After obtaining the approval of the press authorities, on December 20 Dostoevsky was confirmed as editor-in-chief of The Citizen. A new phase in Dostoevsky’s literary activity thus began, whose unexpected ideological twists and turns would surprise both his friends and his enemies during the seven years still remaining to his life. His salary was set at the modest sum of three thousand rubles a year, although he was also to be paid at space rates for all his own contributions. Anna estimates that, for the first time in his literary life, he could count on a regular income, and besides this advantage he now had the opportunity to experiment with his idea for the Diary of a Writer. After his long isolation from the Russian literary scene, he savored the chance to make his voice heard on all the social-cultural issues confronting his troubled country.
Dostoevsky’s appearance in the editorial offices of The Citizen is recorded in one of the best memoirs written about him. Twenty-three-year-old Varvara Timofeyeva was then writing a column about social-cultural events in the radical journal The Spark and worked as a proofreader in the printing plant producing The Citizen. Setting down her recollections, based on notebook entries, in 1904, Timofeyeva gives us a striking picture of Dostoevsky in terms of what may be called his ideological physiognomy at this time of his life, and her own comments help to define the social-cultural climate to which he was then responding.
Word had spread in the printing plant that Dostoevsky was to be the next editor of The Citizen, and Timofeyeva could hardly contain her excitement: “At this moment, there would arrive here the famous author of Poor Folk and House of the Dead, the creator of Raskolnikov and The Idiot—he would arrive, and something extraordinary, new would happen to me.” What she saw, however, was a middle-aged man who “seemed very tired and perhaps ill.” He stood there “with a gloomy, exhausted face, covered like a net with some sort of unusually expressive shadings caused by a tightly restrained movement of the muscles. As if every muscle on this face with sunken cheeks and a broad, high forehead was alive with feeling and thought. And these feelings and thoughts were irresistibly pushing to come to the surface, but not allowed to do so by the iron will of this frail and yet at the same time thick-set, quiet and gloomy man with broad shoulders.”2 Dostoevsky shook hands with his proofreader, bowing slightly, after a formal introduction. “His hand was cold, dry, and as it were lifeless. Indeed, everything about him that day seemed lifeless . . . [his] barely audible voice and lackluster eyes that fastened on me like two immovable dots.”3 He sat silently at his table, reading proof for an hour without uttering a single word; even his pen moved silently over the proof sheets as he made corrections.
By all accounts Dostoevsky was taciturn and secretive with members of the young intelligentsia like Timofeyeva. After the denunciations of Demons in the radical and progressive press, he could be certain that he would be looked on with repulsion by them as a renegade from the radical ranks, and she herself bears out such a view of his suspicions. “In liberal literary circles,” she writes, “and among the student youth, with whom I had some familiarity, he was unceremoniously called someone ‘off his rocker,’ or—more delicately—a ‘mystic’ or ‘abnormal’ (which, as understood in those days, meant the same thing). This was the time just after the din had died down of the Nechaev trial and the publication of Demons in the Russian Messenger. We, the young people, had read the speeches of the noted trial lawyers in The Voice and the St. Petersburg News, and Dostoevsky’s novel seemed to us then a monstrous caricature, a nightmare of mystical ecstasies and psychopathology. . . . And after the author of Demons assumed the editorship of The Citizen, many of his friends and admirers turned against him once and for all.”4
Even aside from such ideological undercurrents, Dostoevsky proved to be an exacting taskmaster as an editor. He made it clear that he wished his orders to be obeyed without question, even when they were unreasonable or impossible to carry out. “Neither his preemptory tone,” writes Timofeyeva, “to which I was totally unaccustomed, nor his peevishly dissatisfied remarks and exasperated anxieties over a wrongly placed comma, fitted in with my image of the writer as man, the writer as sufferer, the writer as seer of the human heart.”5 Indeed, Timofeyeva was deeply shocked one day by an episode involving Mikhail Alexandrov, the foreman in charge of typesetting, in which Dostoevsky, flying into a rage at this man’s entirely reasonable explanation for not inserting a last-minute change in proof, shouted “like a landowner” (pro-barski) to make the change. “ ‘Whether on the wall or on the ceiling, I want [this] printed,’ he shrieked,” according to Timofeyeva, “his face turning dead-white, his lips twitching spasmodically.” Alexandrov answered that he was not capable of such miracles; and at this ironic retort, Dostoevsky thundered that he needed people who would carry out his instructions to the letter “with doglike devotion.” (Timofeyeva was outraged by this phrase.) He scribbled off a note on the spot—handing it to the silent and stony-faced Timofeyeva for transmission—demanding that Alexandrov be dismissed immediately. But the insertion was dropped, the note was never passed on, and nothing more was heard about firing Alexandrov.6 When in 1875 Dostoevsky was making preparations to publish his Diary of a Writer as an independent publication, he took great pains to place Alexandrov in charge of its production.
Varvara Timofeyeva only gradually overcame her hostility to Dostoevsky’s chilling reserve. The ice was broken late one evening when they were going over the proofs of Dostoevsky’s article about an art exhibit in Petersburg, and his analysis of a work of the artist N. N. Ge called A Mysterious Evening. This painting represented the Last Supper as if it had taken place in the present (“all the apostles in the picture [were shown] as if they were present-day ‘Socialists,’ ”), and the work was a favorite of the radicals for this reason.7 Dostoevsky’s article criticized this reduction of the great Christian theme to a day in the life of a Russian radical, and Timofeyeva quotes him as writing, “Where is the Messiah, the Savior promised to the world—where is Christ?”8 Like most of the younger radicals of the 1870s, Timofeyeva had become responsive again to the moral values of Christianity, and she was swept away by the passion of Dostoevsky’s eloquence, which aroused memories of the reverence for Christ imbibed during childhood from her mother, “a woman of burning faith.” “Suddenly,” she recalls, “without knowing why myself, I was irresistibly drawn to look at him . . . Feodor Mikhailovich looked at me intently and point-blank, with an expression that seemed to indicate he had been observing me for some time and waiting for me to turn my glance toward him.” The young woman’s face must have revealed to Dostoevsky that she had been moved, though neither uttered a word, and when, long after midnight, she came to say good-bye, he stood up, clasped her hands, and spoke to her tenderly as he led her to the door. “You wore yourself out today,” he said solicitously. “Hurry home and sleep well. Christ be with you!”9 Timofeyeva walked home that night filled with joy at having finally encountered what she felt to be the real Dostoevsky, at last illuminated by the power of his thought and the depth of his feeling.
Although he was always subject to sudden shifts of mood, when he would retreat broodingly into himself, his relations with Timofeyeva became more open and friendly. She depicts him reciting some favorite verses from the poetry of Nikolay Ogarev—verses in which the poet, opening the Bible at random, hopes “That would come to me by the will of fate / The life, and grief, and death of a prophet.” Timofeyeva continues: “Feodor Mikhailovich then got up, stepped into the middle of the room, and with flashing eyes and inspired gestures—exactly like a priest before an invisible sacrificial altar—recited for us “The Prophet” of Pushkin, then of Lermontov.”10 For Timofeyeva, it seemed that the poems “were Dostoevsky’s own confession. To this day I still hear how he twice repeated: ‘I know only—that I can endure / . . . And can endure!—’ ”11
Despite the young radical’s growing affection for the seer in her midst, she found some of his pronouncements disconcerting. In the course of an impromptu attack on the
danger to Russia of absorbing European influences, he said, “our people are holy in comparison with those over there. . . . [I]n Rome, in Naples, on the streets I was made the most shameful offers—youths, almost children. Disgusting, unnatural vices—and openly, before everybody, and no one even bothered about it. Try to do that amongst us! All our people would condemn it, because for our people that’s a deadly sin, but there—it’s in the customs, a simple habit, nothing more.” When Timofeyeva objected that it was not this aspect that admirers of the West wished to emulate, he rancorously replied that “there is no other,” that “Rome went to pieces because they began to transplant Greece among themselves; beginning with luxuries, fashions, and various sciences and arts, it ends with sodomy and general corruption.”12
If Timofeyeva objected to the extremity of Dostoevsky’s anti-Westernism, she found it even more difficult to accept his literal predictions of apocalyptic doom triggered by recent political events. Lifting up his head from the proofs of an article dealing with Prussia, Bismarck, and the papacy, he declared: “They [radicals] do not suspect that soon everything will come to an end—all their ‘progress’ and chatter! They have no inkling that the Antichrist has been born . . . and is coming—.” Dostoevsky, she says, “pronounced this with an expression in his face and voice as if announcing to me a terrible and grandiose secret.” When she gingerly expressed some skepticism, he struck the table with his fist and “proclaimed like a mullah in his minaret: ‘The Antichrist is coming! It is coming! And the end of the world is closer—closer than they think!’ ” Timofeyeva confesses, with some retrospective embarrassment, that she could not help recalling the opinion about him accepted by her Populist comrades: “ravings, epileptic hallucinations . . . the mania of one idea . . . an obsession.”13
Timofeyeva had no such negative reaction to another of their dialogues on religious matters, when he asked, “how do you understand the Gospels?” She thought about the matter for the first time and answered, “The realization of the teachings of Christ on earth, in our life, in our conscience.” When Dostoevsky expressed disillusionment (“And that’s all?”), she thought harder and replied, “No. . . . Not everything finishes here, on earth. . . . All this life on earth is only a step . . . to another existence.” “To other worlds!” he exclaimed triumphantly, throwing up his arm to the wide-open window, through which could be seen a bright and luminous June sky.14
This revelatory exchange focuses the crux of Dostoevsky’s ideological-artistic preoccupations during the 1870s—the conflict between a worldly (Utopian Socialist and Populist) acceptance of Christian morality and one grounded in divine illumination. It is then followed by some poignant words: “ ‘And what a wonderful though tragic task this is—to tell this to the people—’ he continued, momentarily hiding his eyes with his hands—‘wonderful and tragic because there is so much suffering here. So much suffering, but then—so much grandeur! . . . It’s impossible to compare it with any well-being in the world!’ ”15 Nowhere else in the Dostoevsky canon do we find another passage expressing so simply and spontaneously his conception of his own creative task and the core values of his theodicy.
These intimate conversations with Timofeyeva, combined with public expressions of Populist ideas, influenced Dostoevsky’s opinion of the new radical generation and led to a softening of the harsh judgment expressed in Demons. Through her reactions he could see that there was no longer any irreconcilable opposition between the Christian moral values he had defended all through the 1860s and those of the Populists. He could still evoke some responsiveness in the new generation, and this ability was also confirmed by a letter from Vsevolod Solovyev (a son of the famous historian S. M. Solovyev), who wrote Dostoevsky the moment he learned that the novelist was again in Petersburg.
Vsevolod Solovyev, later to become a well-known historical novelist, had just embarked on a career as a journalist. He told Dostoevsky how much his novels had helped to shape his own religious convictions, upheld in arguments with school comrades mouthing the more fashionable doctrines of Nihilist atheism. Moreover, despite such differences of opinion, he assured him that these comrades “regard Crime and Punishment as one of the best works—yes, but all the same . . . Russian society still does not understand you as it should . . . and listens to your words . . . with confusion and dismay.”16 Dostoevsky was so moved by this tribute that he called on his young admirer a few days later and left his card. Returning the visit, Solovyev soon became Dostoevsky’s friend and literary protégé, and no one in the future would support him more staunchly and more consistently in the Russian press. Like Timofeyeva, he helped to relieve Dostoevsky’s fear that he had become isolated from the younger generation, whom he hoped to dissuade from embarking on the self-destructive path of social revolution.
Dostoevsky also exchanged letters with Vsevolod’s younger brother Vladimir, destined to become the most important Russian philosopher of the turn of the century. A poet as well as a philosopher, Vladimir was a capricious, eccentric, engaging personality with a whimsical sense of humor—a highly intellectualized and spiritualized type of holy fool, which in Russian culture always implies some relation to the religious and sacred. Vladimir had sent an article to The Citizen in 1873, with a letter that spoke admiringly of the refusal of the journal to accept “the superstitious reverence” displayed in Russian literature for “the anti-Christian foundations of civilization,” a reverence that made any “free judgment of these foundations” impossible.17 Dostoevsky rejected Vladimir’s first article but accepted another a year later after receiving a copy of his master’s thesis, The Crisis in Western Philosophy. This talented work had caused a considerable stir for its brilliant style, its deep erudition, and its attack on the reigning acceptance of a semiscientific positivism inconsistently mingled with the profession of secularized Christian moral values. He argued that Western rationalism was now bankrupt, and he claimed that the most recent developments of Western thought—Schopenhauer and the then-fashionable Eduard Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious—were moving in the direction of a fusion with the truths preserved in the religions of the East, specifically in Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
Like his older brother Vsevolod, Vladimir had gone through an acute radical period under the influence of reading Pisarev. Dostoevsky’s novels had been one of the most effective remedies that aided both brothers to overcome their adolescent Nihilism. Vladimir once remarked that among the pages he most admired were certain passages in Demons, and these would have been presumably those in which Kirillov traverses the deadly dialectic of attempting to replace the God-man with the Man-god. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s unmasking of the mortal dangers of an unrestrained egoism was decisive for Solovyev’s thought, which constantly stresses the importance of attaining a new reconciliation between the atomistic ego, released from the religious bonds of the past, and a revitalized source of absolute moral values.
26. Vladimir Solovyev
Dostoevsky, Anna tells us, was very much taken with his young philosopher-admirer, who became a frequent visitor to their home in 1873. He reminded her husband of a friend of his youth, the innerly tormented and tempestuous poet and God-seeker Ivan Shidlovsky, who had played an important role in his own artistic-spiritual formation. “You resemble him to such a degree in appearance and character,” he once told Vladimir, “that at certain moments I feel his soul to be living in you.”18 Solovyev’s pale, gaunt, and angular face, with large black eyes fixed in a distant stare, was framed by locks of hair falling to his stooping shoulders. His image had been compared with the Christ figure appearing in some Russian icons, and occasionally peasants, often taking him for a priest, would kneel down to obtain his blessing. Preferring a comparison with Italian Renaissance art, Dostoevsky was reminded of the Christ image in one of his favorite pictures from the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, The Head of the Young Christ by Carracci.
Solovyev left Russia in June 1875 to study abroad, and there he pored over the theosophic and kabbalistic wr
itings in the British Museum. Presumably under their inspiration, he abruptly embarked on a voyage to Egypt. A mysterious revelation, vouchsafed to him in a vision, had assured him that in this land of ancient mystery he would encounter the Divine Sophia, the feminine incarnation of Eternal Wisdom. Learning one day about a tribe in the desert who supposedly had preserved ancient kabbalistic lore, he decided to walk to their camp wearing his usual black-hued European clothes. The local Bedouins took him for some sort of evil spirit, and the story goes that he barely escaped with his life. Solovyev returned unscathed to Russia in July 1876, and became particularly close to Dostoevsky during the very last years of the novelist’s life.
Dostoevsky’s duties as editor of The Citizen turned out to be far more demanding than he had anticipated, partly because of his own exigent literary standards and partly because the editorial interferences of Meshchersky plagued him as much as they had Gradovsky. Meshchersky was sarcastically known in radical circles as “Prince Full Stop” after having flatly declared in one of his articles that “it is necessary to bring the fundamental reforms [initiated by Alexander II with the liberation of the serfs in 1861] to a full stop.”19
Dostoevsky’s problems as editor were also compounded by the debonair carelessness of Meshchersky about the regulations governing the Russian press. At the end of January 1873, The Citizen published an article by the prince in which he directly quoted Alexander II asking the head of a Kirghiz delegation whether he spoke Russian. It was forbidden to cite such august utterances without special permission, and the nonchalant prince, accustomed to chatting with royalty, had neglected to abide by this formality. Legal responsibility fell not on the author but on the editor of the publication, Dostoevsky, who was condemned to pay a fine of twenty-five rubles and spend two days in the guardhouse. His lawyer told him to plead not guilty, and he later commented ironically on the legal advice he was given (and followed) when the violation of the law was perfectly obvious.
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