Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Such was the self-sacrificing mood in which the educated youth “went to the people” in the early 1870s, and what they expected to find in the Russian villages was not only absolution from the sin of their privileges but also a morally superior form of life, a primitive Socialist Arcadia far preferable to the supposedly more advanced countries of the West.

  If Lavrov had inspired the educated youth with a sense of guilt about their own advantages, another Populist thinker, Nikolay Mikhailovsky, persuaded them that the Russian village and the Russian peasant harbored unsuspected treasures that should not be lightly surrendered to the march of “progress.” Mikhailovsky, who enjoyed enormous prestige in the 1870s, was a member of the editorial board and a regular contributor to Notes of the Fatherland, and his monthly column was eagerly devoured. His credentials with the new generation had been established by a small book, What Is Progress?, which appeared shortly after Lavrov’s Letters. These reflections are a product of that widespread disillusionment with the West, particularly France, produced among Russian progressives by the failure of the revolutions of 1848, the assumption of power by Napoleon III, and the ferocious suppression of the Paris Commune in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Taking up a refrain to which Herzen had first given voice after 1848, and which Dostoevsky had echoed in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions in 1863, Mikhailovsky argued that a decadent Western civilization could no longer serve as a lodestar to the left-leaning Russians eagerly seeking the way toward a more just social-economic order.

  Such disenchantment found eloquent expression in Mikhailovsky’s notable critique of “progress” as this concept was understood in Europe. Employing the ideas of Charles Darwin and the then-famous Herbert Spencer, but turning them to his own purposes, Mikhailovsky maintained that progress should be measured in terms of the richness and diversity of human life that it furthered, not solely by the accumulating production of material goods. Understood only in this latter sense, as was the case in Europe, progress could well destroy the integrity of all individual life still preserved in less developed social forms (that is, the Russian village). The so-called “objective” scientific laws governing society—the laws worked out in Western social thought—offer no help in choosing between these two notions of progress, and Mikhailovsky argued that a “subjective” (moral) criterion must be introduced in favor of the protection of the individual personality.

  Thus Lavrov and Mikhailovsky rejected the worship of “science”—so typical of the Nihilism of the 1860s—as the ultimate basis of human values; they firmly broke with ideas that left no independent room (at least in theory) for the human personality and hence for morality. For these thinkers, as much earlier for Kant, science determines the laws of the physical world but not of human desires and ideals. Lavrov made a direct appeal to the moral sensibility of the intelligentsia as the basis for his radicalism; and Mikhailovsky too, in his Slavophil-tinged critique of progress, used “subjective” moral criteria as the justification for his distaste of its Western avatar. Such aspects of Populist thought were much closer to Dostoevsky’s own views than anything he had encountered previously among radical ideologues.

  One of the dogmas of radical ideology in the 1860s, expounded most intransigently by Chernyshevsky, was a monistic materialism—supposedly the last word in “scientific” thought—that excluded the possibility of any such entity as “free will.” For Dostoevsky, it was a moral-psychological necessity of the human personality to experience itself as free, and he now found in the key Populist texts a decisive affirmation of precisely what he had maintained all along—and what Nihilism had declared to be nonexistent. “I take as my point of departure,” affirmed Lavrov, “the fact of the consciousness of freedom, and on the foundation of these facts I construct a coherent system of moral process.”6 Similarly, Mikhailovsky wrote that “society obeys certain laws in its development; but no less unquestionable is man’s inherent consciousness of a free choice of action. At the moment of action I am aware that I give myself a goal freely, completely independent of the influence of historical conditions.”7

  Like Dostoevsky ten years earlier, the generation of the 1870s now explicitly rejected the incongruous attempt to extract a morality of obligation out of “rational egoism,” and no one attacked it more incisively than Mikhailovsky. “Clinging to this formula,” Mikhailovsky argued, “we lost sight of the fact that, in the first place, the extension of our personal ego to the point of self-sacrifice, to the possibility of identification with an alien life—is just as real as the crudest egoism. And that, in the second place, the formula that sacrifice is sheer nonsense does not at all cover our own psychic situation, for more than ever before we are ready to make the most extreme sacrifices.”8 After such a passage, it is no surprise to learn that the critic had read Crime and Punishment with great admiration.

  This revival among the Populists of a sensitivity to the ethics of self-sacrifice, so movingly dramatized in that work, went hand in hand with a renewed respect for Christianity itself. In a speech given in 1872, Mikhailovsky explained that “the ancient world knew nothing of the idea of personality. Man as something beyond fixed castes, layers, and nationalities meant nothing to antiquity. . . . Christianity gave a completely new characteristic to history. It brought forth the thought of the absolute worth of man and human personality . . . henceforth, for all people, in spite of delays, mistakes, and wanderings, there is but one goal: the absolute recognition of man, of human personality, and of its many-sided development.”9 Such a positive view of Christianity by a spokesman for the radicals would have been inconceivable in the 1860s, but now he identifies his own social-cultural ideal—a Populist Socialism based on the supreme value of the human personality—with the emergence of Christianity as a world religion.

  Such a revaluation of Christianity was typical of the mood of the entire generation for whom Mikhailovsky had become a spokesman. D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, the great turn-of-the-century historian of the Russian intelligentsia, accordingly stressed that what distinguished the Populists of the 1870s from the previous generation was, above all, their “psychological religiosity.” “In place of the one-sided attraction for the physical sciences appeared a lively interest in social, economic, and historical questions—in particular, for the history of the movements of the people, in the Raskol [the religious dissenters] and the sects. The indifferentism and skepticism in religion, which so sharply marked the ‘Pisarevist’ tendency, notably declined. Unconcerned with dogmatic religion, with official religion, the new generation displayed an unmistakable interest in the Gospels, in Christian ethics, and in Christ the man.”10

  Mikhailovsky helped to infuse the Populist mentality with Proudhonian ideas, which translate the messianic hopes of the Christian faith into modern, secularized terms. N. V. Sokolov, a friend of Mikhailovsky’s who was arrested and tried in the mid-1860s for a book called The Heretics, declared in open court that “the entire guilt of the heretic Socialists consists in the fact that they seek the Kingdom of God not in the clouds but on earth.” “Silence me,” he told his judges, “if you find in my words any perversion of the commandment of Christian love of neighbor. I know only that none of you loves Christ more than I.”11 Dostoevsky had accepted a similar view of Socialism in the 1840s, and a copy of Proudhon’s La célébration du dimanche was found in his room at the time of his arrest in 1849. Whether or not he had read statements like those of Sokolov, the spirit they conveyed was familiar from his own past and was omnipresent in the Russian culture of the 1870s.

  Narodnichestvo could thus hardly have failed to evoke a sympathetic response from Dostoevsky, who joined here with the Slavophils as well as the Populists. All were alarmed at the growth of capitalism in the country, and regarded the existing social-economic institutions of the peasantry (and hence the way of life and the ethos from which they sprang) as uniquely valuable and precious in themselves and in their present form. The most essential task of the Populists, particularly in face of
the increasing pace of industrialization, was to protect peasant life from the forces leading to the disintegration of the commune. “In Russia,” Mikhailovsky had declared in 1872, reversing the earlier thrust of Russian radicalism, “only the preservation of the means of labor in the hands of the workers is required, a guarantee to the present proprietors [the peasants] of their property.”12 As far back as 1850, Dostoevsky had agreed with the Slavophils that European conceptions of a workers’ revolution had no relevance to Russian social conditions, and Mikhailovsky was now presumably agreeing with such views, in effect renouncing social-political revolution in favor of safeguarding the economic interests of the peasantry.

  Even though the Populists now accepted the Christian virtue of self-sacrifice, which for Dostoevsky lay at the root of the peasant obshchina in a socially modified form, they preferred to cast their ideas in more contemporary terms. Mikhailovsky thus worked out his own “sociological” variant of the pervasive myth that peasant life was valuable in its own right. The criterion of progress, he argued, should be the achievement in human life of the most harmonious and well-rounded personality. From this point of view, although Europe had reached a higher “stage” of social development than Russia, the Russian peasant represented a “higher type” of humanity than his counterpart, the European industrial worker. The Russian peasant, in accomplishing his daily tasks, employed all of his diverse physical and mental capacities and thus remained an integral individual; the European industrial worker, ever more splintered by the refinements of the division of labor, had been literally reduced to a dehumanized cog. In his still privately cherished ideology of pochvennnichestvo, Dostoevsky had looked forward to the Europeanized intelligentsia returning to the values embodied in their native soil to create a new and richer synthesis, and the aim of Populism was to safeguard the unique worth embodied in the superior type of life of the Russian peasant, raising it to a higher “stage” without destroying its irreplaceable virtues.

  Even though pochvennichestvo and narodnichestvo cannot simply be equated, the similarity in overall perspective—particularly the quasi-Slavophil disaffection with European civilization—is nonetheless evident. Mikhailovsky had been appalled by Marx’s depiction of “primitive accumulation,” the process by which the English yeomen had been forced from the land in order to create an industrial proletariat dependent on wage labor. “Reason and moral feeling did not influence the economic development of Europe,” he had indignantly declared to advocates of Russia’s industrial expansion along European lines.13 To exorcise the monstrous image of evil displayed in the Crystal Palace of the London World’s Fair, Dostoevsky had likewise appealed to the moral values still preserved at the roots of Russian life. Mikhailovsky now wrote that “we not only do not scorn Russia, but we see in its past, and still in its present, much on which we can rely to ward off the falsities of European civilization.”14

  The activity of the Populists in the early 1870s could well have seemed to Dostoevsky a more than coincidental response to everything he had been advocating in his books. A classic description of their aims and ideals in the spring of 1874 can be found again in the memoirs of Prince Kropotkin. The primary concern of all, he writes, was to find the answer to one important question:

  In what way could they be useful to the masses? Gradually, they came to the idea that the only way was to settle among the people, and to live the people’s life. Young men came to the villages as doctors, doctor’s helpers, village scribes, even as agricultural laborers, blacksmiths, woodcutters. . . . Girls passed teacher’s examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and went by the hundreds to the villages, devoting themselves to the poorest part of the population. These people went without any idea of social reconstruction in mind, or any thought of revolution. They simply wanted to teach the mass of the peasants to read, to instruct them in other things, to give them medical help, and in this way to aid in raising them from their darkness and misery, and to learn at the same time what were their popular ideals of a better social life.15

  This picture is a little too idyllic, although it can be accepted as a firsthand account of the deeply altruistic mood in which the young Populists went to the people. Their aim was also to “raise the consciousness” of the people and to prepare the way for revolution. Some groups, influenced by Bakunin, were convinced that only a spark was necessary to ignite a raging fire of revolt among the descendants of Pugachev and Stenka Razin, and they were disappointed to find the Russian folk so distressingly immune to their incendiary rhetoric. The peasants on the whole would have little truck with these educated youth, who mysteriously appeared in their midst awkwardly garbed in peasant clothes, and they loyally reported them to the police. Dostoevsky had prophesied just such a reaction in the concluding pages of Demons, when his pathetic innocent, Stepan Verkhovensky, decided to “go to the people” about whom he had been prating all his life.

  All of literate Russia was emotionally stirred by this moral crusade, which suddenly, and apparently spontaneously, moved thousands of the finest youth to “give up their riches” (many came from wealthy and highly placed families) and “go to the people.” The minister of justice, Count Pahlen, noted in surprise that many respectable families helped their own children embark on this irresistible outpouring of effort to realize the Christian ideal of love, the ideal of aiding and comforting those who suffer. S. M. Kravchinsky, a participant who was scarcely a sentimentalist (a few years later he would stab to death in broad daylight the head of the Russian secret police), spoke of the movement as hardly anything “that could be called political. It was rather some sort of crusading procession, distinguished by the totally infectious and all-embracing character of a religious movement. People sought not only the attainment of a definite practical goal, but at the same time the satisfaction of a deep need for personal moral purification.”16

  Dostoevsky could well have discerned in what he heard of these events—and all of Russian society was abuzz with rumors about them—the beginning of a realization of his own social-political ideal. For the Populist youth were not only concerned to educate and arouse the people, they also wished to be educated themselves, to assimilate to them, learn about their values and beliefs. Dostoevsky had always dreamed of such a fusion between the intelligentsia and the people, and he could well have believed, during the mad spring and summer of 1874, that the longed-for day had finally dawned. But if so, a major article of Mikhailovsky’s on Demons in Notes of the Fatherland revealed the gulf between the radicals and himself that would never be bridged.

  Taking pains to treat Dostoevsky with respect as “one of the most talented of our contemporary writers,” Mikhailovsky focuses his critique on Dostoevsky’s depiction of Russian radicalism as the end product of the disintegrating European influence on Russian culture. As Dostoevsky saw it, the Russian educated classes had become detached from the Russian people and simultaneously from the people’s religion, and had thus lost the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. Hence they were inevitably doomed to the destruction depicted in Demons. Mikhailovsky objects, however, that it is not necessary to share the religious convictions of the people in order to accept the moral values embodied in their way of life. Dostoevsky, he points out, uses the word “God” in Demons sometimes to mean a supreme being and sometimes as a synonym for “national particularities” and national customs, thus identifying attachment to the Russian people with religious faith. But this theory is “simply impossible,” and Mikhailovsky carefully disengages the question of religion from that of the relation between the intelligentsia and the people.17

  For the novelist, there is only the unequivocal condemnation of the intelligentsia pronounced in Demons or the equally unequivocal and uncritical glorification of the people in his journalistic pieces. Dostoevsky is “a happy man,” Mikhailovsky writes enviously. “He knows that whatever happens with the people, in the end it will save itself and us.”18 All those who do not share this faith in the people, with all their cu
stoms and beliefs, are called citoyens by Dostoevsky, the French appellation stressing their alienation from their native soil. But whatever the past, Mikhailovsky goes on, it is a mistake to overlook the new group of citoyens (the Populists), who, while sharing his reverence for “the Russian people’s truth,” nonetheless find the traditions of this “truth” contradictory and confusing; they accept only that part which coincides with the general principles of “humanity” acquired from other sources (the ideals of social justice embodied in Western Socialism). Indeed, as Mikhailovsky penetratingly remarks, Dostoevsky does the very same thing himself in many instances, though refusing to acknowledge that he arbitrarily identifies his own humane values with “the Russian people’s truth.”

  In a passage that became famous and echoes Lavrov, Mikhailovsky writes that these citoyens are willing to forgo agitating for legal and political rights, which would benefit only themselves as members of the educated class, and work for social reforms of immediate benefit to the people. “Giving the preference to social reforms over political ones,” Mikhailovsky explains, “we are only renouncing the strengthening of our rights and the development of our freedom as instruments for the oppression of the people and even further sin.”19 Admonishing Dostoevsky directly, he writes: “If you would stop playing with the word ‘God’ and become acquainted somewhat more closely with your shameful Socialism, you would be convinced that it coincides with at least some of the elements of the Russian people’s truth.” Rather than attack those who now share a common reverence for the people and their “truth,” he urges Dostoevsky to look around and pay attention to all the new “devils” that have recently emerged to plague the country: