Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  June 7, the first session of the Pushkin festivities, opened with some words about Pushkin from the only foreign delegate to make the journey, the French Slavist Louis Léger. Telegrams were read from Victor Hugo, Berthold Auerbach, and Alfred Tennyson, but the main event, eagerly awaited by all—if for differing reasons—was Turgenev’s speech. In composing it, Turgenev drew on two lectures he had given on Pushkin in the 1860s and on his famous article, “Recollections of Belinsky,” which had paid tribute to the great critic who had first defined Pushkin’s place in Russian literature. Indeed, much of what Turgenev says about Pushkin’s historical position, compared with that of Lermontov and Gogol, is derived from Belinsky’s famous series of essays on the poet.

  He begins by declaring Pushkin to be “the first Russian artist-poet,” and praises him profusely as the founding father of modern Russian literature. Declaring art to be “the embodiment of the ideals lying at the foundation of a people’s [narodnoi] life, defining its spiritual and moral physiognomy,” he quickly moves on to some of the well-known facts of Pushkin’s artistic career.30 At first imitating foreign models (Voltaire and Byron are mentioned), Pushkin rapidly freed himself from such tutelage and found his own voice. But then, to an audience inflamed by patriotic fervor, Turgenev rather maladroitly equates Pushkin’s rejection of foreign models in his poetry with an equal rejection of Russian folk poetry itself: “The independent genius of Pushkin quickly . . . freed itself from the imitation of foreign forms and from the temptation of the counterfeiting of a folk [narodnoi] tonality.” When he yielded to this tempation, as in “Ruslan and Ludmilla,” he produced “the weakest of all his works.” In Russia, “the simple people” (prostoi narod) do not read Pushkin any more than the German people read Goethe, the French Molière, or the English Shakespeare. For “every art is the elevating of life based on an ideal, those remaining on the level of ordinary, everyday life remain lower than this ideal level.”31

  All the same, Goethe, Molière, and Shakespeare are narodnoi poets in the true sense of that word, which Turgenev defines in his own way. For him it means imparting to the values of one’s own culture a national significance, thus attaining a level of universality that transcends mere class or regional boundaries. Such poets unquestionably represent their people, but they have so absorbed its values that they raise those values to the universal level of the ideal. To drive home this point, Turgenev disparages the slogan of “folk-character [narodnost’] in art” as the sign of weak, inferior, and enslaved peoples struggling to preserve their existence and identity.32 Russia, happily, is not such a country, and there is thus no reason for it to have recourse to such a palliative. At a moment when Populism (narodnichestvo) was the dominating social-political, as well as artistic, ideal of the Russian intelligentsia both on the right and on the left, Turgenev was completely at odds with the reigning mood of the vast majority of his audience.

  He then raises the crucial question of whether Pushkin can be considered a “national” poet in this sense, equal to Shakespeare, Molière, and Goethe, and replies evasively: “For the moment we shall leave this open.” There is no question, however, that Pushkin “gave us our poetic, our literary language, even though some argue that no such language exists even yet because it can only come from ‘the simple people,’ along with other tradition-preserving institutions” (a passing jab at the virtues attributed to the Russian peasant commune). Pushkin’s language, all the same, expresses the best elements of the Russian character—its “virile charm, strength, and clarity, its straightforward truth, absence of deceit and pose, [its] simplicity, the openness and honesty of its feelings.”33 But then, to support such claims, Turgenev invokes remarks made to him by Victor Hugo and Prosper Merimée, as if his Russian audience were likely to be impressed by the approbation of such eminent foreign authorities. Turgenev also cites Merimée as approving “the absence of any explanations and moral conclusions” in Pushkin’s poetry.34 What Turgenev offered as artistic praise could well be seen by his audience as a denial that Pushkin’s poetry had any moral significance whatever!

  Referring to the radical rejection of Pushkin in the 1860s, which merely developed the critique initiated by Belinsky in the late 1840s, he explains it as a result of “the historical development of society under conditions that gave birth to a new life, which stepped from a literary epoch into a political one.” The adoration of art and Pushkin ceased, and he was replaced by the wrathful Lermontov, the satirical Gogol, and “the poet of revenge and sorrow” (Nekrasov). They won the adherence of succeeding generations and created a different kind of literature more responsive to the moral-social needs of the times.35

  Turgenev thus refuses to condemn the assault on Pushkin by the radicals, which reflected the new realities of Russian life, but he rejoices that this period of artistic inconoclasm appears to be reaching its end. In Pushkin’s day, belles lettres had served as the unique expression of Russian society, but then a time came when the aims of art as such were entirely swept aside. “The previous sphere was too large; the second shrunk it to nothing; finding its natural limits, poetry will be firmly established forever.” And then, perhaps, a poet will appear “who will fully deserve the title of a national-universal poet, which we cannot make up our mind to give to Pushkin, although we do not dare deprive him of it either.”36

  A concluding paragraph of panegyric follows, but the damage had been done. As Dostoevsky wrote to Anna, Turgenev “had denigrated Pushkin by refusing him the title of national poet.”37 And this was the sentiment of a large part of the audience as well. Turgenev had finally balked, no matter how hesitantly and reluctantly, at placing the Russian among the very first rank of the European poets with whom he had been compared. The exhilaration of the ceremony was badly deflated by this embarrassing denial, which seemed to indicate the continued inferiority of Russian culture, supposedly being celebrated, vis-à-vis Europe.

  Turgenev’s talk left his audience with a sense of “dissatisfaction and indistinct vexation,” to quote Strakhov.38 His subtly balanced considerations tried to unite a eulogy of Pushkin with an apologia for his rejection by the radical critics of the 1860s, and he had also expressed his own opposition, as a liberal Westernizer, to the Slavophil and Populist idolization of “the people.” All these opinions were hardly in accord with the overheated emotional temperature of the moment, and he was well aware of his failure to stir his audience.

  Turgenev’s speech, delivered in the afternoon, was followed by a dinner that evening. “The young people,” Dostoevsky reports to Anna “greeted me at my arrival, treated me, waited on me, made frenzied speeches to me—and that was still before dinner.” Toasts were offered, one by the playwright Ostrovsky to Russian literature, and Dostoevsky was prevailed upon to speak. “I only said a few words—and there was a roar of enthusiasm—literally a roar.” He proposed a toast to Pushkin as one of the greatest poets, “the purest, the most honorable, the most intelligent of all Russian men,” thus giving a foretaste of what he would proclaim the following afternoon.39 As the party broke up, he was surrounded by a group of young people. In conversation with them, Dostoevsky complained about his illness, which prevented him from working and then, pausing in silence for a moment, he continued: “ ‘I will write my Children and die.’ The novel Children, according to him, would be the continuation of The Brothers Karamazov. In it, the children of the preceding novel would come forward as the main heroes.”40

  Dostoevsky continues to describe the adulation he received on the night before his speech: “At 9:30 when I got up to go home, they raised a hurrah for me in which even people not in sympathy with me were forced to take part. Then this whole crowd rushed down the stairs with me, and without coats, without hats, followed me onto the street and put me in a cab. And then they suddenly started kissing my hands—and not one, but tens of people, and not just young people, but gray-haired old folks. No, Turgenev just has members of a claque, while mine have true enthusiasm.” “Tomorrow, the eighth, is my mo
st fateful day,” he goes on. “In the morning I read my piece.”41

  The session of June 8 opened with some introductory remarks and a poem, “To the Memory of Pushkin,” written and read by Dostoevsky’s old companion in the Petrashevsky circle, Aleksey Pleshcheev. Then it was Dostoevsky’s turn, and, to use the words of Marcus Levitt, he advanced to the podium “to hijack the festival.”42 Even though many accounts exist of what became an epochal event, none takes us so directly to its heart as his own, written on the night of his astonishing triumph. “No, Anya, no,” he writes, “you can never conceive of and imagine the effect it produced! What are my Petersburg successes! Nothing, zero, compared to this! When I came out, the hall thundered with applause and it was a very long time before they let me read. I waved, made gestures, begging to be allowed to read—nothing helped: rapture, enthusiasm (all because of The Karamazovs). I finally began reading: I was stopped by thunderous applause on absolutely every page, and sometimes even at every sentence. I read loudly, with fire.”43

  From Gleb Uspensky, we obtain the view of an outside observer who, at the beginning of the session, noticed Dostoevsky sitting “as quietly as a mouse” (smirnekhonko) at the back of the stage as if in hiding, “scribbling something in a notebook.”

  When his turn came, he smirnekhonko stepped up to the speaker’s stand, and not five minutes had elapsed before everyone without exception present in the assemblage, all hearts, all thoughts, all souls, were in his power. He spoke to them simply, absolutely as if he were conversing with an acquaintance, not declaiming weighty phrases in a loud voice or tossing his head. Simply and distinctly, without the slightest digression or unnecessary embellishment, he told the public that he thought of Pushkin as someone who expressed the strivings, hopes, and wishes of that very public—the one listening to him at that moment, in that hall. He found it possible, so to speak, to bring Pushkin into that hall, and with his words clarify for all those gathered there something about their own present anxieties, their present anguish. Until Dostoevsky, no one had done that, and this was the major reason for the extraordinary success of his speech.44

  How was Dostoevsky able to accomplish this remarkable feat? Drawing on a lifetime of observations about Pushkin scattered through his work,45 and employing his most brilliant critical style, he unites these ideas into a powerful synthesis hailing Pushkin as the poetic herald of the glorious mission that Russia has been called upon to accomplish on behalf of humanity. Dostoevsky usually interprets literary works not in terms of the author’s personality or the historical and social-cultural problems with which he or he may have been engaged, but always in the light of some larger issue. His criticism is thus an example of what Nietzsche called the “monumental” style of historical writing, in which the subject becomes a symbolic expression of some much greater theme, whether psychological, moral-metaphysical, or religious. In this instance, he turns Pushkin into a symbol of his own Russian messianism and his exalted conception of “the people,” which now harmonized so perfectly with the emotions of the vast majority of his audience.

  He begins by citing Gogol—“Pushkin is an extraordinary and, perhaps, unique manifestation of the Russian spirit”—a citation that wipes out at the very start Turgenev’s reference to the replacement of the artistic Pushkin by the satirical Gogol. For Dostoevsky, Pushkin was not only “extraordinary” but above all “prophetic,” and it is the essence of this prophecy that he intends to illuminate. He divides Pushkin’s work into three periods, though stressing that no hard-and-fast boundaries can be drawn. “The accepted view is that during this first period of his work Pushkin imitated the European poets . . . particularly Byron.” Dostoevsky, however, insists that “even [his imitations] expressed the extraordinary independence of his genius. Imitations never contain the kind of personal suffering and depth of self-consciousness that Pushkin displayed” (26: 136–137).

  As an example, he takes Pushkin’s early poem, “The Gypsies” (1824), in which a Russian nobleman named Aleko leaves civilization to live with his gypsy mistress and joins her wandering tribe. Dostoevsky interprets this scenario as already emblematic of a fundamental Russian dilemma, which gave birth to a new character type. “In Aleko, Pushkin had already found and brilliantly rendered that unhappy wanderer in his native land, that historical suffering Russian who appeared with such historical inevitability in our educated society after it had broken away from the people.”

  As he enlarges on Pushkin’s creation of this type, he manages, in Uspensky’s words, to bring Pushkin into that very hall. The “Russian wanderer” has become “a permanent fixture” of the culture, and Dostoevsky now imagines his successors “running off to Socialism, which did not yet exist in Aleko’s time.” Pushkin’s “wanderer” thus becomes identical with the Socialist youth who were hanging from the rafters of the auditorium and drinking in Dostoevsky’s every word—not to mention a Populist Socialist like Uspensky himself. And then, alluding to those who now “take this new faith in a different field and work it zealously” (those who “went to the people”), Dostoevsky sees them as adding an additional trait to the character of the “Russian wanderer.” What he needs is no longer something purely personal but something universal: he needs “the happiness of the whole world in order to find his own peace of mind” (26: 137).

  Dostoevsky steps back to glance at the historical roots of this character type, dating it from “just at the beginning of the second century after the great Petrine reforms”; it was then that educated Russian society became totally “detached from the people and the people’s strength.” Of course, an awareness of this detachment did not affect the vast majority of Russians, but “it is enough if it happens merely to ‘the chosen few’ . . . since through them the remaining vast majority will be deprived of their peace of mind.” Aleko was seeking something but did not know what, but in fact he and those like him were seeking “for the truth which someone, somewhere had lost, and which he simply cannot find.” Later Russian generations, instead of turning to nature, went to Europe’s “stable historical order and well-established civic and social life” in search of this lost truth. This quest was a self-deception, however, because “the wanderer” must find the truth “first of all, within himself”; but how could he understand this necessity when he has become a stranger in his own native land, “no more than a blade of grass, torn from its stem and carried off by the wind. And he can sense that and suffer for it, and often suffer so painfully!” (26: 138).

  Aleko was called “a disdainful man” by the gypsies, who drive him away after he commits a murder out of jealousy; and while Dostoevsky acknowledges this Romantic climax to be “far-fetched,” he nonetheless accepts the characterization of Aleko as “real, and Pushkin’s perception here [as] apt.” Aleko is still a Russian nobleman who takes full advantage of his station and “angrily attacks his opponent and punishes him” when he is offended. But Dostoevsky also detects in the poem a suggestion of “the Russian solution” to Aleko’s rage, “in accordance with the people’s faith and truth.” This solution is: “Humble yourself, O haughty man; first curb thy pride; Humble yourself, O idle man; first labor on thy native soil!”46 Proclaimed here is Dostoevsky’s statement of his positive ideal, which he identifies with the people’s “truth.” Urging “the Russian wanderer”—and all those like him in the audience—to accomplish such a self-conquest, Dostoevsky assures them “you will embark on a great task and make others free . . . you will find happiness . . . and you will at last understand your people and their sacred truth” (26: 138–139). No passage in the speech aroused more commentary, both positive and negative, than this call for humility and submission.

  If “this solution . . . is already strongly suggested” in “The Gypsies,” Dostoevsky finds it even more clearly expressed in Evgeny Onegin (1833), whose first chapters were composed during the writing of “The Gypsies.” The main figure again “wanders in anguish through his native land and through foreign parts” and is everywhere a stranger
. “It’s true that he loves his native land, but he has no faith in it” and looks down “with sad mockery” on those who do have faith. Onegin kills Lensky “simply out of spleen,” and such spleen “may have been caused by his longing for some universal ideal.” He compares Onegin with Tatyana, whom he sees as the embodiment of the Russian ideal, and he regrets that the poet did not use her name for his title; it is she, after all, who is the positive protagonist of the work. “One might even say that a positive type of Russian woman of such beauty has almost never been repeated in our literature except, perhaps, in the character of Liza in Turgenev’s Nest of Gentlefolk” (26: 140). This tribute to Turgenev was unexpected and much appreciated; he was sitting on the stage, and everyone could see that he blew a kiss in Dostoevsky’s direction when the flattering reference was made.47

  In comparing Onegin to Tatyana, Dostoevsky turns her into someone “who stands solidly on her own native soil” and is the incarnation of true Russian folk values (though in fact she is no more a member of “the people” than Onegin himself). Onegin’s rejection of the love she offers him at the beginning of this novel in verse is transformed into an exemplum of his contempt for the treasures to be found in his native land. While Dostoevsky concedes that “he treated her honorably . . . Onegin’s manner of looking down on people caused him to disregard Tatyana entirely when he met her for the first time, in a provincial backwater, and in the humble image of a pure, innocent girl so timid in his presence.” He could not appreciate her sterling moral qualities because “he is a man of abstractions, he is a restless dreamer and has been so all his life.” Onegin did not understand Tatyana, but, after the famous stanzas describing her visit to his room (Dostoevsky speaks of “their matchless beauty and profundity”), where she examines his foreign books and trinkets, she finally understands his essential hollowness: “Uzh ne parodiya li?” (“Is he not a parody?”) (26: 140–141).