The first mention of the sketch in his notebooks, dated December 30, reads: “The Christmas tree. The small boy in Rückert” (22: 322). Friedrich Rückert, a minor German poet, had composed the prose poem, The Orphaned Child’s Christmas (Des fremden Kindes Heiliger Christ). Dostoevsky had lived in Germany, where its recital was a standard feature of Christmas festivities (much like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in English-speaking lands). The thematic similarity of Dostoevsky’s story and the poem was first pointed out by G. M. Fridlender.6 An orphaned child wanders the streets at Christmas, peering into the brightly lit windows of houses where happy children have Christmas trees. He knocks on the doors and windows of the houses, hoping that someone will take pity on his lonely misery; but all remains silent. Overcome with grief, he breaks into tears and calls on Christ to rescue him from his desolation; suddenly another child appears, carrying a torch and dressed in white. It is the Christ-child himself, who points to a huge Christmas tree shining among the stars more brightly than any in the houses. It has been lit for all the orphans of the world, and, as if in a dream, angels descend from the glittering tree. The orphan is carried up to the light, and in heavenly eternity he forgets all the travails of his life on earth.
Rückert’s poem touchingly dissolves the miseries of the poor orphan into an eternity of heavenly bliss. Dostoevsky, as one might expect, gives the same theme a more somber treatment and penetrates far more deeply into the wretchedness of his little beggar-boy. The very placement of the sketch in the Diary brings out the pathos of his loneliness by contrast; and because it is set between descriptions of events that actually occurred, a semblance of verisimilitude is imparted to the miraculous intervention of the Christ-child. Indeed, Dostoevsky plays effectively on the ambiguous status of the sketch as “art” and “invention,” but an invention resembling “reality” so closely that it is difficult to tell the difference. “I know for certain,” the sketch begins, “that I actually did invent it; yet I keep fancying that this happened somewhere, sometime, precisely on Christmas Eve, in a certain huge city during a terrible frost” (22: 14).
The general absence of specificity in the background detail extends the anecdote into a sort of parable. We find ourselves in an archetypal Dostoevskian milieu, characteristic of almost every work—a dark, freezing, miserable Petersburg hovel, a dying woman lying neglected and alone on a bare bed, a hungry, shivering little boy dressed in rags, uncomprehendingly watching her death agony. “How did she happen to be here?—She may have come with her little boy from some faraway town, and then suddenly had fallen ill.” Everything is left in this atmosphere of vagueness, and the situation thus takes on the universal quality of a mythical exemplar. This is not an individual woman dying but one whose fate symbolizes that of thousands. By contrast, as the little boy shiveringly and futilely looks around the room for something to eat, there is a keen acuity of sensuous detail that throws the awfulness of the situation into high relief. “For a moment he stood still, resting his hand on the shoulder of the dead woman. Then he began to breathe on his tiny fingers in an attempt to warm them, and, suddenly, coming upon his little cap that lay on the bedstead, he groped along cautiously and quietly made his way out of the basement” (22: 14–15).
The remainder of the tale records the little boy’s reactions as he wanders through the streets of the looming city at night, gazing into houses filled with happy children clustering around sumptuous Christmas trees, and pauses with fascination before mechanical toys in a shop window. Frightened by some older, unruly urchins, he takes refuge in a yard behind a pile of wood (a familiar Dostoevskian setting). There he falls asleep, and his frozen body is found the next morning. But before his pitiful demise, he has dreamed a wonderful dream: “Where is he now? Everything sparkles and glitters and shines, and scattered all over are tiny dolls—no, they are little boys and girls, only they are so luminous, and they all fly around him.” These are the children at the party of Christ’s Christmas tree, a party for all the child-victims of human sin and social injustice. Some of these children
had frozen to death in those baskets in which they had been left at the doors of Petersburg officials; others had perished in miserable hospital wards; still others had died at the dried-up breasts of their famine-stricken mothers (during the Samara famine); these, again, had choked to death from stench in third-class railroad cars. Now they are all here, all like little angels, and they are all with Christ, and He is in their midst holding out His hands to them and to their sinful mothers. . . . Down below, the next morning the porters found the tiny body of the runaway boy who had frozen to death behind the woodpile; they found his mother as well. . . . She had frozen to death even before him; they met in God’s heaven. (22: 16–17)
In the concluding paragraph, Dostoevsky shifts back to himself as narrator and to the “imaginary” aspects of his narrative. “But the point is that I keep fancying that all this could actually have happened—I mean, the things which happened in the basement and behind the piles of kindling wood. Well, and as regards Christ’s Christmas Tree—I really don’t know what to tell you, and I don’t know whether or not this could have happened” (22: 17). Whether or not any of these events could or did happen, the aim of this sketch is manifestly to make something approximating Christ’s Christmas party happen on earth.
In the early pages of the February issue, Dostoevsky exalted the Russian people, arguing that everything of value in Russian literature originates in the assimilation by Russian writers of the people’s Christian ideals. Expressing a certain weariness, however, with all these “professions de foi,” he decides to relate a reminiscence that, “for some reason, I am quite eager to recount precisely here and now, in conclusion of our treatise on the people” (22: 46). This reminiscence is “The Peasant Marey,” and its significance far transcends its immediate purpose in the Diary. On one level, the episode is a supplement—and an extremely valuable one—to House of the Dead; on another, it is the only direct evocation of his childhood coming from his pen. This entry of the Diary has been discussed earlier (on pp. 207–211) in the chapter on House of the Dead, and is unquestionably of crucial importance, not only because of the unique childhood reminiscence but also as the only attempt by Dostoevsky to portray the inner evolution of his beliefs about the Russian peasants. Its details are worth repeating here more briefly in the context in which it was originally written.
The episode begins with a sharp and swift evocation of the Easter week celebration in the Siberian stockade, during which the prisoners could drink, carouse, and quarrel to their heart’s content. Dostoevsky looked on, with a feeling of deep loathing, at the raucous turbulence and brutality of the spectacle unrolling before his eyes. “Never,” he confesses, “could I stand without disgust drunken popular rakishness, and particularly in this place.” Another political criminal, a cultivated Polish patriot, expressed what seemed to be their common reaction when the two met outside the barracks, where they had gone to escape the brawling and the bedlam. “He looked at me gloomily, his eyes flashing; his lips began to tremble: ‘Je hais ces brigands!’—he told me in a low voice, grinding his teeth, and passed by” (22: 46).
Returning to the barracks, Dostoevsky then lies down on the wooden boards where all the convicts slept and begins—as he did for consolation—to conjure up his past memory. And he suddenly recalls how once, at the age of nine, he had been happily exploring the forest on his father’s property during a summer vacation. The one or two sentences devoted to the forest are full of feeling, evincing a sensibility rarely displayed elsewhere: “And in all my life nothing have I loved so much as the forest, with its mushrooms and wild berries, its insects and birds and little hedgehogs and squirrels; its damp odor of dead leaves, which I so adored” (22: 47). He had been warned by his mother that wolves were in the vicinity, and suddenly, in the midst of his bucolic foraging, he heard distinctly (though it turned out to be an auditory hallucination) the cry that a wolf had been spotted. Terrified, the boy ran
to a peasant plowing in a nearby field.
“This was our peasant Marey. . . . He was almost fifty years old, stocky, pretty tall, with much gray hair in his bushy, flaxen beard.” The peasant comforts the little boy, and blesses him. “He extended his hand and stroked me on the cheek. ‘Do stop fearing! Christ be with thee. Cross thyself’ ” (22: 48). The consoling words calmed the agitated young Dostoevsky and convinced him that there had been no wolf. The incident had vanished from his memory for twenty years, but lay dormant there, like a seed planted in the soil, ready to blossom and flower at the moment when its reappearance would take on the stature of a revelation. Here, in his childhood experience, in one symbolic and never-to-be-forgotten instant, Dostoevsky had glimpsed all the spiritual beauty contained in the Russian peasant character. “He was our peasant serf, while I was his master’s little boy; no one would learn of his kindness to me and no one would reward him . . . only God, maybe, perceived from above what a profound and enlightened human sentiment, what delicate, almost womanly tenderness may fill the heart of some coarse, bestially ignorant Russian peasant serf, who, in those days, had no intimations about his freedom” (22: 49).
The resurrection of this long-faded childhood incident brought about a complete transformation in Dostoevsky’s whole relation to his previously abhorrent surroundings. No longer does he see the drunken convicts as coarse brutes, incapable of harboring any humane and generous feelings; they now have all become potential Mareys, whose natural purity of soul had been over-laid by the harshness and hopeless oppression of their lives. “I went along, gazing attentively at the faces which I encountered. This intoxicated, shaven and branded peasant, with marks on his face, bawling his hoarse, drunken song—why, he may be the very same Marey; for I have no way of peering into his heart” (22: 50). This incident furnishes a valuable paradigm for grasping how Dostoevsky persuaded himself of the validity of his own beliefs about the Russian people. And it illustrates once more his genius for taking an isolated and commonplace personal incident and endowing it with a wide-ranging social and symbolic significance.
The first issue of the Diary opens on the spate of suicides among young people then disquieting Russian opinion; and this theme will be the inspiration for a number of Dostoevsky’s most moving stories. “And there is not a moment,” Dostoevsky comments sadly about these incidents, “of Hamlet’s pondering ‘that dread of something after death’ ” (22: 6). Indirectly, the question of immortality is thus broached, uniting an eternal “accursed question” with the dispiriting news on which he reports. Dostoevsky returned to the theme in October 1876, prompted by the recent suicide of the seventeen-year-old daughter of a “very well-known Russian émigré.” Herzen’s daughter Elizaveta had taken her life, and Dostoevsky cited her suicide note, written in French, requesting that, if her suicide did not succeed, her family and friends should gather “to celebrate my resurrection with Clicquot.” Otherwise, she asked that her death be ascertained before burial, “because it is most unpleasant to awake in the coffin underground. That would not be chic at all.” He contrasts such words with those of a second suicide, “the humble [smirennoe] suicide,” of a poor, young St. Petersburg seamstress who “jumped and fell to the ground, holding an icon in her hands” (23: 144–146).
Both these deaths haunted his imagination, and the second inspired one of his most beautiful stories, “A Gentle Creature.” The suicide of Liza Herzen led to the composition of an imaginary suicide note, entitled “The Sentence.” Devoting a few paragraphs to Liza Herzen, he compassionately senses, underneath the strained flippancy of her tone, a protest against the “stupidity” of mankind’s appearance on earth and the oppressive tyranny of a meaningless causality to which humankind can never become reconciled. Without any conscious awareness of such matters, the young girl had nonetheless been affected by the “linearity” of the ideas “conveyed to her since childhood in her father’s house” (23: 145). These ideas—of atheism and materialism—ultimately impelled her to take her own life. To express their disastrous effect in its most powerful form, Dostoevsky then prints his fictive suicide note.
The writer of the imaginary suicide note refuses to accept, in the name of some hypothetical paradisiacal bliss, the suffering necessarily imposed by being born a conscious human being who, as an atheist, does not believe in immortality. The inconsolable thought of her own extinction impels the writer to see in the creation of human beings, and particularly of himself, “some sort of the most profound disrespect for mankind, which, to me, is profoundly insulting, and all the more unbearable as here there is no one who is guilty” (23: 146–147). Rather than endure the humiliation of existing in a senseless universe, where mankind is merely the plaything of a cruel and sadistic nature, he chooses suicide, as the only honorable protest against the indignity of having been born.
The repercussions of this article anticipate much of the later history of Dostoevsky interpretation. So powerfully had he presented the point of view he was opposing, so penetratingly had he entered into a consciousness whose dangers he wished to expose, that he was immediately accused of supporting what he was striving to combat. “The moment my article was printed,” he wrote in December 1876, “I was swamped—by letters and personal callers—with inquiries as to the meaning of ‘The Sentence.’ ” Taking up the question publicly, he leaves no doubt that he had tried to express “the formula of a logical suicide”—the only possible conclusion about life as a whole that, in his view, could be drawn by an atheist and materialist. “I have expressed this ‘last word of science’ in brief terms, clearly and popularly, with the sole purpose of refuting it—not by reasoning or logic, since it cannot be refuted by logic . . . but by faith, by the deduction of the necessity of faith in the immortality of the soul” (24: 53).
It is impossible, he stresses, to give life a meaning by substituting beneficent social action for religious faith. For he insists that, where religious faith is lacking, a true “love of mankind” not only is impossible but runs the risk of being transformed into its opposite. The thought of all the unredeemed suffering that mankind has endured, and the impossibility of alleviating that suffering, cannot help but turn the initial love into hate. Addressing the Populists directly, he writes: “Those who, having deprived man of his faith in immortality, are seeking to substitute for it—as life’s loftiest aim—‘love of mankind,’ those, I maintain, are lifting their arms against themselves, since in lieu of love of mankind they are planting in the heart of him who has lost his faith seeds of the hatred of mankind” (24: 49). Such words anticipate the creation of that despairing idealist Ivan Karamazov, who will find himself caught in exactly such a love-hate relation to mankind.
The image of “the humble suicide” continued to haunt Dostoevsky’s imagination, and in late October he decided to use it as the subject for a story. At first he thought of making “the girl with the icon” an episode in a novel (never written) called The Dreamer (Mechtatel’). Some features of this early draft were retained in the final story, among them the monologue form and a main character who had refused to fight a duel and was convinced that he was seeking the naked truth. Work on the Diary, however, left no time to develop this novel project. Deciding that the theme was rich enough to deserve independent treatment, however, he turned to his old notes. What he found there was his longstanding fascination with the figure of a “usurer”—the base epitome of an egoistic selfishness excluding any concern for others.
Notes for such a figure appear in a plan for a novel in the early 1860s, and were taken up again in 1869 as an idea for a story after the completion of The Idiot. The character here is described as “a genuine underground type; has been insulted. Becomes embittered. Immeasurable vanity. . . . His wife cannot fail to notice that he is cultivated, but then realized, not very much; every gibe (and he takes everything as a gibe) angers him, he is suspicious. . . . For a time he endeavors to establish a loving relationship with his wife. But he had broken her heart” (24: 382). This situati
on already contains an outline of the later story.
Another plan for a story, set down at the same time but never written, gives a more extended description of the psychology associated with the usurer:
Most important trait—a misanthrope, but from the underground . . . a need to confide himself [to others], which peeps out from the terrible misanthropy and the ironically insulting mistrust. . . . This need is convulsive and uncontrollable, so that with frightening naïveté (a bitter, even touching naïveté, worthy of pity) he throws himself suddenly on people and, of course, receives a rebuff, but, once receiving a rebuff, he does not forgive, forgets nothing, suffers, turns it into a tragedy. (24: 382)
These are the contours of the character whose voice will be heard as the narrator of “A Gentle Creature.” Although the idea for this story first emerged in Dostoevsky’s thoughts about “the girl with the icon,” by the time the story took final shape she had receded into the background. Instead, her husband, the narrator, comes to the forefront, and what gives him a special stamp is the character of his self-image. He sees himself as some sort of misunderstood and neglected hero, whose life is a personal protest against an unjust society, and this self-image sustains him emotionally and motivates his behavior. It is what has made life possible for him since—in a rather stock situation in the repertoire of Russian Romanticism—he had been expelled from his regiment for having failed to defend its honor on some public occasion.
Before we learn the details of his past, however, the narrator is shown simply as the proprietor of a pawnshop; and this role again strikes a familiar Dostoevskian note. A preoccupation with money is usually the symptom of a lust for power stemming from a status of inferiority and subordination. So it is here again; but complicated by the character’s need to persuade himself of his own rectitude and virtue. “You say ‘pawnbroker’—everybody says it. And what of it? This means that there must, indeed, have been reasons why one of the most magnanimous of all men became a pawnbroker” (24: 16). The narrator refuses to view himself as he knows he is regarded by others—and even by some part of himself that he cannot suppress. This discrepancy is the source of the tragedy recounted in the story, which arises from the narrator’s pitiless attempt, in a hopeless search for love and understanding, to impose his own self-conception on another. But because he seeks love without being willing to love (until it is too late), because he wishes to obtain love through the domination of another consciousness, the result is the very opposite of what he desires. “But here,” he thinks, looking at the corpse of his dead wife, “there was something I forgot or failed to see” (24: 17).
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