Russia, that frenzied invalid you have depicted, is being girded with railroads, besprinkled with factories and banks—and in your novel there is not a single indication of this world! You focus your attention on an insignificant handful of madmen and scoundrels! There is no devil of national wealth [industrial expansion at the expense of the welfare of the people] in your novel, the most widespread devil of all and less than all the others knowing the boundaries of good and evil.20
Acknowledging the impact of Mikhailovsky’s article in the very next issue of The Citizen, Dostoevsky called it “a new revelation for me” (21: 156). Dostoevsky was touched by the gravity of Mikhailovsky’s tone, with its deeply felt expression of the Populists’ desire to sacrifice themselves on behalf of the people. But he had no illusions concerning the major point on which he and the Populists would continue to differ, and he put his finger on the crucial bone of contention between them, no matter how much their views might otherwise coincide. “But to write and assert that Socialism is not atheistic,” he admonished Mikhailovsky, “and that atheism is not its central, fundamental essence—that surprises me extremely” (21: 157).
Just about this time (1873) the antagonism between radicalism and religious faith had been resoundingly proclaimed by a resolution of the Slavic section of the First International. Under the influence of Bakunin, it had declared itself in favor of “atheism and materialism” and had pledged “to fight against any kind of divine worship, against all official religious confessions and . . . to endeavor to eradicate the idea of divinity in all its manifestations.”21 “Socialism—this is also Christianity,” Dostoevsky had jotted down in his notebooks (1872–1875), “but it proposes that it can succeed with reason.”22 Such words indicate his awareness of the Christian inspiration underlying Populist Socialism, but pinpoint what he felt to be its self-contradiction.
In one of the most arresting of Dostoevsky’s articles, “One of Today’s Falsehoods” (in which he aimed to free himself from the cloud hanging over his name as regards Demons), Dostoevsky focused on the atheism stemming from David Strauss for the purposes of his covert argument with the Populists. “People will tell me, perhaps . . . that, for example, even if Strauss does hate Christ and has set himself as his life’s goal the mocking of Christianity, he nevertheless worships humanity as a whole and his teaching is as elevated and noble as can be.” He is willing to admit that “the goals of all today’s leaders of progressive European thought are philanthropic and magnificent.” But he is also convinced of something else, which he expresses in a powerful peroration that now seems remarkably clairvoyant: “If you were to give all these grand, contemporary teachers full scope to destroy the old society and build it anew, the result would be such obscurity, such chaos, something so crude, blind, and inhuman that the whole structure would collapse to the sound of humanity’s curses before it could even be completed. Once having rejected Christ, the human heart can go to amazing lengths. That’s an axiom” (21: 132–133). Dostoevsky was thus arguing that even those who regarded Socialism as an updating of Christian ideals—as the Populists had begun to do again—were not immune from the temptations of Nechaevism, even though they had rejected the Utilitarianism basis of his tactics.
Nonetheless, because the Russian Populists no longer linked atheism to a rejection of Christian morality or the teachings of Christ as such, there will be a noticeable shift of accent in Dostoevsky’s relation to this new brand of radicalism. He will treat it with a mildness of tone in sharp contrast with his polemics of the 1860s, and his artistic notice will no longer be on figures like the underground man (who denies the possibility of any kind of morality, on Nihilist principles) or like Raskolnikov and Stavrogin, who replace Christian conscience with a Utilitarian calculus or with a proto-Nietzschean theory of amoral indifferentism beyond good and evil. The Populists had now come around to accepting the Christian values of “the Russian people’s truth,” and so he believed he could appeal to them in terms of a morality they would not automatically reject.
Dostoevsky had always insisted that the Russian knows in his heart of hearts that he has sinned; the European, on the other hand, complacently accepts malfeasance as perfectly justified. In this context, Dostoevsky famously asserted: “I think that the principal and most basic spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, incessant and unslakeable suffering, everywhere and in everything. I think the Russian people have been infused with this need from time immemorial. . . . There is always an element of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian people, and without it their happiness is incomplete” (21: 36). The Russian people’s imputed “love of suffering” meant a desire for moral and spiritual redemption, which in the end would gain the upper hand over the evils of the present time.
His great ambition had always been to reconcile the refractory and radicalized younger generation, if not to the existing conditions of Russian life, then to the government that, as he was convinced, offered the only possibility of changing such conditions for the better. This new basis for dialogue thus offered him an unrivaled opportunity, which he sought to utilize by publishing his next work in Mikhailovsky’s own journal, Notes of the Fatherland. The weakest link in the Populists’ ideology was their willingness to revere “the Russian people’s truth” while refusing to accept the root of this “truth” in the people’s inherited belief in Christ as the divine God-man. How could the Populists idolize the people without also adhering to the religious faith from which all the people’s moral values sprang and which for Dostoevsky provided their only firm anchorage? The theme of the necessity for religious faith takes on a new importance and intensity in the novels of this last period and is conspicuously placed in the foreground. To be sure, it had always been present, but subordinated to a defense of the Christian ethics of love and self-sacrifice against Nihilist onslaughts.
Dostoevsky and the Populists would continue to diverge on this fateful question of religious faith, although enough points of contact remained for him to acquire a unique status as someone who, despite his loyalty to the tsar, managed to transcend a narrow factionalism. And he tried to use this eminence, as the 1870s wore on, to ward off the catastrophe that loomed closer and closer for his country as the once peaceful, apolitical Populists turned to terror out of despair.
1 Cited in B. S. Itenberg, Dvizhenie revolyutsionnogo narodnichestvo (Moscow, 1965), 136.
2 Ibid., 136–137.
3 Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Garden City, NY, 1962), 201.
4 P. L. Lavrov, “The Cost of Progress,” in Russian Philosophy, ed. J. M. Edie, J. P. Scanlan, and M. B. Zeldin, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1964), 2: 141.
5 Cited in Itenberg, Dvizhenie revolyutsionnogo narodnichestvo, 83.
6 Cited in V. V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. G. L. Kline, 2 vols. (London, 1953), 1: 354.
7 Ibid., 369.
8 N. K. Mikhailovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1909), 4: 38–39.
9 Quoted in James H. Billington, Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism (Oxford, 1958), 131–132.
10 D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, “Istoria Russkoi intelligentsii,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1910–1911), vol. 8, part 2, 197.
11 Quoted in Billington, Mikhailovsky, 132.
12 Ibid., 67–68.
13 Ibid., 67.
14 Ibid., 66.
15 Kropotkin, Memoirs, 199.
16 Quoted in V. Bogucharsky, Aktivnoe narodnichestvo semidesyatikh godov (Moscow, 1912), 179.
17 Sochineniya N. K. Mikhailovskogo, 7 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1888), 2: 272–273.
18 Ibid., 304.
19 Ibid., 306–307.
20 Ibid.
21 Quoted in Itenberg, Dvizhenie revolyutsionnogo narodnichestvo, 346.
22 See LN 83 (Moscow, 1971), 290.
CHAPTER 48
Bad Ems
Dostoevsky resigned from The Citizen in April 1874, and it was shortly afterward that an un
expected event occurred: Nekrasov called on his former friend. Anna was aware of their recent estrangement, and when her husband invited his visitor into his study she could not resist eavesdropping on their conversation. What she heard was an offer from Nekrasov for Dostoevsky to contribute a new novel to Notes of the Fatherland during the next year, at “a payment of two hundred and fifty rubles per folio sheet, while until this time Dostoevsky had gotten only a hundred and fifty.”1 When he went to consult Anna, she impetuously told him to accept even before he could pose the question. Dostoevsky, however, went to Moscow to first determine whether Katkov, who had supported him so loyally for so long, wished to acquire his new novel for the Russian Messenger. Katkov consented to the higher rate per folio sheet but demurred at a large advance, and Dostoevsky was thus released from any obligation.
Around this time, a Russian specialist, Professor Koshlakov, had advised Dostoevsky that his emphysema could be alleviated by a six-week stay at the spa of Bad Ems, whose mineral waters were famous for their curative powers. At the beginning of June he thus left Staraya Russa for Petersburg and spent a few days looking after urgent matters before undertaking his journey abroad. One such case involved the estate of his late aunt, the wealthy A. F. Kumanina, who had given Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail ten thousand rubles each in 1864 and then excluded them from her will. Both Dostoevsky and Mikhail’s widow were contesting the exclusion. In a letter a month earlier to his younger brother Nikolay, an engineer given to drink and often aided by his older brother, Dostoevsky put pressure on him to sign a statement, as one of the heirs, renouncing any claim to the money given to the brothers. “Otherwise,” he writes, “don’t bother to have any dealings with me at all,”2 and Nikolay promptly complied.
Even though he was disappointed to find that only two copies of The Idiot had been sold at the offices of The Citizen, which served as a depot for the Dostoevsky publishing firm, he was heartened when he ran into a publisher named M. P. Nadein. “Nadein,” he writes Anna, “proposed to me definitely to publish a complete edition of my works . . . and all just for 5 percent, and as soon as he collects it, the whole edition will belong to me.” In Dostoevsky’s view, his literary stock had just risen because “the booksellers have gotten somewhat excited by Orest Miller’s . . . articles about me in Nedelya [The Week], in the end very laudatory.”3 These articles form a part of the volume Russian Literature since Gogol, and The Week was a journal with both marked Populist and Slavophil sympathies. Nadein was known as a personal friend of some of the leading Populist radicals, and his offer indicates how old ideological lines were now being redrawn. As A. S. Dolinin has remarked, Miller’s articles helped to remove some of the onus that had marred Dostoevsky’s reputation because of his editorship of The Citizen.4
If Dostoevsky unperturbedly went his own way and allowed his readership to interpret the idiosyncrasies of his social-political position in any manner they pleased, his old comrades-in-arms were not so serenely untroubled. He tells Anna that “Maikov was a little cold somehow” when he met his old friend at the home of Strakhov, and the latter, an inveterate gossip, also conveyed the unwelcome news that “Turgenev was to stay in Russia the whole year, write a novel, and bragged that he would describe ‘all the reactionaries’ (that is, including me).”5 Turgenev, as it turned out, remained in Russia for only two months, and his next novel, Virgin Soil, contained no such caricature. This letter also allows us to catch a glimpse of some of the intimacies of Dostoevsky’s home life. It continues with lines that Anna later attempted to obliterate. “Anya, dear,” her husband enjoins her, “please be attentive to them [the children]. I know that you love them. Just don’t yell at them and keep them clean.” There is an intimation as well that Anna ruled the servants with more of an iron hand than suited Dostoevsky’s own inclinations. “And be nice to Nanny,” he advised her.6
The overnight trip to Berlin was a grueling one, both because of the cold and because rail travel by ordinary coach meant sitting upright without sleep. From Berlin to Bad Ems was another raking ordeal (“We sat like herrings in a barrel”). Dostoevsky had arrived at the height of the tourist season, and “the prices [were] horrible”; all the careful calculations he and Anna had made bore no relation to reality. Scouring the town, he succeeded in renting two rooms, and he arranged to take his meals there as well. He hastened to see a doctor and, after being examined, was assured that there was no sign of consumption. He suffered from “a temporary catarrh” that interfered with his breathing, and he was ordered to drink water from a spring.7
Ordinarily, Dostoevsky wrote in the stillness of the late night hours, but in Ems, forced to adapt to the routine of his cure, such a schedule was impossible. “All of Ems,” he explains, “wakes up at 6:00 in the morning (me too), and at 6:30 a couple of thousand patients are already crowding around two springs. It starts usually with a very boring Lutheran hymn to God: I don’t know anything more sickly and artificial.” His prescription was to drink one glass of curative water at 7:00, walk for an hour, drink a second glass, and then return home for coffee. He tried to work after his morning coffee, but “until now I’ve just been reading Pushkin and getting intoxicated with delight. Each day I find something new. But on the other hand I haven’t been able to put something together for a novel.”8
Ems was overflowing with people, among whom he often heard his native Russian, but he found the vast majority of his compatriots as intolerable as the lady—a directress of an institute in Novocherkask—that he mentions to Anna: “A fool such as the world has never produced. A cosmopolitan and an atheist, who adores the tsar but despises her native land. I came right out and told her that she was unbearable and that she didn’t understand anything, laughing, of course, and in a society manner, but very seriously.”9 As his first enraptured response to the beauties of Ems wore off, his letters become one protracted litany of complaints. The unpredictable climate was trying and the epileptic attacks that he mentions in his letters also contributed to the jangled state of his nerves. “I have come to hate every building here, every bush. . . . I have become so irritable that (especially early in the morning) I view as a personal enemy every person in the slovenly crowd that throngs at the Kranchen [spring] and would perhaps be glad to be on bad terms with them.”10
The only relief for his aching misery was the news from Anna, and he awaited her letters with eager impatience as a balm to his gnawing loneliness. She wrote faithfully, but her letters never arrived on time—not, as Dostoevsky bemoaned, because of the inefficiency of the Russian post but because, as Anna learned a year later, they were being read by the secret police. He delighted in news of the children, about whom he worried incessantly. “News about the children is essential to me,” he tells Anna. “I can’t look at children even here calmly, and if I hear a child crying, I give way to misery and evil premonitions.”11 The letters also reveal that the marriage, despite the twenty years’ difference in age between the partners, had now become solidly rooted (for Dostoevsky at any rate) in a passionate sexual attachment. “I have seductive dreams of you,” he confides to Anna. “Do you dream of me? . . . You said that I’d probably start chasing after other women here abroad. My friend, I have come to know by experience that I can’t even imagine one other than you. . . . And besides, there’s nothing better in this regard than my Anechka. . . . I hope you won’t show this letter to anyone.”12 From a reference in this letter, one surmises that Anna too had confessed to having “indecent dreams,” and he replies affectionately with a famous quote from Gogol: “Never mind, never mind—silence!”13
Dostoevsky gave Anna a running account of his progress on his next novel, which was coming along, if at all, only at a snail’s pace. “I’ve prepared two plans for novels here and don’t know on which one to venture . . . at the end of August I’ll get down to the writing, and do you know what I’m worried about: whether I’ll have the energy and health for such hard work. . . . I’ve finished novels, but nonetheless, on the whole, have ruined m
y health.”14 He was upset for practical, as well as artistic, reasons. “I’m terribly troubled by the daily thought of how we will arrange things for ourselves in the fall and on what funds. (I cannot ask Nekrasov again [for another advance], and besides, he probably wouldn’t give me anything.) He isn’t Katkov; he’s a person from Yaroslavl.”15 Moreover, the flow of his inspiration was hampered by writing for a journal in which he hesitated to express himself freely. “The mere fact that Notes of the Fatherland will be afraid to publish certain of my opinions practically cuts off my hands.”16
A week before returning to Russia he writes that “although there really is an improvement, that is . . . less dry coughing, breathing is easier, and so on . . . a certain (diseased) place remains, and that diseased place in my chest refuses to heal completely.” Nonetheless, “in everything else I feel incomparably healthier than before: energy, sleep, appetite—all of this is excellent.”17 He left Bad Ems on July 27, and, according to Anna’s account, “he was not able to deny himself his deep desire to visit once more the grave of our first daughter, Sonya. He went to Geneva and visited the children’s cemetery of Plein Palais twice; and from Sonya’s grave he brought me a few sprigs of cypress, which in the course of six years had grown thick over our little girl’s monument.”18
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