Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  To be sure, Dostoevsky’s satire is not much tenderer for Shigalev than it is for Peter Verkhovensky, but he acknowledged the existing spectrum of radical opinion. Shigalev, in Dostoevsky’s notes, is first called Zaitsev—the same radical critic V. A. Zaitsev who had argued in the pages of the liberal journal The Russian Word that without the protection of slavery, the black race would be doomed to extinction because of its inherent inferiority. Shigalev too is initially an honest democratic radical who ends up, much to his dismay, favoring the “slavery” of the masses to an omnipotent radical elite. “I am perplexed by my own data,” he confesses, “and my conclusion is in direct contradiction of the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism” (10: 311).

  The views of the radically oriented Zaitsev derived from his Social Darwinism, and this doctrine is alluded to when Shigalev asserts that all previous social thinkers “have been dreamers, tellers of fairy tales, fools who contradicted themselves, who understood nothing of natural science and the strong animal called man” (10: 311). Shigalev’s own theory for attaining “the earthly Paradise” is unmistakably biological, even though it is given only in an abbreviated version. (He solemnly asks for ten meetings to expound it properly, but, alas, the revolution cannot wait!) A “lame teacher” who has read his manuscript explains the chief idea: “Shigalev suggests . . . the division of mankind into two equal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and, through boundless submission, will by a series of regenerations attain primeval innocence, something like the original paradise. They will have to work, however. The measures the author proposes for depriving nine-tenths of humanity of their true will, and their transformation into a herd by means of the re-education of whole generations, are . . . based on the facts of nature and very logical” (10: 312).

  One might imagine that Dostoevsky here has simply let his satirical fantasy run wild à la Swift, and that there could be no textual source for Shigalev’s plan to create “the earthly Paradise” by selective Socialist breeding. In fact, however, such a source exists in the radical journalism of the 1860s, and Dostoevsky’s familiarity with all varieties of such journalism makes it more than likely that he drew on it for his purposes. It can be found in the writings of P. N. Tkachev, one of whose first articles was published by Dostoevsky in Time, and who had been associated with Nechaev in agitating among Petersburg students in 1869. Together they had written a Programme of Revolutionary Activities, which led to Tkachev’s arrest in the roundup of Nechaev’s followers after Ivanov’s murder. Both Tkachev and Zaitsev developed the implications of Social Darwinism within the Russian radical context, but Tkachev drew conclusions even more extreme, and more shockingly inhumane, than the iconoclastic defender of Negro slavery.

  Tkachev accepted the biological foundations of Darwinism but deplored the social-political conclusions that could be drawn from its tenets. If unchecked and uncontrolled, he argued, the struggle for existence could lead only to the eternal perpetuation of inequality and injustice. Justice could not be achieved except in a world of total equality, but this aim “must by no means be confused with political or legal or even economic equality”; rather, it meant “an organic, physiological equality conditioned by the same education and common living conditions.” Such equality, Tkachev wrote, was “the final and only possible aim of human life . . . the supreme criterion of historical and social progress”; it was thus “the absolute goal and highest ideal of the coming Socialist revolution.”13 If Dostoevsky was not parodying Tkachev, it is surely a remarkable coincidence when Peter Verkhovensky exclaims that “Shigalev is a man of genius” because “he’s discovered ‘equality.’ ” “Great intellects cannot help being despots and they’ve always done more harm than good. . . . Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned—that’s Shigalevism! Slaves must be equal: there has never been either freedom or equality without despotism, but in the herd there’s bound to be equality, and that’s Shigalevism!” (10: 322).

  The ultimate aim of Peter Verkhovensky is to seize power by turning Stavrogin into Ivan the Tsarevich, the false pretender to the throne, and in this way to enlist the peasantry behind his revolutionary banner. Even here Dostoevsky does not depart from a verisimilar transmutation of Russian historical reality into the “myth” of his creation. Deeply rooted in the Russian folk imagination was the idea of a “tsar in hiding” who would someday appear to remedy the world’s injustices. Time and again in Russian history a revolt has been justified by the claim that the reigning tsar was “false.” The renegade monk Gregory Otrepeyev, who led the uprising against Boris Godunov in the early seventeenth century, claimed to be the “true” tsar and the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible. Exactly the same legend arose at the end of the eighteenth century, when the rebellious Cossack leader Pugachev claimed to be Peter III, who had been killed in a court conspiracy. Peter Verkhovensky intends to exploit the deepest historical recesses of the Russian folk imagination and use the quasi-religious status of the tsar to achieve his overthrow in the interests of social revolution.

  This is a part of the solid historical foundation on which Dostoevsky constructed what seems to be his most extravagant fictional edifice. One of the commonest charges made against Demons in the mostly hostile early reviews was that the book was purely a product of Dostoevsky’s “psychiatric talent”—his penchant, long ago noted and harshly criticized by Belinsky, for preoccupying himself with what could only be considered abnormal and psychopathological characters. But Dostoevsky was convinced, and time has proven him right, that his “fantastic realism” cut more deeply into the problems of Russian life than the more superficially verisimilar and equably average presentation favored by his literary contemporaries. While giving free rein to his “fantasy,” however, he knew that the charges of his critics might be justified unless he took great pains to anchor its flights in the “realism” we have tried to document; and we shall next show that he took the same care with Russian culture as he had done with the “myth” of Nechaev and his group.

  The Nechaev affair and its ramifications is only one of the interweaving historical-ideological strands in Demons. Another is the satirical confrontation between Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky and his Nihilist son Peter. Even though this encounter became subordinate in the final text, Dostoevsky succeeded, all the same, in making Demons one of the two classic portrayals in Russian literature of this momentous battle between the generations.

  Turgenev had depicted its opening salvos in Fathers and Children (1862), but Stepan Trofimovich is much closer to the central figure of an earlier Turgenev novel, Rudin (1856), than he is to any of the characters who speak for the past face-to-face with Bazarov. Like Stepan Trofimovich, Rudin is also a Romantic Idealist of the 1840s—a genuinely pure and noble spirit, but one too weak to live up to his lofty phrases and glowing ideals. Demons may thus seem as a disputation between two of Turgenev’s characters at a later stage of their lives, when Rudin had sunk into a whimsically charming self-pampering poseur and Bazarov had stiffened into a ruthless fanatic. Dostoevsky, we know, enthusiastically agreed with Maikov’s remark that Dostoevsky’s characters reminded him of “Turgenev’s heroes grown old.”

  Demons thus has an extremely important literary-cultural dimension, which includes its relation both to Turgenev’s novels and to Turgenev himself (malevolently but irresistibly caricatured in the figure of Karmazinov). In addition, it also encompasses a whole range of other literary, moral-philosophical, and cultural phenomena whose richness can only be rivaled, in the nineteenth-century novel, by Balzac’s Les illusions perdues and Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale. The book is almost a compressed encyclopedia of the Russian culture of the period it covers, filtered through a witheringly derisive and often grotesquely funny perspective, and it creates a remarkable “myth” o
f the main conflicts of this culture reconstructed on a firm basis of historical personages and events.

  The figure of Stepan Trofimovich, as we have seen, is primarily derived from that of T. N. Granovsky, a historian from the 1840s who was already half-forgotten by 1869. Dostoevsky had cherished his image particularly because of the portrait given in Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts. In a famous chapter, Herzen describes the end of his friendship with Granovsky in the summer of 1846. This was the fateful moment when Belinsky and Herzen had become militant atheists, but Granovsky refused to follow Herzen along this emotionally lacerating path. “I will never accept your desiccated, cold idea of the identity of the body and spirit,” Herzen cites him as saying; “with that, the immortality of the soul disappears. Perhaps you don’t need this, but I have had to bury far too much to give up this belief. For me personal immortality is a necessity.”14 Dostoevsky, who himself clung tenaciously to the hope of personal immortality, saw Granovsky as a kindred soul: here was a liberal Westernizer who refused to surrender the ultimate sanctuary of religious faith. It was precisely such a figure, with all its inner contradictions, oscillations, and uncertainties, that Dostoevsky wished to highlight as the precursor, as well as the shocked opponent, of the amoral Nihilism exhibited by the new breed of Bazarovs.

  The sources for Stepan Trofimovich-Granovsky can be found not only in the personality and biography of the Moscow historian, who died in 1855, but also and more extensively in the controversies that began in the middle of 1858, when the tension between the generations exploded in public. The spokesmen for the newly vociferous raznochintsy intellectuals, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, unleashed a flood of derogatory articles against the generation of the 1840s, which was dismissed as weak and indecisive; its members were slaves to high-flown principles that only served to bolster their egoism and vanity:

  People of that generation were possessed by lofty but somewhat abstract strivings. They strove toward truth, longed for the good, they were captivated by everything beautiful; but highest of all for them was principle. . . . Withdrawing in this way from real life, and condemning themselves to the service of principle, they were not able truly to estimate their strength and took on much more than they were capable of performing. Hence their eternally false position, their eternal dissatisfaction with themselves, their eternal grandiose phrases of self-approval and self-encouragement, and their eternal failure in any practical activity. Little by little they sank into their passive role, and, of all that had gone before, they preserved only a youthful inflammability, yes, and the habit of conversing with well-bred people about good manners and dreaming of a little bridge over the stream [that is, local, insignificant reforms and improvements—J.F.]15

  No better outline of Stepan Trofimovich’s character profile could be sketched; all that remained was for Dostoevsky to fill in the traits.

  Such attacks could hardly fail to elicit a reply; and one was soon forthcoming from Herzen, who had been the original inspirer and propagator of whatever radical and Socialist currents of thought existed in Russia in the 1860s. Granovsky may have furnished an external schema for Stepan Trofimovich, but the pattern of his opposition to Peter, as the horrified “father” of a Nihilist “son,” is historically based on Herzen’s intransigent refusal to knuckle under to the generation of the 1860s. Herzen, as we know, was much on Dostoevsky’s mind exactly at the moment when he was working on the early drafts of Demons. His death in January 1870 immediately called forth an important series of articles by Strakhov summing up his career, and they were published almost simultaneously with Dostoevsky’s decision to write a “pamphlet-novel.”

  Dostoevsky’s reaction to these articles has already been cited; here we need only recall his remark that “the main essence of all Herzen’s activity [was] that he has been, always and everywhere, primarily a poet.” It is this aspect of his nature, Dostoevsky believed, that explains “even his flippancy and inclination to pun about the loftiest moral and philosophical questions (which, by the way, is very revolting in him).”16 Such a comment indicates to what extent Stepan Trofimovich and Herzen blended together in Dostoevsky’s imagination. For the quality that offended Dostoevsky in Herzen also offends the narrator in Stepan Trofimovich. “Why could not this week be without a Sunday—si le miracle existe?” exclaims the latter despairingly, anticipating a meeting with the formidable Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina on that fateful day. “What could it be to Providence to blot out one Sunday from the calendar? If only to prove His power to atheists et que tout soit dit!” “He wouldn’t have been himself,” the narrator comments acidly, “if he could have dispensed with the cheap gibing free-thought which was in vogue in his day” (10: 100).

  Herzen’s The Superfluous and the Bilious (1860) was the first reply of the generation of the 1840s to the onslaught of their detractors, and, like Stepan Trofimovich, Herzen spoke for the fathers, or at least those among them who refused to abdicate their right to paternal respect. Voicing the attitude of the “bilious” sons, their unnamed spokesman (Chernyshevsky) sarcastically remarks that the “superfluous men” of the 1840s “were educated differently, the world surrounding them was too dirty, not sufficiently wax-polished, besmirched by hands and feet. It was far pleasanter for them to moan over their unhappy lot, and meanwhile to eat and drink in peace.”17 These were exactly the words, and this is unmistakably the condescendingly contemptuous tone, of Peter about his father.

  Just as Stepan Trofimovich returns home in a shambles after his attempt to make a comeback in Petersburg in the early 1860s, having been discarded by the new breed of radicals as “un vieux bonnet de coton,” so Herzen is dismissed by Chernyshevsky as similar to “the fine skeleton of a mammal . . . that had been dug up and belonged to a different world with a different sun and different trees.” But Herzen, refusing to be swept so easily into the dustbin of history, stubbornly rejects an obligation to say farewell, in the name of utility and revolution, to the significance of his own past and that of humankind as a whole. For if the blinkered view of the 1860s is accepted, then, as Herzen says in eloquent words that Stepan Trofimovich will echo, “farewell not only to Thermopylae and Golgotha, but also to Sophocles and Shakespeare, and incidentally to the whole long and endless epic poem which is continually ending in frenzied tragedies and continually going on again under the title of history.”18

  Despite disagreements over tactics, particularly after Karakozov’s attempt to assassinate Alexander II, which Herzen reproved in The Bell, Herzen insisted that the goals of the indigenous Russian radical movement, which looked to Chernyshevsky as its leader, did not differ from the ones he had advocated in exile, and he urged that the two generations should go forward hand in hand. This plea for unity only provoked a furious reply from one of the leaders of the “young emigration,” Alexander Serno-Solovievich, who dismissed Herzen even more unceremoniously than Chernyshevsky had done. In words that remarkably anticipate Dostoevsky’s, he proclaimed that Herzen was just another vieux bonnet de coton, exactly like Stepan Trofimovich:

  You are a poet, an artist . . . a storyteller, a novelist, anything you wish but not a politician. . . . Failing to perceive that you have been left behind, you flap your enfeebled wings with all your might; and then, when you see that people are only laughing at you, you go off in a rage and reproach the younger generation with ingratitude to their leader, to the founder of their school, the first high priest of Russian Socialism. . . . Come down to earth; forget that you are a great man; remember that the medals with your effigy were struck not by a grateful posterity, but by yourself out of your blood-stained wealth. . . . [Y]ou, Mr. Herzen, are a dead man.19

  Herzen did not reply directly to this scurrilously abusive broadside. Instead, he sent the brochure, along with a letter, to Bakunin, whose indiscriminate sympathy with the younger generation would later lead to his association with Nechaev. Serno-Solovievich, in Herzen’s view, “is insolent and a fool; but the worst is that the majority of the young Russians are the s
ame and we’re the ones who have contributed to make them like this. . . . This isn’t Nihilism. Nihilism is a great phenomenon in the evolution of Russian thought. No. These are the dispossessed noblemen, the retired officer, the village scribe, the local priest and petty landowner disguised in costumes.”20

  Dostoevsky had read the harangues of Serno-Solovievich, and the young radical is mentioned, along with Nechaev (no others are identified), as belonging in “the herd of swine” infected by “the devils” who “came out of the body of Russian man.” Dostoevsky, of course, could have had no knowledge of Herzen’s letter, but he was able to intuit, with remarkable percipience, exactly its mixture of consternation and guilt. “I agree that the author’s fundamental idea is a true one,” Stepan Trofimovich says of What Is To Be Done?, the “catechism” of the Nihilists, “but that only makes it more awful. It’s just our idea, exactly ours; we first sowed the seed, nurtured it, prepared the way, and, indeed, what could they say new, after us? But, heavens! How it’s all expressed, distorted, mutilated. . . . Were these the conclusions we were striving for? Who can understand the original idea in this?” (10: 238).

  Herzen’s last important work, Letters to an Old Comrade (1869), was written expressly to counteract the turbulent torrent of vandalism running through the Bakunin-Nechaev propaganda. These open letters addressed to Bakunin were included in a collection of Herzen’s posthumous writings that Dostoevsky certainly would have hastened to procure. “The savage clamors exhorting us to close our books, to abandon science, and to engage in an absurd combat of destruction,” Herzen wrote, “belong to the most uncontrollable and baneful demagoguery. They always provoke the unleashing of the worst passions. We juggle with terrible words, without thinking at all of the harm they do to the cause and to those who listen to them.”21 Herzen certainly did not believe that the Bakunin-Nechaev movement, which had led to the murder of Ivanov, was merely an isolated and aberrant episode, and he felt it his duty to raise his voice against the terrible consequences he could so clearly foresee.