Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  So ends this remarkable little work, certainly the most powerful and concentrated expression that Dostoevsky ever gave to his genius as a satirist. Notes from Underground, it has often been said, is the prelude to the great period in which Dostoevsky’s talent finally came to maturity, and there is no question that with it he attains a new artistic level. For the first time, he motivates an action entirely in terms of a psychology shaped by radical ideology; every feature of the text serves to bring out the consequences in personal behavior of certain ideas, and the world that Dostoevsky creates is entirely conceived as a function of this purpose. Psychology has now become strictly subordinate to ideology; there is no longer a disturbing tug-of-war, as in The Insulted and Injured, between the moral-psychological and the ideological elements of the structure.

  Dostoevsky has also at last found the great theme of his later novels, which will all be inspired by the same ambition to counter the moral-spiritual authority of the ideology of the radical Russian intelligentsia (depending on whatever nuance of that ideology was prominent at the time of writing). In this respect, the nucleus of Dostoevsky’s novels may be compared to that of an eighteenth-century conte philosophique, whose characters were also largely embodiments of ideas; but instead of remaining bloodless abstractions like Candide or Zadig, they will be fleshed out with all the verisimilitude and psychological density of the nineteenth-century novel of Social Realism and all the dramatic tension of the urban-Gothic roman-feuilleton. It is Dostoevsky’s genius for blending these seemingly antithetical narrative styles that constitute the originality of his art as a novelist.

  Dostoevsky, though, never again attempted anything as hermetic and allusive as Notes from Underground. It is very likely that he considered the work a failure—as indeed it was, if we use as a measure its total lack of effectiveness as a polemic. No one really understood what Dostoevsky had been trying to do (with the exception, as we shall see, of Saltykov-Shchedrin), and even though Grigoryev, with his artistic flair, praised the novella and told his friend to continue writing in this vein, the silence of the remainder of the literary world was positively deafening. Suslova’s letter, which contains references to Dostoevsky’s “scandalous novella” and the “cynical things” he was producing, conveys the general reaction. Since she had not yet read the text, her words report what she had heard in the literary salon of the novelist Evgenia Tur (which she was then frequenting in Paris), and whose habitués were only repeating the latest literary gossip from Petersburg. Such reactions probably persuaded Dostoevsky that he had perhaps counted too much on the perspicacity of his readers to discern his meaning. He would never again place them before so difficult a challenge to their literary and ideological acumen.

  1 N. K. Mikhailovsky, “Zhestoky talant,” in F. M. Dostoevsky v Russkoi kritike, ed. A. A. Belkin (Moscow, 1956), 306–384.

  2 V. V. Rozanov, Dostoevsky and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, trans. Spencer E. Roberts (Ithaca, NY, 1972), 35.

  3 V. L. Komarovich, “ ‘Mirovaya garmoniya,’ Dostoevskogo,” in O Dostoevskom, ed. Donad Fanger (Providence, RI, 1966), 119–149.

  4 Originally published in a Czech periodical, the essasy has been reprinted in A. Skaftymov, Nravstvennie iskaniya Russkikh pisatelei (Moscow, 1972), 70, 96.

  5 A. I. Gertsen, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow, 1954–1966), 6: 36.

  6 Very close to the end of his life, Herzen wrote a telling letter to his son, Alexander Jr., in which he made the point perfectly clear. The younger Herzen, by this time a noted physiologist, had published a lecture course in which all animal and human activity was interpreted as a function of the nervous reflex system; and he thus concluded, like Chernyshevsky, that free will was an illusion. His father replied: “At all periods, man seeks his autonomy, his liberty and, though pulled along by necessity, he does not wish to act except according to his own will; he does not wish to be a passive gravedigger of the past or an unconscious midwife of the future; he considers history as his free and indispensable work. He believes in his liberty as he believes in the existence of the external world as it presents itself to him because he trusts his eyes, and because, without that confidence, he could not take a step. Moral liberty is thus a psychological or, if one wishes, an anthropological reality.” No more expressive statement could be given of Dostoevsky’s own existential conception of liberty and moral freedom. See A. I. Gertsen, Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniya, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1946), 2: 283.

  7 Pis’ma, 1: 178; March 24, 1856.

  8 The main character of Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie, a reformer philanthropist, also defeats a coalition of crowned reactionaries at Austerlitz. Dostoevsky is already suggesting here the tendency of radical social reformers to identify themselves with Napoleon. See PSS, 5: 386.

  9 Pis’ma, 1: 353; March 26, 1864.

  CHAPTER 31

  The End of Epoch

  After the interment of Marya Dimitrievna, Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg at the end of April and once again began to take an active part in the editorial affairs of Epoch. To tide himself over financially, he obtained a loan from the Literary Fund, and, as if to signal the beginning of a new era in his life, he also ran up a substantial bill at a fashionable Petersburg tailor for a new suit of clothes and a summer overcoat. But if the death of his first wife might be considered a blessing in disguise, whatever the pangs of conscience and the disruptions provoked by her long death agony, he was soon to be confronted with another personal loss that was an unmitigated disaster.

  Mikhail Dostoevsky and his family had taken up residence for the summer at a dacha in Pavlovsk, the fashionable watering place not far from Petersburg. Dostoevsky was living in Petersburg with his stepson Pasha and making preparations to go abroad again for his health, certainly with the tempting image of a reunion with Suslova never out of his mind. Just before his departure, however, he was so struck by his brother’s ailing appearance that he decided to delay his voyage. And, in the first week of July, he scribbled a quick note to his stepson from Pavlovsk: “Dear Pasha, send me some linen. My brother is dying. Don’t tell anyone about this.”1

  Mikhail had been overtaxed by the strain of publishing Epoch singlehanded, and by the burden of financial obligations that he could meet only by incurring others still more onerous. Not sparing himself physically, and suffering from an intermittent liver ailment, he collapsed on July 6 after hearing that an article on which he had counted could not pass the censorship; three days later he was dead. “How much I have lost with him,” Dostoevsky wrote to his brother Andrey some weeks later, “That man loved me more than anything in the world, even more than his wife and family, whom he adored. . . . All the affairs of brother’s family are terribly disorganized. The affairs of the journal (an enormous and complicated affair)—all this I will take on myself. There are many debts. Not a penny left for the family, and they are all minors. . . . Naturally, I am at their service. For a brother such as he was, I will cut off my head and sacrifice my own health.”2

  Mikhail was buried in the Pavlovsk cemetery on July 13, and Dostoevsky then faced an extremely difficult decision. Epoch was saddled with a huge deficit—both long-term debts and more urgent ones, which demanded immediate payment. In a letter written eight months later to his old friend Baron Wrangel, Dostoevsky explained: “I had to choose between two roads: abandon the journal, turn it over to the creditors . . . along with all the furniture and belongings, and take in the family. Then get to work, pursue my literary career, write novels, and provide for the needs of the widow and orphans. Another possibility: find the money and carry on the publication at whatever cost. What a pity that I did not choose the first!”3

  Dostoevsky obtained ten thousand rubles from his wealthy Kumanin aunt in Moscow, the sum that would have been left him in her will, and scraped together additional funds wherever he could. He was convinced that, if he could keep publishing until the end of the year, and bring the monthly numbers approximately up to schedule, he would attract enough s
ubscribers to cover expenses and to pay off his debts. His plan was to whip the journal into shape, establish it on a sound financial footing, and then turn it over to Mikhail’s family as a source of income when—as he was determined to do in the future—he would withdraw to write his novels. The rapid rise of Time had convinced him that he was capable of turning Epoch into a flourishing enterprise.

  If hard work and grim determination had been enough to guarantee success, then Dostoevsky would certainly have succeeded. As it turned out, there were too many obstacles to be overcome, even though he literally drove himself to the edge of collapse. “It was necessary to take matters in hand with energy,” he explains to Wrangel. “I printed on three presses at the same time, without regard for my health and strength; I alone took on the work of chief editor and the reading of proofs; alone I negotiated with authors and the censorship, corrected articles, raised money, stayed awake until 6 o’clock in the morning, slept five hours a night, and I put the journal on its feet; but it was already too late.”4

  Despite Dostoevsky’s heroic efforts, the needed subscriptions did not flow into the coffers of Epoch, and it became financially impossible to continue publication after the first two issues of 1865. In his letter to Wrangel, Dostoevsky blames the situation on the general fall in subscriptions that had affected all Russian publications, coupled with an economic crisis in the country that made it difficult to obtain credit. But there were, as Dostoevsky knew, more particular causes for the failure of Epoch. Completely drained by his labors as editor and publisher, he was hardly able, after Notes from Underground, to do more than write a few articles and one unfinished satirical story (“The Crocodile”). The journal thus was deprived of the cohesion and ideological force given to Time by his vigorous contributions on matters of current interest, and it published nothing to match the mass appeal of such works as The Insulted and Injured and House of the Dead (though it did publish Turgenev’s Phantoms, Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and Grigoryev’s splendid memoirs, My Literary and Spiritual Wanderings). Many people were not even aware that the noted writer Feodor Dostoevsky had any connection with the new journal. Others were confused by the new editor-in-chief, an unknown named A. Y. Poretsky (as an ex-convict, Dostoevsky still could not officially be named as responsible editor), who took charge of the publication in the name of “the family of Mikhail Dostoevsky.” It was clearly impossible for Dostoevsky to explain to every potential subscriber, or even to state publicly, that Poretsky was only a straw man whose chief asset was a high rank in the Civil Service.

  Born under an unlucky star, Epoch’s brief career had a disastrous effect on the future course of Dostoevsky’s life. When the journal went bankrupt, he was saddled with the crushing load of debt he had contracted to keep it afloat, and he struggled for most of the remainder of his life to satisfy his creditors. “Oh, my friend!” he exclaims to Wrangel. “I would voluntarily again go to prison camp, and for the same number of years, in order to pay off all my debts and feel free again.”5 With the failure of Epoch, preceded by the death of his first wife and then of his brother, another period of Dostoevsky’s life comes to a close. The two people to whom he had been closest in the world were now gone; he was left bereft and alone, and his hopes of establishing himself as an editor with a regular income from a monthly periodical had finally gone glimmering. Dostoevsky knew that he had reached a watershed in his life, and he marked the occasion in a letter to Wrangel.

  “You pity me,” Dostoevsky writes, “because of my fatal loss, the death of my angel, my brother Misha, but you do not know to what extent destiny has crushed me! Another person who loved me, and whom I loved immeasurably, my wife, died of tuberculosis in Moscow, where she had gone to live last year.”6 Dostoevsky evokes an image of their conjugal life that reveals what complex emotional fibers had united these two beings throughout their mutual torments. “She died on April 16 of last year. . . . Oh! my friend, she loved me immeasurably, and I also loved her the same way, but we were not happy together. I will tell you everything when we see each other—now I will only say that, despite being positively unhappy together (because of her strange, suspicious, and unhealthy fantastic character)—we could not cease loving each other; the unhappier we were, the more we became attached to each other. No matter how strange, that is how it was. She was the most honorable, the noblest and the most magnanimous woman of all those I have ever known in my life.”7

  At the death of his wife and brother, Dostoevsky continues, he suddenly became aware that the life he had been trying to build, both personally and professionally, had been shattered. “I could not possibly have imagined to what an extent my life would become empty and painful when they scattered earth on her grave. And now a year has passed, and my feeling is the same, not lessening at all. . . . After burying her, I flew to Petersburg, to my brother—only he was left to me, and in three months he died as well, having been slightly ill a whole month so that the crisis resulting in his death occurred almost unexpectedly in three days. And thus I suddenly found myself alone and simply terrified. My entire life at one stroke broke into two. In one half, which I had lived through, was everything I had lived for, and in the other, still unknown half everything was strange and new, and there was not a single heart that could replace those two. . . . Literally—I had nothing left for which to live. To establish new relations, to plan out a new life! The very thought of doing so was repellent to me. I, for the first time, felt to the marrow of my bones that no one could replace them, that it was only them that I loved in the world and that a new love not only could not be acquired but should not be. Everything around me became cold and empty. And thus, when I received your warm and kind letter three months ago, filled with previous memories, I became so depressed that I cannot tell you how I felt.”8

  More than a week later, Dostoevsky continues: “Nine days have passed since I began this letter and in these nine days I have not literally had a moment to finish it.”9 Continuing his account of the problems of Epoch, Dostoevsky stops again after two paragraphs, resuming only five days later, on April 14. As a result of having tried to keep Epoch afloat, Dostoevsky was now in desperate economic straits: “I owe 10,000 rubles in signed contracts, and 5,000 on my word; 3,000 have to be paid immediately, come what may. In addition, 2,000 are necessary in order to purchase the right to publish my works, a right now held as a guarantee on a loan, so that I can begin to edit myself.” Dostoevsky’s plan was to write a new novel and issue it in separate installments, “as is done in England”; he also wished to re-edit House of the Dead “with illustrations, in a luxury edition,” and then, the following year, an edition of his complete works. But the prospect of writing under such desperate pressure, solely to meet his debts, fills him with anguish: “Now I am going to begin writing a novel under the lash, i.e., out of necessity. It will produce an effect, but is that what I need? To work out of necessity, just for money, crushes and destroys me.”10

  Returning to the immediate situation, Dostoevsky sees his position as hopeless: “But in order to begin I need, and right away, at least 3,000 rubles. I am beating the bushes trying to get it—otherwise, I am done for. I feel that only an accident can save me. What remains from all the reserve of strength and energy in my soul is something troubled and disturbed, something close to despair. Worry, bitterness, a complete cold industriousness, the most abnormal state for me to be in, and in addition loneliness—of all my past forty years, nothing remains to me. And yet it still seems to me that I am just now preparing to live. Funny, isn’t it? The vitality of a cat.”11

  Nothing could have been more unexpected than this last remark, and yet nothing is more characteristic of the man who had not allowed himself to be crushed by the house of the dead and who, no matter how desperate his situation, had never given way to a paralyzing despondency. Dostoevsky, after all, believed in the freedom of the will, and in his case this conviction sprang from the deepest resources of his personality. There is never a moment in Dostoevsky’s
life when we can catch him giving up entirely, never a moment when—in the wreckage of whatever hopes he may have been building on, or whatever disaster has overtaken him—he is not making plans for the future and feeling the same surge of energy and expectation to which he so surprisingly gives expression here.

  Time had already proceeded with its healing work, and just a month or two before his letter to Wrangel, Dostoevsky had probably struck up a liaison—for how long it is hard to say—with a worldly-wise and emotionally battered woman by the name of Martha Brown. Also, in that very month of April, just as he was completing his letter to Wrangel, Dostoevsky proposed marriage to the beautiful and rebellious young daughter of a wealthy, highly placed family, Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, whose short stories he had printed in Epoch and whose talent he had encouraged. The sudden shift so noticeable in the letter—the abrupt transition from past to present—may be attributed to such events, when a resurgence of faith in the future suddenly intruded on the melancholy past that he was recalling. Indeed, an entirely new life for Dostoevsky was to begin in a little more than a year, when he would marry another young woman and then flee to Europe for a prolonged exile in order to escape his creditors.

  Dostoevsky first heard of Martha Brown from the man with whom she was then living, a minor contributor to Epoch named Peter Gorsky. He was one of the numerous denizens of St. Petersburg’s literary Grub Street who clustered around the various publications, eking out a beggarly existence on the edge of destitution and often supplementing their literary labors with manual work. All that we know of the relations between Dostoevsky and Martha Brown is contained in a handful of letters written by her between November 1864 and January 1865, which raises the possibility that the two became lovers.