Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Dostoevsky evidently had a clear grasp of his murder plot and its thematic significance. He also includes in his reply a lesson on how he should be read. “Not just the plot is important for the reader,” he tells her, “but in addition a certain knowledge of the human soul (psychology), which an author has the right to expect from a reader.” When Dimitry, instead of continuing his flight, leaps down from the fence to examine Grigory’s wound and wipe the blood on his forehead, “he seemed to say to the reader already that he was not the parricide.” His behavior shows compassion, not the cruelty of a murderer, and “if he had killed his father he wouldn’t have stood over the servant’s body with words of pity.”43 Certain types of behavior are simply incompatible with killing another human being.

  October 30 was Dostoevsky’s fifty-eighth birthday, and it was marked by a gift from his wife obtained with the help of Countess Tolstaya. He had long expressed admiration for Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, a painting that had enthralled him during his visits to the Gemäldegalerie while residing in Dresden. The countess arranged for a large photographic reproduction to be made and presented to Anna by Vladimir Solovyev. When Dostoevsky went to his study that day, much to his surprise and delight he found the picture, framed in wood by Anna, hanging above the couch. “How many times,” Anna recalls, “I found him in his study in front of that great picture in such deep contemplation that he did not hear me come in.”44 At such moments, she left him undisturbed.

  On November 16, he dispatched the remaining chapters of Book 8 and informs Lyubimov of an alteration of his initial plan. Instead of limiting himself to the judicial investigation, he would include a chapter on “the sore spot in our criminal procedure,” the preliminary investigation, “with the old routine and the most modern abstract impersonality embodied in the young lawyers, judicial investigators, and so on.”45 All this material would constitute the new Book 9, promised for the December issue. Aside from allowing him to dramatize on a larger scale the shortcomings of the abstract notions of law imported from the West, whose human limitations he had already railed against through Razumikhin in Crime and Punishment, he informs Lyubimov that “I’ll outline Mitya Karamazov’s character even more strongly: he experiences a purification of his heart and conscience under the storm of misfortune and false accusation. He accepts with his soul punishment not for what he did but for the fact that he was so hideous that he could and did want to commit the crime of which he will be falsely accused through a judicial error. It’s a thoroughly Russian personality: if the thunder doesn’t rumble, the peasant won’t cross himself. His moral purification begins during the several hours of preliminary investigation to which I intend to devote Book 9.”46

  On December 8 he wrote Lyubimov that “I worked so hard that I fell ill, [and] the book’s theme (the preliminary investigation) has grown longer and more complicated.” Aside from his own desire to produce as polished a work as possible, his novel, as he also stresses, “is being read everywhere, people write me letters, it’s being read by young people, it’s being read in high society, it’s being criticized or praised in the press, and never before, with regard to the impression produced all around, have I had such a success.”47 Dostoevsky assures Lyubimov that Book 9 will be sent for the January issue.

  At the end of the month Dostoevsky took part in a benefit organized on behalf of the students at the University of St. Petersburg, where he read the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. The organizers had submitted the text to the theological authorities for permission. In reply, Archimandrite Iosif declared that “certain monuments of religious literature and even to the lives of Orthodox saints” lacked “the respect deserved” and could not be approved.48 He was finally permitted to read the Legend, but was forced to omit the introductory section with its references to Dante and Victor Hugo. This clerical interdiction probably motivated him to supply some prefatory remarks to replace what had been prohibited. He began the reading with his own explanation of the Legend, saying, in part:

  The fundamental thought is that if you distort the truth of Christ by identifying it with the aims of this world, you instantly lose the meaning of Christianity; your reason must undoubtedly fall prey to disbelief; instead of the true ideal of Christ, a new Tower of Babel is constructed.49

  The audience reaction may be gathered indirectly from a letter Dostoevsky wrote later in response to an invitation by the Literary Fund to present the Legend again. He replied regretfully that it was impossible. “The supervisor [of the St. Petersburg schools, Prince M. S. Volkonsky] . . . told me that, judging by the impression it had made, he would not allow me to read it from now on.”50 The wary prince thought it unwise to allow so much excitement to be stirred up once more.

  1 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 63; May 10, 1879.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Ibid., 64.

  4 PSS, 29/Bk. 2: 43; June 10/22, 1875.

  5 Russian scholarship has also located a more contemporary source that may have had some effect on Dostoevsky’s text. A. N. Pypin published a biography of Belinsky in 1875 that included extensive abstracts from his letters of the early 1840s. At this time Belinsky was breaking free from an erroneous interpretation of Hegel propagated by Bakunin. Bakunin insisted that Hegel was advocating “a reconciliation with reality” (the terrible reality of the Russia of Nicholas I!) because Hegel had proclaimed that “the real is the rational.” Finding this doctrine intolerable, Belinsky exploded in letters denouncing, very much as does Ivan, the apologia for evil contained in the notion that the immolation of some is necessary for the harmony of the whole. “Even if I attained to the actual top of the ladder of human development,” he wrote, “I should at that point still have to ask [Hegel] to account for all the victims of life and history, all the victims of accident and superstition, of the Inquisition and Philip II, and so on and so forth; otherwise I will throw myself head-downwards” (cited in PSS, 15: 470). One may assume that Dostoevsky would have read Pypin’s book, and this letter was also quoted in an article by Mikhailovsky on “Proudhon and Belinsky” in the November 1875 issue of Notes of the Fatherland.

  6 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 66; May 19, 1879.

  7 Ibid., 67.

  8 Ibid., 2: 45–46.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Ibid.

  11 The italicized phrase is the King James translation of the passage in the book of Revelation that Dostoevsky cites. The Russian version of the same text reads: “the mouth proud and blasphemous.”

  12 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 68; June 11, 1879.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid., 70.

  15 The Notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov, ed. and trans. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago, 1971), 63.

  16 Schiller, Samtliche Werke, 4: 161.

  17 Letopis zhizni i tvorchestvo F. M. Dostoevskogo, ed. N. F. Budanova and G. M. Fridlender, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1995), 3: 332.

  18 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 301; July 11, 1879.

  19 Ibid., 77–79.

  20 Ibid., 75–77; July 8, 1879.

  21 Ibid., 79–80; July 19, 1879.

  22 Ibid., 83–84; July 24/August 5, 1879.

  23 Ibid., 85–87; July 25/August 6, 1879.

  24 Ibid., 91; July 28/August 9, 1879.

  25 Ibid., 90–91.

  26 Ibid., 104–105; August 9/21, 1879.

  27 Ibid., 120–122; August 24/September 5, 1879.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Ibid., 102–103; August 7/19, 1879.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Die Urgestalt des Brüder Karamasoff, ed. V. L. Komarovich (Munich, 1928), 127–128.

  32 Ibid.

  33 Georgy Florovsky, Puti Russkogo bogosloviya (Paris, 1983), 123–125.

  34 Quoted in Komarovich, Die Urgestalt, 78.

  35 Ibid., 107.

  36 Quoted in ibid., 108.

  37 Quoted in ibid., 114.

  38 LN 15 (Moscow, 1934), 139.

  39 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 121–122; August 24/September 5, 1879.

  40 Ibid., 125–126; September 16, 1879.

  41 Ibid., 127; October 8, 1879.<
br />
  42 Ibid., 129; November 8, 1879.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 326.

  45 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 130; November 16, 1879.

  46 Ibid.

  47 Ibid., 132; December 8, 1879.

  48 Letopis, 3: 360.

  49 PSS, 15: 198.

  50 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 143; March 21, 1880.

  CHAPTER 55

  Terror and Martial Law

  The new year 1880 began auspiciously for the Dostoevskys. On February 3, the members of the Slavic Benevolent Society selected him to write a congratulatory address to be presented to Alexander II on February 19, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession to the throne. Two weeks before the festivities, however, Russia was shaken by an event that cast a gloomy pall over the prospective festivities.

  On February 5, at twenty-two minutes past six in the evening, a bomb exploded in the Winter Palace just under the dining room of the tsar. A diplomatic dinner had been scheduled for that hour in honor of Prince Alexander von Battenburg, the newly elected ruler of Bulgaria, and the party was just about to enter the banquet chamber when the explosion occurred. Neither the tsar nor his guests were injured, but the blast killed ten soldiers on guard duty and wounded fifty-six others. Responsible for the carnage was the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya), a group of formerly Populist radicals who had decided that the assassination of Alexander II was an indispensable first step toward any social-economic improvement. One of their members, Stepan Khalturin, a skilled cabinetmaker and carpenter, had obtained employment in the palace under a pseudonym and lived in a room in the basement. He smuggled in small quantities of dynamite, storing it at his bedside until he believed he had enough to accomplish his purpose, but the explosion, though powerful, had not been strong enough to collapse the dining room floor.

  This was the fourth unsuccessful attempt by the People’s Will to kill the tsar. Previously they had made elaborate plans to blow up the railroad carriage on which he traveled but were thwarted by a series of accidents, although in one case a baggage car was blown to smithereens. Despite this new failure, Khalturin’s defiant invasion of the tsar’s own residence succeeded in creating an awesome image of the power of the hidden revolutionaries, who were apparently able to penetrate anywhere they pleased. The authorities were impotent to cope with their activities, and the terrified state of mind overwhelming the ruling circles can be caught in the diary of Dostoevsky’s admirer, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich. “We are living through a time of terror,” he wrote on February 7, “with this one difference. The Parisians during the revolution saw their enemies face-to-face, and we not only do not see them or know them, but have not the faintest idea of their number . . . general panic.”1

  On February 7, the People’s Will published a statement taking responsibility for the explosion and expressing “deep distress” at the death of the soldiers, but declaring that such efforts would continue unless the tsar handed over his powers to a constituent assembly. The educated upper classes remained as disaffected from the throne as they had been during the earlier assassination attempt by Alexander Solovyev. In response to this new threat, erupting at the very moment when the tsar’s loyal subjects were scheduled to offer their expressions of fidelity and devotion, Alexander II decided that drastic measures had to be taken. Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov, an army officer who had been ennobled in recognition of his victories in the Russo-Turkish War, had successfully suppressed terrorist radicals as governor-general of Kharkov while understanding the necessity of placating moderately liberal opinion. The tsar now appointed him dictator in charge of the entire country, empowered “to make all dispositions and to take all measures” necessary to ensure public tranquility anywhere in the empire.2 The period of his rule, which began on February 12, has been called “the dictatorship of the heart” because of some slight easing of government controls. Dostoevsky reacted favorably to Loris-Melikov’s assumption of power, although he complained to the journalist Suvorin that Loris-Melikov’s declarations to Russian society (which meant its educated upper class) to cooperate in reestablishing a basis for civic order were “badly written.”3

  On February 14, Dostoevsky presented a draft of his jubilee address to the members of the Slavic Benevolent Society, and, according to the historian Bestuzhev-Ryumin, “he electrified the meeting in reading his confession of faith.”4 The first paragraphs contain the obligatory conventional phrases expressing the devotion of the members of the society, along with all the Russian people, to their beneficent and loving ruler. Dostoevsky then eulogizes the reign of a tsar who had liberated the serfs and instituted a far-reaching series of other praiseworthy reforms. All the same, other passages transform this text into one of the most unusual documents ever written for such an occasion.5

  The document informs the tsar—as if he did not already know it!—that, among the vast majority of fervent and devoted servants of the fatherland, there had long since appeared, in “the cultural [intelligentny] stratum of society,” people “not believing in either the Russian people or its truth, nor even in God.” On the heels of such people came “impatient destroyers, ignorant even in their convictions . . . sincere evildoers, proclaiming the idea of total destruction and anarchy” but genuinely believing that whatever remained after destruction had done its work would be preferable to what exists. Now “the young Russian energies, alas, so sincerely deluding themselves, have at last fallen under the power of dark, underground forces, under the power of enemies of the Russian land and consequently of all Christendom.” These were the forces that, “with unexampled audacity,” not long ago “committed unheard-of evil deeds in our country, which caused shudders of outrage in our upright and mighty people and in the entire world.” (Whether it was diplomatic to have referred, even obliquely, to the Winter Palace explosion or to the earlier attempts on the tsar’s life may well be questioned.)

  Nor does Dostoevsky denounce the perpetrators of these outrages with any of the condemnatory epithets that might have been expected. For him they are “young Russian energies” whose motives, whatever their “evil deeds,” could hardly be considered entirely criminal or wicked because they had been misguided in their sincerity and gone astray. The nefariousness of their actions begins to dissolve when these young people are viewed as the products of the entire course of Russian social-cultural development, the end result of what had begun with those who did not believe in the Russian people, in its truth, and in God (presumably the generation of the 1840s). Dostoevsky assures the tsar that the Slavic Benevolent Society “stands, so far as their opinions are concerned, firmly opposed—both to the faintheartedness of so many fathers, and the wild madness of their children, who believe in villainy and sincerely bow down before it.” This repeated emphasis on the “sincerity” of the radicals was hardly the language that the tsar was accustomed to hear about those attempting to destroy him and his regime.

  Dostoevsky highlights the contrasting convictions held by the Slavic Benevolent Society—but of course voicing his own views—concerning the relations between the tsar and his people. This relation is purely patriarchal and derives from “the ancient truth, which from time immemorial has penetrated into the soul of the Russian people: that their Tsar is also their father, and that children always will come to their father without fear so that he hears from them, with love, of their needs and wishes; that the children love their father and the father trusts their love; and that the relation of the Russian people to their Tsar-Father is lovingly free and without fear, not lifelessly formal and contractual.” This last phrase is a thrust at the idea of “crowning the edifice” by a Western-style constitution. Rumors had been widely circulating that, to celebrate the anniversary, the granting of such a constitution would be announced on that day.

  Dostoevsky knew that this familial image of the relation between the tsar and his people was more a longed-for ideal than a reality. Whatever the people might fe
el about their Tsar-Father, their approach to him, if it took place at all, could occur only by means of a tightly controlled ritual, and was hardly one of free and easy access. By twice emphasizing the importance of being able to appeal to the tsar “without fear,” he distinctly implies the absence of such a desirable state of affairs. Indeed, in a notebook entry made during the last year of his life, he states his view: “I am a servant of the Tsar like Pushkin, because his children, the people, do not disdain to be servants of the Tsar. They would be his servants even more when he actually believes that the people are his children. Something that, for a very long time, he has not believed.”6

  Like the radicals who had called for a constituent assembly, Dostoevsky was also admonishing the tsar to consult the people. Moreover, instead of emphasizing the immutability of the reign that he was presumably glorifying, he looks forward (though of course discreetly) to its eventual modification in the public interest. For it is on the “unshakable” foundation of this father-child relation, he affirms, “that perhaps may be accomplished and completed the structure of every future transformation of our state, to the extent that these will be recognized as necessary.” He too looked forward to a “crowning of the edifice,” but not by the granting of a constitution; what he desired was the distribution of more land to the peasantry by the will of the tsar.