus,” Slavische Rundschau 3 (1931), 636–642.

  2 Pis’ma, 1: 310; June 26/July 8, 1862.

  3 Walter Houghton remarks that the World’s Fair of 1851 was generally greeted by “the identification of progress with the spirit of God,” and he cites a passage from Charles Kingsley, who wrote that “he was moved to tears; to him [entering the Crystal Palace] was like going into a sacred place.” A few days later, Kingsley preached a sermon in which he saw everything that the Palace symbolized as “proofs of the Kingdom of God, realization of the gifts which Christ received for men, vaster than any of which they [our forefathers] had dreamed.” Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, 1957), 43.

  4 It is striking to observe the similarity of Dostoevsky’s remarks about London with those of Friedrich Engels in his The Condition of the Working Class in England. “Hundreds of thousands of people from all classes and ranks of society crowd by each other [on the streets]. . . . Meanwhile it occurs to no one that others are worth even a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each individual person in his private interest becomes the more repulsive and offensive the more these individuals are pushed into a tiny space. We know well enough that this isolation of the individual, this narrow-minded self-seeking—is everywhere the fundamental principle of modern society. . . . From this it follows that the social war—the war of all against all—has been openly declared. As in Stirner, men here regard each other only as useful objects.” Cited in Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (New York, 1975), 147. Geoffrey C. Kabat makes a detailed comparison between this work of Engels and Winter Notes in his Ideology and Imagination (New York, 1978), 74–91.

  5 Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgins, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 4: 1688–1689. My translation differs slightly from that given in this text.

  6 Pis’ma, 1: 78; May 4, 1845.

  CHAPTER 28

  An Emancipated Woman, A Tormented Lover

  Despite the severity of the permanent interdiction of Time, its editors and contributors could not believe that the misundersta
nding on which it was based would long continue. Strakhov, whose reputation was at stake, hurriedly wrote letters to Katkov and Ivan Aksakov explaining his loyalty to the Russian cause. The censorship would not allow Strakhov’s letters to be printed, but Katkov, magnanimous to a repentant foe, replied that he would clarify the matter in an article. Hopes thus revived, as Dostoevsky wrote to Turgenev in mid-June, that the decision of the authorities could be reversed. A week or two later, Katkov’s article lifted the dire accusation of pro-Polonism from Time’s shoulders, but he continued to object to the principles of pochvennichestvo, whose cloudiness he decried as being at the root of the trouble. Still, this article paved the way for the authorities to change their mind, although they took longer to do so than Dostoevsky had anticipated.