Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  This brilliant and moving portrayal of the Golden Age as a Feuerbachian world, in which mankind, rather than alienating all its love from the earthly to the supernatural, would lavish it on themselves, is one of Dostoevsky’s great passages. It equals, in expressive poignancy, Raskolnikov’s dream of the plague in Crime and Punishment, and it would be hard to find its match elsewhere. What follows is almost embarrassing, as the machinery of the plot is dutifully cranked up to display the vacillations of Versilov on the level of the intrigue.

  The details of the intrigue need not concern us, except to note that the morally healing impact of Makar’s death proves to be short-lived, and all the most acute symptoms of the “Russian fate” now assail Versilov. Literally, he becomes two people: one is contrite and remorseful over his eccentric and outrageous behavior, while the other continues to perform the most disgraceful actions under the uncontrollable influence of “a second self.” “Do you know that I feel as though I were split in two,” Versilov says. “Yes, I am really split in two mentally, and I’m horribly afraid of it.” Just after uttering these words, moved by the irresistible destructive force of his “second self,” he smashes the icon left him as a heritage and pledge for the future by Makar; and though he shouts, “don’t take this as being allegorical, Sonya,” he admits the significance a moment later: “All right, so take it as an allegory, that’s how it was meant!” (13: 408–409). The Russian European “wanderer” from the intelligentsia, whatever the elevation of his spirit, is ultimately unable to take up the burden of the Cross—the “allegory” of his reunion with the Russian people. On the more prosaic level of the plot, Versilov never marries Arkady’s mother, even though he is now legally free to do so.

  Arkady’s speculations about Versilov’s demented behavior form part of the epilogue, but it was hardly to be expected that the still callow young man should give any sophisticated analysis of his father’s psychological contortions. Arkady cannot draw any definite conclusions, and in refusing to go beyond the immaturity of his narrator Dostoevsky took the considerable risk of turning Versilov too obviously into a pathological case, thus furnishing fuel to the critics who had always charged him with an unhealthy concern for psychic abnormality. Elsewhere, psychic disorder is always presented as the result of a profound moral-spiritual crisis, and the attempt to “explain” it in purely psychiatric terms is satirized and ridiculed.

  Versilov, the former man of the world, is now a helpless semi-invalid, entirely dependent on Sofya and Tatyana Pavlovna. “His intelligence and his moral standards have remain unchanged,” remarks Arkady, “while his striving for an ideal has become even stronger.” Nonetheless, the old, capricious Versilov emerges in a scaled-down replay of the superb deathbed scene of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Versilov first expressed a desire to observe the Lenten fast of the Orthodox Church, but then, two days later, because “something had irritated him unexpectedly, something he described laughingly as ‘an amusing incongruity,’ ” he abandons his intention. “ ‘I do love God very much, my friends,’ he said, ‘but I simply have no talent for these things’ ”; no conversion of “the philosophical deist” to the rites of Orthodoxy takes place (13: 446–447).

  Allusions to numerous writers, both Russian and European, appeared in Dostoevsky’s notes for A Raw Youth, particularly to Pushkin and Dickens, but most frequently mentioned is Tolstoy, and these references are central to his artistic aim of going beyond what the gentry writers had accomplished. As he had written to Strakhov three years earlier, both Turgenev and Tolstoy had created only “gentry-landowner literature. It has said everything that it had to say (superbly by Lev Tolstoy) . . . but there has not yet been a new word to replace that of the gentry-landowners.”2 His desire to pick up the artistic gauntlet had certainly been strengthened recently by the acclaim accorded to Anna Karenina.

  If he had not intended to enter into a more overt rivalry with Tolstoy, he was certainly goaded into doing so while defending himself against the hostile attacks provoked by the publication of his first chapters. One critic accused him of excessive “naturalism”—a naturalism so extreme that it violated the rules of art, as if Dostoevsky wished his readers to feel that they were literally participating in the events being depicted, no matter how menacing or threatening. Two venomous articles in the Russian Messenger, where his own earlier novels had been published, accused him of being “immoral” and of fixing “the reader in the stinking atmosphere of the underground, [which] . . . blunts his sense of smell and accustoms him to this stinking underground.”3

  His first impulse, which he confided to his notebooks on March 22, 1875, was to answer such denigrations in a preface to be included with the novel’s later publication in book form, and the notes for this preface contain the most illuminating self-definitions that he ever gave of his own artistic mission. As he saw it, his aim was to depict the moral-spiritual consequences of living in a society that “had no foundations,” and which in fact “hasn’t worked out any rules of life, because there really hasn’t been any life either.” This society has experienced “a colossal shock—and everything comes to a halt, falls down, and is negated as if it hadn’t ever existed. And not just externally, as in the West, but internally, morally.” Meanwhile, “our most talented writers [he mentions Tolstoy and Goncharov] have been describing the life of the upper middle class,” believing they were “describing the life of the majority.” But this was an illusion: the life they portray is that “of exceptions, while mine is the life of the general rule” (16: 329).

  Dostoevsky speaks of “the civic feeling” that for a moment had led him to think of joining the Slavophils “with the idea of resurrecting the dreams of my childhood” (which included his reverence for Saints Sergius and Tikhon). Instead, he created the underground man, for whom he is now being insulted. “I am proud,” he defiantly proclaims, “to have exposed, for the first time, the real image of the Russian majority . . . its misshapen and tragic aspects. The tragic lies in one’s awareness of being misshapen.” Listing characters created by other writers (including Prince Bolkonsky of War and Peace and Levin in Anna Karenina), he sees their defects as arising solely from “petty self-love,” which can be adjusted according to the fixed social norms of their still unshaken moral-social order. Only he had brought out “the tragedy of the underground, which consists of suffering, self-laceration, an awareness of a better life coupled with the impossibility of attaining it. . . . What can sustain those who do try to improve themselves? A reward, faith? Nobody is offering any reward, and in whom could one have faith? Another step from this position, and you have extreme depravity, crime (murder). A mystery” (16: 329).

  The most crucial problem of all for him was the loss of (religious) faith; and he believed that by his attempts to grapple artistically with the moral-social aftermaths of this deprivation he had probed more deeply into the Russian psyche than the gentry-landowner writers who simply accepted the values of their long-established world, with its precepts for good behavior. Far from flinching at the charges made against him, Dostoevsky glories in the validity of his moral-artistic vision: “Underground, underground, poet of the underground, our feuilletonists have been repeating over and over again, as if this were something derogatory to me. Silly fools, it is my glory, for that’s where the truth lies” (16: 329).

  Dostoevsky finally confided his self-defense to an epilogue, written by the character Nikolay Semyenovich, Arkady’s guardian during his high school years, and his observations allow Dostoevsky to guide the reader toward a broader social-cultural comprehension of his novel. Dostoevsky’s spokesman obliquely refers to Tolstoy when he affirms that a novelist aiming to leave an elegant impression “would only write historical novels, since there are no longer beautiful types in our time. . . . Such a novel . . . would provide an artistically finished picture of a Russian mirage, but one that really existed so long as no one guessed it was a mirage.” The reference to War and Peace is unmistakable, but for Dostoevsky the bea
uty of that world was only a mirage based on the slavery of serfdom. This is why, as Semyenovich adds, implicitly referring to the character of Levin in Anna Karenina, “the grandson of the characters depicted in a picture showing a cultured, upper-class Russian family over three generations in a Russian historical setting—such a descendant could not be portrayed otherwise than as misanthropic, isolated; and a sad sight to behold.” Levin, in other words, was trying to carry on the tradition but was now gloomily aware that it had been “a mirage” (13: 454).

  If this is true for a descendant of such a noble family, how much more would this be the case for someone like Arkady Dolgoruky, the illegitimate offspring of a peasant mother and a father belonging to the hereditary nobility! “Yes, Arkady Makarovich,” he is told, “you are a member of an accidental family, in complete contrast to all our recent types of legitimate hero who had boyhoods and youths quite unlike yours” (those depicted in Tolstoy’s trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth). Versilov himself is described as embodying a chaos of opposites. “He belongs to one of the oldest families of the nobility while at the same time belonging to the Paris Commune. He is a genuine poet, loves Russia, and yet completely denies its value. He has no religion, but he is prepared to die for almost anything vague which he cannot name but in which he can passionately believe, on the example of many, many enlightened Russian Europeanizers of the St. Petersburg period of Russian history.” Torn by such contradictions, what traditions and moral-cultural heritage can Versilov transmit to his children? “I confess,” confides Semyenovich, “I would not want to be a novelist trying to describe a hero from an accidental family! . . . Serious mistakes would be possible, and exaggerations and oversights. . . . But what choice does a writer have who has no wish to write historical novels but is possessed by a longing for the present scene? . . . He has to guess . . . and get it wrong”(13: 455).

  Whether or not Dostoevsky believed he had “gotten it wrong,” he was here implicitly answering all those critics—among them, some of his closest friends—who were measuring his world against the far more reassuring one created by Tolstoy. Even by his own standard, however, A Raw Youth cannot be said to hold its own against the three novels that had been its predecessors. Indeed, if the defects of A Raw Youth prove anything, it is that Dostoevsky could do full justice to his talent only when he allowed his eschatological imagination a free rein, and he would take this artistic lesson to heart three years later in The Brothers Karamazov.

  1 Dostoevsky’s notebook entries regarding this peasant world range much more widely than the more limited picture in the finished work. In one, he demonstrates his acquaintance with the theology of the Old Believers. Other notes contain extensive entries about “stinking Lizaveta,” who is much more vividly developed here than she will be in The Brothers Karamazov. Not merely an inarticulate half-wit, she is consumed by the self-immolating fire of a passionate faith. “Stinking Lizaveta. ‘Do not send me, the stinking one, to your bright paradise, but send me into utter darkness, so that even there, in fire and in pain, I could raise my voice to Thee: “Holy, holy art Thou,” and I have no other love’ ” (16: 138).

  2 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 216 n.21; December 2/14, 1870.

  3 Cited in PSS, 17: 347.

  CHAPTER 50

  A Public Figure

  With the completion of A Raw Youth, Dostoevsky was once again faced with the problem of what to undertake next. Although the publisher of several of his own works, he still had no regular source of income to provide for his family, recently increased to three children with the birth of a new son, Aleksey, on August 10, 1875. Now he returned to the idea of publishing a new periodical, his Diary of a Writer, which he had experimented with in The Citizen. A family decision was made to take the plunge, even though, as Anna wrote, “if the Diary proved to be a failure, we would be put into a hopeless position.”1

  Dostoevsky’s decision to undertake his Diary of a Writer was an adventurous gamble that marked a new stage in his astonishing career. Although he had once more become a name to be reckoned with on the Russian literary-cultural scene, his fame was still largely confined to intelligentsia circles. With the Diary of a Writer, however, he reached out to a much larger and diversified reading public, to whom he spoke eloquently and passionately about matters that were uppermost in the minds of all literate Russians. No one had ever written about such matters so forcefully and vividly, with such directness, simplicity, and intimate personal commitment. It is little wonder that the public response was tremendous, and that Dostoevsky was deluged with correspondence, both pro and contra, the moment his publication appeared in the kiosks.

  One of the salons he frequented in these years was that of Elena Shtakenshneider, who attracted everyone by her intelligence, sensitivity, and kindness, and by the stoic courage with which she bore her disfiguring hunchback. Noting the immense popularity of the Diary, she wrote in her own diary: “Dostoevsky’s fame was not caused by his prison sentence, not by House of the Dead, and not even by his novels—at least not primarily by them—but by the Diary of a Writer. It was the Diary that made his name known in all of Russia, made him the teacher and idol of the youth, yes, and not only the youth but all those tortured by those questions that Heine called ‘accursed.’ ”2

  His life for the next two years was intimately intertwined with the redaction of the Diary. Indeed, the routine necessitated by its regular appearance was so rigorous and exhausting that it left little time for anything else. The Diary, all of it written by Dostoevsky, appeared once a month and consisted of sixteen pages. It went on the newsstands on the last day of each month, and he was fanatic about keeping to schedule. Those close to him were aware of the exhausting pressure, both physical and mental, imposed by his Diary, and Mikhail Alexandrov, now employed at the printing plant, remarked that “if the expression is justified of some writers that they write their works with their blood, then this expression fits no one better than Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.” Indeed, on the evidence of working so closely with him for two years, Alexandrov believed that the Diary “shortened his life” and that he “squandered on it his physical health, which was affected by it much more than even by his years in katorga.”3

  The Dostoevskys had lived in Staraya Russa for most of 1875, but the Diary required their residence in St. Petersburg once more, and they returned to the capital in mid-September, where they secured five modest rooms in an aging apartment house. Alexandrov was particularly struck by the bareness of the study, which reminded him of a monastic cell. A Turkish couch covered with oilcloth also served as a bed, and there were two tables. One was covered with a pile of magazines and newspapers; the other, larger table was garnished with an inkwell, a pen, and a thick notebook “in which Feodor Mikhailovich noted down individual ideas and facts for his future works.” Above the table hung a photograph of Dostoevsky, and before it stood an armchair with a hard seat. There was no mistaking that this was the workplace of a writer, and its “strict, almost impoverished simplicity” inspired in Alexandrov “a great respect.”4

  Dostoevsky’s routine now varied but little. Writing late at night and into the early morning, he slept until two in the afternoon or later. Once having risen, and donning a loose and lengthy jacket of dark broadcloth, he went to the samovar awaiting him in the dining room. Returning with his glass of tea to the study, he drank several cups as he read the newspapers and rolled cigarettes out of thick yellow paper. After tea he received visitors, and at three o’clock he ate a light meal in the dining room. Dostoevsky drank a wineglass of vodka with the meal, sipping it as he chewed on a slice of black bread, once explaining to Alexandrov that this was the healthiest way to take vodka. After finishing, he went for a walk, dropping in at the printing plant on his stroll, and returning at six o’clock to dine with the family and put the children to bed before settling down to work.

  Such was his normal schedule and behavior, which, if nothing unexpected occurred, went smoothly and equably. But if he was unwarily aroused before
his accustomed time, he became “despondently serious and silent,” and in such a mood he could flare up suddenly in an outburst of irritability: “He easily got angry, and then spoke harshly,” appearing to be “rude and despotic even with those close to him.” But Alexandrov hastens to add that those who knew him best were aware that they represented only a momentarily unsettled state of his nerves.5

  Concern over the future of his young children no doubt contributed to his anxiety; and it is in this context that we find Dostoevsky keeping a vigilant eye on the legal proceedings in the Kumanina estate. In November Dostoevsky assures his youngest brother Andrey that, contrary to rumors, in filing suit to exclude some collateral relatives of his aunt from any claim to a share of the estate, he was “looking after their own interests.” After getting the money, he would “immediately divide it up among them and would take for myself only enough to cover the expenses of the proceedings and not a kopek more.” Dostoevsky adds that, “by giving up to them [his sisters] what by law should come to me,” he was “taking away from my children what was legally theirs.”6 (His suit proved unsuccessful.) A few months later, he writes to Andrey that he wishes “to live at least another seven years” in order to establish a firm foundation for the future of his children.7 He had long been haunted by the fear of death because of his epilepsy, but the dread of a sudden decease had now been replaced by the conviction that he was slowly succumbing to the undermining effects of his emphysema.

  A few months into publishing the Diary, Dostoevsky learned from a letter of Khristina Alchevskaya, a lady active in the cause of educating the people, that some considered that he was wasting his time “with trifles, with a survey of current events, little stories and suchlike.” Apparently having heard the same reproach from others, he replied: “I have reached the irresistible conclusion that in addition to the original artistic inspiration, a writer of belles lettres must also know the reality portrayed down to the smallest detail (historical and current).” Far from viewing the Diary as a departure from his artistic task, he explained that it was an indispensable preliminary for his future works. “That is why, while preparing to write a very long novel, I in fact planned to immerse myself specifically into the study . . . of the details of contemporary life.” Among such details, “one of the most important . . . is the younger generation, and with it, the contemporary Russian family.”8