Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  At the same time, welcome evidence of Dostoevsky’s stature came in a letter from Pavel Tretyakov, the owner of an important art gallery in Moscow, who had commissioned the artist V. G. Perov to furnish his collection with portraits of the most eminent contemporary figures in Russian culture. Dostoevsky accepted the honor of sitting for Perov with a great deal of satisfaction, joining a group of notables that included Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Maikov, and the short-story writer and lexicographer V. I. Dal’. Perov arrived from Moscow in the spring of 1872 and visited Dostoevsky every day for a week to observe him in various moods and attitudes. The portrait is one of Perov’s greatest achievements and was highly praised in all quarters, even winning the approval of Turgenev.

  Despite the stimulus provided by an active social life, Dostoevsky knew that he needed solitude to complete Demons. He thus planned to leave Petersburg at the very beginning of the spring for a summer in the country. Dostoevsky remembered that his nephew-in-law, Vladislavlev, had praised Staraya Russa, a small watering place some hundreds of versts south of Petersburg at the confluence of several rivers. He could rent “a house with furniture, even with kitchen wares,” and, as he wrote to his sister Vera, the town also contained “a station [voksal] with newspapers, magazines, etc.”8 Vladislavlev rented a house for the Dostoevskys from a local priest, Father Rumyantsev, and the family lived there from mid-May 1872 to the beginning of September.

  24. Dostoevsky in 1872, by V. G. Perov

  To reach Staraya Russa, one took a train in St. Petersburg, transferred at a local station for Novgorod, and then boarded a boat for the trip across Lake Ilmen. Anna never forgot the view of Novgorod that greeted them as they watched the city glide by. “The sun shone bright on the river’s far shore from which the crenellated walls of its kremlin rose up, the gilded cupolas of the Cathedral of St. Sophia were ablaze, and in the chilly air the bells were loudly calling to matins. Feodor Mikhailovich, who loved and understood nature, was in a tender mood, which I unconsciously absorbed.”9 During his first stay there in 1872, these trips turned out to be far more frequent than he had anticipated. Just a few weeks before the family had planned to leave Petersburg, Lyubov fell and injured her wrist, and subsequent complications required the Dostoevskys to return to Petersburg, where Anna remained for three weeks with their daughter after the operation while Dostoevsky hastened back to Staraya Russa and his manuscript.

  His letters to Anna are those of a terribly worried husband and father, upset by the disruption of his family routine. His mood was extremely irritable and querulous, and his observations on the local social scene reflected all the intemperance that so often overcame him when his nerves were frayed. “The crowd here is obviously very formal, high-toned, constantly trying to resemble high society, with the vilest French. The ladies all try to shine with their outfits, although they all must be trashy women . . . I definitely don’t like the park. And in general, this whole Staraya Russa is terrible trash.10 Worst of all, he writes Anna, “you can’t help me with stenography, and I would like to send material to The Russian Messenger.”11 Dostoevsky tried to work, but he complains bitterly: “I’m having a horrible time writing. When will we achieve at least a month of calm, so that I wouldn’t have to be worried with all my heart and could be entirely at work. . . . What a gypsy life, painful, most gloomy, without the least joy, and all there is to do is worry and worry!”12 After a severe epileptic attack he sadly reports that “it’s still dark in my head and my arms and legs ache. That has interrupted my work even more, so that I don’t even know what I am going to do about The Russian Messenger and what they think of me there.”13

  Once Anna and Lyubov returned to Staraya Russa, life settled into its normal routine again—but not for long. Anna recalled these spring and summer months of 1872 as perhaps the most racking in her entire life. She caught a chill, developed an abscess in her throat, and ran a high fever. The doctor treating her warned Dostoevsky that her life was in danger, and “Feodor Mikhailovich fell into utter despair,” retreating into another room “to put his face in his hands and sob uncontrollably.” Anna believed herself to be dying and, not able to speak, “made signs first to Feodor Mikhailovich and then to the children to come over to me. I kissed them, blessed them, and wrote down for my husband my instructions as to what he was to do in the event of my death.”14 Happily, the abscess broke that night, and Anna began to recover, though it was weeks before she regained her full strength. At the beginning of September 1872, the sorely tried family limped back to Petersburg, scarcely having obtained the unruffled months of rustic quietude so much hoped for on their departure.

  The indefatigable Anna had done a bit of apartment hunting in Petersburg during her stay there, and the Dostoevskys moved into a five-room flat, owned by a general of the Izmailovsky Regiment. Dostoevsky’s immediate preoccupation was the fate of his novel, on which he had been working steadily. In a remark to Maikov after the publication of the first chapters, Dostoevsky wrote: “In your comments you had a brilliant statement: ‘Those are Turgenev’s heroes in their old age.’ That is brilliant! While writing, I myself was dreaming of something like that, but in these words you have designated everything, as if a formula.”15 Maikov thus confirmed Dostoevsky’s own sense of the book’s relation to Fathers and Children, but the novelist warned his friend against taking Stepan Trofimovich, to whom the comment refers, as the main character. “Stepan Trofimovich is a secondary character; the novel will not be about him at all; but his story is closely linked to other events (main ones) in the novel, and therefore I have taken him as though the cornerstone of everything. But still and all Stepan Trofimovich’s star turn will be in the fourth part [actually the third]; at that point there will be a highly original conclusion to his fate.”

  Dostoevsky’s firm grasp of the novel as a whole can be seen in what he told his niece Sofya Ivanova, to whom The Idiot had been dedicated in its journal text. This honor had aroused some envy in her older sister, Marya Alexandrovna, who also aspired to have her name attached to one of her uncle’s novels. Dostoevsky thought, however, that it would be unseemly. “There will be passages in the novel (in the second and third parts). . . . One of the main characters . . . secretly confesses to another character a crime he has committed. The psychological influence of that crime on the character plays a large role in the novel; the crime, however, I repeat, even though it can be read about, is not suitable for a dedication. When you dedicate something, it is as though you are saying publicly to the person to whom you make that dedication: ‘I thought of you as I wrote this.’ ”16

  Dostoevsky is referring to a chapter of the novel that was never published during his lifetime, the chapter sometimes called “Stavrogin’s Confession” or, more literally, “At Tikhon’s.” This chapter narrates the visit of Stavrogin to a monastery in which the monk Tikhon is living and his confession, in the form of a written document, of the violation of a twelve-year-old girl. Dostoevsky wrote this chapter in the fall of 1871 and finished it not later than November. Chapters 7 and 8 were printed in the November issue of The Russian Messenger, but then the serialization came to a halt. Katkov refused to accept the decidedly shocking episode, and Dostoevsky could not persuade him to change his mind; the pages thus never appeared during Dostoevsky’s lifetime. The chapter was found among Dostoevsky’s papers in 1921, published in 1922, and since then has been the subject of considerable critical controversy.

  The text exists in two versions: one consists of the galleys Dostoevsky received from the journal before the decision was made not to publish; the second is a copy, transcribed by Anna, containing the alterations and corrections Dostoevsky undertook in an effort to meet the editors’ objections. Dostoevsky was upset by the rejection of this cornerstone of his creation, which contains not only the crucial revelation of the full range and depth of Stavrogin’s depravity but also his moral-philosophical motivation, his inner torments, and his longing for redemption. To test his own judgment, Dostoevsky read the galleys aloud t
o Maikov, Strakhov, and Pobedonostsev. When they unanimously agreed that the section containing Stavrogin’s confession was “too realistic,” he began to invent variations, one of which described Stavrogin’s encounter with an adolescent girl who had been brought by her governess to a bathhouse to meet him. Someone had told Dostoevsky about such an incident; but his “advisers” warned against using it because it might be taken as an insult to governesses and thus ran afoul of the “woman question.”17 (This variation of the confession grew into the calumny that Dostoevsky himself, unexpectedly showing up in Turgenev’s room one day when his fellow novelist was visiting Petersburg, confessed to having committed this very crime.)

  Dostoevsky traveled to Moscow in January 1872 to consult with the editors about the chapter, and he informs Sofya Ivanova the next month that, after much head-breaking indecision, he has decided not to invent a new version of the crime. Instead, “remaining with the substance of the matter, I changed the text only enough to satisfy the chaste editors. And in this sense I have sent an ultimatum. If they do not agree, then I really do not know what to do.”18 Dostoevsky’s revision left in doubt whether any violation of the young girl had actually occurred: Stavrogin refuses to give part of his manuscript to Tikhon, but affirms categorically that nothing untoward happened except for an innocent embrace. “Calm yourself,” he tells Tikhon, “it is not my fault if the girl was stupid and did not understand me. There was nothing, nothing at all.” To which Tikhon replies, “Thank God!” and crosses himself (12: 111). There is also an intervention by the narrator, speculating that the document was “a morbid work, the work of the devil who took possession of that man,” and suggesting that what it recounted may be just an invention. It is compared to the scene in which Stavrogin bites the governor’s ear, causing a scandal but doing no real harm. But then the narrator backtracks: “I certainly do not maintain that the document is false, that is to say, that it has been completely made up and invented. More likely, the truth is to be sought somewhere in between” (12: 108).

  In March 1872, Dostoevsky wrote N. A. Lyubimov, Katkov’s assistant editor, with reference to the revision: “I believe that what I have sent you . . . can now be printed. Everything scabrous has been removed. . . . I swear to you, I cannot do without the core of the matter. This is a full-fledged social type (in my opinion), our type, Russian, . . . having lost his ties with everything national, and, most important, his faith, depraved out of melancholy longing—but conscience-stricken, and making an effort through convulsive suffering, to renew himself and again begin to believe. . . . But all this will be cleared up even more in the third part.”19

  Despite such insistences and justifications, the journal still hesitated to accept the chapter. No final decision was made, however, and Dostoevsky was told that Katkov, no longer wishing to publish in small installments, would wait for the remainder of the novel before resuming publication. Dostoevsky thus forged ahead, sending in several more chapters, on the assumption that his disputed section would be included. It was only in early November 1872 that he learned there was no further hope of publishing even the revised variant of Stavrogin’s confession. By this time, publication had been scheduled to begin with the November issue, and so Dostoevsky, his back to the wall, reworked as much of the manuscript as he could to cope with the new situation.

  It is not necessary to detail all the differences that exist between the partly revised manuscript of Part III and its published form, but one is of particular importance. In Chapter 7, which narrates the touchingly pathetic “pilgrimage” of Stepan Trofimovich, he listens to a reading of passages from the Gospels and then takes on himself the primary responsibility for having infected the body of Russia with the devils. No such scene is found in the manuscript, which means that it was added after Dostoevsky had learned that his confession chapter would not be printed. The omission of this scene in the manuscript may indicate that Dostoevsky had originally intended to portray Stavrogin as having assumed this burden of guilt (which would make more thematic sense) but was unable to do so because, without the glimpse he had hoped to give into the torments of Stavrogin’s conscience, a sudden display of such conscience in the final pages would have been insufficiently motivated.

  The remainder of Demons was finally published, after a year’s delay, in the November and December 1872 issues of The Russian Messenger, arousing a fury of abuse and recrimination in the radical and progressive press. As Anna puts it mildly, serenely looking back on the turbulent past, “I must say that Demons had an enormous success with the reading public, but at the same time it brought my husband a great many enemies in the literary world.”20 When the novel appeared in book format the next year, it had once more been extensively revised. Several passages in Part II foreshadowing and motivating the encounter with Tikhon were eliminated, and these, along with the suppressed chapter itself, now must be taken into account in any consideration of the book. Dostoevsky himself did not include this chapter in later editions, but both internal and external reasons provide a plausible answer for his failure to reinstate it. For one thing, he had altered the published text as much as possible before magazine publication to meet the crisis he had not foreseen; the work thus no longer represented his original conception, and extensive rewriting would have been required to transform it once again. Also, he would then have had to face the formidable hurdle of the official censorship, and perhaps fail.

  Dostoevsky decided to leave well enough alone, and Stavrogin remains a far more enigmatic and mysterious figure than he was initially meant to be. He lacks the clarifying moral-philosophical motivation that Dostoevsky had intended to provide, and it is remarkable that so much is still conveyed of the stature of his personality even without the both diabolic and penitential effect such motivation was meant to furnish. If Dostoevsky could not give us the book as he had originally conceived it, however, he still did nothing less than to write a symbolic history of the moral-spiritual travails of the Russian spirit in the first half of the nineteenth century.

  1 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 218; July 18, 1871.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 176.

  4 Ibid., 178–179.

  5 PSS, 29, Bk. 1: 226; February 4, 1872.

  6 V. P. Meshchersky, Moi vospominaniya, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg), 2: 144.

  7 Cited in PSS, 12: 259.

  8 Ibid., 235; April 20, 1872.

  9 Reminiscences, 191.

  10 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 240; May 28, 1872.

  11 Ibid., 242; June 3, 1872.

  12 Ibid., 245; June 5, 1872.

  13 Ibid., 250; June 14, 1872.

  14 Reminiscences, 205.

  15 PSS, 29: Bk. 1: 184–185; March 2/14, 1871.

  16 Ibid., 164; January 6/18, 1871.

  17 This is the version of events given in Reminiscences, 378–379. It is accepted as accurate by the editors of the commentary to the novel, PSS, 12: 239.

  18 Ibid., 29/Bk. 1: 227; February 4, 1872.

  19 Ibid., 232; end March/beginning April 1872.

  20 Reminiscences, 206.

  CHAPTER 44

  History and Myth in Demons

  Dostoevsky had in the past created fictional characters who, as the embodiment of certain social-cultural ideas and attitudes, could be considered “historical” in a broad sense, but not until Demons (Besy) had he ever based himself on actual events that were a matter of public knowledge. Obviously, his novel is not limited to the actual, rather insignificant dimensions of the Nechaev affair. If this had been the case, “the facts” would have given him only a rather pitiful tale of a distressing event that had occurred among a handful of students and hangers-on in the student milieu, who had been duped by a revolutionary zealot into the useless murder of an innocent victim. Rather, this incident furnished only the nucleus of Dostoevsky’s political plot, and he enlarged and magnified it, according to the technique of his “fantastic realism,” into a full-blown dramatization of the far
more ambitious tactics and aims set down in the writings of Nechaev and his supporters.

  What happens in Demons is thus myth (the imaginary amplification of the real) and not history, art and not literal truth—just as Raskolnikov may be considered a “myth” engendered by the “immoderate Nihilism” of Pisarev and Zaitsev. Much of what he learned from the documents at his disposal, in any case, hardly taught him anything new, for he could draw on recollections from his own days as a revolutionary conspirator when his secret group had worked in the shadows to manipulate the larger Petrashevsky Circle. Dostoevsky thus remained faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of what his documentation revealed about the Nechaev affair.

  It may seem, at first sight, as if this monster of deviousness, Peter Verkhovensky—who resembles Shakespeare’s Iago as a destructive inciter of evil in others—would be light-years removed from any conceivable image of a nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary or of the real Nechaev in particular. Yet the actions taken by Peter Verkhovensky with such masterful relish are exactly the same ones that Nechaev accomplished, or would have accomplished had it been within his power to turn desires into deeds.

  An indelibly vivid portrait of Nechaev at work is sketched in a letter we are fortunate to possess from no less a pen than that of Bakunin. He had been—along with Dostoevsky’s Geneva acquaintance, the sympathetic but weak-willed Ogarev—one of Nechaev’s most enthusiastic supporters. Many scholars have speculated on the curious personal relations between the young revolutionary and the passionately eloquent veteran of a hundred subversive plots, who was crowned with the aureole of his fabulous insurrectionary past. For Bakunin soon found himself in thrall to the young man, whom he admiringly called an abrek (a pitiless Muslim warrior of the Caucasian peoples) and “a young eagle.” But this was before Nechaev, after escaping to Europe in the wake of the Ivanov murder, began to use the methods they had both agreed upon against Bakunin himself and the circle of their common friends. Once Nechaev did so, Bakunin felt it necessary to write in July 1870 to a family with whom Nechaev had entered into contact. The letter is revelatory and precise in its depiction of Nechaev’s limitless unscrupulosity.