Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

To rage in his universe—He, the artist,

  Remains invisible, modestly He

  Hides himself in eternal laws.16

  This is the fundamental idea that Dostoevsky had already expressed when interpreting the first temptation, “turning stones into bread,” and explaining why God had not provided mankind with both beauty and bread.

  With the Legend, Dostoevsky told his editor he “had achieved the culminating height of his literary activity.” When his friend Putsykovich asked why he gave such importance to the Legend, Dostoevsky replied that he “had carried the theme of the Legend in his soul, so to speak, during the whole course of his life, and wished particularly now to place it in circulation since he did not know if he would ever again succeed in printing something important.” The Legend, he added, was directed “against Catholicism and the papacy, and particularly . . . the period of the Inquisition, which had such awful effects on Christianity and on all of humanity.”17 Even though Dostoevsky said nothing about Socialism in these remarks, both Socialism and Catholicism had become identical for him as embodiments of the first and third temptations of Christ, the betrayal of Christ’s message of spiritual freedom in exchange for bread, and the aspiration toward earthly power.

  Dostoevsky’s schedule required him to send off a text on the tenth of each month, and he tried to snatch some time between installments to keep in touch with friends. A consoling letter to Anna Filosofova, not yet in exile, responds to her truly agonizing situation. “I was,” she wrote, “between two fires: on the one hand, my husband received proclamations from the nihilists that they would kill him; on the other, the government sent my son into exile, and threatens me with the same.” As for herself, she had written to her husband: “You know very well that I hate our present government . . . that band of brigands, who are bringing Russia to ruin.”18 Even while trying to raise her spirits, Dostoevsky confesses that he is “depressed” himself. “The main thing is that my health has gotten worse, the children have all been ill—the weather is horrible, impossible, it rains buckets from morning to night . . . it’s cold, damp, . . . In that state of mind . . . I was writing the whole time, working nights, listening to the high wind howling and breaking hundred-year-old trees.”19

  By this time, he had decided to travel to Bad Ems once again and told his editors that it was impossible for him to complete the work in one year. In addition to his health, he wrote, “I want it to be finished off well, and there’s an idea in it that I would like to put forth as clearly as possible. It contains the trial and punishment of . . . Ivan Karamazov.”20 His trial and punishment are of course moral-psychological; and Dostoevsky gives them so much importance because, through the depiction of Ivan’s inner torments, he was attempting to undermine from within the intense humanitarian pathos of the Populist ethic. On July 17, having abandoned his previous deadline, Dostoevsky left Staraya Russa for Petersburg, Berlin, and Bad Ems.

  He arrived in Petersburg on July 18, after a grueling trip that left him, as he wrote to Anna, “collapsing from exhaustion . . . my head is spinning, and I can see spots before my eyes.” Despite feeling that “I’ve grown as weak as a five-year-old child,”21 he staunchly went about completing the preparations for his journey. First collecting the money for the recent chapters of his novel, he then went off to the Blockhead embassy (as he called the Germans) to obtain a visa. The trip to Berlin was equally exhausting; nor did he particularly wish to see the awaiting Putsykovich, who was attempting to establish another version of The Citizen on German soil. The two men went to visit the aquarium, the museum, and the Tiergarten, and Dostoevsky found himself, despite his prior determination, “paying for his beer, at the restaurant, the cabby, and so on.” Moreover, “he borrowed forty-five marks from me for paper and stamps (postage) for the first issue, which will come out in a week.”22 Dostoevsky’s liberality, one assumes, was prompted by his willingness to support the new journal.

  He reached Ems on July 24 and immediately went to see Dr. Orth. “He found,” Dostoevsky reports to Anna, “that a part of my lung had moved from the spot and changed position, just as my heart also has changed from its former position and is now located in another one—all as a consequence of the emphysema, although he added by way of consolation the heart is absolutely healthy, and all these changes don’t mean very much either and are no special threat.” Far from being reassured, he adds that “if the emphysema, still just at the outset, has already produced such effects, what’s going to happen later?” A program of gargling and drinking the two types of curative waters (Kranchen and Kesselbrunnen) was prescribed, and he writes with hope that “I’m relying on the waters greatly and began drinking them today.”23

  Dostoevsky’s final stay in Bad Ems was marked by the loneliness and isolation he had anticipated before departing, and his reaction to the environment of the fashionable spa, already quite atrabilious, reached a new pitch of irascibility. His anti-Semitism came into full play as well, though he exhibited a fine impartiality in scattering his abuse right and left. It is somewhat ironic that, concurrently, he was working to complete his chapters on the teachings of Zosima, whose message of love and universal reconciliation he hoped would answer the anathemas of Ivan Karamazov. One can hardly imagine a writer whose everyday feelings and emotions were more at odds with the sentiments he was pouring into his artistic work.

  If Putsykovich had one virtue it was that of persistence, and he knew that Dostoevsky’s name would provide a much-needed luster to his proposed journal. Reminding Dostoevsky of his promise to support the launch of the journal, he received on July 28 a letter for publication testifying that the journal’s orientation “is sincere and incorruptible.”24 This official letter was accompanied by a private one in which once again Dostoevsky gives rein to his dislike of “the polyglot crowd, almost half of them rich Yids from all over the globe.” In this connection, he calls Putsykovich’s attention to an article he had read in Katkov’s newspaper, Moscow News (Moskovskie Vedomosti), which summarized “a German tract that has just appeared: Where Is the Jew Here? Interestingly, it coincides with my own thought just as soon as I entered Germany: that the Germans will become completely Judaized and are losing their old national spirit.”25 The brochure mentioned in this article was a reply to another, from the pen of an ex-Socialist turned anti-Semite, which had attacked the growing Jewish influence on German life. As Dostoevsky wrote to Pobedonostsev, he took this controversy as confirmation of his own opinion that in Germany “there’s the influence of the Jew everywhere.”26

  In a letter to Pobedonostsev, he describes himself as “being sick and over-anxious in my soul,” attributing his lamentable state of mind “to the depressing impression from observing what has been going on in the ‘Madhouse’ of the Russian press and the intelligentsia too. . . . ‘Pan-European’ ideas of learning and enlightenment stand despotically over everyone, and no one dares state his opinion.” These issues had worked up Dostoevsky to the point of “being tormented by the desire to continue the Diary, since I really do have things to say . . . without fruitless, uncouth polemic, but instead with firm, fearless words.”27

  He then strikes off a passage accurately defining the unique place he had managed to carve out for himself amidst the deadly rivalries of Russian social-cultural life—a position that allowed him alone to speak out fearlessly:

  I consider my literary position . . . almost phenomenal: how has a person who writes at the same time against European principles, who has compromised himself forever with Demons, that is, with reaction and obscurantism, how is it that this person, without the help of all their Europeanizing journals, newspapers, and critics, has nonetheless been recognized by our young people, by those very same young Nihilists who have lost their moorings and so on? . . . They have announced to me that they await a sincere and sympathetic word from me alone and they consider me alone as a guiding writer. These declarations by the young are known to our literary leaders, brigands of the pen and swindlers of print, and they are
all struck by that, otherwise they wouldn’t allow me to write freely! They would eat me alive, like dogs, but they’re afraid and watching in perplexity to see what happens next.28

  Such words reveal the burning sense of mission that inspired him, and led him to believe he could participate in saving his country from the catastrophe so clearly, as he felt, looming ahead.

  What occupied Dostoevsky most during his stay in Bad Ems was, of course, his novel. At the beginning of August he sent off his manuscript, as usual, with an explanatory letter. “I have entitled this book ‘The Russian Monk’—a daring and provocative title, since all the critics who do not like us will scream: ‘Is that what a Russian monk is like? How can you dare to put him on such a pedestal?’ But so much the better if they scream, isn’t it? . . . it’s correct, not only as an ideal but as an actuality too.”29 “I took the character and figure,” Dostoevsky explains, “from ancient Russian monks and saints: along with profound humility—boundless, naïve hopes about the future of Russia, about her moral and even political mission. Didn’t Saint Sergius and the metropolitans Pyotr and Aleksey always have Russia in mind in this sense?” He pleads with Lyubimov to assign a reliable proofreader to this text because the language is not ordinary Russian. Of the chapter entitled “About the Holy Scriptures in the Life of Father Zosima,” he writes, “That chapter is exalted and poetic: the prototype is taken from certain of Tikhon Zadonsky’s teachings, and the naïveté of style from the monk Parfeny’s book of wanderings. Look through them yourself, dear Nikolay Alekseyevich, be like a father!”30

  Dostoevsky thus indicates the stylistic models he was imitating, which differ considerably from the tonal register of the remainder of the novel. V. L. Komarovich has given a description of the style that Dostoevsky borrowed from The Story of the Monk Parfeny about the Holy Mountain Athos, of His Pilgrimage and Voyages through Russia, Moldavia, Turkey and the Holy Land.31 This work, long a favorite of Dostoevsky’s (it was one of the few books he took along on his European travels between 1866 and 1870), was also greatly appreciated by Westernizers such as Saltykov-Shchedrin and Turgenev for its touching images of Old Russian piety. Parfeny’s own book is filled with such a moving spirit of kindness and benevolence, even toward those with whom he argued about questions of faith, that it attracted not only a reader like Dostoevsky but also many whose relation to Christianity was more cultural than religious.

  In the stories and preachments of Zosima, as Komarovich notes, one finds “even in the arrangement of their parts, and the whole of their syntax, a rhythm entirely strange to Russian literary speech. It appears as a departure from all the norms of modern syntax, and at the same time imparts to the entire narration a special, emotional coloring of ceremonial and ideal tranquility. The frequent repetition of the same words and even the same word combinations in successive sentences . . . the alternation between long, rhythmically united sentences and introductory sentences in indirect speech; finally, the pleonasms, the tendency to pile up epithets that describe one and the same picture, as if words failed the narrator to attain the desired richness of expression—all this gives to the meaning of the teachings a certain shading of inexpressibility.”32 The influence of the monk Parfeny’s book extends to many aspects of the depiction of monastic life as well.

  The influence of Saint Tikhon Zadonsky, a mid-eighteenth-century Russian monk elevated to sainthood in 1860, goes back a long way in Dostoevsky’s moral-spiritual evolution. He may well have come across Saint Tihkon’s abundant literary legacy in the early 1860s when he was editing Time and beginning to work out his own social-political ideal of pochvennichestvo. Saint Tikhon was one of the few Russian saints who underwent an intense inner struggle to attain his religious ideal—the conquest of “pride by humility, anger by gentleness and patience, hatred by love.”33 As Komarovich has suggested, Dostoevsky might well have seen a relation between his own personal character and that of Tikhon. “The bishop always displayed a tendency to nervous ailments and hypochondriacal onsets,” wrote one of his cell servants. These episodes included accesses of anger and displeasure, and at the end of his life he “fell into a completely hypochondriacal state.”34 It was by no means easy for him to attain the state of self-mastery that would enable him to dominate his hostile reactions to others. In addition, he was often the butt of mockery and derision in the monastery, and here again Dostoevsky might have felt some similarity with his own situation as a writer.

  The clergyman intervened, whenever he could, on behalf of peasants who were mistreated—and this during the darkest days of serfdom!—attempting to put into practice, on the level of social life, the ideas of Christian love that he was preaching. Several times he was struck by irate landowners, influenced by the prevalent antireligious Voltairianism then all the rage (and still reflected in the speeches of the totally unprincipled father of the Karamazov family). In each case, though not without an inner conflict, Tikhon finally begged the pardon of his assailants for having provoked them to rage; and such humility led to a complete change of heart on the part of his offenders. Dostoevsky probably saw in such episodes not only the clash of two opposing moral-religious principles—Old Russian piety and the new, destructive spirit of atheism—but also the power of humility to produce a moral transformation even in those who, under the influence of rationalism, thought themselves immune to the effect of its redeeming force.

  The issue of immortality had become the foundation of Dostoevsky’s own moral-religious convictions, and this Christian hope, including the Resurrection, was a recurrent preoccupation for Tikhon as well. “It is this churchly doctrine,” writes Komarovich, “to which his spiritual ear is especially attuned, and like Dostoevsky, the saint attributes the spread of disbelief in his own day to the oblivion into which this conviction had fallen.” Saint Tikhon hardly ever mentions the Last Judgment when he evokes the Resurrection (nor does Dostoevsky); this event was “never connected with the idea of retribution and punishment for sins, but always with the glory and ultimate bliss of ‘God’s children.’ ”35 The Resurrection is also almost invariably linked by Tikhon with the image of the glory of “the Son of God,” and he celebrates the eventuality of humankind attaining such glory in ecstatic words: “The flesh of our abasement will be transformed. . . . The chosen of God [the Christians] will be clothed in such exalted, wonderful glory that they will shine like the sun.”36

  Dostoevsky would also have found in Tikhon’s work rhapsodic depictions, similar to those he would pen himself, of the Christian Utopia of love that glimmered before his enraptured eyes as his ultimate earthly ideal. “Oh, how wonderful everything would be,” Tikhon wrote, “if everyone would love one another! Then there would be no theft, no robbery, no deceit, no murder . . . the jails would not be overflowing with prisoners, locked up because of crimes, moneylending, failures to pay debts; there would finally be no poor and needy any longer, but all would be equal.”37 Dostoevsky’s own apocalyptic intimations of the earthly paradise could not have been expressed more vividly. Over and over again in his notes, Dostoevsky plays variations on his key motif: all are responsible for all, and “everyone is guilty before all and for everything, and therefore everyone is strong enough also to forgive everything for others, and all will then become the work of Christ, and He Himself will appear among them, and they will see Him and become united with Him” (15: 249). None of these reflections, however, which would hardly have been permitted by the censorship, were retained in the text.

  In response to Pobedonostsev’s remark that he was eagerly awaiting “the repulse, the retort, and elucidation”38 to the powerful Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky expresses his trepidation over whether his reply to this “negative side” of his work will be “a sufficient reply.” “The more so,” he goes on, “as the reply, after all, is . . . only an indirect one . . . an artistic picture. . . . [T]here are a few of the monk’s precepts in response to which people will absolutely yell that they’re absurd in the everyday sense, but in another, inner sense I
think they [Zosima’s precepts] are right.”39

  After completing Book 6, Dostoevsky immediately began work on the next installment, promised for the September issue. But his departure from Ems on August 29, and the ensuing break of six days required for the journey, slowed down work on his next installment. The trip from Bad Ems to Staraya Russa had been so exhausting that it took him a week to recover. On September 16 he sent off the first three chapters of Book 7, which narrate the burial of Zosima and the scandal caused by the odor of corruption emanating from his corpse. Dostoevsky feared this might give offense because of his use of the word “stink,” but insisted it was suitable coming from Father Ferapont. He also requests Lyubimov “to do a good job” of proofing the legend about the “onion” narrated by Grushenka. “It’s a gem,” Dostoevsky declares, “written down by me from the words of a peasant woman, and, of course, is recorded for the first time.”40 A Russian folklorist had printed a similar legend in 1859, but this only illustrates the authenticity of Dostoevsky’s own use of the moral-religious creations of the folk tradition.

  On October 8, Dostoevsky informed Lyubimov that “I am again forced to be late” with the next installment.41 The first chapters of this intallment contain the scene in which Dimitry, lurking in his father’s garden, gives the signal that brings the old man to the window. Dostoevsky stops the action after Dimitry “suddenly pulled the brass pestle out of his pocket” by inserting a few lines of dots, leaving his readers in suspense; but the sentence immediately following the hiatus was meant to suggest what had not occurred: “ ‘God was watching over me then,’ Mitya himself said afterwards” (14: 355). However, Dostoevsky perhaps relied too much on the perspicacity of his readers to decipher this reference to divine protection. These chapters appeared on November 1, and on November 8 he replied to a letter from a troubled reader unable to wait for further clarification: “The old man Karamazov was killed by his servant Smerdyakov. All the details will be clarified as the novel progresses. . . . Ivan Karamazov participated in the murder only obliquely and remotely, only by (intentionally) keeping from bringing Smerdyakov to his senses during the conversation with him before his departure for Moscow and stating to him clearly and categorically his repugnance for the crime conceived by him (which Ivan Feodorovich clearly saw and had a premonition of) and thus seemed to permit Smerdyakov to commit the crime. The permission was essential for Smerdyakov. . . . Dimitry Feodorovich is completely innocent of the murder of his father.”42