Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  A number of Moscow students had gone to greet a convoy of students from the University of Kiev, who had been arrested on minor charges and were being sent to the provinces in police custody. As they proceeded together peacefully through the streets, some butchers and shopkeepers from a local food market swarmed out and, to shouts of “Beat them!” severely manhandled some of the young men. This physical attack was one of the first of its kind on such a scale, an eye-opening indication of the lack of solidarity of the urban lower-class population with student unrest. This realization caused a crisis of self-questioning in the student ranks. “What is most important for us,” they told Dostoevsky, “is to resolve the question: To what extent are we, the students, guilty, and what conclusions about us should be drawn by society, and by ourselves, from this occurrence?”

  To the first part of this question Dostoevsky gave an unequivocal reply: “In my view you are not guilty at all. You are only children of that very same ‘society’ which you are now deserting, and which is ‘a lie in every sense.’ ” Students, he continues, “are in rightful revolt—though unfortunately still only in a European (that is, Socialist) manner. . . . Instead of going to the people so as to live their life, the young people, knowing nothing about it . . . simply despising its foundations, for example, religious faith, went not to learn from the people but . . . to instruct it arrogantly, with contempt—a purely aristocratic, leisure-class pastime!” Although he deplores the beatings, such violence was only to be expected; the people “are uncouth, they are muzhiks.”11

  Dostoevsky, however, refused to lose heart, despite the assassinations during the spring and summer of 1878 causing panic in the country. What he saw, or wished to see, to counterbalance a menacing reality—he writes to Leonid Grigoryev of “the hideousness of rural district administrations and morals, vast quantities of vodka, incipient pauperism and a kulak class, that is, European proletariat and bourgeoisie”—was a new consciousness that had burgeoned among the people with the Russo-Turkish War: “There has been established in them . . . a political consciousness, a precise understanding of Russia’s meaning and mission.” But to impute such a “precise” understanding to the people was too much even for him, and he adds that this understanding was at least “constantly becoming precise. . . . In short, . . . the beginnings of higher ideas, . . . the rest will come. One must penetrate beneath the surface of the people to uncover the hidden reality.” One should not believe that “the hideous facts” reveal the essence of their ideals.12 He was unshakably convinced that the Populists’ return to the moral ideals of a secular Christianity was only the first step in their eventual acceptance of the truth of a supernatural Christ, and that his mission was to supply the leadership in this direction that was so woefully lacking.

  During these very months, when Dostoevsky was consulted by students who, if they were not prowling the streets with revolvers themselves, sympathized with those who were, he was also asked to meet with some young men who might easily become their targets. Sometime in the first week of February 1878 he received a visit from D. S. Arsenyev, the tutor of the Grand Dukes Sergey and Paul, the younger sons of Alexander II. The purpose of the call, made in the name of the tsar himself, was to invite him to become acquainted with Arsenyev’s pupils, so that, to quote Anna, “by his conversations Feodor Mikhailovich might have a beneficial influence on the youthful grand dukes.”13

  What Dostoevsky must have felt at such a moment can well be imagined. He—who had been convicted of a crime against the state! He—who had served a prison term at hard labor in Siberia and worn the shackles and striped garment of a convict for four painful years! He—who had sunk to the lowest depths of Russian society and shared the fate of the most hardened criminals! He—now invited to enter as an honored guest into the most exalted and exclusive court circles, and to serve as guide and counselor to those in whose hands the future of Russia would eventually be entrusted!

  His first appearance at court was recorded in the diary of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, a cousin of Sergey and Paul and the son of the commander of the Russian Navy.14 “I dined at Sergey’s.” he wrote. “His guests were K. N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin and Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. I was very much interested in the latter, and had read his works. . . . He speaks extremely well, as well as he writes.”15 This visit to his royal interlocutors was a success, and invitations to dine with them came regularly thereafter. He now found himself in the extraordinary position of being a cherished adviser not only of the young radical generation but also of the younger members of the reigning family. And if he felt that fate (or God) had entrusted him with a mission at this crucial moment of Russian history, he certainly had objective reasons for believing that such a momentous task should have fallen to his lot. Indeed, ever since returning from Siberia in 1860, he had endeavored to play precisely the role into which he had now been cast—that of arbitrator and conciliator between the dissident intelligentsia and Russian society as a whole.

  Never, indeed, could Dostoevsky have felt himself in a better position to influence public opinion. Had the Diary not furnished ample proof of the power of his words to grip the minds and hearts of his readers? And never could he have felt it more essential to do so than in the late 1870s, when the earlier crises of Russian nineteenth-century society shrank into insignificance before the menace of the present. A fraction of the Populists, driven to despair by the relentless persecutions of the government and the lack of any response to their peaceful propaganda among the peasantry, had launched a systematic campaign of terror against tsarist officialdom and finally against the tsar himself. Both the novel Dostoevsky was now beginning and his sensational speech at the ceremonies inaugurating a monument to Pushkin two years later would mark his attempts to mediate the lethal conflict that was tearing Russian society apart.

  Life proceeded for the Dostoevskys in the carefully organized routine that had enabled Dostoevsky to maintain the exacting schedule of his Diary—until April 30, 1878, when their three-year-old son Alyosha suffered a first epileptic convulsion of four minutes. On May 16 the boy was overcome by a major epileptic fit lasting for twelve hours and forty minutes, ending with his death. “My husband was crushed by this death,” Anna writes in her Reminiscences. “He had loved Alyosha somehow in a special way, with an almost morbid love. . . . What racked him particularly was the fact that the child had died of epilepsy—a disease inherited from him.”16 Anna Filosofova, who rushed to see the Dostoevskys on hearing the news, was struck by their isolation, prostration, and helplessness. She was told by Anna, weeping inconsolably, that Dostoevsky had spent the entire previous night on his knees beside Alyosha’s bed.17

  “I so lost my bearings,” writes Anna, “mourned and cried so much, that I was unrecognizable.” Her husband, after the first shock, “to outward appearance. . . was calm and bore with courage the blow that fell on us; but I very much feared that this suppression of his deep grief might react fatally upon his already shaky health.” Anna soon rallied from her apathetic state, responding to his entreaties “to submit to God’s will” and “to take pity on him and the children, to whom I had become, in his words, ‘indifferent.’ ”18 Once having regained some stability, Anna thought it imperative to distract Dostoevsky from his own silent mourning by encouraging him to realize a long-cherished plan of visiting the famous monastery of Optina Pustyn. Vladimir Solovyev had called on them regularly during the period following Alyosha’s death, and Anna persuaded him to convince her husband to undertake the arduous journey in his company. Dostoevsky intended to travel to Moscow in mid-June and offer his new novel to Katkov for The Russian Messenger, and a trip to the monastery from there would be quite feasible.

  Despite the taxing pilgrimage, “My husband returned from Optina Pustyn seemingly at peace and much calmer,” Anna writes, “and he told me a great deal about the customs of the hermitage, where he had passed two days. He met with the renowned elder [starets] Father Ambrose three times. . . . These talks had a pr
ofound and lasting effect on him.”19 Dostoevsky was not the only eminent Russian who found solace in the company of Father Ambrose. Tolstoy, who had visited Optina Pustyn a year earlier in the company of Strakhov, had written afterward, “This Father Ambrose is a true saint. I had only to speak to him, and my soul immediately felt relieved. It is when one speaks with men like him that one feels the closeness of God.”20

  Father Ambrose, revered not only as a spiritual counselor but also as a person of formidable knowledge and erudition, directed the work of translating and editing the texts of the Greek Fathers that had given the Optina cloister its reputation as a center of theological learning. He was famed for possessing the same gift of moral-psychological divination that will soon be attributed to Father Zosima; and the scene in The Brothers Karamazov where Zosima comforts the peasant mother mourning her little son Aleksey employs the very words that Father Ambrose told Dostoevsky to convey to his wife. The elder tells the mother to “weep and be not consoled, but weep. Only every time that you weep be sure to remember that your little son is one of the angels of God, that he looks down from there at you and sees you, and rejoices at your tears, and points at them to the Lord God. . . . but [your weeping] will turn in the end into a quiet joy, and your bitter tears will be only tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart and delivers it from sin” (14: 46).

  Dostoevsky left no firsthand account of his meetings with Father Ambrose, but Solovyev reported that he was in “a very excited state all through the visit.” There was, however, another eyewitness to this meeting, a close friend of Strakhov. He writes that Dostoevsky, instead of “obediently and with fitting humility paying attention to the edifying discourses of the elder and monk, spoke more than [Ambrose] did, became excited, heatedly raised objections, developed and explained the meaning of words pronounced by the elder, and, without being aware of it, from someone desiring to listen to an edifying discourse was transformed into a teacher.”21 However that may be, he drew a good deal of inspiration for his next novel from this visit to the monastery, although it is unlikely, as Solovyev wrote a few months later to Konstantin Leontiyev, that Dostoevsky “specifically went to Optina Pustyn . . . for the first chapters of his novel.”22

  Since Solovyev’s friendship with the novelist had once again become close, it was only to be expected that the Dostoevskys would faithfully attend the famous series of lectures on Godmanhood that he gave in Petersburg all through the winter and early spring of 1878. These lectures were a great public as well as cultural event, and the hall was filled not only with students, normally averse to anything smacking of the religious or theological, but also with the cream of Petersburg cultivated society. Strakhov was there, and on one occasion, instead of the usual exchange of pleasantries, Dostoevsky noticed a certain evasiveness in his behavior. Strakhov later explained that “Count Leo Tolstoy came to the lecture with me. He asked me not to introduce him to anyone, and that was why I stayed away from all of you.” Dostoevsky was disappointed that he had not at least been given the opportunity to scrutinize Tolstoy in the flesh: “But why didn’t you whisper to me who was with you?” he asked Strakhov reproachfully. “I would have taken a look at him at least!”23 The two giants of Russian literature, who were for the only time in their lives in the same place, were thus deliberately kept apart.

  Dostoevsky’s attendance at Solovyev’s lectures was intimately linked with the ideas he was mulling over for his novel. No one reading the Lectures on Godmanhood can fail to be struck by the repeated echoes of Dostoevskian themes and preoccupations in Solovyev’s text, but whether Solovyev exercised any influence on him is a more difficult question to answer. It is probable, however, that the trained philosophical mind of the young man both stimulated Dostoevsky and sharpened his awareness of some of the implications of his own convictions (Strakhov had performed much the same function in the 1860s). One challenging topic that preoccupied both was the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. For Dostoevsky this notion presumably remained speculative and transcendent; it was only in a new and transfigured garb that one could imagine such a glorious fulfillment. Solovyev, however, believed in the possibility of a free Christian theocracy, in which the Christian law of love would entirely penetrate and spiritualize the workings of earthly life. His Lectures sketch the entrancing vision of a humanity gradually approaching such a blessed state of Godmanhood—a society in which, under the leadership of the Orthodox Christ and his Church, the divine and the human would fuse and follow the example of Christ the God-man himself so far as this was possible. Solovyev later wrote that, during their journey to Optina Pustyn, Dostoevsky had told him that “the Church as a positive social ideal must show itself to be the central idea of [his] new novel or a new series of novels, of which only the first has been written—The Brothers Karamazov.”24

  There is an unmistakable resemblance between Solovyev’s Utopia and Dostoevsky’s hopes, but the notion of such a free Christian theocracy of love, under the exclusive hegemony of the Orthodox Church as both a social and a religious institution, is not taken with the same literality in both cases. It is Ivan Karamazov who expresses precisely such an idea and argues for the view that “the Church ought to include the whole State, and not simply occupy a corner of it, and, if this is, for some reason, impossible at present, then it ought, in reality, to be set up as the direct and chief aim of the future development of Christian society!” (14: 56–57). Ivan is accused by the Western liberal Miusov of advocating ultramontanism, that is, the Roman Catholic doctrine of the political subordination of the state to the church, which is not the same as the moral-spiritual transformation of the state into a church.

  Father Zosima, while agreeing that the aim of human society should be such a transformation, takes this goal out of history and places it in an eschatological perspective. Christian society, he says, though not now ready, “will continue still unshaken in expectation of its complete transformation from a society almost heathen in character into a single, universal, all-powerful Church. So be it! So be it! Even though at the end of the ages, for it is ordained to come to pass!” (14: 61). Dostoevsky, of course, uses this argument over state and church to reveal the inner split in Ivan between his reason and his moral sensibility; but contemporaries immediately associated it with Solovyev.

  Another point of contact between the philosophies of the two men may be seen in the analysis of the three temptations of Christ, which appears both in the Lectures on Godmanhood and then, a year later, in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. For Solovyev, however, Christ’s subjection to these temptations is part of the gradual cosmogonic process through which God actualizes himself within the confines of time and earthly life and affirms his willingness to accept human limitations on his divine powers. There is no hint of the intense pathos of freedom expressed in Dostoevsky’s treatment of this same great theme, nothing similar to the sublimity of his emphasis on Christ’s rejection of the temptations in order to safeguard the liberty of human conscience and preserve humankind from enslavement to external and material forces.

  To what extent the final shape of the Legend may have emerged from the intimate colloquies of the novelist and the philosopher is unknown; one should not forget the many anticipations of the Legend that had already appeared in the Diary. Nonetheless, there is one passage in Solovyev that is directly relevant. “Several years ago in Paris,” he writes, “I heard a French Jesuit give the following reasoning: ‘Of course, at present no one can believe in the greater part of the Christian dogma, for example, the divinity of Christ. But you will agree that civilized society cannot exist without a strong authority and a firmly organized hierarchy; only the Catholic Church possesses such an authority and such a hierarchy; therefore, every enlightened man who values the interest of mankind must side with the Catholic Church, that is to say, must be a Catholic.’ ”25 Such a passage would not have taught Dostoevsky anything he had not long since believed and written about Roman Catholicism; but the frank affirmation of a
theism from such a source, encountered exactly at this moment, may well have helped to shape the form in which the Legend finally was cast. Dostoevsky was beginning to make notes for the first chapters of The Brothers Karamaxov during the very months that Vladimir Solovyev was giving his lectures.

  The extant notes for The Brothers Karamazov resemble those that Dostoevsky usually had made at a relatively late stage in composition. As we know, the essential components—including plot and narrative technique—of what became The Brothers Karamazov had long existed in his notebooks or in earlier works. It is thus entirely possible that Dostoevsky relied on such material without feeling the need to make a completely fresh start.

  Literary works that had long fascinated Dostoevsky were also revisited now. His notes document the strong influence of Friedrich Schiller on the conception of The Brothers Karamazov. Schiller, we know, had produced a powerful impression on Dostoevsky in his childhood and youth, and the German playwright, poet, and philosophical essayist had been equally important in Russia for Dostoevsky’s entire generation. In 1861 Dostoevsky wrote that “Schiller . . . was not only a great universal writer, but—above all—he was our national poet” (19: 17). Fifteen years later, he repeats that Schiller “soaked into the Russian soul, left an impression on it, and almost marked an epoch in the history of our development” (23: 31). This conviction helps to explain why he portrays the influence of Schiller as having “soaked into” the souls of all the major characters of The Brothers Karamazov. Dimitry, Ivan, and even the lecherous old Feodor Pavlovich are all capable of citing Schiller by heart. Alyosha refers indirectly to Schiller’s theory of art, and a few lines of Schiller are woven into the speech of the defense attorney Fetyukovich. A Schillerian atmosphere envelops The Brothers Karamazov from the first page to the last, and contributes a good deal to the heightening of its poetic quality.