No question at this time agitated Dostoevsky more viscerally than the movement to liberate the Balkan Slavs. Even his review of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina focused on what the novel disclosed about the present state of Russian society and its opposing attitudes toward the Balkan Slavs. He vehemently attacks Tolstoy—already showing traces of his future pacifism and doctrine of nonresistance to evil—for having denigrated the Russian volunteer movement. Levin ridicules this military initiative as artificial and insincere, whipped up by propaganda rather than inspired by any true, spontaneous feelings of sympathy with brother Slavs. Dostoevsky took such words, with good reason, as a direct challenge to the views he had so passionately expressed in his Diary. And he thus mercilessly rips apart this new aspect of Levin, who is now revealed to be not really one of “the people” at all. Hence he cannot genuinely understand the national impulse that had arisen spontaneously to aid the Balkan Slavs.
The reader is invited to accept Levin as a seeker after “truth,” who finally discovers it when, instructed by the casual remarks of a peasant, he suddenly realizes that he has been misled all his life by his educated ratiocinations. It is only through a direct, instinctive faith in Christ’s law of love that he has finally found faith and become one with “the people.” But no matter how fervently this “Moscow nobleman’s son, of the middle upper-class stratum” tries to assimilate to the people—and here he is manifestly talking about Tolstoy—“it’s not enough simply to think oneself one of the people or to try to become so through an act of will, and a very eccentric one at that.” Indeed, he amusingly portrays the process—parodying Tolstoy’s didacticism—through which Levin will in the future lose his faith.
Kitty started to walk and stumbled. Now, why did she stumble? If she stumbled this means that she should not have stumbled for such and such a reason. It is clear that in this case everything depended upon laws which may be strictly ascertained. And if this is so, this means that science governs everything. Where, then, is Providence? What is its role? What is man’s responsibility? And if there is no Providence, how can I believe in God? Take a straight line and extend it to infinity. (25: 205–206)
All these barbs, however, are merely preludes to the blistering main offensive aimed at Levin’s declaration that the Russian volunteers were the usual bunch of adventurers and freebooters “who are always ready to join a Pugachev gang.” In fact, Levin declares that among the Russian people “such an immediate sentiment for the oppression of the Slavs does not and cannot exist” (25: 213). Dostoevsky was particularly incensed by the argument that the Russian people, ignorant of both history and geography, could not possibly have any opinion about events in the Balkans. Such notions betrayed the usual contempt for the people among the Westernized upper class and the usual ignorance of their ideals. The imagination of the people, on the contrary, was filled with stories from the lives of the saints about the Holy Land, and they knew very well that it was now in the hands of the infidel. One of the “historical traits” of the Russian people was precisely their passion for setting off on pilgrimages to such holy places as an “act of contrition,” and Dostoevsky links the upsurge of sentiment for their fellow Christians to this ingrained search for salvation (25: 214).
What the people had experienced since the liberation of the serfs was hardly inspiring. “Among other things they have seen the spread of drunkenness, the increasing number of solidly established kulaks, misery all around them, and often, the stamp of bestiality on themselves. Many—oh, very many perhaps—have been afflicted at heart by a kind of anguish, a penitent anguish, an anguish of self-accusation, and a quest for something better, something sacred.” This quest was given a goal when they heard about the tortures being inflicted on fellow Christians by the hereditary Muslim enemy of Russia, and they took up the cause “as an appeal to repentance, to prepration for a sacrament” (25: 215–216). None of these sentiments could be understood by Levin or the old prince, his father-in-law, who refer to the volunteer movement with amused and aristocratic scorn.
Dostoevsky was outraged at Levin’s declaration that he himself possessed “no immediate feeling for the oppression of the Slavs.” Livid with indignation, Dostoevsky unrolls a horrifying panorama of Turkish atrocities in the Balkans, where “people are being exterminated by the thousands and tens of thousands” and “children are tossed in the air and caught on the point of a bayonet while their mothers watch,” a detail close to one used in The Brothers Karamazov. Levin’s seeming “humaneness,” which recoils before the prospect of killing Turks to put an end to such barbarities, is in reality a callous indifference for everything except his own personal interests and narrowly egoistic concerns. Let us imagine Levin, he writes, reading about “a wholesale massacre, about children with crushed heads crawling around their assaulted, murdered mothers with their breasts cut off . . . and there he stands and meditates: ‘Kitty is cheerful; today she ate with an appetite; the boy was bathed in the tub and he begins to recognize me: What do I care about the things that are transpiring in another hemisphere?—No immediate sentiment for the oppression of the Slavs exists or can exist—because I feel nothing.’ ” Dostoevsky cannot understand how Tolstoy could expect his readers to continue to take Levin “as an example of a righteous and honorable man.” People like the author of Anna Karenina, he concludes sadly, “are the teachers of our society. . . . So what is it, then, that they are teaching us? (25: 218–223).
In Dostoevsky’s first reaction to the Balkan crisis, in the April 1876 issue, he introduces a dialogue between himself as author and an interlocutor, who upholds and praises the virtues of war. Since this “paradoxicalist” merely restates, in a livelier and more elaborated fashion, much that can be read in Dostoevsky’s letters to his niece Sofya Ivanova during the Franco-Prussian War, there can hardly be any doubt that he represents Dostoevsky’s own point of view. To be sure, the diarist pretends to take the opposite, “Christian” side in deploring the cruelty and bloodshed that war inevitably entails, but he argues so weakly that no true dialogue takes place (unlike what occurs in Herzen’s From the Other Shore, to which the “dialogic” pages of the Diary are often compared). The paradoxicalist, however, maintains that war arises because humanity could not “live without noble ideas, and I even suspect that humanity loves war precisely in order to be part of some noble idea.” A lengthy period of unbroken peace inevitably leads to social decay because “the social balance always shifts to the side of all that is stupid and coarse in humanity, principally toward wealth and capital.” War has “the finest and most sublime consequences” for the people themselves because war “makes everyone equal in time of battle and reconciles the master and the slave in the most sublime manifestation of human dignity—the sacrifice of life for the common cause. The landowner and the peasant were closer to each other on the battlefield of 1812 than when living on some peaceful estate in the country” (22: 122–126). War thus brings about that union of classes that Dostoevsky saw as the only hope for solving Russia’s social ills, and the prospect of such a union arising (and having in fact arisen) through Russia’s support for the Balkan Slavs became a leitmotif in his articles on this topic.
Launching into a discussion of Russia’s role in the modern world, he outlines a staggeringly sublime image of his country’s messianic destiny. Even when he envisages the first step of Russia’s new policy as the unification of “all of Slavdom . . . under the wing of Russia,” he specifies that this union is “not for seizing territory . . . nor for crushing the other Slavic personalities under the Russian colossus.” No, its sole purpose is the restoration of these long-suffering Slavs to their place in humanity, thus “enabling them to contribute their own mite to the treasury of the human spirit.” Sooner or later, he boldly asserts, Constantinople (which he also calls Tsargrad) will inevitably fall into Russian hands and become the capital city of a united Slavdom. Invoking the “Third Rome” ideology of Russian nationalism—which saw Russia as the God-appointed successor to the By
zantine Empire (the second Rome), and the inheritor of the toga of Christian world leadership—Dostoevsky argues, with incredible assurance, that Russia’s “moral right” to Constantinople would be “clear and inoffensive” to other Slavs, and even to the Greeks (23: 49).
In his January 1877 issue, even before Russia entered the conflict, he viewed the events in the Balkans in apocalyptic terms. “It is evident,” he writes, “that the time is at hand for the fulfillment of something eternal, something millenarian, something that has been in preparation since the very beginning of civilization” (25: 6). And he describes this climax of world history as a struggle among the three dominating ideas contending for mastery over the destiny of the world. One was “the Catholic idea,” embodied now in France and still at the heart of French Socialism. “For French Socialism is nothing other than the compulsory unity of humanity, an idea that derived from ancient Rome and that was subsequently preserved in Catholicism” (25: 5–9). The second was German Protestantism, which Dostoevsky, like the Slavophils, views as fundamentally a protest against Latin Catholic civilization, hence containing nothing positive of its own and ultimately leading to atheism and Nihilism.
Until recently, these two world ideas had struggled for domination, but now a third has dawned on the horizon: “the Slavic idea” contained in Eastern Orthodoxy and incarnating the true image of Christ. What will emerge from the clash of these three world ideas nobody yet knows, “though there is no doubt that it brings with it the end of all the previous histories of European humanity, the beginning of the resolution of their eventual destinies, which lie in the hands of God and which humans can scarcely foresee, even though they may have forebodings.” One such prescient observer was obviously Dostoevsky; and to the mocking criticism that he anticipated—and which did not fail to arrive—he replied in advance that “ideas of such dimensions [cannot] be subordinated to petty, Yiddifying, third-rate considerations.” Russia, he pronounced, had “two awesome powers that are worth all the others in the world—the intactness and spiritual indivisibility of the millions of our people, and their intimate link with the monarch” (25: 9).
By October 1876 the Serbian Army, led by the swashbuckling Russian General Chernayev, had been defeated. The Russian volunteers were ordered to leave the country, having aroused the ire of the Serbs they had come to aid by their offensive behavior. All these misfortunes, Dostoevsky believed, were the result of the intrigues of the Serbian upper class! Dostoevsky was convinced that “the Serbia of the people . . . considers the Russians alone as their saviors and brethren, and the Russian Tsar as their sun.” In looking back, he in effect endows Russia with the halo of a Christ among the nations. For he regards the movement to help the southern Slavs as one “which in its self-sacrificing nature and disinterestedness, in its pious religious thirst to suffer for a righteous cause, is almost without precedent among other nations” (23: 150). The annals of nationalism are of course filled with similar adulatory claims for the supreme virtues of one or another people (see Fichte on the Germans and Michelet on the French).
Dostoevsky was especially bitter about the European nations, particularly England, that supported Turkey out of fear of Russian expansionism. He mentions being told about an eight-year-old southern Slav girl who suffered fainting spells because she had seen her father flayed alive before her eyes. Such barbarism is what Russia was attempting to combat, though thwarted by those European countries supposedly representing the values of “civilization.” “Oh, civilization!” he exclaims. “Oh, Europe, whose interests would suffer so, were she actually to forbid the Turks to flay the skin from fathers while their children watch! These higher interests of European civilization are, of course, trade, maritime navigation, markets, factories; what can be higher than these things in European eyes?” But “let these interests of civilization, and may civilization itself, be damned,” Dostoevsky cries out, “if its preservation demands the stripping of skins from living people” (25: 44). Responding to a remark made by Disraeli, who had implied that the Russian volunteers flocking to Serbia were mainly radicals and revolutionaries determined to stir up trouble, Dostoevsky accuses Disraeli of being directly responsible for the slaughter: “It was something he permitted, after all—and not just permitted—he plotted it himself; he is a novelist and this is his chef d’oeuvre” (23: 110).
In a letter written ten years earlier to Maikov, he had affirmed that his recognition of the union of the tsar with the people had been a major factor in converting him to tsarism.2 Nothing like such unity, he was firmly convinced, existed in Europe, “which completely depends on the stock markets of the bourgeoisie and on the ‘placidity of the proletariat.’ ” Russia cannot “be conquered by all the Yids of Europe taken together, nor by the millions of their gold, nor by the millions of their armies” (25: 97–98). Dostoevsky’s fanaticism has reached such a pitch that Europe has now become “Yiddish”—ruled entirely by grossly material considerations—just as have all those Russian liberals and Westernizers, writing in several leading newspapers, who expressed any doubts about the sagacity of Russia’s course.
The Diary is distressingly marred by Dostoevsky’s deep-rooted xenophobia, which extended to every people not of Great Russian origin and is most obvious here in relation to the Jews. Time and again Dostoevsky hurls the direst accusations against them as ruthless exploiters of the misery of others, motivated by a greedy lust for gain, and deploying their international influence against the interests of the Russian state. By the 1870s, the liberation of the serfs had led to a period of economic transformation in which the capital of Jewish financiers played an increasingly important role, especially in the intensive spate of railway construction. It is then that Dostoevsky began belaboring the Jews in his Diary in the most insulting language, holding them responsible for the growing industrialization and commercialization of Russia and Russian life that he abhorred with every fiber of his being. He now never missed a chance to berate “the crowd of triumphant Jews and kikes that has thrown itself on Russia . . . kikes . . . both of the Hebraic and Orthodox persuasion” to suck the lifeblood of the liberated but hopelessly indebted peasantry (22: 81). It is all too clear that he was inclined to accept the age-old demonization of the Jews both as ruthless batteners on the misery of others and as concealed masters and manipulators of world politics.3
The Russian Army advanced rapidly in the early days of the campaign but was delayed for four months during the siege of the Bulgarian city of Plevna, where it sustained heavy losses. As Russian losses mounted, Dostoevsky does everything in his power to keep up the spirits of his countrymen, insisting that “the Russian people . . . all, as one man, want to achieve the great aim of the war for Christianity” (26: 44). Once Plevna had been captured, the Russian Army resumed its advance and was soon within sight of Constantinople. But when the Turks sued for peace, the war-weary Alexander II accepted. The initial treaty of San Stefano awarded the Russians a considerable amount of territory and influence in southeast Europe—so much that the united European powers demanded (and obtained) a revision of the treaty that deprived Russia of much of the fruits of victory. The war thus ended for Russia in a general sense of disappointment and frustration. The new era of world history that Dostoevsky had prophesied turned out to be a mirage.
II. Stories
The sketches and short stories in the Diary of a Writer contain some of the purest and most moving expressions of Dostoevsky’s genius, happily free from the dubious elements of his ideology so often marring his articles. Even those critics and readers who sharply disagreed with his vehemently asserted opinions were unanimously warm in their praise of such masterpieces as “A Gentle Creature” (Krotkaya) and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (Son smeshnogo cheloveka). Shortly after the publication of the first of these stories, Saltykov-Shchedrin invited Dostoevsky to contribute a story to Notes of the Fatherland. As he wrote to a friend, “You simply feel like crying as you read; there are very few such jewels in all of European liter
ature.”4 These stories indeed contain the essence of the most sympathetic aspects of Dostoevsky’s vision—his acute identification with human suffering, both material and spiritual, and his unswerving commitment to an ideal of human felicity attained through fulfilling the Christian commandment of mutual love.
The very first issue of the Diary contains an extremely touching sketch—“A Little Boy at Christ’s Christmas Party” (Malchik u Christa na Elke)—that could not illustrate more clearly the organic relation between his journalism and his art. Just a month before, on December 26, 1875, Dostoevsky had taken his daughter to the annual Christmas ball for children at the Artists’ Club in Petersburg, an event famous for the size of the Christmas tree in the ballroom and for the lavishness of its decorations. The next day he paid his visit, already described, to the colony for juvenile delinquents. While going to and fro in the Petersburg streets, and pondering over what to include in his first fascicule, he noticed a little boy begging for alms. These impressions, he wrote Vsevolod Solovyev, solved his problem; he decided to devote a good part of the January issue “to children—children in general, children with fathers, children without fathers . . . under Christmas trees, without Christmas trees, criminal children.”5 And so he begins with the Christmas ball and ends with the visit to the colony for delinquents; between them he inserts his fictional sketch.
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