Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  No later than the end of his first month as editor, Dostoevsky confesses to his niece Sofya Ivanova that “My time has now shaped up so awfully that I can only curse myself for the resolve with which I suddenly took upon myself the editorship of the journal.”20 He had promised Meshchersky that he would supply the weekly with a column of political commentary, and he wrote to Anna (who had taken the children to Staraya Russa for the summer) that “I have to read through newspapers by the dozens” in order to write such political articles. No wonder he says that “horribly depressing thoughts and . . . dejection . . . [have] overcome me almost to the point of illness at the thought that I have tied myself down to all this hard labor at The Citizen for at least another year.”21

  Soliciting a contribution from the nationalist historian Mikhail Pogodin, whose staunchly patriotic writings Dostoevsky admired, he complains that the weekly had no secretary to take care of routine business matters, and even more, “my main source of distress is the mountain of topics on which I would like to write myself.” “Much needs to be said,” he continues, “for which reason I first joined the journal . . . here is my goal and thought: Socialism . . . has corroded an entire generation. . . . We need to fight, because everything has been infected. My idea is that Socialism and Christianity are antitheses. That is what I would like to show in a whole series of pieces, but meanwhile I haven’t even started.”22

  The summer of 1873 was a particularly difficult time for Dostoevsky. His editorial duties required him to remain in Petersburg separated from his family in Staraya Russa. His letters are filled with laments about his sadness and loneliness, his (sometimes frightening) dreams about his children, his concern over Anna’s health, and the difficulties of making arrangements so he could spend a few days in the country. Recounting a nightmare in which his son Fedya falls from a fourth-floor windowsill, he instructs Anna: “Write me as soon as possible about whether anything happened to Fedya. . . . I believe in second sight, the more so as it is factual, and I won’t calm down until I get your letter.”23

  Provided now with an income for his own expenses, Dostoevsky was still constantly in economic straits when the time came to meet the installments for the debts of his deceased brother Mikhail. A due date fell in late July, and he was forced to pawn his watch to pay off this obligation. Some consolation, however, was provided by an evening spent with Pobedonostsev, whose invitation he accepted even though he had felt feverish for a week. He tells Anna gratefully that his host had been very solicitous: “He wrapped me in a blanket; . . . he himself saw me down three flights of stairs, with a candle in his hand, right out to the street entrance.” What gratified him even more was the news that the latter had read Crime and Punishment with great appreciation “upon the recommendation of a certain person, an admirer of mine very well known to you, whom he accompanied to England.” Pobedonostsev had just returned from vacationing on the Isle of Wight with Tsarevich Alexander, who had been the guest of the British royal family. “Consequently,” Dostoevsky writes, “things are not as bad as all that. (Please don’t chatter about this, darling Anechka).”24

  Anna returned to Petersburg with the children at the end of August 1873, and Dostoevsky could once again resume the tranquil routine of family life he had so much longed for in their absence. But the anxieties and grueling routine of meeting weekly deadlines never ceased for a moment. If Meshchersky’s editorial high-handedness provided a constant source of friction, much more serious conflicts arose when they clashed on social-cultural issues. In one instance The Citizen became involved in a controversy with the St. Petersburg News, and both Dostoevsky and the prince worked on a reply. Meshchersky brought up the question of revolutionary proclamations from abroad circulating in the student milieu; and he suggested that such “distractions” might be circumvented if students lived in dormitories under the surveillance of the authorities. Dostoevsky had no objections to improving student living conditions, but explains in a note to the prince why he unceremoniously struck out seven lines “about the task of government surveillance.” “I have my reputation as a writer,” Dostoevsky states, “and in addition I have children. I do not intend to destroy myself.” The next sentence, inked out in the original text, has been deciphered: “Besides, your idea is deeply opposed to my convictions and fills my heart with indignation.”25 This last sentence was obviously too impolitic for the rabidly reactionary Prince Full Stop, who, true to form, countered that “I presume you are not of the opinion that the students should be without surveillance.”26 Although no answer was given to this challenge, the odious seven lines, which would have ruined Dostoevsky’s reputation forever as the partisan of a police state, remained unprinted.

  His opinions were clearly not tailored to any official government line, and his independence brought on another clash with the censorship. A widespread famine afflicted several Russian provinces during 1873–1874, and he printed several articles critical of the government’s response, especially in the province of Samaria. These articles brought down the wrath of the guardians of the press, who banned the sale of individual copies of The Citizen. Only subscribers could receive the weekly, resulting in a considerable loss of revenue. Dostoevsky wrote a fulsomely supplicating letter to a high press official, asking this dignitary to intercede with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the ban was lifted a month later.

  By the beginning of 1874, the strains and stresses of editing The Citizen began to wear on Dostoevsky’s health. As Anna notes sadly, “Feodor Mikhailovich, who had to leave the house in every kind of weather . . . and to sit for hours in an overheated proofreading room before each issue went to press, began to catch frequent colds.” Consequently, “his slight cough became acute and a shortness of breath appeared”—the beginning of the emphysema that was eventually to cause his death. “Compressed air treatment” was prescribed by his doctor, and “Feodor Mikhailovich would sit under the bell [the apparatus placed over his head] for two hours at a time, three times a week.” Even though “the treatment was very beneficial,” it “made the fulfillment of his editorial duties all the more difficult.”27

  In March 1874 Dostoevsky finally served the sentence condemning him to two days’ detention in a guardhouse. A. F. Koni, an official in the Ministry of Justice who was an admirer, arranged that the date be set at Dostoevsky’s convenience. The guardhouse was in the center of Petersburg, and Anna brought her husband a suitcase with “overnight necessities.” “He asked whether the children had missed him, and wanted me to give them some goodies for him and tell them he had gone to Moscow for toys.”28 Anna enlisted Maikov to visit Dostoevsky the next day, and he in turn contacted Vsevolod Solovyev, who also dropped in. Solovyev found the prisoner sitting at a small table in a spacious and “reasonably clean room, drinking tea, rolling and smoking cigarettes,”29 and perusing a copy of Hugo’s Les misérables borrowed from Timofeyeva.

  The imprisonment evidently revived memories of his confinement in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress almost a quarter of a century earlier. The two men had not seen each other recently, and the younger one complained of suffering from apathy. The best treatment, Dostoevsky insisted, was the one that fate had imposed on him—a sudden change, the shock of new situations and the need to adjust to a new environment. “When I found myself in the fortress, I thought: this is the end, I thought I wouldn’t hold out for three days, and—suddenly I calmed down. . . . Oh, that was a great happiness for me: Siberia and the katorga. People say: horror, resentment, they speak of the rightness of some sort of resentment! What awful nonsense! Only there did I have a healthy, happy life, I understood myself there, my dear fellow. . . . I understood Christ. . . . I understood Russian man and felt that I was a Russian myself, that I was one of the Russian people.”30

  Such words cannot be taken as even a remotely adequate account of Dostoevsky’s experiences after his arrest and during his years in prison camp. They convey, rather, the sense of triumph over the hardships he had been forced to endure, and the transf
ormation of his personality and convictions that had resulted from these years. He emerged from the ordeal of his mock execution with an ecstatic sense of the infinite value of life, and he recalls this epiphanic moment to Solovyev as their talk continued. “Ah, life is a wonderful thing. . . . In every incident, in every object, in every word there is so much happiness!”31 In conclusion, asking his admirer to visit Anna and assure her that he was in the best of spirits, he cautioned him to speak softly. If the servants heard that their master was under arrest, they would conclude that he was probably guilty of theft.

  This event certainly played its part in Dostoevsky’s surrender of the editorship on April 1, 1874. There was as well the steady accumulation of internal reasons connected with editorial policy. “You ask what I’ve been doing,” he writes to Pogodin in November 1873. “I keep being sick and flying into rages. My hands are somewhat tied. In tackling the editorship a year ago, I imagined that I would be much more independent.”32 The impossibility to write anything nonjournalistic also proved a continual torment. Early in his editorship he had told Pogodin that “the shapes of stories and novels swarm in my head and take shape in my heart. . . . I see that all my time is taken up with the journal . . . and I am driven to repentance and despair.”33 Adding to his distress was the prevailing hostility toward The Citizen. All the other journals of the time, Vsevolod Solovyev explains, criticized The Citizen harshly and even coarsely. “On the new editor, a stupid and vulgar mockery rained down from all sides. The author of Crime and Punishment and House of the Dead was called a madman, a maniac, a renegade, a traitor; the public were even invited to visit the show at the Academy of Art and contemplate the portrait of Dostoevsky painted by Perov as prime proof that here was such a madman, whose place was in a home for the feeble-minded.”34 One can well understand his desire to escape from this unremitting hail of invective.

  However, Dostoevsky’s year-and-a-half term as editor was far from entirely negative, and a conversation relayed by Timofeyeva discloses the mutation of sensibility that occurred at this time. Telling her of his intention to resign and to begin work on a new novel, Dostoevsky suggested that she ask her Populist friends at Notes of the Fatherland whether they would have room for such a novel next year. For the author of Demons even to think of publishing in the most prominent of the left-wing journals of the time certainly indicated an astonishing change of front! When the question was posed by Timofeyeva to G. Z. Eliseev, the same radical publicist who had once accused Dostoevsky of slandering Russian students in Crime and Punishment, he replied “with the friendliest voice: ‘Of course, let him send it along. We’ll always find a place for him.’ ”35 Dostoevsky’s next novel, A Raw Youth (Podrostok), thus was serialized in the pages of Notes of the Fatherland—to the astonishment of all and to the dismay of his closest and oldest friends.

  1 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 220.

  2 DVS, 2: 139.

  3 Ibid., 141.

  4 Ibid., 140.

  5 Ibid., 142.

  6 Ibid., 163–164.

  7 Ibid., 144.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ibid., 145–146.

  10 The poem of Lermontov is a translation of Byron’s “Farewell,” first published in 1859. See DVS, 2: 517.

  11 DVS, 2: 184–185.

  12 Ibid., 179–180.

  13 Ibid., 180–181.

  14 Ibid., 161–162.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Pis’ma, 3: 229.

  17 Cited in LN 83 (Moscow, 1971), 331.

  18 Reminiscences, 223.

  19 DVS, 2: 512.

  20 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 258–259; January 31, 1873.

  21 Ibid., 281–282; July 23, 1873.

  22 Ibid., 262; February 26, 1873.

  23 Ibid., 282; July 26, 1873.

  24 Ibid., 284.

  25 Ibid., 307; November 12, 1873.

  26 Ibid., 519.

  27 Reminiscences, 226.

  28 Ibid., 227.

  29 DVS, 2: 211–213.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Ibid., 213.

  32 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 308; November 12, 1873.

  33 Ibid., 262; February 26, 1873.

  34 DVS, 2: 209.

  35 Ibid.

  CHAPTER 47

  Narodnichestvo: Russian Populism

  Dostoevsky’s surprising desire to offer his next novel to the leading Populist journal, Notes of the Fatherland—edited by the poet Nekrasov and the deadly satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, who had mercilessly pilloried him in the 1860s—is a direct outcome of the young intelligentsia’s shift to an ideology known as narodnichestvo, or Russian Populism. This new tendency in radical ideology peaked during the Nechaev trial, whose effect was to destroy the Utilitarian morality (or lack of anything that could be called morality) of the 1860s. There is ample evidence that the stirring speeches made not only by the defense attorneys but also by some of the defendants in the name of liberty and justice produced a rousing effect on the student youth who flocked to the courtroom and jammed the benches. For many, as one contemporary wrote, “those being tried appeared as fighters struggling to free the people from the oppression of the government. The youth surrendered to the fascination of the battle for the ideas of truth and justice and tried to find a better path for bringing them into being”1 than had been offered by Nechaevism.

  The nationwide newspaper coverage revealed the tactics of Nechaev in all their sinister details, which led to a horrified revulsion even among those who sympathized with his aims. The considerable memoir literature left by the survivors of the Populist movement returns again and again to their sense of outrage when they learned the truth. Vera Figner, for example, wrote that Nechaev’s “theory—that the end justifies the means—repelled us, and the murder of Ivanov filled us with disgust.”2 (Nonetheless, she was later to become a member of the executive committee of the terrorist organization People’s Will, which planned the assassination of Alexander II.)

  The circles of radical youth that began to form now took the lessons of Nechaevism to heart and avoided any temptation to disregard morality in the higher interest of the revolutionary cause. Prince Peter Kropotkin—the scion of an ancient noble family destined for a distinguished career at the imperial court, who became instead both a noted scientist and an anarchist and revolutionary—belonged to one of these circles (the Chaikovsky group) and left a portrait of its dominating ethos. “The circle of self-education of which I am speaking was constituted in opposition to the methods of Nechaev. The few friends [in the circle] had judged, quite correctly, that a morally developed individuality must be the foundation of every organization . . . whatever program of action it may adopt in the course of future events.”3 His remarks stress the new moral and ethical dimension that had now come to the fore in radical self-awareness.

  The younger generation thus abandoned the Utilitarian morality preached by the dominating ideologists of the Nihilist 1860s, such as Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, and especially reacted against Pisarev, who had encouraged a contemptuous elitism among the intelligentsia toward the people and envisaged the only hope of progress as lying in the self-cultivation of the educated youth through the study of science. When such ideas were combined with Pisarev’s panegyric to the glories of personal self-fulfillment and rampant individualism, the Pisarevschina of the late 1860s opened the way for a slackening of the moral idealism that had marked the activities of the intelligentsia so notably in the earlier part of the decade.

  This complex of ideas and attitudes was sharply attacked in Peter Lavrov’s Historical Letters (1869–1870), which became a major source of inspiration for the narodnik (Populist) intelligentsia of the 1870s. During the student disorders at the University of St. Petersburg in 1862, Lavrov, an ex-artillary colonel who had taught mathematics at various military academies, encouraged the rebellious youth by addressing one of their turbulent meetings in full military regalia. Later arrested and stripped of his rank after the 1865 attempt on the life of Alexander
II (in which he had no part), he was sent to live in a poverty-stricken village in the northern district of Vologda. There he wrote his letters and published them legally under a pseudonym. He escaped abroad after a few years and continued his career as an important, highly respected scholar and publicist who participated actively in the European radical movement. A good friend of Karl Marx, he became the editor and chief contributor of a radical Russian émigré review, Forward (Vpered), writing both as a commentator on Russian affairs and as a learned historian of social thought.

  Lavrov’s Historical Letters compose a sweeping, essayistic survey whose theme is the rise of civilization from barbarism. In the immediate Russian context, his most influential idea is contained in his fourth letter, “The Cost of Progress,” which assesses the exorbitant price paid in human suffering for the advancement of civilization. He stresses the “debt” that cultivated minorities (the Russian intelligentsia) owe to the suffering millions (the Russian peasantry) who have toiled through the centuries to provide them with the means for their self-cultivation. How can this debt be absolved? “I shall relieve myself of responsibility for the bloody cost of my own development,” writes Lavrov, “if I utilize this same development to diminish evil in the present and in the future.”4

  These words produced an electrifying effect on a whole generation of Russian youth, who were dispiritedly groping for a positive moral ideal. N. S. Rusanov, later an important publicist, experienced their galvanizing shock as a young student:

  At one time we had been attracted to Pisarev, who told us of the great utility of the natural sciences in making a “thinking realist” out of men. . . . [W]e wished to live in the name of our “cultivated egoism,” rejecting all authority and making our goal a free and happy life for ourselves and for those who shared our ideas. And suddenly [Lavrov’s] little book tells us that there are other things besides the natural sciences. The anatomy of frogs by itself does not take us very far [an allusion to Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, who spends his time dissecting frogs]. . . . There are the people, the hungry masses, worn out by labor, working people who themselves support the whole edifice of civilization solely to make it possible for us to study frogs. . . . How ashamed we were of our miserable bourgeois plans for a happy personal life! To the devil with “rational egoism” and “thinking realism.” . . . Henceforth our lives must belong wholly to the masses, and only by dedicating all our strength to the triumph of social justice could we appear anything but fraudulent bankrupts before our country and before all mankind.5