Just about this time, a young woman named E. P. Letkova-Sultanova (a kursistka in the higher education courses for women) wrote in her diary about a meeting with Dostoevsky at one of the famous Fridays of the poet Yakov Polonsky. Advancing into the drawing room, she saw everyone, dignified gentlemen and smartly dressed ladies, clustered around one of the three windows and intently listening to someone talking. Suddenly she recognized the voice of Dostoevsky and caught a glimpse of the speaker, whom she had never seen before. Her first impression did not correspond at all to the imperious image she had formed in her mind; he was shriveled, rather short, and struck her as someone who looked vinovaty, that is, as if he felt guilty about something. The window before which he stood gave onto Semenovsky Square; and he was holding the other guests spellbound as he relived the past. It was Polonsky who had led him to the window and asked if he recognized what he saw. “Yes! . . Yes! . . . Really! . . . How could I not recognize it,” he had replied.1
Dostoevsky’s words came tumbling out in a stream of spasmodic sentences. He evoked the freezing coldness of the morning, and the horror that overcame him and the other Petrashevtsy as they heard the death sentence being pronounced. “It could not be that I, amidst all the thousands who were alive—in something like five to six minutes would no longer exist!” The appearance of a priest holding a cross convinced them that death was inevitable. “They could not joke even with the cross! . . . They could not stage such a tragicomedy!” Dostoevsky remembered that a feeling of numbness and torpor overcame him: “Everything seemed insignificant compared to this last terrible minute of transition to somewhere, . . . to the unknown, to darkness”; and this numbness did not lift even after he learned that their lives had been spared. Polonsky approached him to break the tension and said consolingly, “Well, all this is past and gone,” inviting him to drink tea with their hostess. “Is it really gone?” Dostoevsky whispered.2 The indelible impact of this confrontation with death had exercised a decisive effect on the remainder of his days.
Letkova was deeply moved by Dostoevsky’s words, uttered in breathless bursts, and she describes him, when he finished, standing “as if a waxen figure: sallow and pale, eyes sunken, lips bloodless, smiling but with a look of suffering.”3 Her opinion of Dostoevsky up to that moment had been anything but favorable, and she tells of the heated discussions in her student group caused by each issue of the Diary. It was generally agreed that his anti-Semitism was intolerable; nor could they endorse the warmongering chauvinism of his articles about the Russo-Turkish War, whose sacrifice in human lives now seemed so vain and futile. Letkova and her fellow students had unanimously detested Demons, and felt light-years removed from Dostoevsky’s political tendency and ideas.
All this was forgotten, however, in the aftermath of what she had just heard. What now emerged before her mind’s eye was “his entire sacrificial path: the torture of awaiting death, its replacement by katorga, the ‘House of the Dead’ with all its horrors: and all this had been borne by this puny man, who suddenly appeared to me greater than everyone surrounding him.” Everything else vanished into oblivion before this vision, and “a feeling of unbelievable happiness, the happiness one can only feel when young, took hold of me. And I wanted to throw myself on my knees and bow down to his sufferings.”4
Everyone had read House of the Dead, and the emotion she experienced was widely shared by all those who, at one public event or another, had listened to him read. Her reaction thus helps to explain some of the astonishing responses called forth by Dostoevsky’s presence on the platform before a mass audience—an audience that, in the majority and at a more sober moment, could well have been antagonistic to his politics. If it was true, as he untiringly maintained, that the Russian peasants particularly revered the suffering of their Christian saints who had endured martyrdom for their faith, then some of this reverence appears to have been transferred—by the new generation who once again accepted the value of suffering and self-sacrifice—to Dostoevsky himself.
A dinner invitation from Grand Duke Sergey for March 5, conveyed through Arsenyev, informed him that the grand duke had perused House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment, and the first part of The Brothers Karamazov. Hence he was even more eager to enjoy the benefits of Dostoevsky’s conversation, of which he retained “a pleasant memory.” At the table were also Pobedonostsev and Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who commented about the evening in his diary, “Feodor Mikhailovich pleases me very much, not only because of his writings but simply because of himself.” Several days later he again noted in his diary, “I have obtained The Idiot of Dostoevsky. When you read his works, it’s enough to drive you out of your mind.”5
Even though he had been invited to dine with younger members of the royal family for the purpose of broadening their minds and shaping their sensibilities, the anomalies of Russian imperial society were such that Dostoevsky was still, as an ex-convict, under the surveillance of the secret police. To end this exasperating situation, he decided to use the considerable influence he could now muster. On March 10 he received a letter from Lieutenant-General A. A. Kireyev, an aide-de-camp of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, the brother of the tsar, obviously in response to efforts to acquaint some important personages with his plight. Kireyev informed Dostoevsky that it would be necessary to make the demand himself to the proper authorities. The document, written the same day, outlines the facts of the restoration of his civil rights. Dostoevsky concludes: “On hundreds of pages I have spoken . . . of my political and religious convictions. I hope that these convictions are such that they cannot give cause to suspect my political morality.”6 His name was thus finally stricken from the list of those on whom the Third Section was keeping a watchful eye.
Social obligations continued to pile up. On March 8 he received a visit from Anna Filosofova, ever busy with charitable endeavors and now arranging a reading for the Literary Fund. Turgenev, just returned to Russia, had already acccepted an invitation the day before, and she now solicited Dostoevsky’s participation. Turgenev’s return to Russia amounted to a rehabilitation of his reputation among the radicals who had mercilessly repudiated him after Fathers and Children. His next novel, Smoke, had aroused even more hostility among all sections of the reading public because of the speeches of one character, who caustically denied that Russia had contributed anything of value to world culture except the samovar. Virgin Soil, his most recent work, presented a not unsympathetic yet disabused view of the Populist “going to the people” movement, and was generally considered a failure. Few champions had come forward to defend these later novels, and Turgenev’s self-imposed exile was in part a means of escaping the implacable hostilities of Russian literary life. This absence from Russia had also injured his reputation. Even Anna Filosofova, surely more sympathetic to his reformist liberalism than to Dostoevsky’s instransigent tsarism, remarked: “I respect him less than Dostoevsky. Feodor Mikhailovich bears the traces of all the miseries of Russia on his skin, he has suffered through them and was tortured by all his convictions, while Ivan Sergeyevich became frightened and fled, and all his life he criticized us from the beautiful beyond.”7
By the spring of 1879, however, the social-political situation in Russia had become intolerably tortuous because of the continuing assassinations. As a result, the return of the Europeanized liberal Turgenev, which led to public banquets and celebrations in his honor, assumed a special significance. The festivities in which he took part became symbols of the longing, which could not be expressed openly, for some concessions on the part of the iron-fisted, despotic government to the increasingly desperate radical youth. Annenkov, Turgenev’s alter ego, commenting on the enthusiasm aroused by his appearance in Russia, wrote in April that a “complete rehabilitation has been occurring of the representatives of the 1840s, a public recognition of their services, and they are accorded a deep, classless, and typically Russian bow, even to the earth and to the point of prostration. It may be that the exploits of Nechaev, Tkach
ev, and tutti quanti have moved society to the side of the old development, beginning under the banner of art, philosophy, and morality; but however that may be—the present moment in Russia may be the most important of all that it has lived through these last twenty-five years.”8
What Anna Filosofova tells us of Turgenev’s reception by the audience at this reading amply confirms Annenkov’s words. “The hall was filled to overflowing. Suddenly Turgenev appeared. . . . [E]verybody rose as one and bowed to the king of the [enlightened] mind. I recalled the episode of Victor Hugo when he returned from exile to Paris and the whole city poured into the streets to greet him.”9 Other writers participated, but all eyes were fixed on Turgenev and Dostoevsky. Their juxtaposed presence on the stage brought together the opposing poles of Russian culture. As the writer B. M. Markevich put it: “What is there in common, I asked myself . . . between such an ‘incurable Westernizer,’ to use Turgenev’s own words about himself, and that eternal seeker of the genuine Russian truth—whose name is Dostoevsky?”10 Both were competing, on these nominally apolitical occasions, for the minds and hearts of the public on whom would depend the future; and everyone felt, like Annenkov, that their country was facing its greatest social-political crisis since the Crimean War.
Turgenev read early in the program, and chose a story, “The Bailiff,” from his classic A Sportsman’s Sketches. Dostoevsky always preferred to read in the second half, and then he produced the as yet unpublished “Confession of a Passionate Heart,” which elicited a sensational response. As Anna Filosofova wrote, “He read that part where Katerina Ivanovna takes the money to Mitya Karamazov, to a beast who wishes to show his superiority over her and to dishonor her because of her pride. But then the beast calmed down and the human being triumphed. . . . Good God! How my heart beat . . . is it possible to convey the impression left by the reading of Feodor Mikhailovich? We all sobbed, everyone was filled to overflowing with some sort of moral ecstasy.” And she continues: “For me, that evening, Turgenev somehow vanished, and I almost did not hear him.”11
Also present in the audience was Varvara Timofeyeva, Dostoevsky’s one-time assistant and confidante at the time he was editing The Citizen. She had not met him since, and memories came surging back when she heard his voice again. For her “it was something like the revelation of our destiny. . . . It was the anatomical dissection of our ailing, gangrenous corpse—a dissection of the abscesses and illnesses of our stultified conscience, our unhealthy, rotten, still serflike life.”12 The whole audience was stirred to its depths, and Timofeyeva depicts an unknown young man sitting next to her who “shivered and sighed” and “blushed and turned pale, convulsively shaking his head and clenching his fists, as if restraining himself with difficulty from breaking into applause.” When the applause finally came, it was deafening, lasting for fifteen minutes and calling him back to the stage five times. “We suddenly felt,” writes Timofeyeva, “that . . . it was impossible to hesitate for a single moment . . . because each moment brings us closer to eternal darkness or to eternal light—to the evangelical ideals or to bestiality.”13
Dostoevsky’s apocalyptic sensibility could not have been better attuned to the tension-ridden mood of his audience, torn by conflicting emotions over the desperate duel between the ever-more oppressive regime of the Tsar-Liberator, now fighting for his life, and the revolutionaries who had begun by invoking the example of Christ and were now committing murder. When Dostoevsky visited Filosofova the next day, even before he could ask her, in a trembling voice, whether the evening “had gone well,” she threw her arms around his neck and began to weep with deep feeling.14
While Turgenev and Dostoevsky had thus far managed to observe the proprieties in public, hostilities between the two writers came out into the open on March 13 at a banquet organized in Turgenev’s honor by a group of Petersburg literati. Some of the speeches, which came to more than twelve, were embarrassingly fulsome. Grigorovich, for example, said that if one were to place Turgenev against a window, light would shine through him as through a piece of crystal, “so pure is he morally among us.” At last Turgenev rose and greeted what he saw as the new reconciliation of the generations, whose separation he had once depicted in Fathers and Children. The moment had come, he affirmed, when the split could at last be healed because both generations now accepted “an ideal that . . . perhaps is quite close, and in which they are unanimously united.”15 Everybody knew that he was referring to the possibility of “crowning the edifice” (as the Russians liked to call it), that is, the granting of a Western-style constitution by Alexander II that would, by creating a representative democracy, complete the process begun with the liberation of the serfs.
This speech elicited a thunderous ovation, and when others flocked to congratulate the speaker, Dostoevsky chose this moment to precipitate a scandalenshrined in the annals of Russian literary history—a scandal that may well have been caused by his dismay at the news of the latest assassination attempt earlier that day. He too approached Turgenev and defiantly shot out the question: “Tell me now, what is your ideal? Speak!” Instead of replying, Turgenev merely lowered his head and waved his arms helplessly, but others present said loudly: “Don’t speak! We know!” Dostoevsky’s unseemly behavior, which, as one journal put it, broke “the general tone of veneration accorded to Turgenev,” was more than an outburst of ill humor or envy.16 He had always been an unrelenting opponent of a Russian constitution, on the ground that it would benefit only the educated portion of the population.
Turgenev left Russia shortly afterward, encouraged to do so by the authorities, who had become upset over the social-political implications of the public demonstrations in his honor. He and Dostoevsky met again, however, just a day after the second Literary Fund evening, in the salon of Countess Sofya Tolstaya. Whether they exchanged anything more than a few perfunctory words is not known, but present also was Vicomte Eugène Melchior de Vogüé, an aspiring young French homme de lettres then in the diplomatic service and stationed in the French embassy in St. Petersburg. He had laboriously acquired a fluent command of Russian during his first two years there, married into the highly placed Annenkov family (his wife was a lady-in-waiting to the tsarina), and moved assuredly in the cultivated circles of the capital. Having immersed himself in Russian literature, the Vicomte was of course familiar with the works of Dostoevsky, and he has left observations of their meetings, especially valuable because they come from a neutral foreign observer. Dostoevsky’s face “was that of a Russian peasant, a true muzhik of Moscow: the flattened nose, small eyes blinking under the arched eyebrows, burning with a fire sometimes gloomy, sometimes gentle; a large brow, mottled with indentations and protuberances, the temples receding as if shaped by hammer blows; and all these features drawn, contorted, collapsed into a painful mouth. Never have I seen on a human face such an expression of accumulated suffering. . . . His eyelids, his lips, all the fibers of his face trembled with nervous tics.”17
Some of their conversations are preserved in de Vogüé’s pathbreaking study, Le roman Russe, which introduced the great Russian writers to the Western world. “Literary discussions with Dostoevsky,” he remarks with quiet irony, “ended very quickly; he stopped me with a word of prideful compassion: ‘We possess the genius of all the peoples and also have our own; thus we can understand you and you cannot understand us.’ ” Much the same opinion, if less laconically, had been expressed in the Diary. The worldly Frenchman was also entertained by his opinions about Western Europe, which he found to be “of an amusing naïveté.” One evening he spoke of Paris “as Jonah must have spoken of Nineveh, with biblical fire.” He said: “A prophet will appear one night at the Café Anglais and will write three flaming words on the wall; and that will be the signal of the end of the old world and Paris will collapse in blood and fire with everything of which it is proud, its theaters and its Café Anglais.” De Vogüé could only raise his eyebrows at this tirade against the Café Anglais, “that inoffensive establishment,”
which Dostoevsky seemed to consider “the umbilical cord of Satan.”18 Little did Dostoevsky know that the elegant French diplomat he was hectoring would, six years later, be primarily responsible for making his name familiar among cultivated European readers.
In mid-March, Voice contained an account of the trial of two foreigners, a couple named Brunst, who were accused of mistreating their five-year-old daughter in a monstrous fashion, and Dostoevsky used some of its details (the smearing of the child’s face with excrement) in Ivan Karamazov’s rebellious vituperation against God for creating a world in which such outrages were possible. Unfortunately, another trial at the time also attracted his attention, that of nine Georgian Jews accused of murdering a young girl in the Kutais district of that region. The girl had disappeared on the eve of Passover, and although the blood libel was not mentioned in the indictment, there had been much discussion in the Russian press, including The Citizen, as to whether “fanatical [Jewish] sectarians” kidnapped and killed Christian children to obtain their blood for ritual purposes at this time of year. Everyone thus knew what the charges involved, and it says much in honor of the reformed Russian judicial system that the Kutais Jews, against whom there was no evidence, were acquitted on March 17. An appeal to a higher court a year later met with no more success. Reading the newspaper accounts, Dostoevsky came to an opposite conclusion. Writing to Olga Novikova, whose contributions to the English press earned her the title of “the M. P. from Russia,” he said, “How disgusting that the Kutais Jews are acquitted. They are beyond doubt guilty. I’m persuaded by the trial and by everything, including the vile defense by Alexandrov, who is here a remarkable scoundrel—‘a lawyer is a hired conscience.’ ”19 This tidbit of news too, alas, becomes part of The Brothers Karamazov, whose pages were then causing a furor among the Russian reading public.
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