Self-conquest is thus the highest expression of the freedom of the will, the most exalted goal of the most powerful personality. The subsequent career of the great sinner is rapidly sketched: “Suddenly adolescence and debauchery. . . . Insensate pride. Out of pride he becomes ascetic and pilgrim. . . . [H]e shows himself as gentle and humble toward all—precisely because he is infinitely higher than all” (9: 138). As with all the notes he made for future works, Dostoevsky is much concerned with narrative technique and form. The “tone” of his narrative was to be that of a vita, the hagiographic life of a saint. “N.B. Tone (the narrative is a vita, i.e., even though it comes from the author’s pen, . . . The reader still ought to know at all times that the whole idea is a pious one.” “The man of the future,” he adds, “is to be exhibited for everyone to see, and to be placed on a pedestal” (9: 132–133). Dostoevsky would later return to these notes for both A Raw Youth (where the peasant “wanderer” Makar also regales an adolescent with edifying parables and apothegms) and The Brothers Karamazov, where Zosima’s life is narrated as a vita and the semi-hagiographic treatment of the “man of the future” would be realized in Alyosha.
Dostoevsky did not, so far as we know, settle down to the redaction of the novel sketched in these notes. Instead, as he told Maikov just a month later, he was swept away by a new inspiration that changed all his plans. “I have tackled a rich idea,” he informs his friend enthusiastically. “I am not speaking of the execution, but the idea. One of the ideas that has an undoubted resonance among the public. Like Crime and Punishment, but even closer to reality, more vital, and having direct relevance for the most important contemporary issue. I will finish by fall; I’m not hurrying and not rushing.”24 These words are the first reference to Demons, which was indeed conceived in relation to the recent discovery of a murder committed by a group of revolutionary conspirators. Dostoevsky thus sets aside his “eternal” theme, that of atheism, for one that was burningly topical because he was persuaded that such a book would solve all his problems. He would pillory the radicals once and for all, satisfy The Russian Messenger with a novel, reap a rich financial reward, and do all this in record time. “I hope to make at least as much money as for Crime and Punishment, and therefore, by the end of the year there is hope of putting all my affairs in order and of returning to Russia. . . . Never have I worked with such enjoyment and such ease.”25
Work on the new novel began immediately and relegated The Life of a Great Sinner, which Dostoevsky must have given up with some relief, to a less uncertain, less economically harassed, and happily repatriated future. But his imagination could not relinquish the stately vistas it had created, and he continued to toil at their elaboration. In late March, Dostoevsky speaks of five novels to Maikov, instead of three (the size of War and Peace, he remarks, again disclosing the competition with Tolstoy), and defines his “main question” as being “the same one that I have been tormented by consciously and unconsciously all my life—the existence of God.” He also confesses how painfully he suffers from a sense of inferiority to his two great rivals, Turgenev and Tolstoy, and his hope of enhancing his status by the exalted thematic heights he would be attempting to scale. “Perhaps people will at last say,” he complains sadly, “that I did not spend all my time writing trifles.”26
More than anything else, however, and with Saint Tikhon as model, Dostoevsky wished to produce “a majestic, positive, holy figure.”27 His great ambition was now to provide Russian culture with an august image expressing its highest religious values. The disappointing reception of his first attempt, The Idiot, had not quenched his aspiration, and the historical stature of Saint Tikhon would shield his literary eulogist from the all-too-familiar accusation of giving rein to his weakness for “the fantastic.” “I will not be creating anything,” he assures Maikov, “I will just portray the real Tikhon.” Side by side with Saint Tikhon would stand the type of character Dostoevsky had been struggling to delineate ever since the epilogue to Crime and Punishment—a great sinner, who would convincingly undergo a religious conversion and display the regenerative effects of Saint Tikhon’s teaching and example.
Dostoevsky intended to keep his “contemporary” theme separate from his more “exalted” one of atheism, postponing the second for more propitious working conditions while quickly (and profitably) dispatching the first. In doing so, however, he was allowing his contest with Tolstoy, whose elevation of subject matter he envied and wished to emulate, to tempt him into running counter to the distinctive idiosyncrasy of his talent. Dostoevsky always found his inspiration in the most immediate and sensational events of the day—events that were often commonplace and even sordid—and then raised such material in his best work to the level of the genuinely tragic. This union of the contemporary and the tragic was the true secret of his genius, and he finally found it impossible to maintain the forced and artificial disjunction of one from the other that he thought he could impose. The great work that he called his “poem” could not be kept distinct from the social-political “pamphlet” into which he had thrown himself, and the two eventually blended together into his unprecedented novel-tragedy, Demons.
1 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 58n.1; August 29/September 10, 1869.
2 Ibid., 123; May 7/19, 1870.
3 Ibid., 32; March 18/30, 1869.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 43; May 15/27, 1869.
7 Ibid., 56–57; August 29/September 10, 1869.
8 Ibid., 57n.37.
9 Ibid., 49n.2, 51; August 14/26, 1869.
10 Ibid., 51.
11 Ibid., 63; September 17/29, 1869.
12 Ibid., 67, 69, 70; October 16/28, 1869.
13 Ibid., 71–73; October 27/November 8, 1869.
14 Ibid., 77–78; November 23/December 5, 1869.
15 Ibid., 81; December 7/19 1869.
16 Ibid., 88; December 14/26, 1869.
17 N. N. Strakhov, Kriticheskiye stati, 2 vols. (Kiev, 1902–1908), 1: 247.
18 The relations of Grigoryev and Dostoevsky are informatively discussed by I. Z. Serman, “Dostoevsky i Grigoryev,” in Dostoevsky i ego vremya (Leningrad, 1971), 130–142. The polemic with Strakhov-Grigoryev in The Eternal Husband is analyzed in Richard Peace, “The Eternal Husband and Literary Polemics,” Essays in Poetics 3 (1978), 22–49.
19 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 88; December 14/26, 1869.
20 Ibid., 11; February 6/January 25, 1869.
21 Ibid., 118; March 25/April 6, 1870.
22 Georgy Florovsky, Puti Russkogo bogoslaviya (Paris, 1983), 123–125.
23 For the citations from Saint Tikhon’s works, see the commentary to The Life of a Great Sinner in PSS, 9: 511–514.
24 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 107; February 12/24, 1870.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 117; March 25/April 6, 1870.
27 Ibid., 118.
CHAPTER 42
Fathers, Sons, and Stavrogin
At the end of May 1869, Katkov published an article in the Moscow Gazette dealing with the recent student disorders that had broken out in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and he designated among their leaders “a certain Nechaev.” He was described as a “very hardened Nihilist,” an “inflamer of youth,” who had been arrested but managed the unprecedented feat of escaping from the Peter-and-Paul Fortress and fleeing abroad. In Europe he had produced a series of incendiary proclamations calling on students to revolt, “printed them very handsomely,” and sent bales of them back to Russia through the public mails.1 In fact, Nechaev had never been arrested, much less escaped from the impregnable fortress, but this was the legend that he spread about himself in accordance with his calculated tactic of deception in the service of the revolution. Bakunin and Ogarev, who eagerly aided Nechaev in his proclamation campaign, at first greeted him admiringly in Geneva as the resurrected incarnation of the revolutionary aspirations of their youth. It was only later, when his unscrupulousness had been turned against them, that their initial enthusiasm was reversed to regretful repudiation.
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Six months later, the Moscow Gazette carried news of the murder of a student on the grounds of the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy in Moscow, where Anna’s brother, Ivan Snitkin, was a student. But it was only on December 29 that Nechaev’s name was linked to the murder, and thereafter stories about him appeared regularly in the newspapers, with references to “some kind of wild conspiracy with proclamations” and to Ivanov, the murdered student, as having “died because he wished to denounce the criminal scheme.”2 (What Ivanov objected to, so far as can be established, was Nechaev’s assertion of his right to absolute dictatorial control over the members of his group of five.)3 On January 4, 1870, a leading article by Katkov, which summarized and commented on foreign newspaper reports covering the Nechaev affair, devoted a good deal of space to Bakunin, who, along with the weak-willed and compliant Ogarev, had participated with Nechaev in launching his propaganda campaign. Katkov had known Bakunin all too well as a young man (he had once almost faced him in a duel), and he quoted Bakunin’s anarchist call for the total destruction not only of the Russian state but of every and any existing state.4 He also cited Bakunin’s advice to the younger generation to foster in themselves that “fiercely destroying and coldly passionate fervor that freezes the mind and stops the blood in the veins of our opponents.”5
All through the month of January, Katkov’s newpaper continued to print reports about the gradually unfolding story of the Nechaev case, often using corroborating information from foreign (particularly German) newspapers, which of course Dostoevsky could read independently. It was precisely at this time—between December 1869 and February 1870—that Dostoevsky suddenly shifted his literary course, set aside the Life of a Great Sinner, and threw himself into a book with “direct relevance to the most important contemporary issue.” The “Nechaev affair”—the murder by a secret revolutionary group led by Sergey Nechaev of a student named Ivan Ivanov—had seized Dostoevsky’s imagination.
References to Nechaev, the proclamations, and the murder begin to creep into Dostoevsky’s notes from this time. He was then daily poring over the flood of rumor and speculation, and the few snippets of hard fact that emerged in the various press accounts; and he must have immersed himself in such pages with a mixture of fury and gnawing despair. After all, had he not practically predicted this outcome of radical ideas when he created Raskolnikov? Nechaev and his group had merely drawn the conclusions, and taken the actions, that in Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky had only imagined as extreme and “fantastic” possibilities.
And who was ultimately responsible for this perversion of Russian youth, now capable of the most atrocious crimes for the sake of revolution, if not the generation of the 1840s, the generation of Dostoevsky himself and such luminaries as Belinsky, Herzen, Bakunin, and Turgenev (whose Rudin was well known to be an image of Bakunin in his youthful heyday)? Indeed, had not Turgenev himself, in a recent preface to a new edition of his Fathers and Children (1869), practically claimed such responsibility in his attempt to overcome the hostility of the radicals to his work? A “witty lady” of his acquaintance, he informed his readers, had said after perusing the novel: “You are a Nihilist yourself.” And Turgenev adds musingly: “I will not undertake to contradict: perhaps the lady spoke the truth.” In another passage he declares that, with the exception of Bazarov’s views on art, “he almost shares all his convictions.”6 A shocked Strakhov, in the December issue of Dawn, had exclaimed in amazement: “Turgenev—a Nihilist! Turgenev shares the convictions of Bazarov!”7
All through the past several years, Dostoevsky’s bile against his own generation had been steadily accumulating. His reminiscences of Belinsky had brought back the abusive insults to Christ made in his presence, and the bitter quarrel with the self-declared renegade Turgenev had only aggravated his animosity. The Nechaev affair reopened all these old wounds, and what he learned from the newspapers became amalgamated not only with Strakhov’s ironic article on Turgenev but also with an earlier one by the same critic, whom he read so carefully and so admiringly. A biography of one of the most eminent members of the generation of the 1840s, T. N. Granovsky, was published in 1869 and reviewed by Strakhov. “He was,” Strakhov wrote, “a pure Westernizer”; and Strakhov then defined this Russian type with lines from Nekrasov—lines that Dostoevsky would pick up and cite in the first chapter of Demons: “A living monument of reproach . . . / Thou stoodst before thy country / O liberal-idealist.” Strakhov saw contemporary Russian Nihilism as a direct consequence of the influence of such “pure” Westernizers, even though the surviving members of that generation refuse to recognize their offspring in the “impure” progeny they have engendered.8
On the other side, the young generation had little respect for such “pure” Westernizers as Granovsky and, wrote Strakhov, “they naturally prefer Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, and Pisarev, who advanced the same position much further.”9 The battle of the generations was thus joined again in Russian culture, as it had been in Fathers and Children. Sometime in January or early February 1870 Dostoevsky put down in his notebook, under the heading T. N. Granovsky, a few sentences depicting “a pure and idealistic Westernizer in his full splendor,” whose “characteristic traits” are sketched in as “aimlessness and lack of firmness in his views . . . which . . . used to cause him suffering before, but have now become his second nature (his son makes fun of this tendency)” (11: 65).
It was Strakhov’s article, in all likelihood, that clarified for Dostoevsky how he might turn to creative profit his smoldering anger against his own generation and his blazing hatred of the Nechaevian avatar it had produced. Shortly after setting down his note, he dashed off a request to Strakhov for “the book of Stankevich on Granovsky. . . . I need that little book as I do the air I breathe, and as quickly as possible, as the most necessary material for my book.”10 A month later, he wrote to Maikov: “What I am writing now is something tendentious, I want to speak out as passionately as I can. All the Nihilists and Westernizers will cry out that I am retrograde. To hell with them, I will speak my mind to the very last word.”11 He has high hopes for his new novel, he tells Strakhov, “but not on the artistic, rather on the tendentious side; I wish to speak out about several matters even though my artistry goes smash. What attracts me is what has piled up in my mind and heart; let it give only a pamphlet, but I shall speak out.”
Once he had fixed on Granovsky as the prototype of the generation of the 1840s (though many others will be amalgamated into the type, particularly Herzen), Dostoevsky’s imagination began to work rapidly. The future Stepan Verkhovensky is pinned down almost immediately and will remain unchanged throughout. “Places himself unconsciously on a pedestal, in the style of relics to be worshiped by pilgrims, and loves it. . . . Shuns Nihilism and does not understand it. . . . ‘Leave me God and art, and I will let you have Christ. . . . Christ did not understand women.’ Fifty years old. Literary recollections. Belinsky, Granovsky, Herzen . . . Turgenev and others” (11: 65). Dostoevsky here was manifestly summoning up all his memories and using them to fill out his ideological canvas.
The notes also contain a romantic intrigue between a character called the Prince and the ward of a family. This was an accessory to the initially main conflict-of-generations theme, but the Prince would evolve into Stavrogin and would no longer serve merely as an accessory. By April 1870 Stavrogin had developed to the point where he had become the hero and taken the book away from both Granovsky and Nechaev. Dostoevsky could no longer contain him within the confines of his initial idea of the novel as a tendentious “pamphlet.” Indeed, at this time a process of fusion took place between the two creative projects that Dostoevsky had intended to keep separate, and it becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other.
In some May notes, the Great Sinner is said to possess “pride and immeasurable arrogance,” and also to have committed “atrocious crimes.” The heroes of his two novels are thus almost identical, and the barriers between the “pamphlet” and the “poem” broke down compl
etely at this time: the Lame Girl, the future haunting Marya Lebyadkina, moves from one to the other, and Tikhon appears as well as the confessor and interlocutor of Stavrogin. It turned out to be impossible for Dostoevsky to write a novel that would be only a politically satiric denunciation of the Nihilist generation and its Liberal-Idealist forebears; his book had now taken on an entirely different and richer character, one that engaged Dostoevsky’s deepest convictions and values. For Stavrogin has absorbed the religious thematic originally reserved for the Great Sinner’s struggle with faith—a struggle that for Dostoevsky inevitably involved the theme of Russia itself and the messianic role that he believed it had been selected to fulfill in the destiny of humankind.
Dostoevsky had promised Katkov—in return for the resumption of his monthly stipend—that he would furnish the beginning of a new novel not later than June 1870. This commitment, however, was based on the rash assumption that he could dash off his pamphlet in just a few months. But the increasing complexity of his plans made this promise impossible to keep, and at the beginning of July Dostoevsky told his niece that he hoped to meet a new deadline at the end of August or early September. Five months later, he described to Strakhov some of the difficulties he had experienced even in the very early stages of composition: “All year I only tore up and made alterations. I blackened so many mounds of paper that I even lost my system of references for what I had written. I have modified the plan not less than ten times, and completely rewrote the first part each time.”12
Short of funds as usual, and unable to obtain any further advances from Katkov before providing some manuscript, Dostoevsky had turned to Dawn for aid. But after receiving nine hundred rubles, nothing had appeared under his signature when Dawn ceased publication in 1873. During the month of July, suffering from weekly epileptic attacks, Dostoevsky found it impossible to write at all,13 but this imposed respite gave him the opportunity, when he returned to his desk in August, to look afresh at what he had already written. He told Katkov a month later that “of the fifteen signatures already written [in the first version—J.F.], probably twelve will go into the new version of the novel.”14 He could now promise his text to Katkov, and enough copy was supplied to the journal in the next five months to ensure the beginning of publication in January 1871.
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