1 The commentator of the Academy edition, searching for some basis for Dostoevsky’s startling assertion, could only find a quotation from a letter of Pushkin written in 1824. While living in the country, the poet describes his activities, and remarks that in the evening he listens to peasant tales (skazki). “With these,” he says, “I make up for the shortcomings of my damned education” (22: 380).
2 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 281; March 21–22/April 2–3, 1868.
3 In a special article of the March 1877 issue devoted to “The Jewish Question,” Dostoevsky, in response to a Jewish reader’s protests, denies using the word zhid (Yid) for individuals, reserving it only “to denote a well-known idea: ‘Yid,’ ‘Yiddism,’ ‘the Kingdom of the Yids,’ etc. These designated only a well-known concept, a tendency, a characteristic of the age” (25: 75). “We are talking,” explains Dostoevsky, “about the whole and the idea; we are talking about Yiddism and about the idea of the Yids, which is creeping over the whole world in place of ‘unsuccessful’ Christianity” (25: 85). By this time, all individual and historical reality has dissolved in Dostoevsky’s nightmare fantasies about Jewish-European materialism taking over the world, just as all national and political reality dissolves when he envisions the cloud-capped vistas of “the Christian idea of salvation,” under the aegis of Holy Russia, leading to a new world-historical era of brotherly love and reconciliation.
4 PSS, 24: 390.
5 PSS, 29/Bk. 2: 72; January 11, 1876.
6 G. M. Fridlender, Realizm Dostoevskogo (Moscow–Leningrad, 1964), 290–308.
CHAPTER 52
A New Novel
The Diary of a Writer for October 1877 contained the announcement that, due to illness, Dostoevsky would suspend publication for two years. When this decision brought more than a hundred letters pleading with him to continue, he told his readers that “in the forthcoming year of rest from periodical publication, I expect, indeed, to engage in belletristic work, which imperceptibly and involuntarily has been taking shape within me during the two years of the publication of the Diary” (26: 126). Both reasons certainly played their part, but perhaps the irresistible call of artistic creation was the stronger. For the next three years, Dostoevsky would be absorbed primarily with writing The Brothers Karamazov, whose first installment appeared in The Russian Messenger at the beginning of 1879. During the last two years of his life, he held all of literate Russia spellbound with monthly installments of his greatest novel. Its gripping theme placed the murder of a father in a vast religious and moral-philosophical context; and no Russian reader of the time could avoid associating its deeply probing pages with the increasingly frequent attempts then being made to assassinate the tsar.
Dostoevsky’s life now took on the features of a cult figure, someone regarded with awe and unstinting admiration.1 It became customary during these years, even among people who disagreed violently with Dostoevsky on social-political issues, to regard him with a certain reverence, and to feel that his words incarnated a prophetic vision illuminating Russia and its destiny. In the eyes of the vast majority of the literate public, he became a living symbol of all the suffering that history had imposed on the Russian people, as well as all their longing for an ideal world of (Christian) brotherly love and harmony.
Nor was Dostoevsky averse to assuming such a prophetic role, one that he could well have felt had been accorded to him by destiny itself. His life had placed him in an extraordinary position from which to understand the problems of Russian society, and his artistic-ideological evolution embodies and expresses all the conflicts and contradictions that made up the panorama of Russian social-cultural life. At no moment was Russian public opinion more ready to seek guidance than in the crisis period the country was then living through. This stormy and unsettled time reached its climax, just a month after Dostoevsky’s own death, with the assassination of Alexander II, the Tsar-Liberator whom he revered.
The period between the cessation of the Diary and intensive work on The Brothers Karamazov allowed Dostoevsky to catch up with correspondence from his readers. He disliked writing letters, he says time and again, yet he continued to reply to readers all the same, and seemed to find sustenance in doing so. An important letter came in the form of a manuscript by an unnamed writer now identified as the philosopher Nikolay Feodorov. He was a strange and enigmatic figure, the illegitimate son of a noble family who was employed as a librarian in the Rumyantsev Museum in Petersburg. He enjoyed a considerable underground reputation in his lifetime even though he never published anything under his own name, believing that all private property (in which category he included ideas) was sinful. Dostoevsky already had received an anonymous manuscript of his in 1876, a portion of which was quoted in the Diary. This citation argued that the absence of private organizations and associations in Russia (including labor unions) should not be judged a social deficiency. All such groups pit one part of society against another, while in Russia “there still lives, with a certain vigor, that feeling of unity without which human societies cannot exist” (22: 82). The writer who had composed Raskolnikov’s final dream in Crime and Punishment, where such social disintegration is depicted with terrifying vividness, found Feodorov’s thoughts a welcome confirmation of his own artistic vision.
This new letter dealt with the question of the resurrection of the dead and the immortality of the soul. Feodorov’s doctrines, which have been labeled “a mystical positivism,” enjoyed an extraordinary vogue in the 1870s, attracting the admiration not only of Dostoevsky but also of Tolstoy and Vladimir Solovyev. At the heart of his speculations was the same eschatological hope that inspired Dostoevsky and Solovyev—the vision of a total transformation of earthly life into the Kingdom of God. He believed that Christ had appeared, not simply to promise resurrection and a triumph over death in some miraculously transformed world at the Second Coming, but rather to point the way for humanity to accomplish the work of resurrection itself. He asserted that this goal could be achieved through the application of humanity’s collective will, determined to turn the Christian revelation into an empirical reality.
Feodorov’s ideas are an odd blend of science fiction and what he called “supramoralism.” Like Fourier, who had influenced him in his youth, he indulged in cosmological fantasies that would allow for the development of new organs and convert nature from a blind, hostile, oppressive force into a realization of human desire. The ultimate aim of this development was to be a state of “multiple unity,” in which everything (including nature) would exist as part of one huge, living organism. Once this condition had been attained, the natural course of human life would be reversed; instead of producing children, humanity would begin to resurrect its ancestors by reassembling the atoms and molecules of which they had been composed and which still remained scattered throughout the universe. For him, humankind’s reverence for its fathers is the root of that family feeling which, empirically, points the way to the future state of humanity as a universal organism, a future in which the source of all the evils in the world—egoism and individualism—would vanish because they would be deprived of the physical basis for their perpetuation.2
Dostoevsky responded to this document—sent by one of Feodorov’s disciples, an ex-revolutionary named Peterson—with a long and excited letter of his own. “I must say that I am essentially in complete agreement with [Feodorov’s] views,” he declared. “Reading them, I felt I might have written them myself.” So taken was he with Feodorov’s ideas that he communicated them to Vladimir Solovyev at the first opportunity. “He [Solovyev] is in profound sympathy with your thinker,” he informs Peterson, “and was intending to say almost exactly the same thing in his next lecture.”3 In fact, Dostoevsky had written something similar long ago in a notebook jotting while maintaining a vigil at the bier of his first wife. He too had seen the ultimate goal of humankind as the attainment of a state in which procreation would cease, the dead would be resurrected, and all humanity would literally be united in a new physical body. Dos
toevsky, however, saw this final transformation of humankind as occurring only at the end of time, not in earthly life; nor did he envisage it being achieved empirically through human effort. Hence he expresses concern over whether Feodorov’s scientific fantasies had not led to a certain Utopian secularism.
Dostoevsky’s epistolary relations with Feodorov, which focus on the supreme metaphysical importance of the theme of fatherhood, occurred exactly at the moment when he was mulling over his first notes for The Brothers Karamazov. It would appear that he thought of introducing a discussion of Feodorov’s ideas into the scene in Zosima’s cell. An isolated jotting reads: “The resurrection of (our) ancestors depends on us” (15: 204). Another reads: “The family will be enlarged: even nonkindred will enter into it, and a new organism will have been woven together” (15: 249). This last note appears among the plans for the conversations and exhortations of Zosima; and perhaps the most important influence may be located there. For even though Dostoevsky’s works are suffused with a sense of the importance of mutual moral responsibility, nowhere is this theme stated more broadly than in The Brothers Karamazov, where each person is declared to be responsible for all. The bold conception of a future humankind that would literally be a huge, united, and interdependent organism may well have guided Dostoevsky toward his epochal formulation.
Despite his intense absorption in constructing a scenario for his new novel, his recurring epilepsy, and the worsening of his emphysema, Dostoevsky maintained a wide range of social commitments. He attended the “Wednesdays” of Prince Meshchersky, often went to Pobedonostsev’s home on Saturday evenings, and continued to frequent the salon of Elena Shtakenshneider. In addition to entertaining guests like Strakhov at Sunday dinners, he exchanged visits with a large family circle. He also dined once a month at a dinner organized by the Society of Writers, which included all literary factions and where, as Anna notes, “Feodor Mikhailovich met and mingled with his sworn literary enemies.”4
In November 1878 he was introduced, at her urgent request, to Countess Sofya Andreyevna Tolstaya by their mutual friend Vladimir Solovyev. The countess was the widow of the poet and playwright Aleksey Tolstoy and, according to Anna, a woman “of great intellect, highly educated,” who had established her own salon.5 According to his wife, Dostoevsky visited her regularly, where he met not only other intellectuals and cultural luminaries but also ladies of the highest society. No fund-raiser for the needy—especially for impoverished students—was organized without inviting him to read. Such invitations were rarely refused, because nothing was more important for him than to maintain his contact with the rising generation of Russian youth.
In addition to his taxing social commitments, Dostoevsky continued to pay the closest attention to criminal and political trials, not only as reported in the newspapers but also as a spectator. Earlier in the year Dostoevsky had been present at the trial of Vera Zasulich, which, he felt, revealed the deep fissures splitting Russian society apart, and which surely filled him with gloomy forebodings. Zasulich was a determined young woman, twenty-eight years of age, who had moved in revolutionary student circles and had been arrested in connection with the Nechaev affair in 1871. She had acted as one of his couriers after he went abroad, but had no connection with the group that murdered Ivanov.
Kept imprisoned for two years, even though no charges were filed against her, she was declared innocent and emerged as a hardened revolutionary. On learning that General Trepov, the governor of St. Petersburg, had illegally ordered the flogging of a Populist political prisoner for refusing to remove his cap in the general’s presence, she calmly walked into his office on a false pretext and shot him, though wounding him only slightly. Her open trial, presided over by Dostoevsky’s friend, A. F. Koni, was conducted with scrupulous impartiality, despite pressure from official circles. Koni, whose later career suffered as a result, allowed the defense to introduce detailed testimony about the relentless flogging. The result was a triumphant acquittal of the defendant, to the wild applause of a courtroom packed with high government functionaries and notables from the most select Petersburg society. Admission to the courtroom was limited, but Dostoevsky was present with a card falsely declaring him to be a member of the legal profession.
During the course of the trial, other Populist prisoners, called as witnesses by the defense, unanimously testified to the constant brutalities they had been forced to endure, and those frightening glimpses into the reality of the prison world produced a shattering effect. Elizaveta Naryshkin-Kurakina, a lady-in-waiting to one of the grand duchesses (and an acquaintance of Dostoevsky’s), was scarcely to be suspected of revolutionary sympathies. But she wrote in her Memoirs, “The appearance of a number of young political prisoners created quite a stir. They had been brought into the courtroom from the Peter-and-Paul Fortress merely as witnesses to the incident in the prison. Their pale faces, their voices trembling with tears and indignation, the details of their depositions—all these statements made me lower my eyes with shame.”6 Gradovsky, whom Dostoevsky had replaced as editor of The Citizen, remembered feeling that, as the testimony of these youthful defense witnesses unrolled, not Zasulich but he himself and all of Russian society stood accused and were standing trial.7
Dostoevsky had raged against flogging in House of the Dead, and perhaps General Trepov’s order reminded him of the savage brutalities of the sadistic Major Krivtsov of his prison camp years. Like so many others at the tribunal, he could not suppress sympathy for the vengeful Zasulich, who during her testimony had said: “It is terrible to raise one’s hand against a fellow man . . . but I decided that this is what I had to do.” The clash between her moral conscience and her social-political convictions made a deep impression on Dostoevsky, who felt that no formal legal judgment would be the best solution. If found guilty, she would become a martyr; if acquitted, her act would be given a legal sanction, and the authority of the Russian state would be undermined.
His prediction that Zasulich would become a heroine was soon all too dramatically borne out. On emerging from the courthouse, she was carried on the shoulders of a celebrating crowd, and this militant rejoicing led to a demonstration that ended with a splattering of gunfire and one death. When the police arrived to arrest Zasulich again, she had vanished into the throng and was later smuggled out of the country. Once abroad, she continued a notable revolutionary career in Switzerland, eventually aligning herself with Plekhanov and the Mensheviks against Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution.
The shot fired by Zasulich echoed throughout Russia, and her example spurred on others to take up arms against tsarist officials. Indeed, in the months following her trial a wave of terrorist attacks was carried out by her hitherto peaceful comrades, formerly devoted only to propaganda among the people. High officials of the regime were killed in Kiev and Odessa, and General Mezentsev, the head of the dreaded secret police, was struck down by a dagger in broad daylight in the very heart of St. Petersburg as revenge for the death of a Populist prisoner. His assassin was Stepniak-Kravchinsky, a young Populist who had fought with the Serbs in their battle against the Turks and who, after the murder, escaped abroad. He became a noted writer whose Underground Russia is still an indispensable source for the Populist movement, and, while in exile in London, helped Constance Garnett improve her Russian. He is often considered one of the prototypes of Razumov in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes.
Dostoevsky comments on the Mezentsev murder to Victor Putsykovich, an old journalist friend who was now receiving warning letters from “Odessa Socialists” threatening him with death if he did not stop printing articles against the Nihilists (he had forwarded these to Mezentsev without receiving a reply). Besides revealing the incompetence of the secret police, the reference to Odessa also occasions another display of Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitic obsession. “Odessa, a city of Yids, turns out to be the center of our militant Socialism. There’s the same phenomenon in Europe: the Yids are terribly active in Socialism, and I won’t even mention the La
ssalles and Karl Marxes. And it’s understandable: for Yids the whole benefit is from any kind of radical shock or upheaval in the state, because they themselves are a status in statu, making up their own community that will never be shaken but will only gain from any kind of weakening of anything that is not the Yids.”8 In fact, very few of the Populists were of Jewish origin (Jewish youth would flock to the radical banner only later in the century), but Dostoevsky preferred not to accuse those purebred Russian lads whose desire for self-sacrifice he hoped to guide into other channels.
Considering the enormous prestige he enjoyed at this time, such hopes were hardly groundless. A commentator in Voice, referring to the termination of the Diary, regretted its disappearance “particularly in relation to the younger generation” and remarked that “the majority of the young, with their unspoiled intuition, were able to decipher his deep genuineness and sincerity and valued these very highly.”9 The oracular status he had now assumed is manifest in a letter sent to him on April 8, 1878, by a group of students at the University of Moscow.
“Dear Feodor Mikhailovich,” the students wrote, “for two years now we have been accustomed to turn to your Diary for the solution, or for the proper posing, of the questions that loomed before us; we have been accustomed to use your decisions for the establishment of our own views, and to honor them even when we did not agree.”10 One of the six signatories was Pavel Milyukov, later a famous historian of Russian culture, leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party in the Russian Duma after 1905, and then foreign minister in an interim government before the Bolshevik takeover. The immediate occasion for this joint missive was a manifestation of popular anger directed at the activities of the young dissidents.
Dostoevsky Page 111
