Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  The second crime that found its way into The Idiot involved the murder of a servant by an acquaintance for the sake of a silver watch. Just before slitting the throat of the watch’s owner, with whom he had been chatting peacefully, the criminal uttered a prayer: “Bless me, O Lord, and forgive for the sake of Christ.” The murderer’s motive in real life was to pawn the watch and return to his starving family in a village. But Dostoevsky uses the incident rather to indicate the deep, instinctive religiosity of the Russian people even in the midst of their worst excesses. Myshkin remarks, in what for Dostoevsky is a self-referential allusion, that if such a detail had been invented by a novelist, critics would have taxed it for being “improbable; but reading it in the newspapers as a fact, you feel that in such facts you are studying the reality of Russian life” (8: 412–413).

  To supplement his devoted scrutiny of the newspapers, he was dependent on letters from friends like Maikov and from his immediate family, and his responses to these letters reveal, on the one hand, a growing antipathy toward European life in all its aspects, and on the other a compensating idealization of Russia that increased in proportion to his hostility. When Maikov wrote that he was translating The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, the famous twelfth-century epic, into modern Russian, Dostoevsky became excited at the news. This task was, as Maikov explained, his “small monumentum, an offering on the ‘altar of the fatherland,’ ”21 and Dostoevsky’s headlong decision to write The Idiot may well have been at least partly inspired by the same impulse to celebrate the highest values of Russian culture as he conceived them. Otherwise, the field would be left to those whom Dostoevsky rails against in a choleric outburst (“just recall our best liberals, recall Belinsky; wasn’t he really a quite conscious enemy of the fatherland, wasn’t he really retrograde?”).22 This view will soon find its way into The Idiot, where it is expounded by the highly intelligent Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky, and he is seconded by Prince Myshkin.

  Dostoevsky grasped at every indication he could find to justify his belief that Russian life—however much appearances might seem to indicate the contrary—was, at its moral core, superior to the much-vaunted European civilization. A striking example of such superiority, for him as well as for Maikov, was furnished by the vicissitudes of V. I. Kelsiev, the former associate of Ogarev, about whom Dostoevsky was informed in a letter from his friend. Maikov recounts how Kelsiev, after years of unbelievable hardship and self-sacrifice—years spent trying to enlist various denominations of the Old Believers for the revolutionary cause—had appeared at the Russian border one day, declared himself a political criminal, and surrendered to the authorities. Taken to Petersburg, he was brought before a special commission and his case was then sent to the tsar, who, after reading Kelsiev’s confession and other documents, ordered him to be pardoned unconditionally. “You know,” Maikov continues, “all this moves me to tears. How Russian this is! How much far and away higher and better this is than all that humanistic bedlam in Geneva.” What carried the day, according to Maikov, was Kelsiev’s autobiographical confession, in which he explained that “only in the Slavic question and in the role of Russia in Slavdom” was he able to discover a resolution for “all his own ideal, deracinated strivings for liberty and activity.”23

  Dostoevsky was ecstatic at such news and replied: “That’s the way, that’s the truth, that’s the way to do things. . . . [A]ll our trashy little liberals of a seminarian-socialist hue . . . will fall on him like wild beasts . . . now they’ll be saying of Kelsiev that he denounced everyone.”24 Dostoevsky will depict his young Nihilists in The Idiot as more ridiculous than menacing, and the abused Prince Myshkin treats them with the same magnanimity that the tsar displayed toward the hapless and remorseful Kelsiev (who honorably refrained from denouncing anybody, and defended his collaboration with Herzen and Ogarev). If Dostoevsky’s reaction to the history of Kelsiev may have influenced his handling of the young Nihilists, there is no question that the figure of Kelsiev himself served as one of the sources for Shatov, the passionately honest and repentant revolutionary-turned-nationalist in Demons.

  Dostoevsky’s fanatical belief in the moral elevation of the Russian spirit, and the messianic destiny marked out for it in the future, is unabashedly proclaimed in an important letter to Maikov written just after sending off the first chapters of The Idiot. He mentions the admiration of their mutual friend Strakhov for the achievements of German culture, and he objects because “that’s the way their life has worked out! And we at that time were putting together a great nation, had stopped Asia forever, endured endless suffering, were able to endure it all, did not lose the Russian idea, which will renew the world. . . . Our people are infinitely higher, more noble, more honest, more naïve, more capable, and full of a different, very lofty Christian idea, which Europe, with her sickly Catholicism and stupidly contradictory Lutheranism, does not even understand.”25 Dostoevsky had just taken the decision to embody this “lofty [Russian] Christian idea” in the character of Prince Myshkin, and some of the thoughts in this letter, especially the contrast between “the Russian idea” and Roman Catholicism, will appear in the Prince’s harangue during his engagement party.

  Dostoevsky reiterates his faith that “Russian thought is preparing a grandiose renovation for the entire world (you are right, it is closely linked with Russian Orthodoxy), and this will occur in about a century—that’s my passionate belief.” But for such a renovation to take place, the rights of the Great Russians over the other Slav nationalities must be definitively and unquestionably affirmed. Dostoevsky’s messianism, then, in one context stresses what Reinhold Niebuhr would call its “ethical-universalistic” component—the notion that Russia was destined to install a Christian reign of goodness and justice on earth—and in another becomes “egoistic-imperialistic” and emphasizes the importance of extending Russian political power.26 For Dostoevsky the two were identical: he viewed the second as the precondition of the first and, unlike many later critics, refused to see any insoluble conflict between them. When it came to individual human life, however, Dostoevsky’s nationalistic hubris was tempered by an acute sense of human fallibility and of the impossibility, which he would dramatize in Prince Myshkin, for any terrestrial being fully to realize the Christian ideal. Only the God-man Christ had been capable of doing so, and the Incarnation had set before mankind a goal toward which it must eternally aspire.

  For Dostoevsky, it was only in the afterlife of immortality that a perfect accomplishment of the Christian ideal of love could be realized, and his letters at this time contain several strong affirmations of his belief in such an afterlife. He consoles his sister and his niece Sofya Ivanova on the death of his brother-in-law, Dr. Ivanov: “lament and shed tears, but don’t give way, in the name of Christ, to despair. . . . Look, you believe in a future life . . . none of you has been infected by the rotten and stupid atheism. Remember that he really knows now about you; never lose the hope of reunion and believe that this future life is a necessity, not only a consolation.”27

  This theme of immortality hovers in the background of The Idiot as an accompaniment to the theme of atheism—with which, as we see here, it is intimately related in Dostoevsky’s sensibility. The plight of the dying young atheist Ippolit as he contemplates Holbein’s Dead Christ, with its suggestion of the triumph of blind nature over Christ, is deepened into irremediable torment precisely because of this lack of religious faith and thus of the hope of immortality. Prince Myshkin, on the other hand, experiences a sense of “the universal fusion of all”—a foretaste of immortality, as it were, though not designated as such—in the moment of aura just preceding the onset of an epileptic seizure. But Dostoevsky had then only begun to create his novel, and it is doubtful whether the thematic use he would make of Prince Myshkin’s epilepsy, or the scenes involving Ippolit, were as yet very clear in his mind.

  Dostoevsky’s notes for The Idiot are extremely complicated and detailed, and there is a learned dispute, into which we need not enter
, over the exact number of his separate plans. Nor is it necessary to spend time on all the twists and turns of the plot situations that he envisaged. Some general sense of their nature is well conveyed in the remarks of Edward Wasiolek, who has done so much to clarify these notes and, indeed, to make all of the notebooks for Dostoevsky’s novels accessible to English readers:

  The relationship between characters fluctuates from plan to plan: sisters are and are not sisters, nephews become sons, fathers become uncles. The Idiot is sometimes the son of the Uncle, sometimes the nephew, sometimes the foster son, sometimes illegitimate, and sometimes legitimate; acts are committed and die abortively in the next plan, or even a few lines later; people hang themselves but then perhaps don’t hang themselves; the same people die by hanging, poisoning, broken hearts or drowning. It is not always clear who is who, where they come from, and where they are going. Characters appear and disappear, crowd on the periphery, nudge their way into the author’s consciousness for a time and then melt away; some appear without names and personalities, take on flesh, then waste away. Some persist to the very threshold of publication and immortality, only to find no place in the final conception.28

  “I spent the entire summer and autumn working on various ideas (some were very entangled),” Dostoevsky writes to Maikov at the end of December. “Finally, I fixed on one of these ideas . . . and wrote a great deal. But then, on December 4 (New Style) I threw it all out.” As we know, the prospect of writing a “mediocre” novel repelled him. “Then (since my entire future depended on it), I set about the painful task of inventing a new novel. Nothing in the world could have made me continue with the first one. I simply could not. I turned things over in my mind from December 4 through December 18. I would say that on the average I came up with six plans a day (at least that). My head was in a whirl. It’s a wonder I didn’t go out of my mind. At last, on December 18, I sat down and started writing a new novel.”29 The first five chapters of the final text were mailed on January 5, and two more followed on the eleventh.

  Just having emerged from this intense spurt of creativity, Dostoevsky confesses to Maikov: “I have no idea myself of what the thing I have sent them is like.” But he explains that it finally emerged from a long cherished ambition: “For a long time already, there was an idea that had been bothering me, but I was afraid to make a novel out of it because it was a very difficult idea and I was not ready to tackle it, although it is a fascinating idea and one that I am in love with. The idea is—to portray a perfectly beautiful man. . . . It was only the desperate situation in which I found myself that made me embark upon an idea that had not yet reached full maturity. I took a chance, as at roulette: ‘Maybe it will develop as I write it!’ This is unforgivable.”30

  Dostoevsky concealed from Maikov that his “main hero” was still only a nebulous outline in his mind. But some further comments on the novel, which show how deeply Dostoevsky had been thinking about Prince Myshkin’s relation to previous literary types, were made to his niece Sofya Ivanova at the very beginning of his work on The Idiot, sometime in mid-October. Repeating what he had written to Maikov, he explains that “the main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful man. There is nothing more difficult in the world, and this is especially true today. All writers . . . who have ever attempted to portray the positively beautiful have always given up. . . . The beautiful is an ideal. . . . There is only one positively beautiful figure in the world—Christ—so that the phenomenon of that boundlessly infinitely good figure is already in itself an infinite miracle. (The whole of the Gospel of St. John is a statement to that effect; he finds the whole miracle in the Incarnation alone, in the manifestation of the beautiful alone.)”31 It is precisely this “manifestation of the beautiful alone” that Dostoevsky will find himself attempting to recreate within a human rather than a divine-human perspective, and the letter shows him to be fully aware of some of the problems he would necessarily be called on to confront in doing so.

  “I will mention only,” he continues, “that, of the beautiful figures in Christian literature, the most complete is that of Don Quixote. But he is good only because at the same time he is ridiculous. The figure of Dickens’s Pickwick (a conception infinitely weaker than that of Don Quixote, but still a tremendous one) is also ridiculous, and that’s the only reason it succeeds. Compassion for the beautiful man who is ridiculed and who is unaware of his own worth generates sympathy in the reader. And this ability to arouse compassion is the very secret of humor. Jean Valjean is another powerful attempt, but he engenders sympathy because of his terrible misfortune and society’s injustice toward him. But there is nothing of this sort in my novel, absolutely nothing, and that is why I am terribly afraid it will be a positive failure.”32 The response of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries, as we shall see, confirmed his worst fears. But though The Idiot is the most uneven of Dostoevsky’s four best novels, it is the one in which his personal vision of life, in all its tragic complexity, is expressed with the greatest intimacy, with the most poignancy, and with a lyrical pathos that touches on sublimity.

  1 Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi, 1867 g. (Moscow, 1923), 361–366.

  2 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 207; August 16/28, 1867.

  3 Ibid., 208, 214.

  4 Ibid., 207.

  5 Ibid., 203, 204, 206.

  6 Ibid., 206.

  7 Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgins, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 169.

  8 Cited in the notes to A. G. Dostoevskaya, “Dnevniki i vospominaniya,” LN 86 (Moscow, 1973), 284n.26.

  9 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 217; September 3/15, 1867.

  10 Ibid., 224–225; September 29/October 11, 1867.

  11 “Dnevniki,” 197.

  12 Ibid., 247.

  13 Ibid., 227.

  14 Ibid., 184.

  15 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 235; November 6/18, 1867.

  16 “Dnevniki,” 276.

  17 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 358; November 1/13, 1867.

  18 Ibid., 239n.10

  19 Ibid., 222n.13

  20 Ibid., 228; October 9/21, 1867.

  21 DSiM, 2: 343; November 3, 1867.

  22 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 259n.23.

  23 DSiM, 2: 341; September 20, 1867.

  24 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 227n.8.

  25 Ibid., 243n.14.

  26 For this distinction, see Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols. (New York, 1964), 2: 15–34. This profound discussion stresses how deeply rooted the messianic dream is in all cultures that believe God’s purpose will be realized in and through history. Niebuhr also points out how inevitably those two types become entangled with each other.

  27 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 254; February 1/13, 1868.

  28 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for The Idiot, trans. Katherine Strelsky, ed. with intro. by Edward Wasiolek (Chicago, 1967), 7–8. My quotations are taken from this translation.

  29 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 240; December 31, 1867/January 12, 1868.

  30 Ibid., 240–241.

  31 Ibid., 251.

  32 Ibid.

  CHAPTER 39

  An Inconsolable Father

  The publication of the first seven chapters of The Idiot in The Russian Messenger (January 1868) successfully crowned the months of torturing gestation that Dostoevsky had just lived through. But his uncertainties about the novel’s continuation were far from over. Dostoevsky was forced to create both a scenario and a final text for each new installment, remaining in continual uncertainty until the very last stage of composition. And he changed residences five times while the novel was under way. Twice the Dostoevskys were forced to change quarters in Geneva, and then they shifted from Geneva to Vevey, on the other side of the lake, which supposedly had a milder climate. Three months later the Dostoevskys went to Italy, living for two months in Milan and then for the remainder of the year in Florence, where the final chapters were completed.

  Work was also interrupted by the birth of their first child, a joyful event then followed by the tragedy of her dea
th—a terrible blow to the couple, whose anguish is movingly expressed in Dostoevsky’s letters. Dostoevsky was continually plagued by worry over the wayward conduct of his stepson Pasha, as well as by the indigence of his late brother’s family. All these and other matters constantly distracted him, and it is not difficult for an observer to share the admiring astonishment expressed by Maikov: “Anna Grigoryevna in her condition, poverty, exile, no close friends or family nearby, how do you bear all this, yes, and while bearing it, to write a novel into the bargain!”1 These were the circumstances under which Dostoevsky toiled away at The Idiot; and he had ample justification for claiming that no major Russian novelist of his time had worked under such disheartening impediments.

  Dostoevsky’s most pressing concern during the remainder of January was to furnish the copy promised to Katkov, and he sat at his desk day and night, struggling to embody his artistic intuitions in living figures on the page. To Sofya Ivanova he provides an image of his working routine: “I get up late, light the fire in the fireplace (it’s awfully cold here), and we drink our coffee; then I get down to work. At four o’clock I go out for dinner in a restaurant, where I eat for 2 francs, wine included. Anna Grigoryevna prefers to eat at home [because of the advanced state of her pregnancy]. After that I go to a café, where I drink coffee and read the Moscow Gazette and The Voice down to the last syllable. When I am through I take a walk for half an hour or so to get some exercise and then return home and go back to work. Later I stoke the fire again, we drink tea, then I get back to work again. Anna Grigoryevna says that she is frightfully happy.”2