Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  The very first (January 1876) issue of his Diary was devoted to the theme of children, and as a preparation he asked his legal friend A. F. Koni to arrange a visit to a colony of juvenile criminals. The two men made the journey in late December 1875, and Koni mentions Dostoevsky’s passionate attentiveness, “asking questions and inquiring into the smallest details in the routine of the fledglings.” He was struck by Dostoevsky’s ability to engage with the boys, whom he gathered together in one of the larger rooms. “He answered their questions, some searching and some naïve, but little by little this conversation turned into a lesson on his part . . . filled with the genuine love of children that shines through every page of his creations.” When the two men left the room to visit the adjoining church, the boys flocked around and continued to speak with him about incidents from their lives. “One felt that . . . a spiritual bond had been created, and that they sensed in him not a curiosity-seeking visitor but a grieving friend.”9

  On the journey home he spoke about the church they had visited. It was filled with icons, some very old and confiscated from Old Believers by the police; others, particularly those of the iconostasis guarding the priestly sanctuary, were painted in a newer, Italianate style: “I don’t like that church,” he muttered. “It’s some sort of museum. . . . In order to act on the souls of those entering, one needs only a few images, but severe, even stern ones, just as the belief and duty of a Christian must be severe and stern.”10 Such images should accompany the boys when they fell back into the urban maelstrom from which most of them had come and recall for them the far-off days of their pure and unsullied village childhood, thus offering some moral protection against the temptation to criminal activity.

  Much attention is paid in the Diary to criminal trials, which he always regarded as an indispensable barometer of the moral climate of the times. Although he was not in the courtroom of all the cases discussed in his Diary (accounts of them were carried in the daily press of the capital and provinces), he was present at some and took an active part in one, in which a young mother had been condemned to penal servitude in Siberia. Ekaterina Kornilova had pushed her six-year-old stepdaughter out of a tenement window. The girl emerged unhurt, and the stepmother immediately went to the police to denounce herself. Kornilova was in an advanced state of pregnancy and her state, Dostoevsky believed, led her to give way to a latent hostility toward her stepdaughter (as well as her husband, the father, who had beaten her that very morning). It was well known, Dostoevsky argued, that pregnant women sometimes behaved in a most peculiar fashion. On these grounds he raised the possibility of reversing the verdict. A reader of the Diary, a lawyer familiar with the process of obtaining pardons for convicted criminals, wrote Dostoevsky that he had been persuaded by his analysis. Urging Dostoevsky to visit Kornilova, he suggested advising her to ask for such a pardon and volunteered to help guide the request through the bureaucratic labyrinth. Dostoevsky did so, and his articles unquestionably played their part in the reversal of her conviction on appeal and then the dismissal of the case, though the jury was warned not to give too much weight to the opinions of “certain talented writers.”11

  The public responded not only to Dostoevsky’s provocative ideas on topical issues; his very language—he addressed his readers as if he were conducting a private conversation rather than developing a thesis—produced an unusual sense of familiarity with his readers, who deluged him with letters to which he often responded both personally and in the pages of his journal. The felt need to communicate with the author of the Diary led to a number of unexpected encounters, such as the one recorded in Dostoevsky’s letter to Alchevskaya of April 9, 1876. “Suddenly,” he tells her, “the day before yesterday, in the morning, two girls, both about twenty, came to see me. . . . ‘Everybody laughed at us and said you wouldn’t receive us. . . . But we decided to try.’ ”12 One can hardly imagine such an incident occurring earlier, when his public image had been shaped by the fearsome convicts he had portrayed in House of the Dead, or by the tormented protagonists of his novels. The Dostoevsky of the Diary, however, was a friend and counselor, and such impromptu visitors as the two girls were no longer a rarity. “They said they were students at the medical academy, that about five hundred women were there now, and that ‘they enrolled in the academy so as to obtain a higher education and then do some good.’ ”

  The humanitarian aims of those future doctors were extremely appealing, and Dostoevsky took them as an immensely encouraging sign of a new state of mind among the younger female generation, whom he contrasts favorably with earlier examples of the “new woman.” “I hadn’t come across this new type of woman (I knew lots of the old female nihilists). Would you believe that rarely have I spent time better than I did these two hours with these girls. What simplicity, naturalness, freshness of feeling, purity of mind and heart.”13 The next two issues of the Diary (May and June) contain strong affirmations for providing women the means to obtain a higher education.

  Alchevskaya stresses in her memoirs that, “most sharply of all remains in my memory the following trait, quite outstanding in Dostoevsky . . . his fear of ceasing to understand the younger generation, of breaking with it. . . . In this idée fixe there was not any fear at all of ceasing to be a beloved writer or of decreasing the number of his followers and readers; no, he obviously regarded a disagreement with the young generation as a human downfall, as a moral death. He boldly and honorably defends his intimate convictions; and at the same time somehow fears not fulfilling the mission entrusted to him, and inadvertently losing his way.”14 No more penetrating remark about him at this stage of his career has ever been made. For he did feel that a mission had been entrusted to him, the mission of guiding the young generation back to the path of the Russian people’s truth—which for him meant primarily the faith of the people in God. And for this reason he considered a definitive severance from younger readers to be the equivalent of a human downfall and a moral death.

  28. Dostoevsky in 1876

  In the summer of 1876 Dostoevsky made another trip to Bad Ems, where he drank the waters for a month. Such an absence, of course, involved special problems for the publication of his monthly Diary, and he published only a July–August combined issue. Dostoevsky’s letters from Ems had always been filled with expressions of his tenderness for Anna, as well as reminders of the physical passion that united the couple. So now; and, on reading them over many years later, Anna thought it prudent to black out a number of passages that were too explicit for her decorous sensibility. These letters are among the most mutilated in the Dostoevsky canon, though one can still read his avowal that he has fallen in love with her four or five times since their marriage, and that this has now occurred again. “Anechka,” he writes, “all I do is think of you. I think of you in all possible sorts of pictures and representations. . . . I love you to the point of torment.”15 This flare-up of passion may perhaps be linked to an episode occurring just before his departure, when he and Anna had quarreled because of a curious incident that she recounts in her memoirs.

  A friend of theirs had written a novel that both had read, and in which an anonymous letter informed one of the characters that his wife had been unfaithful; the proof could be found in a locket that she wore. Anna decided, as a “joke,” to send such a letter to Dostoevsky, assuming he would recognize the imitation of the text and that they both would enjoy a hearty laugh. Instead, he ripped her locket from her neck, drawing blood, and was furious. “ ‘You keep on joking, Anechka,’ he said, ‘but just think what a terrible thing might have happened. I might have strangled you in my rage!’ ” Once his fury had subsided, however, the evening “passed in apologies, regrets, and the most loving tenderness”—which one suspects was the aim of the whole escapade.16 An exchange of letters about the reappearance of one of Anna’s ex-suitors also indicates that she was again attempting to stimulate his jealousy, perhaps as a means of warding off possible attractions abroad.

  Dostoevsky purchased a guest r
egister of the visitors at Ems but was unable to find the names of anyone he knew among those of rank, and he had no wish to meet the others. They were all “Russian Yids and Germans—bankers and pawnbrokers. Not a single acquaintance.”17 He met by chance the well-known radical publicist G. Z. Eliseev, who was also taking the cure and with whom he had rubbed elbows in St. Petersburg. It was Eliseev who had penned a bitterly hostile review of the first chapters of Crime and Punishment, but he had also responded generously to Timofeyeva’s inquiry about publishing A Raw Youth in Notes of the Fatherland. Nevertheless, Dostoevsky’s first impression of Eliseev in Ems was hardly favorable. “The old ‘negator’ doesn’t believe in anything . . . he absolutely has a seminarian’s haughty smugness.”18 Every meeting raised the hackles on both sides. “The trashy vulgar little liberals,” he fumes nine days later, “have undone my nerves. They force themselves on me and greet me constantly, but treat me as though they were being careful ‘so as not to get soiled by my reactionaryism.’ The vainest creatures, especially her, a banal little book with liberal rules. ‘Oh what he says, oh what he defends!’ These two think of teaching someone like me.”19 The Eliseevs vanished henceforth from his correspondence—but not from his literary purview. For there is good reason to believe that the cynical Rakitin of The Brothers Karamazov, who never takes his eyes off the main chance, is based on a caricature of the career of Grigory Eliseev.

  All through this period Dostoevsky doggedly continued to make preparations to write and informs Anna that “I have been rereading all the correspondence [from his readers] that I brought here. I signed up at the lending library (a pathetic library), took out Zola because I’ve terribly neglected European literature in recent years, and just imagine, I can scarcely read it, it’s such revolting stuff. And in Russia people carry on about Zola as a celebrity, a leading light of realism.”20 Emile Zola was then writing a regular letter from Paris in the liberal European Messenger, having been recommended by his friend Turgenev, and he was hailed as the leading proponent and practitioner of a literary naturalism enjoying a considerable vogue. Several translations of one novel alone—Le ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris), the book Dostoevsky borrowed from the Ems library—had been published in 1873, and there were widespread discussions of Zola’s works and theories in the Russian press.

  He jotted down his first reactions in his notebooks: “He will describe every nail in the heel, a quarter hour later, when the sun rises, he will again describe that nail in a different light. That is not art. Give me a single word (Pushkin), but make it the necessary word. Otherwise it . . . drags in ten thousand words, and still cannot express itself, and this with the most complete self-satisfaction, but spare me.” Nor can he accept the morality that Zola contrasted with the purely materialistic ambitions and satisfactions of his shopkeeper and tradesman figures. “Florent [an ex-revolutionary returned from prison] dies of hunger and proudly spurned the help of an honest woman. Zola considers this a heroic deed, but in his heart there is no brotherhood, what sort of republican is he? Accept her help and render it to others out of the fullness of a noble heart—that will be paradise on earth” (24: 238–239). Little did he know, as he was scribbling these remarks, that ten years later his own novels would help to break the grip of Zola’s naturalism on a new French literary generation.

  His morose mood during these days was considerably lifted by a letter from Vsevolod Solovyev, who also sent a copy of an enthusiastic article he had written about the June issue of the Diary. This fascicule contained a statement of Dostoevsky’s exalted conception of Russia’s world-historical mission. The task of Russia, he proclaimed, was to bring about the union of all the Slavs and thus resolve the Eastern question; and this unification would be the prelude to a universal reconciliation of all peoples under the banner of the true Christ preserved only in Russian Orthodoxy. Dostoevsky was pleased with Solovyev’s accolade because he felt that in this issue, for the first time, he had at last dared to allow himself “to take certain of my convictions to their conclusions, to say the last word . . . of my dreams regarding Russia’s role and mission amid humanity, and I expressed the idea that this . . . was already beginning to come true.” The result had been that “even the newspapers and publications friendly to me straight away started yelling that I heaped paradox on paradox.”21

  Dostoevsky’s Diary became the most widely read of all such publications during its two-year life span, reaching audiences not only in the depths of the Russian provinces but also in the highest court circles. In the fall of 1876, Pobedonostsev requested that he send a copy regularly to Tsarevich Alexander. “I know,” wrote the crown prince’s tutor, “that yesterday, in the presence of his brothers, he spoke of several articles and recommended them to their attention.”22 Overjoyed, Dostoevsky wrote directly to Alexander, to whom he had presented a dedicated copy of Demons three years earlier, saying that “the present great energies in Russian history have elevated the spirits and hearts of the Russian people with unimaginable power to a height of understanding of much that was not earlier understood, and have illuminated in our consciousness the sanctity of the Russian idea more vividly than ever before. . . . I have long since thought and dreamed of the happiness of offering my modest work to your Imperial Highness.” He then excuses himself for his “boldness,” and asks that the crown prince “not condemn one who loves you boundlessly.”23

  Dostoevsky well knew that his own veneration for tsarism was hardly shared by those socially conscious members of the younger generation he was trying to influence. Indeed, there were disquieting signs that radical activity was no longer confined to “going to the people.” Discouraged by their failure to arouse the countryside, the Populists in 1876 were rethinking their position and turning to political agitation to attain their aims. One of the first open manifestations of this change of tactics was a demonstration in the square leading to the Church of Our Lady of Kazan in St. Petersburg. In December 1876 a small group led by G. V. Plekhanov (later the founder of the Russian Communist Party and the mentor of Lenin) gathered to listen to a speech by their leader and unfurled a red banner bearing the words “Land and Liberty” (Zemlya i Volya), the name of their revolutionary organization. The police, as well as local workmen and shopkeepers, charged into the group, and many of the demonstrators were severely beaten before being taken into custody.

  For Dostoevsky, the demonstration was simply another instance of how easily Russian youth could be misled because of the purity of their moral idealism. “The young people on December 6 in Kazan Square,” he wrote in his Diary, “were doubtless nothing more than a ‘herd’ driven on by the hands of some crafty scoundrels. . . . Without a doubt there was a good deal of malicious and immoral tomfoolery here, a monkeylike aping of someone else’s doings; nonetheless, it would have been possible to bring them together simply by assuring them that they were to gather in the name of something sublime and beautiful, in the name of some remarkable self-sacrifice for the greatest of purposes” (24: 52). One of the aims of Dostoevsky’s Diary was to encourage such youthful self-sacrifice for what he considered worthier causes than those proclaimed in Kazan Square.

  In May 1877, the Dostoevskys left St. Petersburg for the spring and summer months at Maly Prikol, the country estate of Anna’s brother Ivan Snitkin, located in the province of Kursk. Anna’s health had begun to flag under her combined responsibilities as mother, homemaker, and business manager, and Dostoevsky insisted that she take a complete rest during the summer. Russia had declared war against Turkey in April 1877, and on the journey to Maly Prikol Anna recalls the long delays at various stations, “where our train had to stand for hours because of the movement of the troops being sent off to war. At every stop Feodor Mikhailovich would go to the buffet and buy large quantities of rolls, honey cakes, cigarettes, and matches, and take them into the cars where he would give them out to the soldiers and have long talks with them.”24

  At the end of June, the family departed together from Maly Prikol and se
parated at the railroad junction that took Anna and the two older children on a pilgrimage to Kiev, the cradle of Old Russian civilization, and Dostoevsky to Petersburg. While in the capital, he received only one letter from his wife in a two-week period and became frantic for lack of news. The four letters he wrote are also filled with exasperation at the problems encountered with issuing the Diary on time, as well as in supervising its printing, binding, and mailing to various distributors. The personal origin of some of his most haunting literary scenes is illuminated in a passage describing the effects of a severe epileptic attack. “At 6:30 this morning,” he informs Anna, “on coming to after a seizure I headed off to your room and suddenly Prokhorovna told me in the parlor that the mistress wasn’t home. ‘Where is she?’ ‘Why, she’s in the country at a summer house.’ ‘How can that be? She should be here. When did she leave?’ Prokhorovna persuaded me that I had only arrived the day before yesterday myself.”25 Dostoevsky’s remarkable capacity to depict such states of semiconsciousness, when a character behaves according to subliminal drives and impulses, evidently derives from such episodes in his own life. He wrote his younger brother Nikolay that the seizure “has shattered me,” and he asked Nikolay, whom he saw rarely under ordinary circumstances, to come for a visit.