Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  A discussion between Kraft and Arkady at Dergachev’s underscores the importance of values being embedded in an idea-feeling pervading the personality to its very core, and the impossibility of replacing such an idea-feeling by any abstract notion such as a “future unknown people.” Dostoevsky here is transposing his own belief in humankind’s need for an irrational faith—specifically, a faith in Christ as God-man, and hence a belief in immortality and resurrection—as the sole secure buttress of moral values.

  The attack on Kraft by other members of the Dergachev group also inspires Arkady to spring to his defense with a lengthy and impassioned outburst. For just as Kraft is in the grip of an idea-feeling about Russia, so Arkady has his own about becoming a Rothschild; no abstract argument can alter the resentments of his ego, in which his idea-feeling has its root. Arkady is searching for a new ideal, a new faith, that can overcome his smoldering need for revenge and power, but he sees in his interlocutors only a demand that he surrender his individuality entirely. His tirade has often been compared with that of the underground man, who expressed a similarly passionate, egoistic self-assertion against a Socialist world that Arkady imagines consisting of “barracks, communistic homes, stricte nécessaire, atheism, and communistic wives without children” (13: 50).

  But Arkady defends his own egoism with a more relevant argument—one aimed directly at the Populist refusal to acknowledge the necessary “idea-feeling” of religious faith. “Why should it concern me what will happen to this humanity of yours in a thousand years’ time, if all you allow me under your rules is no love, no life after death, and no possibility of being noble and self-sacrificing?” Returning to the charge a bit later, he invokes the doomsday vision of the earth becoming a cold planet, on which—according to the conclusions of the recently discovered and widely popularized second law of thermodynamics—human life will have vanished entirely. “And why should I be bound to love my neighbor, or your future humanity,” Arkady cries, “which I shall never see, which will never know anything about me, and which will in its turn disappear and leave no trace (time counts as nothing in this) when the earth in its turn will be changed into an iceberg, and will fly off into the void with an infinite multitude of other similar icebergs?” (13: 48–49). Here Arkady addresses precisely the dedication to an ideal without any of the hope provided by immortality. From where would the idea-feelings necessary for its support be derived? Dostoevsky’s Populist readers were thus being informed that merely secular altruistic values would not prove sufficient to sustain them indefinitely and that, like Kraft, they might reach the limit of despair.

  The encounters between Arkady and Versilov in Part 1 are touching and effective because they spring from the basic father-son relationship and are not yet distorted by the complications of the intrigue. The plot begins to dominate in the second section, which takes place after a lapse of two months. Arkady, in the interval, has become transformed into a fashionable dandy-about-town, and in a series of picaresque adventures he plunges into the whirl of social life. His sponsor in this transformation is the young Prince Sokolsky, in whose apartment he lives and who furnishes him with funds. Arkady now experiences one disillusioning shock after another, and these become so severe that he is seized by the destructive impulse to set the entire world on fire.

  All of Arkady’s misadventures in this second part may be viewed as an exposure to what Dostoevsky calls “the common Russian fate” (13: 247), and this phrase applies to all the upper-class figures as well. They all exhibit a hopeless moral impotence, which disintegrates under extreme pressure into a pathological split personality. Young Prince Sokolsky, for example, nourishes the highest conceptions of his obligation to maintain the most rigid standards of personal honor, yet he is guilty of the most contemptible and disloyal conduct and continually violates his own principles.

  None of Arkady’s disillusionments is so severe as what occurs in relation to Versilov, whose elevation of spirit makes his vulnerability to “the Russian fate” all the more disturbing. At the beginning of Part 2, Versilov is presented as a propounder of the loftiest ideas, a man profoundly preoccupied with the most crucial problems of his time, but his wisdom and insight are always tinged with a feeling of impotence. Haughtily impugning the “materialism” of the modern world, he predicts to Arkady that society will finally collapse in “general bankruptcy,” leading to class warfare between “the beggars” and the “bondholders and creditors.” When Arkady inquires anxiously what can be done about this frightening prospect, he only replies that “to do nothing is always best. One’s conscience is at rest anyway, knowing that one’s had no share in anything” (13: 172).

  Similarly, Arkady can derive no positive moral guidance from Versilov’s general ideas about human nature and human life. “To love one’s neighbor and not despise him is impossible,” he informs his son, adding that “ ‘love for humanity’ must be understood as love for that humanity which you have yourself created in your soul (in other words, you have created yourself and your love is for yourself), and which, therefore, will never be reality.” But such disillusioning words are counterbalanced by another dialogue, in which Versilov tells Arkady that “to turn stones into bread . . . is a great thought,” but “it’s not the greatest.” For “men will be satisfied and forget” and then ask: “Well, I’ve had enough and what can I do now?” The question of the meaning of life and of the ultimate destiny of mankind transcends the issue of the satisfaction of material needs, but to the question, What shall I do now?, Versilov can provide no answer (13: 174–175). His utterances always contain this mixture of misanthropy and exalted aspiration.

  As the intrigue of Part 2 unfolds, these opposing aspects of Versilov are no longer divulged through moral-philosophical dialogues but presented in dramatic action. His split personality is now depicted in terms of trivial capriciousness (such as his senseless act of challenging the young prince to a duel and then withdrawing the summons an hour later) or as dark connivance against his own son. When the young man confides the secret of his infatuation with Katerina, his father leads him to open his heart completely, but he encourages Arkady’s effusions only in the hope of obtaining information about the letter to use against Katerina. Versilov finally writes Katerina an insulting letter asking her not to “seduce” an innocent lad to gain her sordid ends, and Arkady is thus humiliated and betrayed by his father in the eyes of the woman he adores.

  By the end of Part 2, Arkady is ready for the major transformation of his personality that will be the reward for all his sufferings. This transformation is the result of his encounter at last with one of the three positive figures in the book (the other two being Arkady’s mother and Tatyana Pavlovna, the self-sacrificing family protector who is supporting Versilov and his illegitimate family entirely from her personal savings). By far the most important is the “legal” father whose name Arkady bears, Makar Ivanovich Dolgoruky, the only peasant character of any importance in Dostoevsky’s novels (excluding the peasant convicts in House of the Dead). His inclusion can surely be attributed to a desire to make literary capital out of the Populist idealization of the peasantry, as well as, unquestionably, an urge to compete with Tolstoy’s Platon Karataev in War and Peace.

  Where Versilov’s injunctions to Arkady have been those of a man who, at bottom, entertains no belief in his own convictions, Makar possesses a tranquil certainty that Arkady has never encountered before. The religious “wanderer” is depicted as a person of great dignity and purity of heart, who bears no ill will toward either Versilov or his unfaithful wife. On the contrary, he is filled with a loving concern for her welfare and has taken steps to guarantee Sofya’s financial security after his death. Nothing could contrast more strongly with the motives and machinations of the “educated” characters, who are unable to overcome the various egotistical ambitions that color all their conduct. Moreover, the words of the old man, waiting to die with a calm and joyous serenity of spirit and an untroubled faith in Christ’s promise,
provide Arkady with the moral inspiration he has sought in vain all his life.

  Initially, Dostoevsky had seen his novel as dominated by “the idea of disintegration” that was “present everywhere, for everything is falling apart and there are no remaining ties not only in the Russian family, but even simply between people in general. Even children are apart” (16: 16). Much of the sense of dissolution was kept in the book, whose title he once thought could be Disorder; but with the inclusion of Makar and his legal wife, Sofya, the humble, downtrodden pair who would be firm as saints, he at last found a center of moral stability amidst the reigning chaos. Such a center was essential because of the very nature of his theme: the precipitous growth into maturity of a rebellious adolescent who has been badly bruised by the vicissitudes of his haphazard boyhood and youth as a member of “an accidental family,” but who learns to accept himself and to acquire a sense of social responsibility.

  In Makar, Arkady finds embodied a secure conviction of the ultimate goodness of God’s creation and a profound sense of wonder and awe at the transcendent mystery both of human existence and of life after death. “Whether the tiny bird is singing, or the stars in all their multitudes shine at night in heaven, the mystery is one, ever the same. And the greatest mystery of all is what awaits the soul of man in the world beyond” (13: 287). Makar’s ecstatic celebration of the beauty of life, as is usual in Dostoevsky, comes from a consciousness haunted by death, but death for him is not the stabbing anguish of despair depicted in The Idiot through such a character as the nonbeliever Ippolit Terentyev. It is, rather, the natural fulfillment of a life devoted to God, a life whose termination it would be “sinful” to protest against and which still keeps its contact with the world of the living. “You may forget me, dear ones,” he says, “but I love you from the tomb.” It is after this affirmation that the deeply impressed Arkady declares to him: “There is no ‘seemliness’ in them. . . . I won’t follow them. I don’t know where I’m going, I’ll go with you” (13: 290–291). Although Arkady’s resolution “to follow” Makar and presumably become “a wanderer” is obviously not meant to be taken literally, the impression left by Makar will never be forgotten.

  The moral inspiration Arkady needs to surrender his ego to a higher ideal could only be offered by the “idea-feeling” of religious faith. Makar admirably fills this function, and in his notes Dostoevsky indicates his source by a line from Nekrasov’s well-known poem “Vlas”: “dark-visaged, tall, and straight” (16: 175). Dostoevsky thus ingeniously introduces into the pages of Nekrasov’s own journal a figure based on Nekrasov’s famous creation—a figure that both caters to the reverence for the peasantry nourished by the radical Populists and also strongly accentuates the religious origins of those peasant virtues they so admired.1

  Arkady’s conversations with Makar run through the first five chapters of Part 3 and provide a commentary on Versilov’s discourses at the beginning of Part 2. This is evident from Makar’s stories about Pyotr Valerianovich, the educated nobleman who lived in the desert with the monks but could not subdue his “understanding.” These stories are meant to illuminate Versilov’s inner struggle and also to refer more generally to the moral stirrings among the Russian educated class.

  The scenes depicting Makar’s stately descent into a dignified death alternate with the unrolling of the intrigue that presents Arkady with his greatest temptation. Arkady’s old schoolfellow Lambert finally makes his appearance to serve as his Mephistopheles. Dostoevsky, in his notes, does not mince words about this character: “Lambert—flesh, matter, horror, etc.” (16: 28). Lambert has always been the epitome of soulless and shameless carnality, and his arrival stirs Arkady’s lascivious longings with the plan to blackmail Katerina into sexual submission by means of the letter. Torn between “seemliness” and naked lust, Arkady finds himself exposed to the full range of the conflict of opposites that constitutes “the Russian fate.” “It always has been a mystery,” he writes from his vantage point as narrator, “and I have marveled a thousand times at that faculty in man (and in the Russian, I believe, more especially) of cherishing in his soul the loftiest ideal side by side with the most abject baseness, and all quite sincerely” (13: 307). Arkady’s situation is now similar, in its inextricable tangle of love-hate feelings for Katerina as goddess and temptress, to that of his father. The recognition of this identity allows him to understand and emotionally to master the events that climax the book in a furious cascade.

  These final pages contain a lengthy confession speech by Versilov that is the high point of the novel. The death of Makar temporarily transfigures Versilov’s personality, and in a sudden surge of genuine sincerity he finally divulges to Arkady the “idea” that has given inspiration to his life. To express this “idea,” which is actually a “vision,” Dostoevsky reaches back into his unpublished files and utilizes the myth of the Golden Age initially intended for the unpublished chapters of Stavrogin’s confession. Versilov’s version, however, is not moral-psychological but historical-philosophical; it illustrates Dostoevsky’s own ideas about the future of European civilization and its relation to Russia. Moreover, in the ideological structure of A Raw Youth, Versilov’s fantasy parallels that of Makar and is intended to supplement it, thus disclosing the essential unity of the Russian spirit. For Versilov projects in terms of European history what Makar expresses in terms of Russian apocalyptic religiosity.

  His dream evokes “a corner of the Greek archipelago . . . blue smiling waves, isles and rocks. . . . Here was the earthly paradise of man.” The innocent beauty of this vision, “when the gods came down from the skies and were of one kin with men,” filled his heart with “the love of all humanity”; this was “the first day of European civilization”—a civilization whose finest flower was precisely “the love of all humanity” that brings tears of all-embracing tenderness to Versilov’s eyes. “Oh, here lived a splendid race! They rose up to sleep and lay down to sleep happy and innocent. . . . Their wealth of untouched strength was spent on simple-hearted joy and love.” But when sleep ends, he is jolted back into the hurly-burly of history: “The first day of European civilization which I had seen in my dream was transformed for me at once on awakening into the setting sun of the last day of civilization! One seemed to hear the death knell ringing over Europe in those days” (13: 375).

  What sounded this death knell was the recent Franco-Prussian War, the temporary establishment of the Paris Commune, and the burning of the Tuileries that ensued in the struggle for control of the city. In the midst of general chaos, it was only he, as “a Russian European,” who could not reconcile himself to this final collapse. Yet in a passage daring for its time, when even liberal Russian opinion regarded the destruction of the Tuileries as an abomination, Dostoevsky did not hesitate to give it a partial justification as an understandable consequence of the flagrant injustices of European society. “I alone among all the conservative reactionaries,” Versilov declares, “could have told those bent on revenge that what happened at the Tuileries, though a crime, was still logical” (13: 375–376).

  In compelling but ultimately sterile contrast to Makar, who had been a wanderer in Russia as a religious pilgrim, Versilov recalls having been “a solitary wanderer” in Europe. Like Makar, Versilov too was preaching the fulfillment of the reign of love and the advent of the Kingdom of God. “Among us [Russian noblemen],” he declares, “has been created by the ages a type of the highest culture, never seen before and existing nowhere else in the world—a type of worldwide compassion for all” (13: 376–377). This Russian nobleman is a prototype of “the man of the future,” and his role is precisely to transcend destructive national differences. The Russian European thus fulfills the injunctions of Christian love on the level of history; the law of his being is to be most himself in total abnegation to others. The Russian peasant-pilgrim Makar and the Russian European Versilov, each inspired by his own form of the Christian promise, are thus united in their service to this vision of a new Christian
Golden Age.

  What continues to separate the two, however, will be captured in Versilov’s remarkable evocation of an atheistic world deprived of belief in a divine Christ—a world that is the final outcome of the inexorable European process of self-destruction. “The great idea of immortality would have vanished, and they would have to fill its place, and all the wealth of love lavished of old upon Him who was immortal would be turned upon the whole of nature, on the world, on man. . . . Men left forlorn would begin to draw together more closely and more lovingly” (13: 378–379). He thus intuits that the profane Golden Age he envisages, a world without immortality, would be pervaded by an aching sense of sadness and sorrow. This accent placed on the “sorrow” of a world without God—even a world that realizes, on its own terms, the Christian ideal of mutual love—is Dostoevsky’s artistic answer to the sublimest secular ideals of Socialism.

  Versilov finally breaks off his speech, acknowledging that “the whole thing is a fantasy, even one that is quite unbelievable,” but “I couldn’t have lived my whole life without it.” He defines himself as a “deist, a philosophical deist,” not an atheist, which is perhaps meant to suggest an unsatisfied religious longing that remains an abstraction rather than a vitally active personal relationship with the sacred. But Versilov cannot entirely suppress his need for a faith closer to that of Makar. “The remarkable thing,” he confides, “is that I . . . could not fail to imagine Him in the last resort among the orphaned people. He would come to them and stretch out his arms to them and . . . there and then the scales would fall from their eyes and there would burst forth a great exalted hymn to the new and total resurrection” (13: 379).