Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  All the more pathetic, and indicating the abyss of loneliness and desolation into which Dostoevsky had been plunged, is his request that Maikov say nothing as yet of Sofya’s death to Dostoevsky’s family. “It seems to me that not only will none of them feel sorry for my child but even, perhaps, feel the opposite, and the very thought of this fills me with bitterness. Of what is this poor little thing guilty of in their eyes? Let them hate me, let them laugh at me and my love—it makes no difference.”20 After they buried Sofya on May 24, the atmosphere of Geneva became intolerable to the Dostoevskys. They would have dearly wished to quit the country and travel to Italy, but this was impossible financially. Besides, it would take too much time from The Idiot, and their livelihood depended on the continuation of the novel for which Katkov was waiting. With a liberality that astonished Dostoevsky himself, Katkov again acceded to the plea of his tardy contributor and sent the requested new advance. The heartbroken pair, accompanied by Anna’s mother, moved only as far as Vevey, where Dostoevsky, choking back his inconsolable sorrow, continued to toil unremittingly at his novel.

  The very first letter that Dostoevsky wrote from Vevey was an answer to one received from Pasha. “Oh, Pasha, I feel so low, so bitter that I would rather be dead. If you love me, pity me.”21 Most of the letter is given over to practical matters, which could not have been worse. With the aid of Dostoevsky’s friends, especially Maikov, Pasha had obtained two jobs as a clerk in various offices, but he had left both after a short time because he had felt insulted by the treatment received from his superiors. When Dostoevsky heard this news from Maikov, he could not control his anger: “What a mentality, what opinions and ideas, what braggadocio!” he exploded to Maikov. “It’s typical. But then, on the other hand—how can I abandon him?”22

  The death of little Sofya haunted him continually, and it is in his letters to Maikov that he expresses the full extent of his mourning. “Apollon Nikolaevich, my friend,” he writes pitiably. “Never have I been as unhappy . . . as time passes, the memory and the image of the departed Sonya stands before me more and more sharply etched. There are moments that are almost impossible to bear. . . . Never will I forget, and never will I stop torturing myself !” Besides his own torment, Anna “is terribly melancholy, cries through entire nights, and this has a very bad effect on her health.”23 Coming to Vevey was a frightful mistake and was worse than Geneva, especially for Anna, who needed some cultural distraction, but given their limited resources no other alternative had been possible.

  In mid-July Dostoevsky wrote to Maikov, complaining that he was sure his correspondence was being intercepted and delayed. Some well-wisher of Dostoevsky’s had informed him anonymously that an order had been issued by the secret police to search him if and when he crossed the Russian border. These instructions, circulated at the end of November 1867, no doubt were the result of the following notation in the files of the Third Section: “Among the overexcitable [eksaltirovannikh] Russians now present in Geneva, [our] agent names Dostoevsky, who is very friendly with Ogarev.”24 Dostoevsky’s frequentation of the notorious revolutionary had thus brought him under suspicion.

  “The Petersburg police,” he told Maikov, “open all my letters, and since the Orthodox priest in Geneva, according to everything known (note that these are not suspicions, but facts), works for the secret police, the post office in Geneva (with whom he has secret connections) delays letters addressed to me, and this I know full well.” “This is why,” Dostoevsky continues, “I am firmly convinced that my letter never reached you, and that your letter has gone astray.” And then the outrageousness of the situation suddenly sweeps over him, and he cannot contain his anger: “N.B. But how can someone like myself, an honest man, a patriot, who has delivered himself into their hands to the point of betraying my previous convictions, idolizing the tsar—how can I bear to be suspected of some sort of connection with some sort of Polacks or The Bell! Fools, fools! . . . Really, they should know that the Nihilists, the liberals of The Contemporary, for three years running now have thrown mud at me because I broke with them, hate the Polacks and love my Fatherland. Oh, the scoundrels!”25

  Maikov had already told Dostoevsky three months earlier that “among us, it is said, even in the higher circles, many do not know the difference between Katkov and Chernyshevsky, between writers devoted to Russia and the Sovereign to the marrow of their bones and the revolutionaries.”26 Now he attempted to console his friend with a story making the rounds that the letters of Katkov and Ivan Aksakov (the Slavophil editor) were also being read, and in the list of their suspicious correspondents was found the inheritor to the Russian throne. “Why should we take offense,” Maikov asks jocularly, “if even he is listed in the category of suspects by the temporarily dominating party?”27

  At the beginning of August, Dostoevsky makes clear to Maikov that “if I travel elsewhere, the main reason is to save my wife.”28 Anna was failing, and early in September, come what might, Dostoevsky decided to strike out for Italy. Their funds took them only as far as Milan, where they settled for the next two months. Dostoevsky found the climate better for his health than Vevey, but it rained a good deal, and the general atmosphere of this bustling industrial metropolis was dismal and depressing. Dostoevsky cherished some pleasant recollections of his stay in Florence in 1862, and he wished to make it the goal of his Italian journey. “Anna Grigoryevna, who is a very active and enterprising person, has nothing to do here. I can see that she is bored, and, although we love each other if anything even more than 1 1/2 years ago, it is still oppressive that she must share my sad, monastic life. It is very bad for her.”29

  Dostoevsky was somewhat heartened by Maikov’s news that “in Petersburg . . . a new Russian journal,” to be called Dawn (Zarya), was now being planned.30 Maikov had asked Dostoevsky to join his name with the others (Pisemsky, Fet, and Tolstoy were mentioned) who had already agreed to collaborate. The editor in charge would be Dostoevsky’s old friend Strakhov, formerly chief critic on his own journals. Dostoevsky greeted Maikov’s news with enthusiasm: “it would be desirable that the review be unmistakably Russian in soul, as you and I understand it, although, naturally, not purely Slavophil.”31 The letter ends with a renewed expression of concern about Pasha and Emilya Feodorovna. “How much I would like to return to Russia,” he confesses, and then reveals a hidden wound referred to nowhere else. “And to think, besides, that Sonya would certainly be alive if we had been in Russia!”32

  Sometime in the early days of November the Dostoevskys moved to Florence, where they rented two rooms on the Via Guicciardini just opposite the Pitti Palace. Dostoevsky immediately inscribed his name in the register of the famed Gabinetto Scientifico-Letterario Vieusseux, which subscribed to Russian periodicals and newspapers, and where his signature joined those of Henri Beyle (Stendhal), Hector Berlioz, Heinrich Heine, Lamartine, and Franz Liszt.33 Anna, who had begun to study Italian at Vevey, was delighted with the liveliness of the streets and the wealth of treasures in the museums. Dostoevsky was tied hand and foot by The Idiot, but he spent some time with Anna just after arrival in visiting the sights. “The roses are still flowering in the open air in the gardens of the Boboli,” he writes to Maikov in his first letter from there. “And what treasures in the galleries! My God, in 1863 I had not paid any attention to the ‘Madonna of the Chair’ [by Raphael]. . . . How many wonderful things there are, even aside from this painting. But I postpone everything till the end of the novel. I have closed myself off.”34

  Dostoevsky was now faced with completing the fourth and final section of The Idiot, which he had promised Katkov by the end of the year. Also, he had been counting on the fourth part, with its crescendo of climactic scenes and haunting finale, to induce publishers to offer substantial sums for the reprint rights, and the impact of this concluding section would be badly weakened if printed in small installments. “If there are readers of The Idiot,” he tells Maikov, “they perhaps will be somewhat stunned by the unexpectedness of the ending
; but, on reflection, they will finally agree that it had to end in this way.”35

  It was in response to Maikov’s report six months later on reader reaction (“the chief criticism is in the fantasticality of the characters”)36 that Dostoevsky set down the famous declaration of his aesthetic credo of “fantastic realism.” “Oh, my friend,” he writes, “I have a totally different conception of reality and realism than our novelists and critics. My idealism—is more real than their realism. God! Just to narrate sensibly what we Russians have lived through in the last ten years of our spiritual development—yes, would not the realists shout that this is fantasy! And yet this is genuine, existing realism. This is realism, only deeper; while they swim in the shallow waters. . . . Their realism—cannot illuminate a hundredth part of the facts that are real and actually occurring. And with our idealism, we have predicted facts. It’s happened.”37 Dostoevsky sees his own “realism” as becoming “fantastic” because it delves beneath the quotidian surface into the moral-spiritual depths of the human personality, while at the same time striving to incarnate a more-than-pedestrian or commonplace moral ideal.

  This same important letter contains an exhortation to Maikov that explains how Dostoevsky wished this “ideal” to be understood—and how we should regard the ending that he thought would so surprise his readers. “In a word: ‘Do you believe in the icon or not!’ (My dear friend, believe more bravely and courageously).”38 Dostoevsky’s directive to Maikov refers to the experience that the Slavophil Ivan Kireevsky had described—as he stood before an icon of the mother of God—of imaginative immersion into the mystery of religious faith. As Kireevsky gazed at the icon, he was overcome by the feeling that it was not merely a wooden board painted with images. For centuries that board had soaked up all the passion and all the prayers addressed to it and had become “a living organism, a meeting place between the creator and the people.” As he looked at the praying mass of sufferers and back to the icon, “I myself saw the features of the mother of God come alive; she looked on all these simple people with pity and love. . . . And I fell on my knees and humbly prayed to her.”39

  In the past, these words had filled Dostoevsky with rapture; they depicted the process of his own conversion, not from atheism, but from a semi-secularized Christian Socialism to a reverence for the people and their “childish faith.” But now he found even such reverence unsatisfactory, because it accepted faith solely for its consoling and compensatory effects on human life. Such faith was not spontaneous and instinctive, not treasured for its own sake and divorced from any practical consequences it might bring about. For Dostoevsky, faith had now become completely internal, irrational, and nonutilitarian; its truth could not be impugned by a failure to effect worldly changes, nor should it be defended rationally, as it were, because of the moral-psychological assuagements it might offer for human misery. Myshkin’s life ends tragically, but for Dostoevsky, poised to write his final pages, this in no way undermines the transcendent ideal of Christian love that he tries to bring to the world, and whose full realization is beyond the power of any earthly human to achieve.

  Dostoevsky was unsuccessful in his strenuous endeavor to provide the completion of The Idiot with the maximum possible aesthetic power of being published as a unit. Only three chapters of the final section made the December issue, and the remainder was printed as a supplement to the second issue of 1869. On the very day that he expected his final section to have arrived in Russia, he explained to his niece, “I had two epileptic attacks, and I was ten days behind the fixed limit.”40 Once again fate had played him a nasty trick.

  1 “Pis’ma Maikova,” DSiM, 2: 343.

  2 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 252; January 1/13, 1868.

  3 Ibid., 258; February 18/March 1, 1868.

  4 Ibid., 281; March 21–22/April 2–3, 1868. Compare this passage with what one of the shrewdest Western analysts of Russian culture, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, wrote about the attitude of the Russian people toward the tsar just two years after Dostoevsky’s death (1883). He was talking about the relations between church and state in the Russian Empire: “If the Tsar remains a secular layman, and if, in religious as well as in civic matters the Emperor acts in his capacity as head of state, it is not as head of a secular state in the modern or occidental sense. If he has no ecclesiastical status, the Tsar, for the mass of the people, has a religious one. He is the anointed of the Lord, established by the divine hand to safeguard and lead the Christian people. His anointment under the narrow cupola of the Uspensky Cathedral has endowed him with the virtue of the sacred. His dignity has no equal under Heaven. His subjects of all classes have, collectively and individually, taken an oath of fidelity to him on the Gospel.” Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, L’Empire des tsars et les Russes (Paris, 1990), 1033.

  5 PSS, 28/Bk. 2; 282n.12.

  6 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 142.

  7 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 272–273; March 2/14, 1868.

  8 Reminiscences, 146.

  9 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 277–278n.12; March 21–22/April 2–3, 1868.

  10 “Pis’ma Maikova,” DSiM, 2: 345.

  11 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 279–280n.12.

  12 Ibid., 278.

  13 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for The Idiot, trans. Katherine Strelsky, ed. with intro. by Edward Wasiolek (Chicago, 1967), 160.

  14 Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot (Cambridge, MA, 1981), 79.

  15 Ibid., 81.

  16 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 285; March 23/April 4, 1868.

  17 Ibid., 286.

  18 Reminiscences, 147.

  19 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 297; May 18/30, 1868.

  20 Ibid., 298.

  21 Ibid., 300; June 9/21, 1868.

  22 Ibid., 298; May 18/30, 1868.

  23 Ibid., 302; June 22/July 4, 1868.

  24 Ibid., 481n.3; end August/beginning September 1868.

  25 Ibid., 309–310; July 21/August 2, 1868.

  26 “Pis’ma Maikova,” DSiM, 2: 350.

  27 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 482n.13.

  28 Ibid., 310n.14.

  29 Ibid., 321; October 26/November 7, 1868.

  30 A. N. Maikov, “Pis’ma k F. M. Dostoevskomu,” Pamyatniki kulturi, ed. N. T. Ashimbaeva (Leningrad, 1984), 70.

  31 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 322n.21.

  32 Ibid., 323–324; October 26/November 7, 1868.

  33 Katherine Strelsky, “Dostoevsky in Florence,” Russian Review 23 (1964), 149–163.

  34 PSS 28/Bk. 2: 333; December 11/23, 1868.

  35 Ibid., 327.

  36 Maikov, “Pis’ma,” 73.

  37 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 329; December 11/23, 1868.

  38 Ibid., 333n.37.

  39 Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgins, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 2: 539.

  40 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 9–10; January 25/February 6, 1869.

  CHAPTER 40

  The Idiot

  Writing to a correspondent more than ten years after finishing The Idiot, Dostoevsky remarks, “All those who have spoken of it as my best work have something special in their mental formation that has always struck and pleased me.”1 The Idiot is the most personal of all his major works, the book in which he embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions. Readers who took this work to their hearts were, he must have felt, a select group of kindred souls with whom he could truly communicate. It is only in The Idiot that Dostoevsky includes an account of his ordeal before the firing squad—an ordeal that had given him a new apprehension of life, and Prince Myshkin struggles to bring this revelation to a world mired in the sloth of the material and quotidian. Prince Myshkin approximates the extremest incarnation of the Christian ideal of love that humanity can reach in its present form, but he is torn apart by the conflict between the contradictory imperatives of his apocalyptic aspirations and his earthly limitations.

  The first part of The Idiot, we know, was written under the inspiration of Dostoevsky’s decision to center a major work around the character of
a “perfectly beautiful man,” and the singular spiritual fascination of Prince Myshkin derives largely from the image of him projected in these early pages. The moral halo that surrounds the Prince is conveyed in the very first scene, where his behavior is marked by a total absence of vanity or egoism; he does not seem to possess the self-regarding feelings on which such attitudes are nourished. Even more, he displays a unique capacity to take the point of view of his interlocutor. This explains the Prince’s failure to take umbrage at his reception by others, and his capacity to transcend himself in this way invariably disarms the first response of amused and superior contempt among those he encounters.

  Max Scheler, in his admirable book, The Nature and Form of Sympathy, distinguishes what he calls “vicarious fellow feeling,” which involves experiencing an understanding and sympathy for the feelings of others without being overcome by them emotively, from a total coalescence leading to the loss of identity and personality.2 The underlying movement of The Idiot may be provisionally defined as the Prince’s passage from the first kind of fellow feeling to the second, but in Part I there are no indications of such a loss of identity. Rather, all the emphasis is placed on the Prince’s instinctive and undifferentiated capacity for completely lucid vicarious fellow feeling even under great stress. As an example, we may take the scene where the Prince intervenes in the bitter altercation between Ganya Ivolgin and his sister, and himself receives the blow intended for the young woman. His response is to hide his face in his hands, turn to the wall, and say to Ganya in a breaking voice, “Oh, how ashamed you will be of what you’ve done” (8: 99).

  This quality of the Prince’s character is not motivated psychologically in any way, but, in a suggestively symbolic fashion, it is linked with certain leitmotifs. On the one hand, the Prince is much possessed by the prospect of death: twice in these early pages he speaks of an execution he has recently witnessed, and he also recounts vividly the feelings and thoughts of a man first condemned to death by a firing squad and then unexpectedly reprieved. A third description stresses the immense value assumed by each moment of existence as the end approaches. Despite the obsessiveness of the death motif in these early pages, the Prince also admits to having been “happy” in the years just preceding his arrival in St. Petersburg, and the relations between these two motifs provides the deepest substratum of his values. The Prince’s “happiness,” we learn, began with his recovery from a state of epileptic stupor. A sudden shock of awareness woke him to the existence of the world in the form of something as humble and workaday as a donkey. The donkey, of course, has obvious Gospel overtones, which blend with the Prince’s innocence and naïveté, and this patiently laborious animal also emphasizes, in accord with Christian kenoticism,3 the absence of hierarchy in the Prince’s ecstatic apprehension of the wonder of life. The same contrast is introduced by the Prince’s remark that, in the early stages of his recovery, he had been consumed by restlessness and had thought to find “the key to the mystery of life” in his transcendent yearning to reach “that line where sky and earth meet”; but then, he adds, “I fancied that one might find a wealth of life even in prison” (8: 51).